The organisation for which I work is wonderful in many ways.
It is, rightly, respected around the world for its ‘without fear or favour’ journalism, it decided early that it should expect people to pay for its online offering, and the fish and chips in the canteen every Friday always set me up for the weekend.
But – there was always going to be a but – it does occasionally get bogged down with bureaucracy.
It is not unique in this affliction. Once any company gets to a certain size, a corresponding amount of red tape becomes inevitable.
A company that comprises three people in a room can be dynamic. Someone can have an idea in the morning, act on it in the afternoon and be making money by the next day. If it is not making money, it can be pulled just as quickly while everyone moves on to the next idea.
The trouble is, this entrepreneurial spirit generally leads to success, which leads to expansion.
Maintaining any dynamism through the transition from small company to big is arguably a greater challenge than getting big in the first place.
A big organisation will, by definition, have more people who need to justify their jobs by being involved.
More people who will want to contribute or say no. Suddenly, ideas need processes and focus groups and getting anything done within a year is a challenge.
Many years ago, my organisation recognised this problem and came up with a solution, the ‘JFDI’ committee.
I think it stood for ‘just flipping do it’, it was something like that anyway. The idea was that you could take an idea to this select group of entrepreneurially minded people and they would fast-track it, without the need to resort to all the various layers of approval that would otherwise afflict it.
The management then were very pleased with this solution. I, on the other hand, could not get past the farcical realisation that the only way they could think of to cut bureaucracy was to create a committee.
Even if it had an edgy acronym in front of its name, all it did was introduce another layer of admin.
It is a strange irony to find yourselves so exasperated by corporate bureaucracy that you are impelled to do something to combat it, yet so in thrall to it that all you can do is create more bureaucracy.
I was reminded of this as I read through the key recommendations of the Financial Advice Market Review (Famr), the long awaited document with which the FCA would use months of consultation to outline its framework for overhauling UK financial advice.
In fact, all it outlined was more consultation.
Every other page of the 85 that made up the review seemed to be announcing a further review, whether on the definition of advice, time limits on attaining qualifications, cross-subsidisation, clarity of factfinds, or rules of thumb and nudges, whatever that means.
