In all my experience of observing and castigating management incompetence, nothing has ever matched the monumental and comprehensive mayhem wreaked by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration in the United Kingdom. Actually, the performance of the Bush White House and the key departments of state is also monstrous, but the centralisation of power in Britain makes the Blair disasters much more numerous.
For a bad start, take that centralisation. All sound management theory, and all good practice, stresses the importance of delegating responsibility downwards, so that people who know what’s happening can take the appropriate action. The opposite policy of dragging everything up into the centre adds a new dimension of bureaucratic maladministration - the people taking the decisions won’t know what needs fixing, won’t know how to fix it, and won’t understand the counter-productive results of their own incompetence.
The centre’s pervasive powers, however, guarantee that the real experts further down will be hamstrung by the interventions of those above. The damage will be compounded by the tendency in such situations to apply the Robert the Bruce Strategy - if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again. The Tony Blair regime began by urging Ministers to spew forth ‘headline-catching initiatives’ - every one of which creates another opportunity for catastrophe.
That is made far more likely by a system which, to be fair, is not a Tony Blair creation. Under the time-dishonoured British system, politicians are put in charge of national and local affairs of which they have no specialised knowledge - or often any knowledge. They don’t know, either, how to run a large organisation, to achieve efficient decision-making, to get proper execution, to master effective follow-up. Having no experience in these matters, they are forced to learn on the job.
If they were given enough time, they might, after painful delays and disappointments, learn enough to become mildly proficient. But they are moved to other work before time can work any magic. John Reid, Tony Blair’s most trusted trouble-shooter, has had nine top jobs in nine years, and has failed at all of them. His latest role at the Home Office will probably end no differently.
For a start, Reid has to work with the very same people in the very same jobs who have failed so spectacularly in everything from immigration to drugs, anti-terrorism to policing. It might help if politicians and civil servants, starting with the man or woman at the top, were promptly rehabilitated or removed in the event of failure. But the chosen Tony Blair response is to close ranks around the culprits - who more often than not have to go anyway, thanks to political or media pressure.
Indecision and obstinacy are the hallmarks of the bad manager. And so is the Ostrich Syndrome. Faced with evidence that the National Health Service, say, is failing all concerned - patients, doctors, health workers, etc - the Government’s PR people instruct their ministers to say that matters are improving, that new ‘reforms’ about to take effect will make things better still, and that anyway any problems, however monstrous, only affect a small percentage of the activity.
The most abysmal aspect of this stance is that the wise fools mouthing it actually believe what they are saying. This, of course, removes the pressure to right the wrongs. The ’small percentage’ argument is hopelessly phony. After all, an airline would get short shrift if it argued that a devastating and avoidable crash didn’t matter that much, because 99% of that day’s flights had been fault-free.
I’ll be returning to this all-important subject later. The concern must be that the issues are getting more and more complex at a time when attempts to master them are becoming more and more simplistic - witness the Blair espousal, unaffected by results or commonsense, of privatisation and management consultancy. Back to Robert the Bruce!
