WE LIVE IN strange times. In the private sector, market rules are so degraded that it has become the role of companies in the real economy, some built up over decades, to act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino. Meanwhile, the public sector is in the grip of a central planning regime of a rigidity and incompetence not seen since Gosplan wrote Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

You think I exaggerate? Well, as Exhibit A, consider the hedge funds that borrow company stock in order to vote for or against a proposal – a merger or takeover, say – not to further the interests of the company, but to make their previous bet on the firm’s share price come true. For Exhibit B, name another government since Leonid Brezhnev’s that prescribes 198 targets for local government, numbers and postings of junior doctors, reading methods for teachers in primary schools, cleaning techniques used in hospitals and how GPs should organise their appointment diaries.

Already individually dysfunctional in their own way, in combination these diametrically opposed management extremes deliver not the fabled ‘third way’, or at least not in any man ner intended, but an unholy mess, from which we get the worst of both worlds.

How have we got to this position? As a reader reminded me last week, our most illuminating guide may be the lamented Jane Jacobs. When she died in 2006, obituarists emphasised the Canadian writer’s regeneration opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But in Systems of Survival (1992), she also put forward startlingly original and equally penetrating observations about the way economic life in general is organised.

From sources ranging from The Observer to medieval law and anthropology, Jacobs concluded that humans had developed two ways of gaining a living: ‘taking’ and ‘trading’, or ‘conquest’ and ‘commerce’. She also found that each of these survival systems had a corresponding ‘moral syndrome’, built out of precept and tradition, modified over time. For example, it’s hardly surprising to find that commerce thrives on a syndrome of honesty, competition, respect for contracts, initiative and enterprise, optimism, thrift, willingness to collaborate and agree, and avoidance of force.

The other syndrome, which Jacobs dubs the ‘guardian’ syndrome because it derives from territorial protection, by contrast emphasises loyalty, honour, tradition, prowess, exclusivity and the distribution of largesse. Trading is anathema to it. This syndrome governs the behaviour of governments and their bureaucratic and other agents, including police, armed forces and judges (also, incidentally, organised religion).

Three points are essential to understand how the syndromes work. The first is that they are practical and internally consistent, not arbitrary: they are ‘what works’, as evolved over time. Second, though mutually exclusive, they are also interdependent: commerce needs ‘guardians’ (the state) to establish and police the rules, guardians need commerce to provide energy and innovation, not to mention taxes. Finally, and crucially, they are systems. One characteristic of systems is that the parts work together and are self-reinforcing.

But by the same token it’s impossible to change or remove individual elements without causing unintended consequences all along the chain. In this case, so sensitive to tampering are the syndromes that combinations of the two produce not a milder median, but what Jacobs calls ‘monstrous hybrids’, with the perverse property of turning virtues in one syndrome into vices in the other.

The classic case is the Mafia, a rigidly ‘guardian’ organisation put to the service of commerce, making travesties of honour, loyalty, competition and industriousness in the process. But hence also the dysfunctional examples with which I began this piece. In fact, in 1992 Jacobs was already anticipating the buyout boom, which she interpreted as companies abandoning commercial morality (thrift, innovation, enterprise) to treat other firms as plunder.

Conversely, the disastrous results of the GP contract can be traced directly to the government’s determination to turn an essentially guardian organisation into a commercial one. GPs have responded to incentives in textbook fashion, by finding ways to meet the targets. The government has changed their motivation from intrinsic (the work itself) to extrinsic (outside rewards). But, as a patient, which GP would you rather consult, one motivated by money or by doing the best medical job?

The point about the syndromes is that one isn’t better than, or replaceable by, the other: they’re symbiotic. It follows that the ability to navigate between them, maintaining their integrity but knowing when to switch, is vital. If, as Jacobs suggests, such a capability is a mark of civilisation, we can only conclude we are going in the opposite direction to what New Labour intended: backwards.

The Observer, 9 March 2008

IN HIS witty column last week, my colleague William Keegan recalled Gladstone’s description of finance as ‘the stomach of the country, from which all the other organs take their tone’. Well, that stomach currently being convulsed by binge-induced indigestion and nausea, and the tone set for the other organs (which means for us) is a throbbing hangover, the effects of which are likely to get worse before they get better.

Coming after the dotcom debacle of 2000, today’s sub-prime saga – which still has some way to run – this indigestion confronts us with an urgent question: how to prevent the stomach’s chronic urge to binge again in another five or 10 years, maybe causing not just a bad headache, like this time, but a cardiac arrest.

One answer could be tighter international regulation: financier and philanthropist George Soros, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to name but three, have all called for reform of international finance. But this is like trying to control obesity or binge-drinking by regulating global supplies of food and drink. What we need is for certain individuals to change their diet.

