There is an old english saying, to wit: You can't have your penny and the bun. It harks back to the rhyme Hot Cross Buns, one a penny, two a penny, Hot Cross Buns. It struck me this morning, as part of an interesting e-mail exchange I am having with one of the commentators to our Guest Blog, that autocratic managers and the dark side of management consultancy have discovered how to keep their penny and still eat the bun.
The way it works is this. You spend a lot of money putting in control systems based on idealised process flows and ways of working. This applies in customer relationship management and health & safety alike along with many other fields. It looks really good on the flow charts. However the day to day reality of dealing with customers, or doing the job (say on an oil rig) means that people have to break the rules. Your business depends on their doing so and as long as it has a good outcome you ignore it. However if something goes wrong, you bring out that rule book and the idealised model and now you have someone to blame: the poor smuck who has been making your business work for you.
PS (added 7 hours later) There is an interesting article on Working Knowledge with the title Are Elite Business Schools Fostering the Deprofessionalization of Management? which links in part to the above. It just popped up in my RSS feed.
Comments (3)
Dave
This is the explanation of why "work to rule" disputes can have such devastating effects i.e. only doing exactly what you are supposed to do paralyzes the organisation. In a recent Nursing dispute here in Ireland the Nurses primary weapon was working to rule. The interesting piece here was 1) The amount of extra work that had to be paid for when the nurses did this (suggesting that management is getting its cake and eating it) 2) the positive patient outcomes. Management was using the "you can't do this it will affect the patients" line while patient care as vouched by patients improved as the nurses concentrated on nursing tasks.
Regards
Dermot
Posted by Dermot Casey | September 7, 2007 10:14 AM
Posted on September 7, 2007 10:14
Dermot's comments are spot on. A couple of weeks ago The Guardian there carried a feature article about 'is social work possible without breaking the rules' - arguing that (despite a welter of quantitative Performance Imposed by Government)it is meaningless for the users of public services that the service they recieve is reduced to an integer, and a set of linear procedures which assume a Newtonian 'clockwork universe'. Such thinking is illustrated in the retrospective coherence embodied in every public inquiry into the death of a child from the 1960s to date - where an 'important person' is appointed by Government to report on how the services involved could fail to prevented the tragedy, and which individuals are to blame. In many cases, particular public service tasks are only possible because of the quality of the relationship between an individual and the practitioner - something that cannot be codified or quantified (despite attempts to the contraryby consultatnts, chief officers and Government)
Posted by David Hoyle | September 7, 2007 1:08 PM
Posted on September 7, 2007 13:08
Dave,
One of the (many) factors that have led to this situation - and which connects with the article you link to - is that companies are very lucky if they have an accounting system that works. 'Relevance Lost' by Kaplan is a wonderful history of industry from the accountancy point of view; companies used to have management systems that worked. Financial reporting required different information for regulatory purposes. Rather than run two systems, companies ditched the one that worked and implemented one to meet regulatory requirements.
There are many other factors as well of course.
regards
brian
Posted by Brian Sherwood Jones | September 10, 2007 4:47 PM
Posted on September 10, 2007 16:47