As much as it pains me to disagree with her, (and at the risk of upsetting my 666th follower on twitter - for she has that dubious honour), I find myself at odds with Deborah Allcock Tyler's view of looking to the private sector for models and ideas in her column of Third Sector Magazine on 12th April 2011 (préci’d = charities are better at what they do than private business is as what it does, so we shouldn’t bother to see what we might learn from them that might benefit us) - surely we should be open to cross sector discussions, especially when some of their management practices put ours to shame (take a closer look at McDonalds), they have happier employees who are less likely to take them to tribunals than us, and have a workforce who are valued better by their employers based on more of ours expecting to leave our sector in 5 years than theirs...
just as there are some 'bad charities', and these are the exception to the norm, there are some 'bad businesses' who are the exception - it’s just a shame that they're mostly in the finance industry...
And surely, we’re both faced with similar challenges: dealing with recession, government expecting us to do more to strengthen society, managing costs, supporting our people – why does there seem to be such an engrained cultural resistance to exploring and addressing these together in the third sector/civil society?
Couldn't agree with you more Adrian. We spend so much time re-inventing the wheel. It frustrates me that some people are so ideologically blinkered that they can't contemplate any good in the private sector. And they wonder why the soc ent sector has huge numbers of small businesses.
ReplyDeleteGraham