The origins of today’s financial crisis lie not in the mysteries of the global financial architecture but in the pay-for-performance practices of Wall Street and the City. Basically, these practices push the perverse incentives contained in all such schemes to the extreme. What marks out the financial sector is its offer of unlimited upside for inventors of clever wheezes like collateralised debt obligations (don’t ask) or mortgage-backed securities, with no downside. Not only are the fabulous bonuses paid before the toxic effects on the rest of the body are evident (and sometimes brazenly even when they are: see Stan O’Neal’s $161m and Chuck Prince’s $42m exit packages at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup respectively) – even worse, participants in the system are cynically aware that, as with Northern Rock, they can’t be allowed to go to the wall for fear of bringing down the whole structure.

The upshot is the ultimate moral hazard: as Martin Wolf has powerfully argued in the FT , the financial sector is an industry ‘that generates vast rewards for insiders and repeated crises for hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders’ who, to add insult to injury, then are obliged to pick up the pieces with their taxes. In the terser formulation of playwright Bertolt Brecht: ‘Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill?’

We did. And it is at this point that the non-dom issue swims murkily into the picture. Of course, there are non-domi ciled, low-tax-paying UK residents of all trades, shapes and sizes – ship owners and business-school lecturers along with City traders and bankers. But be sure that most of the irritating high-pitched drone you’ve been hearing these last few weeks comes not, as you might have imagined, from the famous ‘mosquito’ device for dispelling rowdy teenagers in our town centres but, just as repellent, from high-earners in the City whingeing about the preposterous idea of having to pay tax on all their earnings.

Putting the two things together, let’s see if I’ve got them straight. To make the City safe as the world’s premier financial centre it needs to be free to pay unlimited salaries to incentivise people to devise ever more arcane, risk-bearing financial vehicles in the future, while it is the job of the authorities to pull out all the monetary stops to keep the music playing, in Chuck Prince’s infamous phrase. But not only that those whose extravagant pursuit of riches actually created the mess are now demanding partial exemption from responsibility for paying the clear-up costs, otherwise, like the Mad Hatter, they’ll move on to the next clean plate. Or am I missing something here?

Of course, we want London to continue to innovate and be a magnet for the financial sector, but for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. Maintaining a dubious status as an offshore tax haven, as the IMF named the UK last year, which is home to the largest community of non-dom tycoons in the world, figures among the latter rather than the former.

London owes it to the world, as well as the rest of the economy, to innovate in ways that improve the sustainability of the body as a whole rather than undermine it. That means embracing transparency and accountability, including, especially, the ways its big shots pay themselves. A system that generates colossal rewards for the few and crises and losses for the many is unsustainable in the long term even if it doesn’t auto-destruct in the short.

The UK’s stomach is out of control, demanding to continue consuming at the present rate even if it threatens to absorb all the other organs in the process. It needs to go on a healthy diet that will also nurture the rest of the organism. If it doesn’t, more unpleasant medicine may be needed. It could take a number of forms, but all of them will taste much nastier than paying pounds 30,000 a year to maintain their non-dom tax privileges.

The Observer, 2 March 2008

FOR SUCH an important announcement, the launch of the government’s ‘world-class apprenticeships’ scheme has evoked a curiously muted response. After all, the unsatisfactory interface between education and work is one of the UK’s most vexatious and long-running sores, crimping the lives of millions and helping to confound all efforts to raise the UK’s lagging productivity. In this context, guaranteeing every qualified school-leaver an apprenticeship by 2013 and boosting overall numbers to 400,000 by 2020, as the scheme requires, is nothing short of revolutionary – potentially the biggest change for 50 years.

Such worthy subjects have been thoroughly overshadowed by the latest turns in the City vaudeville show. But it is striking that while employer and professional bodies such as the EEF and Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) are broadly in favour of the initiative, they are hardly brimming over with enthusiasm.

One reason for the shortage of enthusiasm is that, as educationalists point out, this is a purely government initiative. In any other European country, a scheme of this magnitude could only have emerged as a joint commitment between government, employers, trade unions and the education system. The apprenticeships, by contrast, are a product of, and the main instrument in, the government’s plans to keep teenagers in full-time education or training until 18, and increase the stock of national skills. As Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College, notes, the figures are top-down calculations derived from policy requirements rather than commitments of demand and supply on the ground, leaving question marks about the feasibility, and even appropriateness, of the numbers.

Many of the misgivings can be traced back to this central weakness. Everyone agrees that structured, flexible and appropriate apprenticeships combining training and education are a huge benefit to individuals, to companies that know how to make use of them, and to the economy as a whole. Schemes run by Rolls-Royce, BT and a number of other large companies, for example, have great cachet, set high standards and are greatly oversubscribed. Such companies run apprenticeship schemes because they believe they are essential for their future – the best way to prepare for key jobs.

