Accountability ‘a deciding factor’

Wed, June 27, 2012 - 12:00 AM

A LACK OF accountability prevents state-owned entities from being as successful as private sector companies.

This is the view of Dr Pikay Richardson, a senior Visiting Fellow at the Manchester Business School, in an address to Barbados National Bank’s (BNB) corporate and commercial customers last Wednesday.

“In the private sector, if you don’t deliver, if you own the company and the company goes down, you lose your wealth,” he told the media following BNB’s quarterly business seminar at Hilton Barbados.

“If you are running it for somebody else and you are appointed manager, you can be fired easily.

“There’s pressure on the private sector manager to deliver results.

“In the public sector, maybe you have been appointed by government, maybe you are in the good books of the prime minister or the president, maybe you are related to the president’s wife and that’s why you’ve been put there. So if you don’t deliver nobody’s going to sack you.”

The economic and management development educator and consultant said there was often “no drive” to deliver results in the public sector.

He noted that there was no difference between public and private sector enterprises and that leadership and management were the deciding factors in both cases.

“Ownership per se doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can have a government-owned company run by excellent managers who deliver results for government.”

Richardson noted that regardless of ownership, the management of workers and money was critical.

However, he said “in the private sector, there is pressure to use the workers and the money well”.

“In the government-owned sector there is not that much pressure and people can take it easy and therefore we don’t get government-owned companies giving good results but there is no reason why we shouldn’t if we put in good managers [who are] tested and tried,” Richardson said. (NB)