Taken in by the “Transformation” trick?

Hopefully readers will have noticed the frequency with which our masters are using the words “transform” and “transformation”. The latest person to announce he would transform something is Simon Stevens, the new boss of NHS England who replaces Sir David Nicholson, the man responsible for but who never took responsibility for the Mid-Staffs hospital disaster. Simon Stevens has said “only by radically transforming services will the NHS continue to thrive“.

I have a confession to make. In the 1990s, I worked at the management consultancy Gemini Consulting which was part of the Capgemini group

At the time, Gemini Consulting was getting slaughtered in the marketplace by the big accountancies’ growing consultancy businesses. The problem was that the accountancies could deliver the trendy product of that time – BPR (Business Process Reengineering) – for often less than £5,000 per consultant per week. This was much cheaper than the £7,000 plus expenses per consultant per week that we at Gemini charged. The accountancies could undercut Gemini’s prices because they used armies of ‘billing fodder’ (cheap, inexperienced consultants) while Gemini tended to have more experienced and thus more highly-paid staff.

In order to fight back against the lower-priced competition, Gemini tried to find a smart new way of dressing up its services to make them look different and more valuable than those of our competitors. After a few real turkeys, they came up with the idea of ‘Business Transformation’. Gemini’s big chiefs even wrote a book called Transforming the Organization and, if I remember correctly, Gemini tried unsuccessfully to trade-mark the phrase ‘Business Transformation’ as a product only its consultants could deliver.

Reviewing the book at the time, the respected magazine The Economist wrote with great prescience that a true transformation ‘would employ an army of consultants for a century – and cause endless disruption’. (click to see picture clearly)

Most organisations can be improved, but very few need to be ‘transformed’. The great thing about ‘transformation’ was that it enabled us consultants to sell massive consulting contracts where we lucratively, and possibly sometimes unnecessarily, totally restructured our clients’ organisations and also put in huge new computer systems, again lucratively but perhaps unnecessarily.

Eventually, even governments caught the transformation bug. When he was PM, Tony Blair was forever using ‘transform’ and ‘transformation’. He promised us a ‘transformation’ of the NHS, a ‘transformation’ of secondary education, ‘transformations’ of all our public services and even had a meeting with top civil servants where he explained the ‘Seven Keys to Transformation’ which would lead to a ‘transformed civil service’.

Alistair Campbell said history would judge Blair as a ‘great transforming Prime Minister’. Blair’s government helpfully produced a chunky report called The Transformational Government Annual Report in which it detailed the many successes of its Transformational Government programme. The aim of the Transformational Government programme was: ‘Delivering better, more efficient services for everyone’. The programme seemed to be central to the government’s ambitions for improving public services as it explained in typical consultant gobbledegook: ‘Government is committed to a range of citizen-focused activities designed to optimise service design and delivery, and is proud that the United Kingdom is held up as providing some world-class examples of Transformational Government’.

The only thing that transformation has ever transformed are the ever healthier bank balances of the consultants who fool politicians, bureaucrats and business bosses into launching their massive, deluded transformation programmes.