More generally, they form the backbone of the whole employment system in Germany, where they provide an accepted guarantee of shared commercial and technical knowledge. Such apprenticeships are a key economic strength. But both the EEF and CIPD wonder how quickly demand and supply of such high-level programmes can be expanded. Currently, more young people want apprenticeships than can be accommodated, and overall numbers declined this year.

‘Apprenticeships aren’t costless,’ says the CIPD’s John McGurk, and require long-term commitment to set up and run. Both bodies warn that rebranding other lower-level initiatives under the apprenticeship banner to meet numbers would devalue the status and defeat the object. There are other doubts.

German Industry UK, an umbrella body for German companies employing upwards of 500,000 people in the UK, has long been concerned with the shortage of suitably qualified new recruits for skilled jobs – to the point where it set up its own vocational training school to complement on-the-job company training. Last year it met David Lammy, the minister responsible for apprenticeships, to air German concerns and offer help. ‘It’s not a question of saying Ger many is best or the only system,’ insists Bob Bischof, a board member of the association and 40-year UK resident. ‘But we do have a lot of experience – of apprenticeships in particular and of representing the interests of the ‘real’ economy, as opposed the chimerical world of the City, in general.’

This, he believes, gives the German opinion some weight – German employers believe further education arrangements are too complex, suffer from too many overlapping initiatives and fail to offer suitable curricula for serious business. Dividing responsibilities for apprenticeships between two new education ministries and changing the funding arrangements doesn’t help either.

Meanwhile, no one knows what the government’s new ‘diplomas’ are supposed to be for and how they fit with the other components of the system. In a wider context, Bischof says, most people ignore the fact that 50 per cent of German apprenticeships are in the nuts and bolts of commerce itself, providing an essential common structure of understanding for anyone going into business.

Without similar glue to stick it together, the latest in a long line of vehicles for getting non-academic British teenagers on to a worthwhile career path may come apart before it leaves the workshop.

The Observer, 24 February 2008

THE POLICEMAN’S lot is not a happy one. The force exhibits in extreme form the organisational stupidity that successive governments, particularly this one, have visited on all public services by imposing designs and procedures that make it impossible for them to learn. This is why, despite a 39 per cent increase in real resources over the past decade (an extra pounds 5bn) and a 25 per cent boost in manpower, effectiveness and morale has never been lower. The public now trusts the police less than it does doctors, teachers, judges or the NHS.

This is not their fault. ‘They, and we, deserve better,’ says Vanguard Consulting’s Richard Davis, who has worked on policing as a system with several forces. Will Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s long-awaited Review of Policing, which thudded on to ministerial desks last week, provide it? Not of itself, Davis believes. Flanagan knows policing is ‘at a crossroads’, the implication, rightly, being that it needs to change direction. Ultimately, however, he is himself too banged up in the dysfunctional system that created the problems to do more than tiptoe around the main issues.

Thus, the report doesn’t go near the fear of many insiders that the reforms introduced by David Blunkett as Home Secretary were, intentionally or not, an attack on the fundamental duty of protecting the public and in danger of turning the force into an executive arm of the state. They worried that the systematic removal of police discretion was making the service a creature of the inspection and compliance regime, and hence government, rather than the citizen.

Flanagan treats this as an issue of bureaucracy. Police bureaucracy is indeed grotesque – at any one time, notes Davis, out of a command unit of about 350 officers, just 10 will be out policing, the rest behind desks recording data and form-filling – a colossal waste of resources that urgently needs pruning. But it is a symptom, not a cause, and palliatives such as ‘civilianisation’ (recruiting civilian pen-pushers to take the place of officers behind desks) or less intensive incident recording are just that.

The cause of the bureaucracy is the Soviet-style ‘deliverology’ regime developed by the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Tony Blair – ‘targets and terror’, as the equivalent became known in the NHS. In the police, the bureaucratic effects of deliverology were twofold. The first was that each target generated a standalone, ring-fenced sub-unit to deal with it. So every command unit has separate boxes for witness protection, offender management, domestic abuse, child protection, neighbourhood policing, crime prevention, intelligence, ‘volume’ crime, victim support, CID, firearms, licensing, schools liaison, together with the obligatory call centre with the forlorn task of routing calls to the right one (within 15 seconds). Co-ordination is a nightmare, with extra layers of staff drafted in to manage it.

Meanwhile, the target measurements being no help with public protection, their second effect is to generate an additional, valueless (value-eating, since it consumes resources) task of recording figures for government inspectors and auditors, the all-powerful apparatchiks of today’s public-service regime. Their word carrying such weight, a cadre of internal auditors has grown up within police forces whose sole job is to check useless figures before they are reported, still more wasteful bureaucracy that prevents police from doing their job.

