The senior staff of Marks & Spencer challenged the senior staff of the NHS to an annual canoe race to the held on the river Thames in support of Comic Relief. Both teams practised long and hard to reach their peak performance before the first race.
On the big day, the Marks & Spencer team won by a mile.
Patricia Hewitt was discouraged and depressed about the crushing defeat. She appointed a team of senior managers to investigate and to recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was that the Marks & Spencer team had eight people rowing and one person steering, whilst the NHS team had eight people steering and one person rowing. Patricia did not like the report, so she hired a private management consultancy company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.
The consultants opined that too many people were indeed steering the boat, whilst not enough people were rowing and that, in order to prevent another defeat, the NHS rowing team's management structure should be reorganized to four steering supervisors, three area steering superintendents and one assistant superintendent steering manager. They also recommended a new performance system, involving pre-determined targets that would give the one person rowing the boat greater incentive to work hard. The performance system was called the "Rowing Team Quality First Program" and the rower was required to attend twice weekly meetings throughout the year at which he ate bourbon biscuits, was given free pens and listened to presentations from consultant rowing specialists who, thought they had never rowed themselves, were very knowledgeable. There was much discussion about new paddles, canoes and other equipment which were all on order but had not yet arrived.
The next year Marks & Spencer won by two miles.
Humiliated, Patricia Hewitt laid off the rower for poor performance, halted the development of new canoes, sold the paddles, and cancelled all capital investment for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the senior executives as redundancy payments and the following year the rowers were replaced by a team of "rowing specialists" who were cheaper and, though they had never been in a canoe before, "knew a lot about it."
