DECENTRALISE, delegate and if you must have targets, have two or three rather than 20 or 30.
So says Sir John Harvey-Jones, the tough- talking businessman who advised people running businesses in the BBC series Troubleshooter. Now the former chairman of ICI is telling the public sector how to to do it right and his overriding message is “keep it local”.
He tells Care and Health (Feb 8): “I’m a very big fan of local government. It’s central government I don’t like. You can do a hell of a lot in local government if you have the balls to do it.”
But even if you have, don’t try to do it all yourself, Sir John says. Learn to let go and avoid the temptation to micro-manage. And be choosy about what you measure.
“We’ve got to stop measuring every department. One of the first things I did at ICI was to reduce the number of performance indicators to three. You can change those three things every year, as long as you keep an eye on them, but you can only do so much.”
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With views on everything from the commissioning of services to NHS IT systems to running charities, Sir John is often critical of the way the public sector is managed. But it has one major asset — its staff. “People feel they have ownership — it’s personal.”
Not that they are appreciated for it. “The least heard words in the public sector are ‘thank you’,” he says.