Remarkably, without that hindrance the job is perfectly do-able. The astonishing real story about crime is this: when police demand is analysed locally, much of it is predictable by type, time and geography, and perpetrated not by shadowy master criminals but a few offenders of distinctly average intelligence, already known to the authorities via school, social services or the police themselves.

So local policing isn’t a nice-to-have, a sop to the public, it’s essential to doing the job properly. Where some brave officers have ignored the official boxes, worked out the local issues and positioned themselves to respond to it, what happens? Crime falls, officers have more time to respond to calls, public respect and engagement increase. Unfortunately, less crime conflicts with the official target of more detection, so a sergeant on a peaceful patch will come under heavy pressure at month-end for more arrests and detections. This leads to criminalisation of playground squabbles, mobile phone insults and other absurdities. ‘No wonder so many officers lose the will to live,’ sighs Davis.

Flanagan doesn’t deal with the baleful effects of deliverology perhaps politically he couldn’t. The best to be hoped for from the report, therefore, may be the cover it provides for a few enterprising officers to reassert obligation to the public rather than government and quietly reconstitute whatever initiative and discretion hasn’t been kicked out of them by the Home Office, their chiefs and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.

The Observer, 17 February 2008

IF THERE’S one management platitude that should have been throttled at birth, it’s ‘what gets measured gets managed’. It’s not that it’s not true – it is – but it is often misunderstood, with disastrous consequences.

The full proposition is: ‘What gets measured gets managed – even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.’ In the truncated version, there are two lethal pitfalls. The first is the implication that management is only about measuring. Way back in 1956, the academic V F Ridgway famously noted the dysfunctional consequences of managers’ tendency to reduce as many as possible of their concerns to numbers.

Quality guru W Edwards Deming went further, putting ‘management by use only of visible figures, with little consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable’ at No 5 in his list of seven deadly management diseases. Henry Mintzberg, the sanest of management educators, proposed that starting ‘from the premise that we can’t measure what matters’ gives managers the best chance of realistically facing up to their challenge.

In the past few years, of course, spu rious measurement has proliferated beyond, well, measure. Although regulation comes into it, this is often the consequence of IT systems that can measure anything that moves – the number of telephone rings, how long calls take and cost and how many calls a person makes an hour, for instance. The figures can be on a manager’s desk the same evening.

But just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should. All the above, although standard in call centres, are generally pointless, because they only tell you about levels of activity, not about how well the call centre’s purpose is being achieved. Thus, a call centre may boast high productivity and low costs per call but that’s irrelevant if most of its activity is mopping up customer complaints about poor service. Activity measures prevent managers from seeing that cheaper calls aren’t the answer: better to improve the service so that they don’t need a call centre with all its associated costs in the first place.

It gets worse when activity measures form the basis of contracts with suppliers, as they often do in the hard-nosed-sounding guise of ‘payment by results’. Payment by results, whether for calls answered, appointments made or patients seen, is actually ‘payment by activity’ – activity that doesn’t necessarily advance and may actually obstruct the overall purpose. As in the call-centre example above, a contractor paid by ‘results’ (ie activity) has no incentive to improve service, which would reduce the number of calls, and hence payment, and every incentive to worsen it, by cutting the time spent on calls as they inexorably increase in number.

Here we encounter the second problem with the measurement-management equation. All too often in a kind of Gresham’s law (which said bad money drives out good), the easy-to-measure drives out the hard, even when the latter is more important. Strategy writer Igor Ansoff said: ‘Corporate managers start off trying to manage what they want, and finish up wanting what they can measure.’

What happens when bad measures drive out good is strikingly described in an article in the current Economic Journal. Investigating the effects of competition in the NHS, Carol Propper and her colleagues made an extraordinary discovery. Under competition, hospitals improved their patient waiting times. At the same time, the death-rate following emergency heart-attack admissions substantially increased. Why? As targets, waiting times were and are measured (and what gets measured gets managed, right?). Emergency heart-attack deaths were not tracked and therefore not managed. Even though no one would argue that the trade-off – shorter waiting times but more deaths – was anything but a travesty of NHS purpose, that’s what the choice of measure produced.

As the paper observes: ‘It seems unlikely that hospitals deliberately set out to decrease survival rates. What is more likely is that in response to competitive pressures on costs, hospitals cut services that affected [heart-attack] mortality rates, which were unobserved, in order to increase other activities which buyers could better observe.’

In other words, what gets measured, matters. Measures set up incentives that drive people’s behaviour. And woe to the organisation when that behaviour is at odds with its purpose. Imagine the cost to NHS morale (one of Deming’s unknown and unknowable figures) of the knowledge that managing to the measure resulted in more deaths – the grotesque opposite of its aims. Hospitals are the extreme example of a general case. As such, they allow us a definitive rephrasing of our least favourite management mantra. What gets measured gets managed – so be sure you have the right measures, because the wrong ones kill.

