“Do you not read papers?” Thundered the BBC’s John Humphrys to the corporation’s Director General during an interview over the broadcaster’s latest scandal.
That exchange was one of the final straws for the hapless George Entwhistle’s 54 day leadership of the British Broadcasting Corporation where the Jimmy Savile scandal had seen him labelled as ‘Incurious George’ for his failure to ask basic questions of his subordinates.
Humphry’s emphasised this when discussing the Newsnight program’s advance notice of the allegations they were going make;
You have a staff, but you have an enormous staff of people who are reporting into you on all sorts of things – they didn’t see this tweet that was going to set the world on fire?
A lack of staff certainly isn’t the BBC’s problem, the organisation’s chairman Chris Patten quipped after Entwhistle’s resignation that the broadcaster has more managers than the Chinese Communist Party.
George Entwhistle’s failure to ask his legion of managers and their failure to keep the boss informed is symptomatic of modern management where layers of bureaucracy are used to diffuse responsibility.
In every corporate scandal over the last two decades we find the people who were paid well to hold ‘responsible’ positions claimed they weren’t told about the nefarious deeds or negligence of their underlings.
Shareholders suffer massive losses, taxpayers bail out floundering businesses and yet senior executives and board members happily waddle along blissfully content as long as the money keeps rolling in.
If it were just private enterprise affected by this managerialism then it could be argued that the free market will fix the problem. Unfortunately the public sector is equally affected.
Managerialism infects the public service as we see with the BBC and it’s political masters and the results are hospital patients die, wards of the state abused, known swindlers rob old ladies and agencies continually fail to deliver the services they are charged to deliver.
Again the layers of management diffuse responsibility; the Minister, the Director-General and the ranks of Directors with claims to the executive toilet suite’s keys are insulated from the inconvenience of actually being responsible for doing the job they are paid to do.
Managerialism and incuriousity are fine bedfellows, in many ways Incurious George Entwhistle is the management icon of our times.
In many Execs, there’s a culture of not asking questions if one might not like the answer mixed with an unhealthy desire towards “plausible deniability”.
On a side note, I’m curious to know what the smallest bail out has been in the current ongoing GFC clusterf@@? We hear about “too big to fail”, but how big is that, what’s the cut-off point?
Good question, TNA. My guess is the rule of thumb on who is too big to fail is ‘can they afford to employ ex-politicians or their former staffers?’ If the answer is “yes” then they will be bailed out.
“Unfortunately the public sector is equally affected.”
Yes, we’ve seen no accountability from the RBA and just a whole lot of weasel words and side-stepping from the Governor to the Prime Minister for their bribing of foreign officials. The lack of accountability is incredible.
I totally agree Walter, the Securitas scandal exposes the hollow words the Australian Exceptionalists use when they say one of the reasons we’re different is because of our well regulated economy.