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For at least the last 10 years I’ve been complaining to my wife about the level of management currently to be found in all walks of our lives. Wherever you go, whoever you deal with, as soon as you meet a ‘manager’, your life will become, instantly, more complicated and frustrating.
The photo on the right shows “Fred the Shred” currently everyone’s most hated manager but, believe me, he’s only the tip of an enormous iceberg of greed, avarice and incompetence prevalent in every walk of life.
We have ‘managed’ our banks into destruction. We have ‘managed’ our education system into producing 21% of our pupils as illiterates. We have ‘managed’ our health service into producing hospitals like the one in Hampshire which may well be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of patients.
The photo on the right shows “Fred the Shred” currently everyone’s most hated manager but, believe me, he’s only the tip of an enormous iceberg of greed, avarice and incompetence prevalent in every walk of life.
We have ‘managed’ our banks into destruction. We have ‘managed’ our education system into producing 21% of our pupils as illiterates. We have ‘managed’ our health service into producing hospitals like the one in Hampshire which may well be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of patients.
And, it doesn’t end there. The two members of my immediate family who hold relatively senior positions in industry both complain bitterly of the appalling standard of manager with whom they are forced to deal in industry and, very often, at senior levels in major companies.
Local councillors will no longer make decisions preferring, instead, to hire-in consultants at enormous expense to do it for them. This, of course, negates their whole ‘raison d’etre’, only the very reason in fact for which they were elected. We have endless governmental computer systems which don’t work (one of them actually produces its answers in German!). It looks like the new multi-million pound missiles we’re building for the new multi-billion pound nuclear submarines we’re building will not, in fact, fit! They are going to be too big to fit into the ‘holes’ designed into the submarines!
So, what’s gone wrong? Tony Blair (Education, education, education!) decreed that the government should set a target of 50% of all school pupils achieving a University place - a purely arbitrary figure which sounded good but was based on absolutely nothing at all. So, how do we get from 20% to 50%? How do we make that 30% more intelligent all of a sudden? Well, we don’t! That would be impossible! So, what we do instead is lower the educational bar - in other words we make it easier for them to get in!
But once they’re in, what do we do with them? After all, they’re not up to coping with normal academic subjects. So we introduce whole new subjects for them to qualify in - Media Studies (you can take a degree on Coronation Street) and, believe it or not, there’s a Professor of Jokes at Aberdeen University!
There are also degrees in Management. Yep, you can qualify as a ‘Manager’. Not a manager of anything, just ‘a manager’. Gone are the days when you joined a firm, worked your way through every department learning what went on, how the company functioned, and then, if you were lucky (and well above average) you might, just might, become a junior manager and start all over again working your way up through the managerial chain.
As a result, by the time you got anywhere near taking serious decisions, you knew the company inside out!
Local councillors will no longer make decisions preferring, instead, to hire-in consultants at enormous expense to do it for them. This, of course, negates their whole ‘raison d’etre’, only the very reason in fact for which they were elected. We have endless governmental computer systems which don’t work (one of them actually produces its answers in German!). It looks like the new multi-million pound missiles we’re building for the new multi-billion pound nuclear submarines we’re building will not, in fact, fit! They are going to be too big to fit into the ‘holes’ designed into the submarines!
So, what’s gone wrong? Tony Blair (Education, education, education!) decreed that the government should set a target of 50% of all school pupils achieving a University place - a purely arbitrary figure which sounded good but was based on absolutely nothing at all. So, how do we get from 20% to 50%? How do we make that 30% more intelligent all of a sudden? Well, we don’t! That would be impossible! So, what we do instead is lower the educational bar - in other words we make it easier for them to get in!
But once they’re in, what do we do with them? After all, they’re not up to coping with normal academic subjects. So we introduce whole new subjects for them to qualify in - Media Studies (you can take a degree on Coronation Street) and, believe it or not, there’s a Professor of Jokes at Aberdeen University!
There are also degrees in Management. Yep, you can qualify as a ‘Manager’. Not a manager of anything, just ‘a manager’. Gone are the days when you joined a firm, worked your way through every department learning what went on, how the company functioned, and then, if you were lucky (and well above average) you might, just might, become a junior manager and start all over again working your way up through the managerial chain.
As a result, by the time you got anywhere near taking serious decisions, you knew the company inside out!