Yjr `pbserver, 10 February 2008

‘SPECULATORS MAY do no harm on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on the whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done,’ wrote Keynes in 1936, during the depression that followed the Great Crash of 1929.

Writing today, he might add that a position where the economy is managed not to promote enterprise but to keep the whirlpool of speculation turning is beyond serious and becoming surreal.

Far be it from me to say I told you so (well, all right then), but the bill for entrusting the capital development of the country to the casino is now falling due – and the price will be high. As the waters drain out of the whirlpool, what’s left of the UK economic miracle makes a soggy sight.

It turns out the UK’s famous growth economy is built not on prudence and good management but on tick and soaraway property prices. The UK savings rate is negative: total personal debt is now around pounds 1.5 trillion and increasing at nearly 10 per cent a year. About pounds 1.2 trillion of that is mortgages as people chase house prices that nearly trebled in the decade to 2006 (in London, considerably more). We have thus managed the remarkable trick of transforming bricks and mortar into gauzy insubstantiality – a bubble containing thin air.

The architects of this transformation, of course, have been the City alchemists who, as we now know, vastly inflated the bubble by slicing, dicing and selling on the debt to other clever fools. But that is almost entirely the City’s function today. The time is long gone when its job was to provide a service to the economy it’s now the job of the rest of the economy to provide the material for its trades. Consider the foreign exchange market, where pounds 1 trillion is traded every day. Just 20 per cent of this is currency needed for trade or tourism. Eighty per cent is speculative – gambling, in other words. The tail has wagged the dog off its feet.

Even though the definition of a bubble is that the values are unreal, it’s the real world that gets to pick up the pieces. Even at the height of the credit boom, the City was uninterested in start-ups, much preferring buyouts of established firms on which it could weave its financial magic. Now, with the air hissing out of the bubble like a deflating tyre, the word is that start-up capital for the real economy is drying up.

Another casualty of City culture is the patient, human and organisation-building skills that underpin success in the material economy. Alas, computers can’t do everything, even in finance. It’s telling that the most sophisticated surveillance technology was unable to spot Societe Generale’s rogue trader piling up $50bn of trades – but didn’t anyone notice his behaviour?

For contrast, turn for an instant to somewhere that, for the last 15 years, has been as sexy as Horlicks. Germany, throughout the go-go decade, has been regarded by Anglo-Saxons with barely concealed scorn. Who cared about making things when all that could be done in China? Well, Germany has just put out an economic report for 2008 noting that its resilience to external shocks has ‘improved substantially’. Engineering, its economic heart, is expecting growth of 5 per cent this year (11 per cent in 2007) jobs, too, will increase.

Overall, German unemployment remains high, but the country is still the world’s largest exporter. Alone among industrialised countries, it has increased its export market share since 2000. Not only is its manufacturing sector ‘defy ing the laws of economic gravity’, as one analyst put it, Germany also has high hopes for its unregarded services sector. It has twigged that manufacturing and services aren’t alternatives they travel together. So where German exporters boldly go, Deutsche Bank and SAP follow close after. Unfortunately for the UK, the reverse applies. With nothing to piggyback on, UK services are no longer expanding to offset manufacturing’s balance of payments deficit they add to it.

The jewel in the German economic crown is not the famous global names but the Mittelstand – the medium-sized, family-owned companies that employ 70 per cent of German workers and power its export performance. These firms thrive on long-term relationships with employees, customers, suppliers – and banks, which see their job as providing continuity and support rather than doing deals. This is why the private-equity ‘locusts’ arouse such fear in Germany: imported Anglo-Saxon attitudes would tear its economic fabric apart.

Back in the UK, timid recognition that there is still life outside the casino came with last week’s announcement of a boost to the UK’s apprenticeship scheme – partly, it is rumoured, under pressure from German employers, who persist, oddly, in seeing the UK as a manufacturing base. It seems churlish to carp. It is indeed welcome – just 25 years too late.

The Observer, 3 February 2008

THE BRITISH are passionate about their sport – look at the football fans of Newcastle United. Yet the place sport occupies in the nation’s heart is almost comically unmatched by the place it occupies in the national brain – look again at Newcastle, whose panicked directors have replaced the club’s manager four times in the past two years. Connecting the two – so that heart combines with head to yield the long-term success everyone wants – is the job of Peter Keen, the eager young performance head of UK Sport who is charged, among other things, with bringing home Olympic bacon at this year’s Beijing and, even more so, at the 2012 London games.

Keen, an ambitious cyclist turned academic turned coach, is both candid and realistic about his job. While the coach shares ownership of any sporting result, there’s no feeling of helplessness to match that of the person standing on the touchline waiting for the off: ‘You can’t even run it off,’ he sighs. ‘On the starting line, the coach is nothing – and if you believe otherwise you’re a risk to yourself and them.’

