Organizational Transformation at the BBC
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Case Code: BSTR231 Case Length: 27 Pages Period: 1992-2006 Pub Date: 2006 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.400 Organization: BBC Industry: Media and Broadcasting Countries: Britain Themes: - |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
"My main challenge in the BBC is taking a fantastic British institution and figuring out, with everyone in the BBC, how to get it ready for this completely different world. All of my energy is going into getting the organisation to think about quite radical change. So I see myself as a bit of a gadfly in a way, saying,don't assume that we can carry on as we always have."
- Mark Thompson, Director General, British Broadcasting Corporation, in 2006.
"The last 10 years at the BBC, we have seen terrible mismanagement. We had two director generals who really did not know how to run a large corporation."
- Kate Adie, Former BBC Reporter on the leadership of John Birt and Greg Dyke, in 2004.
Thompson Makes His Mark
On May 21, 2004, Mark Thompson (Thompson) was appointed Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the world's first public broadcasting corporation. The immediate task on his hands - to reform the 82-year-old BBC, which had been severely criticized in the Hutton Report. The Hutton Report, which went into a BBC report on the British Government's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, described the BBC's editorial system as defective and said that the editors had not scrutinized the script before it was aired. It also found fault with the BBC's management for having failed to act on a complaint given by the Government saying that the report by BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan (Gilligan) was false. On January 29, 2004, following the publication of the Hutton Report, Greg Dyke (Dyke), Thompson's predecessor, who had stood by Gilligan's story, resigned.
Thompson took charge on June 21, 2004. He was quick to acknowledge the efforts of Dyke, but emphasized that the corporation would require some 'real and radical changes' to sustain itself in the coming years. On his very first day, he announced the restructuring of the BBC's executive committee, the first of the many steps toward creating a simpler and more effective organization structure. The executive committee was divided into three boards - creative, journalism, and commercial - covering the principal activities of the BBC. Thompson headed the creative board.
Thompson also announced that the other businesses of the BBC such as production, commercial businesses, and commissioning would be reviewed with the sole aim of cutting costs and improving the efficiency of the organization as a whole. He said,"We're going to have to change the BBC more rapidly and radically over the next three to five years than at any previous point in its history. It feels like the task of really changing the BBC has only begun." A number of people felt that Thompson had come in at a critical time when the BBC's integrity was under question, employee morale was down, and the impact of digital technology was looming large.
They predicted that the journey further down the road would in no way be an easy one for him. However, analysts were confident about Thompson's capability to solve at least some of BBC's problems. Tessa Jowell (Jowell), Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, believed that Thompson was the right man for the post under such circumstances. Jane Root, Former Controller of the BBC-owned BBC, said, "He thinks very strategically about the big issues in television, and that is more than anything what the BBC needs its new director general to do. There is going to be an incredible amount of turbulence in television in the next few years; Mark was always a big-range thinker who didn't just think about the here and now."...
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