The BBC, Expenses and Legacy Institutions

Recently the Mail Online broke a story about how the BBC technology chief spent £639 on taxi ride. These sorts of expenses are nothing new. The BBC, as well as the and House of Commons and House of Lords, are legacy institutions. Introducing change in legacy institutions is very difficult. The critical issue is how do you manage to adapt an old culture that is used to doing things in own way when that culture is also financially supported and so has no reason to change.

An expensive taxi ride is only part of the real story. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, for years the BBC had internal chauffeur service available to BBC staff for only a certain amount of time per day. Because the internal service wasn’t always convenient, staff used external drivers probably more than the internal service. The expense of individual trips is nothing in comparison to the intuitional cost of holding such services and not using them. So the question is, how do you change old-fashioned cultures?

There’s only one of two ways. You either have a top-down change programme initiated by the board, whereby trying to establish a new leadership style and approach, and a culture that is more conducive to the business of the organisation predominates. Or you take out costs, often through redundancies. If neither takes place, then this £639 taxi ride does capture one element of any legacy organisation — that is that they are well able to criticise everyone else, but when they get scrutinzed, they become highly defensive.

So nothing new. Is the BBC really going to change? I don’t really know. I haven’t seen any initiative to want to change internally and have a more developmental approach to change, but it may be happening. I don’t see any desire to change the structure and the infrastructure of the BBC in order to break down that culture. So I suspect that we’ll see more stories like this, and they’ll continue well into the future.