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Banks Beer and Personnel Management – 56 years ago

Oct 04, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,
Somehow in a contemplative mood, I recall Personnel colleague practitioner Emamudeen Khan and I got a motion unanimously passed at a Bookers’ Sugar Estates Personnel Officers’ Conference 1965, to organise the First Conference of Personnel Officers in Government and Industry. The 41 participants of the subsequent meeting included representations of:
– Public Service Commission
– Public Service Training Centre
– Ministry of Works & Hydraulics
– Transport & Harbour Department,
– General Post Office,
– Mayor and City Council
– Sprostons Ltd
– Wieting & Richter, along with the
– Sugar Industry Welfare Fund Committee
– Bookers Sugar Estates
– Demerara Co.
– Guyana Sugar Producers’ Association; and
– Other Companies of the Booker Group
The conference agreed on the founding of the National Personnel Officers’ Association – registered in 1966. A range of training courses was held on the immediate years following with participants including the Ministries of:
– Agriculture & Natural Resources
– Communications
– External Affairs
– Finance
– Health
– Housing and Reconstruction
– Labour, and the
– Public Service Commission
– USAID
The range of lecturers involved included:
– Minister of Information – Martin Carter
– Chief Personnel Officer, BSE – Harold Davis
– Personnel Manager, Booker Group of Companies – Edmund Richards
– Permanent Secretary, Public Service Ministry – David Ford
– Secretary, Clerical & Commercial Workers’ Union – George DePeana
– Professor of Public Administration, University of Guyana – Dr. Bertram Collins
– Executive Director, Bookers Rum Company Ltd – Pat Thompson
– Assistant General Manager, Demerara Bauxite Co. Ltd. – Bob Rosane
One particular series of training was in ‘Perspectives of Management’ conducted by the Head of then Administrative Staff College, Henley, United Kingdom. By 1969, there was so much excitement generated amongst members of varying professions that it became necessary to absorb them into a transformed new legal entity – registered as the Guyana Institute of Management (GIM).
By 1973, the organisation was producing a quarterly magazine titled ‘Developing Management’, each edition of which featured a ‘Manager-on-the-Spot’ interview. As its Editor, I have always recalled the interview I did with Peter D’Aguiar, then Chairman of Banks DIH. He talked of the informative experience, which he had during a business course in Trinidad and Tobago during which he was allowed access to a study conducted for the Bookers Group about the manufacture of beer. But they could not come up with the budget to fund its manufacture. Peter D’Aguiar then conceived of the first shareholding construct in the local private sector, at an offering of one dollar per share. Incidentally, he was later Advisor to the Banks Beer development project in Barbados.
Several insights emerged from the interview, which I had in his Demico House Office, in Stabroek Square, where the company started the first take-away service in the country, of ‘Chicken-in-the-Rough’.
Here is a quote recorded from the interview:
“Well I am a firm believer that the workers and the owners’ interests are not only compatible but are one and the same…I believe in keeping workers informed as much as possible as to what the company is trying to do, and how it is trying to achieve its objectives. I like the worker to be a shareholder? If space is affordable.”
Yours truly,
E.B. John

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