Taking responsibility
One of the themes that has emerged from the chaos of the past few years has been the call for people to take personal responsibility for their own health. I agree that insulating patients from decisions regarding their healthcare & the consequences thereof does them no favours but wonder why the same rationale does not apply to those making decisions detrimental to the state of the healthcare system.
I refer you then to the claim that “light touch regulation“, a hallmark of most government policy these days, is the responsible course of action & not an excuse for the abdication of responsibility or an enabler for a “free for all”. Surely this excuse has been discredited by the events of this summer, ranging from the failure of the Financial Services Authority to manage the banking industry (with that embarrassing run on Northern Rock caused in part by the regulators themselves) to that of Mattel which having outsourced its manufacturing facilities decided that quality control was beneath it. On a similar note, there is the matter of the Commercial Directorate overseeing the award of a major contract to Atos Origin that had to be publicly cancelled within a few months with the consequent delay in awarding a whole raft of other contracts & yet I am told that an investigation has not revealed any failures. Just how thorough was this investigation then?
Mary Teagarden, Thunderbird school of global management in Phoenix, Arizona.
“You have a situation where there is often no incoming inspection of raw materials, and no outgoing inspection of finished goods. This is about business people displaying poor business practice,†she says. Of course, low-cost sources of production are attractive. But that price arbitrage has to be handled carefully.
Exactly the same situation applies in the services sector with the quality control procedures being very deficient.
Outsourcing does not allow you to abdicate responsibility for failure!
Do the advisors & decision makers who played fast & loose with their responsibilities not bear any of the costs of this & why do we not hear of consequences for more than a token sacrificial lamb? And when it comes to government, hardly any price is paid in the first place & the mistakes are repeated time and again in a cynical “wash, rinse & repeat” cycle
October 7th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Interesting article - good to see you are back!
The parallel with management taking responsibility for its mistakes is clear too. In industry, almighty cock ups tend to result in responsibility per force - failure leaves a manager out of work! Indeed even success is rewarded in this way on occasion!
The failures of MTAS/MMC have yet to yield such results. Why? There is a feeling that if you are employed in the public sector that you cannot be made responsible for your actions. Senior managers take the advantages that come with their position but not the responsibility for the failures of their decisions. A good example ids the blessed Sir Liam. Knighthood, expensive cockup, and still there! Who pays? Joe Public of course!
Surely the workforce can have little confidence that the actions of the clowns responsible will not be repeated in some form if they are not removed.
Let us hope that in the run up to an election that even the PM will recognise, as he did with the precious Patsy, that incompetent DH buffoons could easily lose him the election.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
great to see you back, keep up the good work
November 4th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
[...] is an excellent non-response showing how to diffuse responsibility for an act among a large group of impressive sounding people but in actual practical terms meaning [...]
November 16th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
[...] about accountability then & I am warming to my theme, what with well argued comments from a number of commentators. [...]