With no business background as such, Keen is refreshingly short on management speak. Yet he is long on the practical business of coaxing outstanding performance from promising athletes. Chosen in 1997 to set up a lottery-funded programme to develop high-potential cyclists, he masterminded the rise of the GB team in the world championship rankings from 13th in 1998 to 3rd in 2002 and first in 2005, coaching nine world-record and gold-medal holders along the way.

Is a similar trajectory possible for other Olympic sports? Yes, says Keen. He points to his own case, where the key – both personally and nationally – was lottery funding that enabled him to give up the day job and concentrate solely on coaching and the national cycling centre. Lottery funding of pounds 50m a year, matched by a similar amount from the Exchequer, has enabled UK Sport to provide the minimum platform without which systematic success is impossible – ‘not the nice-to-haves, but the essentials’ – and focus ruthlessly on the few athletes offering international ‘podium potential’.

With this aid, a number of other sports – rowing, sailing, equestrianism and to some extent athletics – have made the transformation to ‘full-on professional mode’, with the resources and ambition to compete with the very best. ‘With those, we’re putting the shiny roof on. Others are shaping up, while others again’ – an example is handball – ‘are just starting out.’

In Olympic terms, the seeds of today’s shoots were sown in the aftermath of the Atlanta games of 1996, where an expectant Britain won just one gold medal and found itself ‘at the bottom of division two’ at 36 in the medals table. In Sydney in 2000 it bounced back to 10th, with 10 gold medals, followed by a similar performance in Athens in 2004. And Beijing this September? Keen cautions against over-optimism. ‘But we’re back in the top 10,’ he says. ‘And although we can’t predict, we’re further ahead than before.’

Keen’s headline focus is, of course, 2012 – ‘the most massive thing to happen to UK Olympic sport’. Meeting the challenge is not rocket science, he says: any sport worthy of the name requires eight or more years to master, and a semi-institutionalised system to instil it. He points to the triumphant France football team of 1998, almost all of whom were graduates of a central national academy. For London, the die is mostly already cast: ‘You know 90 per cent of the top performers six years out.’

In most people’s eyes, particularly athletes, the London Olympics are an entirely dominant end. For Keen, however, they are also a vital means towards broader, more permanent change. It’s not just about honing and refining an elite group, he insists. If a talented teenager wants to be a soldier or a musician, he reasons, there is an established educational path to move down, from apprenticeship to mastery. Why not in sport?

‘I believe passionately in the value of sport to society,’ he says. ‘There’s something fundamental about moving, running, swimming. But while we love it, we don’t really understand it.’ Hence the perennially disappointed ambitions of England football teams and the impossibility of finding an English coach to manage them – ‘2012 is about bringing all that to life’.

But, with funding uncertain after that, for successful sports the London showcase is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to suck in the commercial support that will consolidate the infrastructures – teams, academies, coaches, grounds and events – that have been put in place, and maybe lay the foundations for new ones. Thus, as ever, commercial success depends on performance and performance depends on investment in a system to support and amplify individual talent. Simple in theory – but if he pulls it off, Keen will deserve his own gold medal.

The Observer, 27 January 2008

RESPONSES TO last week’s piece on surveillance and outsourcing management to computers yielded much food for thought – mostly depressing. Most correspondents thought the dangers under rather than overstated.

One wanted to start a movement against the whole paraphernalia of command-and-control management, including computers and targets. Another ended his message: ‘Of course I’m using a Hotmail account from my home computer because I wouldn’t want my work account to log this message. For a civil servant, communicating with journalists is not usually encouraged.’

However, the most graphic description of the dark places such trends lead to came from a trade union official representing NHS Direct staff. He recounted how – against a background of rising call numbers – to cut costs NHS Direct first downsized and restructured its call centres to bring in more non-nursing staff, then launched a drive to standardise shift patterns and other working practices. The vehicle was a central, computerised scheduling system that ‘manages’ everything from shift patterns and annual leave to tea breaks.

This leaves local managers with little discretion – but it does allow countrywide performance comparisons against health department targets. ‘So we have the worst of all worlds – disengaged workforce, fed-up line managers, and management by targets driven by computer software!’ If I’d set out to write a list of everything wrong with modern management, I couldn’t have done better.

Of course, there are some areas where you want computers to help make decisions: flying a jet and running a nuclear power station, for instance. And in some specific domains, such as predictions and diagnostics, computers can do a better job than humans.

Yet while computers are wonderful at some things, they are hopeless at others. It is telling that although they can out-compute humans at chess, they lose at poker. In conditions of ambiguity and partial information, they are adrift. While computers are good at routine and bad at variety, people are the reverse. So what do we do? We get computers to compress variety into the standard formats they can handle (hence all those ‘For option A press 1, for option B press 2…’ interactive telephone answering systems) and get people to read out scripts: exactly the wrong (and most expensive) way to provide a service.

