Quote:
Originally Posted by bl52krz
I am afraid that it is all academic what has continually happened to British Industry. Unfortunately, in my opinion, and after a working life of of various occupations, I honestly believe that it is down to the real lack of understanding of how to manage a firm, be it in manufacturing or elsewhere, by Managers/ owners of the company. Worked at a few companies that I wondered how they stopped in business. This is not down to one particular thing. There are many reasons. A few:- arrogance by managers who actually knew less about what their business entailed, than people who worked for them. Only interested in their ‘playthings’. Cars, boats, horses. You name it. Just a show of ‘this is how good my business is doing’. Three of those actual types of business folded after a few years of mismanaging what could have been an excellent company. Failure to sort out ‘ bad employee’ has occurred at two firms I worked at. I actually had a go at a particular such employee, and also warned the manager himself what was going on. Call me a tell tail if you like, I don’t mind trying to save my job. This company folded. One company I worked at, in waste transfer, the manager had a heart attack. Nothing to do with work stress we were told. We, the drivers and sales staff , worked this company for four months on our own because the owner could not get a manager to take the job on. We were actually told that we had made more profit during those four months than the corresponding period before.I could go on, but don’t want to write a book.
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May I suggest you do write that book. What you outline above resonates with my experience. Tho’ to be fair, whilst I clearly recognise many aspects of what you have set out, my experience of the Private Sector and the Public Sector was that the Public Sector was very much worse.
This was because despite monumental “Male Chicken ups” the Public Sector never had to worry about Profit. In fact - many of those in the Public Sector I worked with saw the very idea of “Profit” as akin to something you trod in.
There idea of “work” was meetings - lots of them, and with lots of people. It was normal to attend a meeting and the head guy would come in flanked by his assistant and a couple of his or her under managers - all of which had assistants to take notes - and then their would be me.
This series of meetings would go on for months and as often as not they would conclude that whatever it was was not a good idea and the notion would be scrapped.
Invariably the summary would be along the self justification lines of:-
“All these meetings have been a valuable use of time effort and resources because we now know what we are not going to do.”
I hope you do write a book - I’m writing mine.