The fog of clichés and management speak

So as not to get lost in the fog of clichés and management speak, we should reflect upon those who have been dreaming up most of the spoken and written garbage remembering that process and procedure does not replace experience and insightful management.

The BBC’s John Humphreys’ summed up the tragedy of Baby P. when he was exasperated by an apologist for Haringey Council, who smugly claimed that it had only followed procedures. He roared: “and the end of this perfect paper trail is a dead baby.” The moral of the story if you just follow the procedures or process there is no guarantee of performance.

From the 1970s a new breed of “professional managers” arrived, trained to manage anything – be it a bank, a finance company or professional practice - but they appeared to lack specific industry knowledge. A perfect example of this today are managers who knew all about management but nothing else so they left the incomprehensible science of sub-prime mortgages calculations to the back office mathematians and their computer programmes

Interestingly, when working with Gemini, David Craig helped draft the concept of organisational transformation. and now goes on to say “We published a book called Transforming the Organization....but it was a con, something we dreamt up to try to sell bigger money-making projects to companies.” In 2008 this worsened and has been morphed by some into, for example “transformational outsourcing” by those wishing to further sell “value based” services to the unwitting / naïve.

David Craig has gone onto debate the use of key performance indicators (KPI’s) “KPI’s are absolutely fabulous if used by effective management. But if you have incompetent, ineffective management and policies that only want to give the illusion of progress, they are a disaster and demotivate everyone in the organisation.” The key point is effective management - many ineffective managers mask their inadequate performance by creating ever complex KPI’s, presenting these as improvements in commercial, service quality, delivery and overall performance terms.

Some revolutionary words: “to apply their professional judgment and discretion to do the right thing.” Mark Rowley, the acting chief constable of Surrey Police. Now I know the management consultants will not like that, but it will make the difference to the Client’s business performance and secure a positive result.

So out with Management by numbers, acronyms and clichés and get back to “doing the right things at the right time” and in particular “doing ordinary things exceptionally well”