The ability to decide how and where to use computer aids – to ‘manage by wire’ – may be a defining quality for today’s managers. But it is one that too many appear unaware of. A previous correspondent, a course leader, noted that ‘even at department level, management is becoming a detached elite, unengaged with the day-to-issues, setting destructive and unattainable targets and demanding their fulfilment whatever the cost, both to workers and the organisation’. The gap is even greater at the top level, the message perfectly conveyed in ever-widening pay differentials they are literally worlds apart.

There’s a Japanese expression, genchi genbutsu , which roughly translates as ‘go and see for yourself’, or ‘go to the source’. Behind it is the idea that any report, say, about a problem on the shop floor is by its nature an abstraction, separated from its context. For that reason, a ‘solution’ dreamed up at head office, where the report is received, is doubly abstracted from the source – with results like those seen at NHS Direct.

Properly understood, genchi genbutsu isn’t a licence for top management interference, but the reverse: a licence to understand the work and help those doing it to resolve the issue. It is the opposite of Gordon Brown mandating a ‘deep clean’ for all UK hospitals on the spur of the moment – did he go to the source to find out how MRSA is spread? – because it is based on understanding, not opinion. This is the logic, as in many Japanese companies, behind making new managers spend the first six months on the line and selling products before being allowed behind a desk and of thinking of the plant as a living, changing thing, rather than a cost-centre or a collection of boxes on a form.

A good role model was the late Sir John Harvey-Jones, the former ICI chairman, who represented most of what’s best about modern British management. The opposite of the manager as geek or bureaucrat, Harvey-Jones was also much more than the bluff extrovert sometimes portrayed. He was both straightforward and subtle, a rare combination. Those who worked for him appreciated his willingness to shoulder hard decisions but always explain them face to face. He was equally capable of leading from the front and allowing others to take the credit. His Troubleshooter TV series was a kind of genchi genbutsu in action. In the days of management-by-wire, such qualities become more, not less, critical. Now, more than ever, he will be missed.

The Observer, 20 January 2008

MORE THAN half of all UK employees – 52 per cent – are now subject to computer surveillance at work, according to research from the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Future of Work’ programme. That’s a remarkable figure, and it has led to a sharp increase in strain among those being monitored – particularly white-collar administrative staff.

‘This is a complete surprise – it came from nowhere. It’s a revolution in our work practices,’ says the LSE’s Pat McGovern, one of the researchers.

So what’s going on? The rhetoric around office technology emphasises its supposed liberation and empowerment: computers remove routine and leave people free to be creative, and remote working delivers individuals from ‘presenteeism’ and allows them to be productive in their own way. But, as another researcher says: ‘Now for the first time we can see how this development is damaging employees’ wellbeing.’

It seems to be part of a complex shift in employment relations. Instead of cutting full-time jobs and using the market to reduce costs, British employers have been devising new ways of keeping their employees, but getting more out of them. Many of the techniques they use – teamwork, performance management and pay, individual development – form part of the bundle of human-resource management (HRM) practices many believe contribute to the much touted ‘high-performance workplace’. Yet the effect seems to be negated when computers rather than people do the managing.

Job satisfaction is falling, too. The damage is especially evident down the office pecking order. The research finds a strong class bias in job outcomes under the new regime, because the combination of IT advances and individualised HRM policies has greatly increased both the number of low-level computer-mediated jobs and the visibility of workers’ performance. ‘Everything is logged, so people become much more accountable,’ notes Warwick Business School’s Professor Harry Scarbrough, who studies the evolution of the knowledge economy.

The result is a tightening of the performance screw, with an extra ratchet or two for those at the bottom of the ladder who are no longer covered by trade union representation. While managers and professionals are well placed to strike individual pay bargains, the lower-paid -especially women – tend to be left out in the cold. The divergence is exacerbated by the computer-generated tendency to centralise information and intensify hierarchy: managers see the performance figures, lowly employees don’t. The consequence, finds the research, is increasing earnings inequality. Substantial pay rises for most managers contrasts with static or even declining wages for low-end computer-monitored workers, who are working harder, and longer hours, into the bargain.

Hence the strain. In effect, today’s employment anxieties are not about being out of work: they’re about the job itself being more demanding, and the rewards more unequal. The unease is not too surprising. One of the casualties of surveillance is trust: this is true even when people don’t know if they are being watched or not. In addition, while technology achieves marvels in compressing time and space, it doesn’t do intimacy it’s hard to build trust by remote.

And perhaps, speculates Scarbrough, that’s the point. Is surveillance by computer the virtual equivalent of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ (a prison whose inmates could all be watched from a central point without their knowing), by means of which employers can keep the advantages of employment continu ity and tight job control without the cost of trust-building measures such as pensions and career structures?

