10 August 2005

Shuffling the deckchairs

The restructuring of the Scottish Enterprise management team is announced in this press release. Extract:
Changes to Scottish Enterprise’s (SE) senior management team are being implemented with immediate effect, staff heard today.
The moves will see a smaller Executive Board and the appointment of a chief operating officer for the network. Lena Wilson, currently responsible for SE’s customer operations, will take on the new chief operating officer post.
Chief Executive Jack Perry said: “We are establishing a leaner Executive team charged with embedding change and customer focus right across the organisation. This will include tackling some major challenges such as how to better harness the wealth creating power of our wider metropolitan areas and how SE can support a greater return for Scotland’s economy from our key industries.
“We will also be strengthening our focus on operational delivery by moving four executive board members to fully operational remits.”
Mr Perry added that the chief operating officer appointment would also allow him more time to focus on some of the big challenges facing Scotland and Scottish Enterprise...
Mr Perry added: “Talk of structural change has the potential to make an organisation too
introspective. I want to mitigate against that and send a strong signal that our first commitment remains delivery. I firmly believe these initial changes at the top of the organisation will enable us to do that.”

First of all, Mr Perry needs a new scriptwriter: what does "embedding change and customer focus right across the organisation" mean? And, if it is that important, why has it not already been done? And how many "wider metropolitan areas" does Scotland have (if any)? And how do changes in the management team "mitigate against" "the potential to make an organisation too introspective"? This is pretty vacuous stuff.

More seriously, it is somewhat surprising that changes to the management team are not seen in the context of Smart Successful Scotland which is of course the overall economic strategy which Scottish Enterprise is supposed to be pursuing but which is nowhere mentioned in the press release.

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