---

---

---

---

Science Current Events and Science News RSS Feeds

---

---

Email a Friend Printer Friendly

The Cost of Control: Speculation on the Impact of Management Consultants on Creativity in the BBC

June 24, 2004

The BBC has made increasing use of management consultants in recent years. Its creativity is said to have diminished. This paper explores the possibility of a connection. Management consultants have been hired in such profusion because authority in the organisation has passed from administrators to managers, of whom unrealistic expectations are made.

Both the modern manager and the management consultant feed on change, and the pressures placed on the BBC by government have provided perfect justification for radical change. One consequence has been the opening of a cultural chasm between those who manage and those who create. But this is novel only in its extremity. The attitude of BBC managers to the academic research of Tom Burns forty years ago is compared with their attitude to the present author's research: BBC managers have long felt threatened by what they cannot control.

Control is fundamental to the manager. There is no point making decisions if there is no assurance that the decisions will be carried out. But the control of the dictator is clearly inimical to the freedom of expression fundamental to creativity, a point that Greg Dyke seemed eager to make. There is, then, another trade-off, analogous and complementary to that between efficiency and flexibility, this one between control and freedom. The further the manager veers towards freedom, the more the manager must trust employees to act as he would want them to act. But why should the manager want employees to be creative if the manager reaps no reward for their creativity? And why should employees be creative if they are not to be rewarded for their creativity? In both cases, creativity requires 'intrinsic motivation'. This is professionalism, by which is meant the proclivity to act towards a greater good, a proclivity that should be inherent in public service broadcasting. A degree of professionalism in the BBC survived the changes Burns noted between 1963 and the mid-'seventies. It may not have survived the more recent onslaught of management consultants.

Modern managers also have their own understanding of professionalism. Managers relate the control they seek to what they have come to regard as their professional status. The consequence is that the very professionalism that might have tolerated some freedom of action in employees, granted parole to their entrepreneurial spirit, is seen as a threat to the manager's own professionalism, and hence to his control. In 1977, Burns noted that "Keeping a watchful eye for extravagance and waste is not a significant item in the code of professionalism; it is for management." The imperative for a public service broadcaster to save money is as strong as ever, but managers now see themselves as professionals too. They occupy a schizophrenic position in which they use the need to prevent extravagance to help justify the need to control, and indulge in extravagance themselves to demonstrate their entitlement to control.

Birt had castigated the BBC as a Byzantine court in which no one knew or cared about costs. The over-riding aim was to increase efficiency by reducing costs. Yet, a decade of intensive management consultancy resulted in more bureaucracy than ever. It may well be that organisations have to sacrifice some efficiency in order to be creative. Bureaucracy may be linked to professionalism and thence to creativity through inefficiency.
"Successful bureaucracies . Provide skills training and socialization into craft or professional standards. Professionals within a bureaucratic setting will combine a primary duty to their professional body with a career path, which serves to increase the sense of affiliation with the organisation and to further limit opportunistic behaviour."

Indeed, the principle of allowing staff space, time and even budget to do what they think is important is well established in the management of innovation. For instance, some 15% or so of the research budget of Europe's largest pharmaceutical firms is given over to such uncontrolled activity.

Tom Burns declared that one of the greatest changes to have occurred in the BBC between 1963 and 1977 was the decline in the personal involvement of BBC staff, of trust and shared ethic, and tacit understanding. In 1963, staff had spoken of working in the BBC: in 1977, people spoke of working for the BBC. By the 1990s, the breakdown in trust had necessitated an audit explosion with all its associated expenses in terms of staff time and effort. In the opportunity the BBC gave Burns for reflection, he concluded that one of the most valuable of his interviews from the 1960s had been that of a senior official in the personnel side of administration.
"'My job is to encourage attitudes which will pull out of the staff more than you could justify by any criteria which exist, say, in the business world . What you have in mind . Is to get the best out of people. This is an increment you don't pay for' (later on he went so far as to say that it was 'something management isn't entitled to') 'and because of that, it is invaluable.'"
BBC manager c.1963

And perhaps this explains rather nicely the impact of management consultants on creativity in the BBC. Their influence has been felt in the BBC for many years; the excesses of the Birt years simply made it more apparent. They have exploited management method, and have been exploited by the BBC's senior managers, to ensure that the BBC gets everything from its staff to which it is entitled - and absolutely nothing more.

Sheffield, University of