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Written by Special Report
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Thursday, 29 November 2007 |
"I've just had a meeting about professional regulation and then I'm going to have another meeting about unprofessional meetings. Then it's over to committee room 3.6 for a meeting entitled 'Proselytising: the Hain explains the way' and rounding the day off with a low key-huddle at 68 Collapsed Mews about the rate of immigration into number 27. This would seem to signal a homeward move but not before an open epilogue on Gavin Funding in Scotland. All this will be microscopically assessed and rated, so that's all for now then guys then."
Internal memoid from John Sarrismund, Foam Master, Simpleyshire
Managers are in crisis. Become a managerialist and you approve a performance-based review for your own alienation from use value. This will become clear to your former colleagues but never to you, as you wade through a miasma of initiatives, proposals and other half-baked schemes that never could be commuted to a proper project, and become mired in bureaucratic procedure. There has never been a better time to subvert expectations away from a role that you think you are entitled to after a certain amount of aging, increased experience and ‘putting in the hours' (itself an indicator of managism's structural weakness).
Evidence of its decline is plentiful. Billy Daives is sacked as Derby manager because he wasn't doing his job. How could he when he had up to eight line managers doing varying stuff with variable levels of efficiency? (he was surely also sacked because he used the tautologous term 'cash investment' three times in his last post-match MOTD comments.)
Then there was HRMC's data blunder not being attributable to junior members of staff but to 'higher levels up the food chain' who were not doing the level of data profiling that the National Audit Office received pre-customs & revenue merger (and cutting many other corners too).
The Geordie donations revelations were further grist to the mill - too many layers for anyone to definitively know the line, and no-one able to free themselves to definitively issue the line (whether it would comply with the regs or not). Brown can't extricate himself as in this extremely joined-up globalised environment of modern politics transparency is a mantra but impossible to achieve.
"We have got to raise our game. We have become too lazy. We are not political enough. It is too easy to become managers," one cabinet minister told The Observer.
Managisers throughout the UK are tending their notice (or being pushed
in the inevitable streamline), seeking a return to relevance, to
practicality. Everywhere there are Keith Pogsons and Malcolm Chasings
trying to fit leisure trousers into corporate Corbys, and failing. Owen
reports on the trial programme to have SE London's chômeurs managed back into employability.
We also noticed that a major chemical producer employs Tony Frencham as
a general manager in its Footwear Solutions Business Unit. At face
value that's not indicative of a decline but it is a pathetic
upholstering of another layer of management. Great name though, Tone.
As K-Punk makes clear, to be a manager in the Brave New Consensus and
Consumption World of Data Crunching is to be a scelerotic stop on
efficiency, to be part of the other of bureaucracy, capable of no more
than iterative change. And it applies to the crisis of paternalism,
where many dads - disavowing the Lawgiver role - can't teach their kids
because fun and joy (for both kid and parent) is now more of an
inalienable right. They should have fun in the day, and I can't see any
contradiction in leaving my kid in an apartment for three hours while I
kickback in the evening, right?
"Bureaucracy
has proliferated into a generalised condition of
surveillance-without-a-centre performed by distributed para-state
bodies or micro-states which increasingly co-opt the so-called
individual into doing their work for them"
Wry takes on the managerial culture in Times blogs (annoyingly
called Snakes and Ladders and subtitled, ironically, Beating Management
at its Own Game) are not going to change one iota of the unleadership
malaise. The need for a change of direction in working culture is acute.
Cull has done its research and we have found the exemplar for the
managerial way forward to be none other than the Rev David de Verny,
who is managing the hell out of the rights of migrant workers in
Lincolnshire. Go De Verny go.
Fax Facts Back to Me
Mannie Manager
Massive-in-Coaching
Slackleigh
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