Simon Caulkin is THE only British journalist working for a major newspaper (The Observer), who has made it his business to challenge Command and Control thinking.
For 16 years Simon has used his weekly column to argue for a human-centred systems approach to improving organisational performance in both the public and private sectors.
Every Sunday his column gave managers and politicians at every level to a unique opportunity to learn from the successes of innovative thinkers, entrepreneurs and consultants such as W. Edwards Deming, Ricardo Semler, Jeffrey Pfeffer, John Seddon, Taiichi Ohno to name but a few.
Now, instead of recognising that Simon was a unique asset for the paper, and energetically promoting his work, the Observer management has terminated his contract as his letter below explains.
The second letter [of protest and condemnation] has been drafted and circulated by Philip Whiteley [phil@whiteleywords.com] and if you would like to add your signature, I am sure he, and Simon, would be pleased to hear from you.
Roy
An email from Simon Caulkin. 15 June 2009
Dear all
Please forgive the global, but you have all been good enough to express
support for the column in the past – and many of you have contributed
ideas, insights and influence, sometimes in ways that you will have
recognised, in other ways not. They have all been important, and I want to
acknowledge and thank you for them.
The context is that after 16 years this week's column is the last, it
having been decided as a cost-cutting measure that the middle of the
grandest management cock-up of all time is the right moment to cease
coverage in the Observer. I believe this is a betrayal of a loyal community
of readers and of the Observer itself. If anyone agrees (or disagrees!)
enough to let the editor (letters@observer.co.uk) know what they think of
the decision (after the weekend, obviously), I'd be delighted, and it might
even cause them a smidgeon of remorse.
Many thanks for all your encouragement, anyway, and I hope we can
keep in touch.
Best regards
Simon
16 June 2009
The Editor
The Observer
Dear Sir
We are astonished and appalled by your decision to drop the Simon Caulkin column just at the point when the ideas he has covered over the years have become more relevant than ever.
We are living through one of the biggest crises of governance in history. September 2008 saw not just the end of Lehman Brothers but the end of 30 years’ dominance of neo-liberalism as the guiding ideology in running major private and public sector institutions. The notion that ‘maximising shareholder value’ can be considered in isolation from society was exposed as a pretence – bad for business as well as for society. The mechanistic strictures of narrow MBA orthodoxy, with its dehumanising notion of people as a ‘resource’, its target culture and its opaque lexicon of competences, outputs and so on, have wrought terrible damage in the NHS and education.
Over the past 16 years, one journalist alone has been consistent in exposing the shallowness and limitations of these approaches. Simon Caulkin has set out a coherent alternative, rather than merely channelling protest. The unifying theme of the thinkers that he has championed – W Edwards Deming, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ricardo Semler, John Seddon, to name but a few – has been that organisations and economies are best managed by understanding the inter-dependence of different stakeholders.
Your decision, therefore, is ill-judged and ill-timed. A wiser choice would have been to elevate Simon’s column to the main section of the paper. There is huge potential in the ideas he has promoted to assist ideological renewal, particularly on the centre-left.
We hope that you will see this as not just a letter of protest, but as sincere advice to recommend urgently that you reconsider your decision, which appears to us as an historic missed opportunity.
Yours sincerely
and so far about twenty distinguished signatories.
