What links Boeing, the Post Office scandal and possibly Lloyds Bank? The answer quite obviously management that wants to take risks. Boeing was turned from an engineering giant to an untrusted, incompetent brand in about ten years. Management was not interested in problems, only in solutions. Those responsible for maintaining standards were sidelined, ignored, passed over and forced out, because they stood in the way of profits. The cheapest solution was considered the best solution, design and therefore safety was out-sourced. The result has been a collapse in standards, after which it is pretty difficult to make profits and a company that has to try to re-create an environment of 100% safety, checks, more checks, engineering excellence and probity. Never easy especially when you have got rid of the people who believed in that stuff and replaced them with money obsessed, over promoted, chancers. Where was the industry’s regulator when all this was going on? Nowhere to be seen, they had been “captured” by Boeing.
Its a wider problem of the erosion of collective responsibility. The whole notion that we have a wider responsibility when we make decisions has been diminished by a Hayekian/Randian ideology which proposes that naked self interest is in the public interest. Sure this ideology promotes some of the worst of people, but it also tells "followers" about the standards to which they should hold. It derides public service since, to quote Reagan, "government is the problem." Wealth is a equated with social value. Self-forgetting is for losers and monks/nuns who are weird. Its a philosophy for the bad and the morally weak. Lets hope the lesson is starting to sink in.
Well said Jonty. And now I fear Nationwide is going down the same path with the purchase of Virgin. They want to do business banking FFS. Being a Mutual there are no big shareholders with research departments to look at the books and stand in their way. The new chief exec has carte blanche to overreach.
Its a wider problem of the erosion of collective responsibility. The whole notion that we have a wider responsibility when we make decisions has been diminished by a Hayekian/Randian ideology which proposes that naked self interest is in the public interest. Sure this ideology promotes some of the worst of people, but it also tells "followers" about the standards to which they should hold. It derides public service since, to quote Reagan, "government is the problem." Wealth is a equated with social value. Self-forgetting is for losers and monks/nuns who are weird. Its a philosophy for the bad and the morally weak. Lets hope the lesson is starting to sink in.
Well said Jonty. And now I fear Nationwide is going down the same path with the purchase of Virgin. They want to do business banking FFS. Being a Mutual there are no big shareholders with research departments to look at the books and stand in their way. The new chief exec has carte blanche to overreach.
Ever thought of podcasting?