DR. LISL KLEIN - Founder and President
Lisl Klein came to England from Czechoslovakia at the age of ten. She first studied languages, but discovered an interest in the nature of work and organisation when she worked on the shop floor in a pharmaceutical company. From then on she alternated between academic and industrial settings: training in personnel management at the London School of Economics and two and a half years' work as a personnel manager for the Metal Box Company was followed by six years of research on the human implications of work study in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and on the behavioural consequences of management control systems with Professor Joan Woodward at the Imperial College of Science and Technology.
At a time when industry became interested in making use of the social sciences, she became Social Sciences Adviser to Esso Petroleum Company Ltd. She held this post from 1965-1970, carrying out and commissioning activities from a wide range of disciplines.
From 1971-1989 she was a senior social scientist in the Tavistock Institute. During this time she wrote a book about the Esso experience; reported on New Forms of Work Organisation in Europe to the German Government’s Commission for Economic and Social Change; consulted for seven years to the German Government's Programme to Humanise Life at Work; consulted for eight years to one of the four clearing banks; contributed to the design of two new manufacturing plants from the point of view of job design; did research (with Ken Eason) to collect other experiences of making use of the social sciences; and began to work with Harold Bridger on his Working Conference model of group relations training.
When Lisl Klein founded the Bayswater Institute in 1990, Harold Bridger gave this model to the Institute to run. She was Director of the Institute until 2002, and is now its President.