This morning I realised that “management” is in danger of becoming a dirty word in the UK.

Estelle Morris, Minister for the Arts, was interviewed on the Today programme, because she has just been chosen as “Minister of the Year”. This award from her peers made the headlines because Morris was not a Minister for much of the last year; in October she resigned as Secretary of State for Education after publically admitting that she wasn’t up to the job, and she was appointed Minister for the Arts only last month.

On the Today programme Morris praised the Blair government for holding itself accountable for the standard of public services, but she went on to say (RealPlayer required):

“The danger is [accountability] turns politicians into managers and I think it’s because of that, that sometimes it looks as though we want to control things at the centre…

…You know I think another thing is that politicians deliver nothing. They only deliver in conjunction with the service, with teachers and doctors and nurses. And sometimes ’cause we’re so managerial I think that we probably exclude those other people from taking credit for what is being done as well.”

Given her comments Estelle Morris must have had some experience with bad managers (haven’t we all?), but the negative connotations she associates with managment generally, indicate that she needs to read the excellent book that I’ve just finished: What Management Is by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone. The subtitle is “How it works and why it’s everyone’s business“.

Everyone includes politicians, of course; and the following excerpt seems tailor-made for Estelle Morris:

Back when labor was mostly a matter of brawn, the work itself could be managed: analyzed, organized, and specified. Workers had only to do exactly what they were told, and supervisors made sure they complied. But even as the supervisory component of management has shrunk considerably, we continue to confuse authority and control. Having the authority to reward and punish – being in charge – isn’t the same thing as being able to control an individual’s performance. When people become managers for the first time, they often experience a rude awakening. At last they take control, only to find they’ve been taken hostage instead. They realize that they are now dependent as never before, because management creates performance through others. Without the willing cooperation of others, management can accomplish very little.

Clearly Estelle Morris was talking about something else when she used the words “manager” and “managerial” this morning. I suspect she meant that holding politicians to account can turn them into tyrannical, dictatorial control freaks, and that they sometimes fail to give credit where it’s due because they’re too autocratic (and selfish?).

In the end I think her choice of words was unfortunate because they will only compound the poor opinion of management that is already palpable here in the UK (see BBC Newsnight: Economy hit by bad days at the office, FT.com: Top bosses ‘overpaid and mistrusted’ and FT.com: No confidence vote for British business), which would be a shame because Magretta and Stone are correct, management in its broadest sense is everyone’s concern:

We began the book by saying what management isn’t. It isn’t supervising other people, it isn’t applied economics, it isn’t about occupying a privileged rung in a heirarchy, and it isn’t confined to commercial enterprises.

Because we have been defining terms as we’ve gone along, we can now venture to say what management is.

Management is the discipline that makes joint performance possible.

Its mission is value creation, where value is defined from the outside in, by customers and owners in the case of a business; by society, more broadly, in the case of government agencies and nonprofits.

Despite being a politician for 24 years, Estelle Morris has yet to understand what management is: the discipline that makes joint performance possible, otherwise known as leadership.