To change or not to change? That is but one of the questions – A change management position paper

In Western economies so many once-public organisations have become privatised or have been exhorted to become more ‘private enterprise-like’ that we now see such changes as nothing new or unusual. We can all count many services that are no longer in public ownership, and we can all point to enterprises that were once civil service through and through and no longer are in name or in fact. The universities for which many of us work are publicly funded entities but nonetheless very much more entrepreneurial in their intent than before, and expected to operate in highly business-like and commercial ways. Some actually do succeed at achieving this. Twenty years of political and organisational change have achieved much on this score. The deeper question is whether the core operations and processes of many of these once-public-now-private organisations, agencies and services are now actually significantly more business like, or whether we have achieved nominal and superficial change only.