Just About Managing

In the UK from 2013 to 2016 there were old Etonians in three important posts: Prime Minister, Mayor of London, and Archibishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby had spent much of his life in the oil industry, and had only been a bishop for just over a year when appointed to the top job in the Church of England. Initially praised for his crisp business-like approach, and expected to drive improvements across the Anglican congregation, some critics thought he ended up achieving very little, reduced to bland words and sleight of hand.

When you spoke to him, you sensed he was a CEO who had mentally allocated you five minutes before passing on to the next matter to be dealt with. That is agenda-driven episcopacy, rather than a listening episcopacy. You can’t run a church with a handbook full of business buzzwords. Pepinster

Mr Welby has undoubtedly seen it as a big part of his job to hold together very different factions within the Church of England and, even more difficult, in the wider global Church, the Anglican Communion of 85 million people. ... He has expended a huge amount of energy in this endeavour of finding common ground through 12 years during which there has been other momentous social change, and at times has shown himself to be an astute political operator. Maqbook

But his failure to tackle the safeguarding issue properly has damaged the Church and brought an end to his tenure. Martyn Percy argues that the safeguarding measures that Welby oversaw are ill-thought-out and arbitrarily enforced, and deter the sort of volunteers on whom the church has traditionally relied for local good works 

And Ian Paul thought Welby was a poor leader overall. Justin managed to make enemies of every single group. He made enemies of liberals by talking about evangelism. He made enemies of evangelicals by talking about sexuality. He made enemies of conservatives by talking about new forms of church.

So much for his management skills then.

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Andrew Anthony, The Church of England is beset by shame and division. Can it survive? (Observer 17 November 2024)

Stephen Bates, Just About Managing (The Tablet, 16 March 2017) (Note: link is to the archived page because of trojan warning on live page)

Stephen Bates, Justin Welby: why archbishop chosen for his managerial skills had to go (Guardian 12 November 2024)

Aleem Maqbool, Church at precarious moment after Welby resignation (BBC News, 13 November 2024)

Catherine Pepinster, Why did Justin Welby fall so tragically short? Because he was preoccupied with efficiency, not listening (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Harriet Sherwood, The C of E’s CEO: how will history judge Justin Welby’s tenure as archbishop of Canterbury? (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Wikipedia: Old Etonians

Complexity: Devious Management and Investment Risk

cross-posted from System Viability and Corporate Governance

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A common feature of much recent malfeasance is the construction of highly complex corporate structures, apparently beyond the legitimate demands of Requisite Variety.

Complexity – whether requisite or otherwise – adds to investment risk. Dodgy management practices may cause a continuous erosion of corporate value, or they may trigger a sudden collapse of value (Enron, Parmalat). Some companies have a sufficiently robust business model that they remain viable even with a certain level of malfeasance. Other companies turn out to be merely pseudo-viable – only remaining solvent thanks to dodgy accounting. Some investors may be willing to tolerate erosion, but do not wish to be confronted with sudden collapse.

Complexity is (or should be) a warning sign. The purpose of complexity is what it does. If it doesn’t serve a legitimate purpose, then it is surely reasonable to assume it is there to serve some other agenda.

Using the theory of complexity, we should be able to construct geological maps of the corporate world, showing (probabilistically) where it might be worth drilling for the next accounting black hole.

For example, it now seems that Parmalat was non-viable, only sustained in pseudo-viability by paper cashflows from a non-existent bank account. But such transactions can only be concealed by having lots of apparently genuine intra-company transactions. There is therefore a control mechanism that forces complexity onto the company at the operational level, and a higher level mechanism that manages the smoke and mirrors. It might not be easy to detect the fraud by looking at the operational company alone; it may be the existence of the control mechanisms that gives the game away.

Conversely, if a management is obliged to construct and present evidence of its bona fides, this evidence needs to include a properly grounded account of the control mechanisms, including a justification of the degrees of complexity and intracompany coupling.