Some years ago I worked for a short time – a mercifully short time – as Chief Engineer for a firm that had been taken over by a large American corporation.
The Americans, or rather their pale English imitators, wanted to use the factory site to develop and manufacture a shiny new project, one that would leave their competitors bereft. And in order to do this they swiftly kicked out all the management team they found in-situ and replaced it with their own hand-picked line of whizz-kids.
Know it all?
The replacement General Manager was one such, a university graduate, survivor of many management training courses and days spent chasing about in the woods shooting paintballs, a ruthless go-getter who knew to a T what was what, and how. And about twenty two years of age.
One day, as we sat together in his office having one of those o-so-essential business meetings his phone rang.
It was the head of another department wanting to know the progress on a piece of equipment he needed. This was my baby, but the General Manager didn’t bother handing over to me. He didn’t need to. He had his finger on the pulse you see, knew immediately how to acquire and pass on the required information.
Leave it to me
Asking the department head to hold, he quickly and efficiently riffled through his in-tray and then, not finding what he was looking for, moved on to the out-tray.
Here he located the requisition form he sought and thus felt able to inform the department head that the equipment he needed had indeed been manufactured and would doubtless be in his hand forthwith.
Ahem ….
After he had replaced the receiver, with the air of yet another decision triumphantly taken, I informed him that, not only was the job not finished, it had not yet been passed onto my foreman so that he could start with it. And that furthermore, such was the backlog of requisitions sitting on my desk waiting to be processed, the equipment could not begin to be built for several more weeks.
I ended by pointing out to this high-flying everything-at-his-fingertips child that getting a job done required rather more than taking an order form from his in-tray, signing it and passing it into his out-tray. That the work had to be materially done by someone, taking rather more time than scribbling a signature.
Water off a ducks back of course. When, at some inevitable time in the near future, the missing piece of kit was queried, the buck would be smartly passed to me as head of the department concerned. It’s a situation engineers are well used to.
England Disunited
My reason for relating this little anecdote here is that I believe the management of England Disunited is in exactly the same situation. Staffed by rich men’s kids who are so amazingly naive about what makes life function they too sincerely believe that making a rousing speech, issuing a stern instruction, means that the objective will certainly be resolved.
After all, it’s no different to issuing orders to one’s servant really.
Who takes the blame?
In fact of course, Cameron’s schoolboy strictures will achieve only more – and more complex – forms issued for social workers and police to fill in, at least one more quango, expensively headed up by Someone who knows Someone, and yet another round of meetings and consultations held to show Something Is Being Done.
As a direct result of course, less will done and more problems left to multiply.
No matter though, by then our illustrious leaders will have found some other cause to be noble and thrusting about. And anyway, when the collapse of their grand ‘new’ ideas becomes clear it won’t be them to blame. It will all be the fault of those at the front end. Like always.
Image: WeeGeeBored under CC BY 2.0
