Simon Caulkin has some interesting reflections on the managerial aspects of the crisis…

The credit crunch conclusively demonstrates that we can no longer afford a corporate model that generates repeated crises for society as a whole as a byproduct of pursuing vast rewards for a few. This makes a mockery of the corporate social responsibility movement, of which the City is a pillar. CSR is simply incompatible with the unbridled incentive schemes, lemming-like pursuit of risk and unaccountability that have produced today’s meltdown. It is time to bring CSR inside – to do what New Labour flirted with ever so briefly in 1997 and then abjectly abandoned – and lay on companies the formal obligation to take into account the wider interests of all stakeholders, including the community, on pain of having their charter removed. To the conventionalists who object that the notion of benefiting all stakeholders is a recipe for fudge and compromise, tell that to rivals of Toyota (largest auto company in the world), Whole Foods Market (fastest-growing retailer), John Lewis, and many other successful companies that include wider social wellbeing in their corporate aims…

And, in case anyone thinks that the Cameroonians will do any better, here’s a sobering thought from Nick Mathiason’s piece about the cosy relationship that New Labour cultivated with the City.:

But just as Labour grapples with regulating the City, it seems likely that the reins of power will be seized by the Conservatives, bankrolled by hedge-fund managers, spread-betting tycoons and blue-blooded Tory bankers. It could soon be political business as usual.

One of the things that dismays me is the pathological bureaucratisation of some of the organisations with which I have to deal, so this perceptive observation by Clay Shirky struck a chord.

Process is the feature creep of organizations. In the same way software has to have features, groups have to have process. But like software, process creep in groups is insidious — each additional check in or form seems to cost little and add much, but over time, the cumulative overhead of process can hamstring an organization, almost without their noticing.

Six or seven years ago, ATT asked me to spend some time helping them figure out their web hosting offerings, and after some preliminary work, it became clear that there would be no mainstream hosting business, because the cost to the customer would be too high to be competitive. This was not because ATT was buying expensive hardware; it was because their minimum hosting processes imagined layers and layers of dev, stage, and live servers, and a complex array of user management interfaces. When ATT asked how the existing hosting companies could provide their services so cheaply, I said that the competition was simply offering shell access, and that people could FTP anything they liked to the server or telnet in and write stuff directly on a live box.

ATT was aghast, of course, at such laxity, but in fact, it was this kind of simple, process-lite attitude that helped the net spread generally, and it was ATT’s “Quality of Service” attitude that marginalized them.

This is many stories, of course, hundreds of stories, thousands of stories. It’s why Berners-Lee succeeded while Nelson failed, it’s why markets work better than central planning, because central planning is process made supreme, and it’s even why Open Source works though it has less process than commercial firms. This is not to say that there is not a process to Open Source efforts, but rather that it is considerably simpler than the process adopted by Serious Commercial Software Firms®, who for years misunderstood Open Source, because they assumed no one could build software with that little process.