Articles, blogs and features

Asian Productivity Organisation
"Digital transformation for the public sector", November 2022

Institute for Global Change
"The state we should be in", September 2022

LabourList
"Reviving public services must be a central part of Labour's offer to voters", June 2022

Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge
"Why do British politicians have so little to say about technology"?, May 2022

Brookings Institution Tech Stream with Tanya Filer
"How digital minilaterals can revive international cooperation", December 2021

Civil Service World
Review of 'Management consultancy and the British state', by Antonio E. Weiss, 2019

Bennett Institute, Digital State Programme, University of Cambridge
'From City to State: Digital Government in Argentina' with Tanya Filer and Juan Cacace, Summer 2019

Twentieth Century British History
"God & Mrs Thatcher: The Battle for Britains Soul. By Eliza Filby.  Review by Antonio E. Weiss", 9 August 2016

Birkbeck blog
"Eric Hobsbawm memorial lecture", 6 June 2016

Prospect
"Three ways to get Millennials voting", with Gabriel Huntley 26 April 2016

Irish Independent
"Girls born today will live until they're 83.  What else does their future hold?", (featured as expert commentator) 16 April 2014

Guardian
"Keep it simple: avoid giving your customers decision overload", 13 March 2014

Guardian
"Civil service needs to focus on long-term capacity", with Caroline Cake, 15 April 2013

Latin News
"The paradox of poverty", with Prof John Weiss, 23 August 2012.

The Church Times
"A selective but genuine faith", 20 January 2012.

The Huffington Post
"The Real Iron Lady: Thatcher, Thatcherism and Christianity", 5 January 2012.

Prospect
"Public service, private gain?", 17 June 2011.

Guardian
"Why Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead", 2 November 2010

Guardian
"China: The future of Christianity?", 28 August 2010

Anticipations
"Stop a big idea being a bad idea", Autumn 2010

Guardian
"Tory education cuts are a big mistake", 7 July 2010

Guardian
"Electoral reform is still the prize for the Lib Dems", 8 May 2010

Guardian
"Beyond Mexico's war on drugs", 28 April 2010

Guardian
"God and the prime ministers", 9 February 2010

Civil Service World
"All their own work?: A brief history of UK public sector consulting", 2 December 2009


Speeches
Sir Alcon Copisarow speech at launch of Key Business Solutions: Essential problem-solving tools and techniques (Financial Times Prentice Hall) by Antonio E. Weiss, 13th October 2011

To celebrate the launch of Key Business Solutions, on Thursday 13th October 2011, 2020 Delivery and Antonio Weiss held an event at Pearson Publishing Offices on 80 Strand.  The guest speaker was the distinguished civil servant and businessman, Sir Alcon Copisarow.  Below is the text of his speech:

I was delighted to be invited to join you this evening both because of my admiration of Antonio's work, and my high regard for the publisher’s record in bringing the best thoughts and practices in this field to a global market.

I have been asked to say a few words about ‘Management today, yesterday, and tomorrow'; if I may tackle them in chronological order.  Whenever I have sought to steer a public or private body in the right direction and enhance its performance I have found it invaluable to study in advance their social, economic and managerial history.  The role of management in problem solving has not in fact changed as much as the tools available to solve them.  Going right back to Biblical times, the way in which King Solomon aimed to make Jerusalem a great market place, to attract the caravans of the Phoenicians and launched vessels on the Red Sea to gain access to the gold and precious stones to the south, has been followed by others.  Then they went on to build the temple, the Greeks with their advances in mathematics the Parthenon, and the Romans their Forums.  I recall the introduction to ‘Gamechange’, written by David Kaye (who I'm happy to see in the audience).  It was for expansion and defence, to maintain Roman discipline and create wealth, that they spent centuries on their immense road construction programme.

Skipping two thousand years, it is intriguing to look back at just 100 years when the Harvard Business School inaugurated its MBA course, with a faculty of 15 and 33 students, in 1908.  That year coincided with the launch of the T-model Ford, and the Harvard curriculum included the management problems of manufacturing.  It also debated the challenges of the 20th century.  This was the time when JJ Thomson and Ernest Rutherford received Nobel Prizes opening a new era in the physical sciences, but no one could imagine the birth of an electronics industry.

Consumer choice and the nature of competition long remained a central theme of management and in the all important automobile industry the respective decisions Robert McNamara of Ford and Alfred Sloan of General Motors loomed large.  They were aided by the development of analytical techniques.  Generally, the efficient use of resources, physical, human and financial, were the dominant management issues.  Then the academic world began to contribute more tools, applicable to the service industries too.  This was the case in America particularly.  Here in the UK sadly, we were slow on the uptake.  In fact the Chairman of our University Grants Committee, then the highly regarded Sir Hugh Beaver, reported “The University view is that management has not the intellectual content to justify it is a subject for a degree course".