McGovern is not so sure. He believes many of the HR practices are genuine. However, in a more general way the dehumanising consequences of embedding ever more management routines in IT systems are too obvious to miss. ‘Human resources management’ by computer is a travesty, a contradiction in terms. Computers are terrible at making fine judgments: see the spectacular junior-doctors fiasco last year. But even substituting computers for routine matters such as scheduling work rotas and holidays can lead to feelings of disengagement and even coercion: the essence of machine bureaucracy.

The effects on managers are potentially just as pernicious. One obvious danger is that managers manage what’s measured for them, rather than decide themselves what to focus on. That stands for a broader peril. Reliance on computers is an invitation to managers to switch off their brains. It is also an abnegation of their real responsibility: the duty of care to those they manage. Managing by machine may be easier, but the prospect it raises – of a generation of managers being denied the opportunity (and obligation) to use common sense, experience and method as the primary tools of their trade – is an unsettling one.

The Observer, 13 January 2008

LET’S START 2008 with a tribute to those without whom this column could not exist – you. When I began writing it 13 years ago, my elation at landing the job was quickly tempered by the realisation that, like cooking in a restaurant, a column was a regular obligation. You couldn’t have a week off when you ran out of ideas. I wrote down the half-dozen subjects I could think of at the time then broke into a cold sweat: what would I write about when those dried up?

I needn’t have worried. The problem was solved by the (in retrospect) inspired decision to attach an email address to the piece. It certainly wasn’t a strategic decision – I don’t remember making it at all – but it was crucial, because it triggered first a trickle, then a steady flow of ideas and commentary from readers that has been the column’s lifeblood ever since.

It also changed the nature of the exercise. If readers were providing some of the direction and motive force, it was no longer the one-way pontification of someone pretending to be an ‘expert’: it was a two-way conversation, more like a joint voyage of discovery.

But it wasn’t only a conversation. It was also, and much more powerfully, a system, a feedback loop in which ideas and the direction of travel were constantly adjusted by interaction with readers and fed back into new ideas. Obvious, elementary even, but it soon became clear that above and beyond generating ideas the loop was an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for learning. Just how powerful was revealed when a reader commented that the column was not only describing others’ new management ideas as they emerged, it was also putting them in a framework and suggesting why they were good or bad. In short, it could connect them.

The point of relating all this is that over time the product of this two-way traffic has coalesced into what I have come to think of as The Observer‘s guide to management – a bit like the paper’s style guide, a practical, joined-up, and (I hope) radical way of thinking about the grammar and language of management.

What does The Observer‘s model of management look like? Well, it doesn’t much resemble anything taught at business schools (with one or two honourable exceptions). As befits its origins, it begins with the customer, and is based on systems principles.

In good Observer tradition, its hostility to the conventional command-and-control, targets-and-inspection-driven management regime that currently dominates both public and private sectors is based on optimism. Human nature is irreducibly self-interested and opportunist, the dominant theory runs, and requires hierarchical control to prevent people from subverting the organisation to their own ends.

But myriad reader reactions confirm that humans are not the desiccated automatons assumed by the standard model and they despair at the arid bureaucratic constraints imposed in its name. On the contrary, people long to do a good job and be proud of their work. In turn, it is management’s job to recognise and reinforce this positive behaviour, not just structure their organisations to prevent the negative.

And, as the feedback shows, they can. First, because, as human are intentional rather than mechanical systems, organisations can take advantage of human realities ignored by conventional management such as self-fulfilling prophecies (trusting systems beget trusting people, just as the reverse is true). Second, because the opposite of top-down command and control is not bottom-up anarchy, as many assume: it is inside-out. If the organisation is built to face outwards, towards the customer rather than the chief executive, as at present, hierarchy becomes less necessary because it is the customer who exerts the discipline.

This is the opposite of soft and woolly ‘people management’. On the contrary, where customers can ‘pull’ what they need from the organisation without friction or barriers, wasted effort of all kinds can be rigorously stripped out and, critically, the capacity of the system increases. Again, readers in public and private sectors have shown with hard examples that by abolishing activity targets and improving flow through the system, results can be predictably achieved that make the targets look laughable.

Ironically, for all its macho emphasis on hard-nosed ‘reality’, it is conventional management that is a failed experiment in sterile, numbers-driven theory. Observer management, in keeping with the paper as a whole, seeks to reinstate the man (and woman) in management, and put people back in charge of their organisations, rather than vice versa.

It would be absurd to pretend we’ve done more than make a start in rolling back the accumulated weight of 50 years. But emails every week confirm it’s necessary and, in innumerable small ways, possible. So thanks to everyone who has ever written to the address below. Let’s see where we get in the next 10 years.

The Observer, 6 Jamnuary 2008