Daily Telegraph: Dr Rieley is wide of the mark on Shell’s ‘malaise’, writes a reader: the delusion of senior managers that because they had got to the top of Shell, and Shell was huge, they must be brilliant”: “No organisation can have had so many initiatives, change programmes and organisational upheavals.”
Posted 6 August 2004
LETTERS PAGE
I read your article with interest (Plain Talk July 29, Danger of not fixing it when it’s clearly broken).
I spent 20 years working for Shell and I am afraid your diagnosis of Shell’s problem is wide of the mark. Shell managers who are deemed to have potential traditionally have only stayed in a job a maximum of two and a half years. So they don’t have time to suffer from your “malaise”. The temptation is, on coming into a job, to rubbish the previous incumbent’s efforts and set an entirely new course safe in the knowledge that by the time you move on the problems associated with it will not have emerged. Skilled incompetence – which appears to mean a resistance to change – is also not a charge that can be laid at Shell’s door. No organisation can have had so many initiatives, change programmes and organisational upheavals.
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