Management in Crisis

The Grotton County Council has at last scored ‘Average and with Moderate Prospects of Remaining Average’ in the annual Comprehensive Area Assessment round. This impressive result was not achieved without massive, radical, and frequent restructuring of the way the Council’s services are provided, all of which are clearly essential if the continued commitment and energies of ‘our most precious resource’, the staff, were to be secured ‘going forward’. A paradigm shift in comparative benchmarking has enabled Grotton authorities to disaggregate fluently. By pulling cross-cutting improvement levers and cascading via a pow-wow mechanism, the organisation has successfully ended in tiers. A holistic basket is in place to take structures to the next level. An analysis of the management systems in place in Grotton County Council in 1979, which appear to have remained unchallenged for many years, had revealed a primitive lack of baseline organisational techniques which would be regarded as critical to the running of any half-decent local authority today.