Facilitation

I have been reading about this on the BBC and thought that, since Robert Peston is referring to it as a public-private partnership (one of Kubernetes’ specialities), a bit of stakeholder analysis was in order.

At the moment, it looks like the key stakeholders are the Treasury and the bidders; with some of the others having a veto power. The Hedge Funds have a large enough shareholding to block a complete sale; the competition authorities can block the support under e.g. EU state aid laws.

It is difficult to decide whether Gordon Brown and the Treasury are separate stakeholders in this (clearly Northern MPs are).  They are listed separately as I wanted to identify the various political dimensions and there should be a difference between the executive operational and political arms of government. Similarly for the FSA and BoE, however they only have influence and little real power at the moment. The people with least influence/power at the moment are customers and staff, however they are the key stakeholder groups that need to be won over for any rescue to be successful.

This is the really interesting part of the picture moving forwards. Assuming that a deal can be struck that a buyer comes in that satisfies the hedge funds (I wonder what average price they bought at?) and the Treasury, then the key is making it work for the 5 years or so that the government backed bonds are projected to exist.

In this scenario, whoever is in charge will not have to manage relationships with the usual customers, staff and shareholders (and the FSA & BoE as they are a bank), they will also have to manage the Political and Government establishments as well. Note I identify two separate stakeholder groups here as the drivers for civil servants in the Treasury are very different to the Chancellor, who is unlikely to be Alistair Darling for the whole time.

As to Gordon Brown………well there has to be an election before May 2010…….

Can it be made to work?  What is clear to me is that the new CEO and senior management will have to have a facilitative leadership style as they have to have all the stakeholders working together to make it happen.  Confidence is everything to a bank, which is why there was a run on Northern Rock in the first place.  If any stakeholder group is not fully bought in the market will pick on it and everything will go to pot and quickly.

So in my opinion what should appear in the jobs network is an advert along the lines of “Expert Facilitator needed – Financial Services experience desirable”.  Anyone want to comment on Jayne Ann Gadhia’s leadership style?