In Defence of Managers

Re-writing reports to reflect favourably on managers and the firm is a thing of the past century surely?  That sort of thing could not possibly happen nowadays. Could it? Cover-ups and the closing of ranks to agree a convenient version of the Truth because it serves vested interests could not possibly occur anywhere else in Sheffield (that is outside South Yorkshire Police or Sheffield City Council or South Yorkshire Ambulance Service or the South Yorkshire Coroner’s Court, or…) We are now in the 21st century, an era of transparency and integrity in public life, are we not?

Anyone making links between those quite distinct and distant events and the behaviour of today’s impeccably conscientious cohort of managers across the whole range of public bodies would be just wrong. To suggest so would be to declare oneself to be an obsessed and deluded fantasist and to imply an ongoing and well entrenched culture of misinformation and that would be nonsense. Of course it would. Those responsible for various services from public service organisations and council departments or charities linked to them or locally based offices of national quangos are, we know, utterly trustworthy and incapable of anything but the most impartial, unbiased and disinterested  judgements. Not for them the lack of transparency, the slanting of reports and minutes to reflect well on themselves, the fraudulent manipulation of consultations  the misinformation and the defamatory statements that are associated with the behaviours of 1989. That was after all another century. And we’re all too shrewd to believe that sort of thing could be still rife anywhere that managers get together in public services and it would be laughable to conclude there would be remotest chance of this kind of manipulation in the conservation industry.

Somebody has to stand up for managers and as can be seen from the blog statement at the side under 'Where What and Why', this blog has always been fair to managers. Where would we be without them? Or rather where would they be without people to manage? Because even land managers spend most of their time managing people.