The grandest enterprise in the land (Blair Ltd.), likes to ape its private sector counterparts - save for one overwhelming exception. The truly modern business decentralises wherever possible and as as possible. Blair Ltd. proudly does the reverse.
It has only to see a 'problem' to monopolise the solution. Whether it's foot and mouth, teaching standards, the Underground, hospital waiting lists, railway safety or business competition, the Man (or Woman) in Whitehall knows not only better, but best. When the centralised answer (as usual) fails, another monster promptly rears its ugly head.
This long-standing, self-defeating British tradition has been intensified under the Thatcher-Major-Blair axis - very curiously, given the simultaneous strategy of devolution. Power has been devolved, not only partially to Scotland and Wales, but near totally to privatised industries, like BT and BA. Yet the decentralisation is highly conditional. If the private milk curdles (see Railtrack), the public sector rushes to the rescue - or the reorganisation.
The maestro of Gulf War logistics, General Gus Pagonis, vigorously opined that reorganisation is a company's worst course. Nestle's CEO, Peter Brabeck, has likewise attacked 'big disruptive change programmes' and their under-estimated 'traumatic impact'. Every reorganisation upsets relationships, threatens morale, delivers unexpected and usually deleterious side-effects, diverts management time from external issues (like pleasing customers), and probably only paves the way for the next pointless upheaval.
The decentralised model means to end this nonsense once and for all. You split organisations into discrete units, as near to the front-line and the customers as possible: place the units under autonomous managements with full authority to deliver on their promises: and sit back and supervise. If failure makes intervention inevitable, you intervene in only one way. You change, not the system, but the management.
Naturally, the system is honoured as much in the breach as the observance. Top British managers are especially prone to interfere with sub-units, notably by imposing central strategies that vitiate efforts by the sub-managers to lead their charges to success. All the same, few (if any) of the private sector managers admired by Tony Blair would dream of advocating centralisation. That's for one simple reason. It cannot possibly work.
Running a 700-bed hospital, for example, is a most daunting managerial task, which involves the daily coordination of many thousands of people. Most are not under management's control - above all the patients. The latter can only relate to the system at the most local level of all: one-to-one. Any approach other than local autonomy of discrete units has no chance of working. In fact, no matter what centralisers propose, the localisers inevitably dispose, as the saga of the cooked waiting lists reveals.
Impose central targets on people, and they will adapt their behaviour, not to improve their performance, but to meet your targets. The classic management guru, W.Edwards Deming, used to sneer at target-setters. Rather, he taught managers to concentrate on improving the system from which 85% of under-performace stems. Blair Ltd, however, specialises in making bad systems even worse - for example, by piling supervisory layer on layer (viz. the hapless and hopeless Railtrack and its overlords). The Tube formula, with its absurd division between track and transport, is another recipe for shambles.
The reorganisations of the NHS and education have followed exactly the same counter-productive pattern. What else would you expect? These schemes are devised, usually at ministerial behest, by civil servants who know little about management, and probably think less, and who are not expert in the practice of medicine, education, justice, transport, etc. The inevitably misshapen plans are then sold to politicians even less qualified than the Whitehall wizards.
Take one prime example of the resulting idiocy (among all too many). Medicine in Britain suffers from severe shortage of doctors, who take much time and money to train: so some sublime economiser actually and uniquely rationed the number of undergraduate medical places. This neatly guaranteed that the shortgage would last for years. Maybe it was the same clever fool who invented the 'internal market' in health-care, a 'product' for which demand is insatiable, which is not price-sensitive, and which is inherently uneconomic.
One horrible side-effect was to convert GPs from pill-pushers to pen-pushers, for which most have neither time nor talent. At a time when Blair Ltd's private heroes are striving to reduce or eliminate bureaucracy, public sector red tape is proliferating like duckweed. Worse, administrators (an invaluable breed) are being asked to become managers when they lack the authority or leadership qualities required. Worse still, vast reservoirs of knowledge about public sector operations exist among those who work therein - but their opinions are sedulously ignored.
The prevailing attitude is neatly illustrated by 'the new unified [i.e, centralised] Child and Family Court Advisory Support Service'. CAFCASS (an ill-omened acronym) is determined to convert self-employed child guardians, willy-nilly, into full-time employees. The official defending this policy unwittingly (or witlessly) put his finger on the problem. 'You can't', he told a BBC interviewer, 'have autonomous individuals in a public service'. Delivery of excellent service, which the private sector itself finds so difficult to deliver, depends on the autonomous actions of motivated and well-organised individuals operating in decentralised systems.
Such systems remove an impossible load from centralised management. Monopolising too many and too complex tasks is alone enough to explain the gross cumulative failures of Blair Ltd. Private sector management is having to learn two huge lessons. For success, not only must people involved in implementing a strategy fully support what only they can execute; but the greater their involvement in strategic and operational planning (aided, as Blair Ltd is not, by the brightest and best available expertise), the better those plans.
Avid, knee-jerk centralisers create rods for both their own backs and those of the overmanaged suppliers and dissatisfied recipients at the sharp end. In modern management, that end is the beginning of all wisdom.
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