Chris Dillow points out a rather fundamental flaw in the Terminal 5 management structure:
"Baggage handlers are obviously complements to a baggage handling system - one's useless without the other. And it's a basic principle of economics that complementary assets should be run by the same boss, to ensure that they work together. And yet BAA and BA have contrived to ignore this; BAA runs the system whilst BA provides the staff.
This is not a sophisticated principle."
Indeed not. But I wonder if this isn't part of an even bigger problem with the British culture of management: A refusal to consider systems as a working whole.
This struck me as I was listening to a BBC interview with BA's chief executive Willie Walsh, featuring a string of revealing statements along the lines of this one:
"In isolation some of these problems were identified and we felt they had been addressed. There were some basic human errors made that compounded the problems."
That just about sums it up. In a complex system, problems don't occur "in isolation", they are connected to other components, which is why someone needs to be on top of all the connections. Unfortunately, holistic thinking is something that the managerial classes in this country appear to have outsourced to an aromatherapy practitioner in Totnes.
It doesn't matter whether it's Terminal 5, Northern Rock or the NHS, British management just can't quite get its head around the fact that everything tends to depend on everything else.
