When Jeremy Hunt asked former Marks and Spencer (M&S) chief executive Stuart Rose to review the leadership of the NHS he was following in distinguished footsteps.
Both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher called frequently on the services of Derek Rayner, who like Rose, was chief executive of M&S. However, the process was not always fruitful. ‘I remember Thatcher getting terribly excited about the need to copy M&S,' says former chief constable, Geoffrey Dear.
‘So a board-level director from M&S came and spent a long time with us. But in the end he went away saying there is actually nothing I can contribute because you are answerable and accountable in so many different ways.'
Mr Dear's experience should not surprise us. M&S employs 82,000 people, has an annual turnover of around £11bn, sells clothes and food and has a straightforward governance structure. By contrast the NHS employs 1.7 million people, spends £110bn annually, fixes the human body and has a complex matrix of governance.
Jeremy Hunt should not expect too much from Stuart Rose. The potential challenges of seeking to share lessons were illustrated by Michael Bichard when he ran the Benefits Agency in the early 1990's.
Motivated at least partly by annoyance at always being encouraged to emulate M&S he offered an exchange: ‘Give me ten M&S staff and I'll put them in the Toxteth Benefit Office and I'll give you ten of the Toxteth Benefit Office staff and let's see how they get on for a month'.
The offer was never taken up. Of course, on one level it is entirely sensible for the public sector to seek outside help from people who have been successful in other fields.
And no doubt Stuart Rose will have some useful advice to share, and we should be grateful that he is willing to do so. But bringing in expertise from the private sector in whatever form can reinforce two unhelpful and misleading stereotypes. First, that management in the private sector is superior to that in the public sector.
Secondly, and more substantially, that the skills required to manage in the private sector are so similar that they can be easily transferred. Whilst some skills are common to all managers, the public sector operates under constraints which make almost every management task exponentially harder.
How do you assess performance without a bottom line? Or set targets or overarching goals? How do you encourage risk-taking and innovation in an environment where the rewards for success are low, and the penalties for failure are high? How do you move quickly and decisively when democratic accountability demands consultation and exhaustive record keeping?
And how do you work effectively with political bosses whose experience, expertise and objectives may be very different from your own? Rather than relying on management theories, methodologies and expertise from those with little relevant
experience to share, the public sector should focus more on developing its own theories, methods and training to cope with its own specific challenges.
And the private sector should take a moment or two to think about what it might learn from the more complex and demanding world of its public sector cousin.
Alexander Stevenson is author of The Public Sector: managing the unmanageable
