This month the Chartered Management Institute asks why management is still so neglected, with just one in five actually qualified as a manager, and 43% rated ‘poor’.
It’s symptomatic of a wider problem, in which entire sectors are glorified or demonized in unhelpful and simplistic ways. This has its roots in a seriously dysfunctional political-economic system. By and large, left-wing parties represent public sector interests, and right-wing parties represent business – and in the USA and UK, considerable support from hedge funds and investment banks.
This has resulted in ‘institutional sectarianism’ – a tendency only to be outraged by governance failures only if they occur in the opponents’ sector. In the UK, Conservatives will denounce public sector inefficiencies and unaffordable public spending, but overlook the damage caused by investment banks’ reckless speculation (ironically, state-subsidized – but that’s another story). Labour will lay into ‘big business’, but neglect failures in health care on its watch, and cover up weaknesses in its welfare-to-work scheme with misleading spin.
This narrow party-political point-scoring holds back proper development of accountability and good governance – in the public and private sectors alike.
From New Normal, Radical Shift:
“In the national media, management and leadership have been dropped as subjects. This is a problem on the left just as much as the right. As the former Financial Times management correspondent Richard Donkin lamented at the awards ceremony for the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in January 2011, there is not a single management correspondent left in the ‘quality’ media in the UK. We will do everything to reform economies and businesses, it seems, except challenge the beliefs, behaviours, attitudes and decision-making processes of the people who run them.”
Buy the book: http://tinyurl.com/mp8w4lg
For Neela’s blog, go to: http://www.neelabettridge.com/category/blog/
Join the Linked-in group Radical Shift: http://tinyurl.com/nbmg754
If you are interested in learning more about training courses linked to these themes, or to invite Neela or Philip to give a talk on any of these subjects, please contact us on:
