qwerty south
no use for a witticism
is this now a part of all areas of publicly-funded life (military etc)?
i know i'm setting myself up here.
i know i'm setting myself up here.
Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result was a definition of insanity. That's what the obsession with targets is. Whether in business or public service, misuse of targets is the single most important reason for public cynicism, rock-bottom employee morale and failed improvement efforts. Targets wreck systems, driving up costs and making things worse. Can we dispose of them once and for all? Let's try.
What's wrong with targets? Yes, everyone has them - but whether in the public or the private sector, they have the same perverse results. The attraction of targets is their simplicity. But it's a fatal one. As part of the misguided managerial obsession with quantification, they misapply partial, linear measures to a complex, shifting world. As Blair's undertaking to magic away asylum seekers shows, they are basically a wish. Bearing no relation to the ability of the system to deliver it, they are arbitrary - they might as well be plucked from the air.
In ourbank managing without any budget worked from the beginning. We didn’t miss it even the first year, because the new way of measuring true performance and to benchmark was so much better compared to how we did it before. So I think in general, the process of abandoning the budget is a very simple and an easy one. You just have to dare to take the decision. But I think there is one major challenge. And that is that you have to rely on people to be able to run a devolved organization. So the difficult thing is probably really to devolve an organization and to say to yourself – being top management – that if we have good people out there and they know what the company’s corporate goal is and they have the tools to be able to do good business and they know we will measure their performance in a realistic way comparing them to peers, then they will do a good job. And having that decentralized, devolved profit center organization you certainly don’t need a budget. So the major challenge in the processis to enable the organization to work on a trust basis. And people have to know what the corporate goals are and they have to know what they have to do.
and
- Handelsbanken's financial goal is to have higher profitability than the average for its competitors
- The financial goal should be achieved by the Bank having more satisfied customers and lower costs than its competitors
- A strongly decentralised organisation - the branch is the Bank
- The customer in focus - not individual products
- Profitability is always given higher priority than volumes
- A long-term perspective
- Oktogonen - the Bank's profit-sharing system
I think (as is so often the case) that some of the blame can be levelled at Thatcher. Part of the reason that there's this 'need' for targets is the legacy of tories' extreme capitalist realism - the view that 'professionalism' and 'pride in your work' are hippy bullshit, and the only way to make people work effectively is to apply a carrot / stick results based approach, and to micromanage them to within an inch of their lives.tatarsky said:I suspect that New Labour got the notions of targets from business, as it is does work in this area. But they probably didn't realise just how dangerous it is to do within the public sector, because of the lack of clearly defined metrics, which results in weird incentives.
gek-opel said:Also- you seem to be arguing for a system of targets which are not used as the basis of funding-- perhaps this would iron out some of the difficulties (the "teach for the exam only" syndrome, if you like) but would undermine the ability to create a market-like position (which is the whole point). Surely without winners and losers, (and ultimately closures in some cases) the system (as argued for by New Labour) is not going to be operating in anything resembling a free market way.
Ness Rowlah said:Two simple goals and a five point corporate philosophy. I like that.
gek-opel said:And how many millions of £s a year are we the taxpayer blowing on these cuntsultants? I heard it was roughly half of the total current NHS defecit...
The failure of choose and book is just the start. Ministers admitted on Wednesday that the overall cost of the NHS's new IT system has tripled from £6.5bn to £20bn. Computer specialists said that the politicians still aren't facing the unpleasant truth and the real cost of the computing disaster will probably be £30bn. An awful lot of that wasted money has been squandered on management consultants who are meant to have the expertise which guarantees that organisations such as the NHS have computer systems that arrive on time and on budget and work when the public servants turns them on.
The Times reported last week that the state subsidies to vastly overpaid consultants increased by 23 per cent last year, to £3bn. They must now rank as New Labour's most favoured client group: a dependancy culture of the upper middle class. So willing are ministers to provide them with corporate welfare that 26-year-olds from the top consultants can charge an NHS trust £3,000 a day for their services, secure in the knowledge that even if their advice leads to disaster, ministers won't punish or blacklist their employers.
gek-opel said:Hmm- so why is it that these Govt computer systems ALWAYS go vastly over-budget? I remember reading an IT trade mag in the mid-90s and there were complaints back then about exactly this kind of thing, its been going on for years. You would think that by now they would at least BUDGET for the expected level of overspend...?