This article seeks to examine the political and cultural origins of business management education for business leaders in post-war Belgium and its progressive integration into the academic environment. The Belgian movement for business management education grew out of the West European campaign for the increase of productivity spurred by the Americans under the Marshall Plan. Contrary to some European examples, however, the Belgian experience was characterized by a strong inclination for the appropriation and spreading of the American cultural model. This predisposition triggered a successful dynamic interplay between industrialists, trade union leaders, and academics. A young and ambitious engineer, Gaston Deurinck was at the core of this nexus. With the support of American officials, he aptly mobilized various social networks to fulfill both of his dreams: enable the incorporation of business management education in Belgian universities, on the one hand, and have this same academic pattern adopted at the European level, on the other. The takeover by public authorities of these largely private initiatives also shows the interacting character of the process of Europeanization of the "American challenge" at the end of the 1960s.