Engineering rules the company, which has been trying and failing to recast itself as a technology company for years. As a result, much of the management and leadership have come from engineering and, all-too-often, those who rise towards the top do so not on the basis of their leadership qualities but on a mixture of luck, ambition and exploitation. Whilst staff grades and senior leadership positions are generally awarded meritocratically, middle management is often self-interested and sparingly honest. Staff grades who are not nakedly ambitious and blessed with some combination of excellence and bravado tend to be taken advantage of, rather than recognised and developed.
As engineers are natural problem solvers, there is also a tendency to get engineers to solve any problems, regardless of whether it's something they're actually skilled, experienced or even trained in. Because of the calibre of the people, this is often successful but the result is many projects under-perform because they've been undertaken by inadequately-skilled people. Depressingly, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to have prevented this situation from improving in at least the last ten years.
Warren East has stated the company will have £1bn in free cash flow by 2020 but the company continues to struggle to meet that target, despite thousands of redundancies as part of a restructuring programme which will have an impact for many months yet.
In some ways, culturally the company is a victim of its own success. There are many long-serving managers who cut their teeth in the 90s and 00s. Consequently Management 4.0 is a long, long way off – most areas are just getting Management 2.0 Beta rolled out.