Of the problems we now face, some are inevitable, within geo- political and techno-political change, but many, of our own making, are avoidable:-the impact of certain regulatory requirements, the attitude to risk, stifling investment opportunities by asset-stripping and a general ‘short-term’ culture.  As the ice begins to crack, crevices open up, and there is work to be done.

We have lived through the birth and death of major industries, some have moved to other continents and the public sector, formerly policy makers and administrative centres, with their agencies, now need more business management.  Happily, many of the problem solving tools have been forged here at home and are being applied globally.

What of the future?  Reliable forecasting has always been impossible.  When I was preparing for university entry I remember reading a famous 1937 study of the prospects for 2000.  It completely missed out on computers, atomic energy, antibiotics, radar and jet propulsion.  There were some visionaries, such as Steve who can perceive and bring about dramatic change within a decade, but even in the very short term forecasts can be quite wrong.  Analysts only a year ago were predicting stability in Egypt and Tunisia and in January Goldman Sachs forecast that the FT Index would rise this year to the of the7000 whilst it has fallen drastically.

One trend, now underway, is the extension of management services from the business and public sectors to a wider range of professional and even informal voluntary or charitable bodies.

The second trend, following the globalisation of business management is it to cater for the very different cultures around the world, different values, attitudes to risk, corruption, communications and decision-making authority.  Beyond that, the lines between the public and private and voluntary sectors are becoming more alert, but we will need further tools as well as the will to tackle them.

Then there are the aspirations of those seeking a more content society, to give people a greater opportunity of reshaping their own lives with more responsibility for self care, or healthier life, better environment and access to justice (the Personal Support Units of our Court services, for example).

Some of those who believe, or at least perceive, that chief executives of multinational corporations or agencies are deciding their fates, wish to manage themselves.  This could lead to fragmentation of large organisations and the traditional concepts of a decision-making hierarchy would no longer apply.  The large organisations for their part might see this trend is an opportunity for a useful cost reduction strategy.

So far as government is concerned there is a polarisation summed up by the captions ‘Whitehall knows best’ and ‘Leave it to the market’.  The pendulum swings according to the government in office, but these responsibilities are complementary.  The problem is complex, but I spotted one way in which this might be approached.  In a fascinating publication by MIT in 1999 entitled ‘When things start to think’, computers and senses would do everything, talking to each other by self-adapting networks and doing useful tasks without human intervention.  Such is the crystal ball.

The future will certainly call for more collaboration between the managerial and academic worlds.  The concept that it is the role of government to legislate, impose laws and with a somewhat intrusive bureaucracy to retain control over the population is already changing in many countries.  In fact it was mentioned to me over 30 years ago by Michel Foucault, Professor of Social Sciences at the Collège de France whose research was on ‘self-governing capabilities’ and ‘governmentality’.  He himself had built in the earlier work of Francois Fourier on ‘responsible communities’.  I believe that the Dean at Cambridge University and others have developed this work recently.

Clearly governments have an essential role in national security, foreign policy, fostering enterprise and creating jobs.  But there is also a case for them to hand over powers.  That would attract a great injection of intellectual capital from across many disciplines.  Hopefully, more of the professional skills and time of experienced business executives also might be given to the needs of the community.

So I can, finally, refer to Antonio's book.  I commend it highly.  Good management calls for many human qualities, vision, values, leadership, judgment and vitality, but to achieve it, to get the job done, a toolbox is necessary too.  This book is the toolbox.  In the problem solving process it sets out clearly when and how to use each tool.  For the manager it encapsulates some of the most useful, by Ansoff, Kano, De Bono, McClelland, Porter and others – as for a Boy Scout, armed with his Swiss army knife.  It goes on to encourage you to use your imagination, and then to look back critically on the results achieved.  I did notice it was incomplete, by the way.  On page 77 ‘fundraising’ was limited to ‘motivating the fundraisers’.  Compared with my own experience, when the Eden Project needed a further £40 million, I pulled into my Club the prospective funders themselves, a pretty well-heeled bunch of ‘high rollers’.  All it needed was a quote from Samuel Butler:-

“The three most important things a man has are his private parts, his money, and his religious convictions.  We are only interested in your money.”

With immense relief, they all opened up their cheque-books.

And one final question the book should ask: Were the improvements in performance long-lasting?  One of my favourite cartoons in the New Yorker showed a pair of wolves howling at the moon until it disappeared, and they are happy.  The moon returns the next night, but at least they had the illusion of success for a day.

Sir Alcon Charles Copisarow, 2011.