Focus only on the things that really matter

MANAGERS ON MANAGEMENT:SIR GERRY Robinson has just spent the past two days in Liverpool Prison filming for a new television series, and his mind is on what interests him most in business: outcomes.

"When you look at why prisons exist, the principal thing about running them - in management terms - should be to do things which give prisoners a serious chance of not ending up there again," he says.

"But the figures are astonishing: eight or nine out of every 10 people in jail in the UK today have been there before - and that really is a hopeless outcome. Does the prison service concentrate on that? I don't think so."

Robinson has at various times been chairman of Allied Domecq, Granada, ITN, British Sky Broadcasting and the Arts Council of England. He is also credited with turning Coca-Cola UK's £7 million (€8.35 million) loss into a £17 million profit in two years and, in a single year, stemming Granada's losses to post returns that were 10 per cent higher than market expectations.

He runs Raphoe Management, an investment vehicle and management company that specialises in acquiring and turning around struggling businesses. But he is probably best known for the television series, I'll Show You Who's Boss and Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS?. In the latter, he examined the management problems at the heart of the UK's struggling health service.

It hardly seems like the CV of a man whose management advice can be distilled down to two simple words: do less.

"I've really been very good at doing very little over the years," he protests. "I don't have the kind of mind which can stay with minutiae. They just bore me.

"At the same time, I've also always been very willing to appoint people who are better at doing things than I am and then delegate - that helps.

"But essentially, what I've learned is that, when an organisation is in trouble, you have to be able to find the three or four things that really matter. You need to concentrate on those and get them right - and that's what I mean by doing less.

"Most things go wrong because they don't get enough concentration. Managers flail about, mistaking being busy with actually achieving something. They get diverted into things like deciding what the company's car-parking policy is . . . Issues like that are very comforting for managers because they have a hard outcome. You can see the results. Whereas some of the big stuff requires a much longer-term view. In a way, it's less satisfying and less comfortable."

So he has little or no patience with the idea of the chief executive as a controlling micromanager?

"If you spread yourself too thinly you're never going to be the best operator in the game. Look at Rupert Murdoch and Sky. Rupert's only drive was: how can I get as many houses as possible on to our system in the next five years? That's why it works.

"Yes, there are day-to-day things you have to keep an eye on, of course there are. Yes, you have to keep an eye on finance. Yes, you need reviews to ensure that progress is being made in some kind of logical way . . . But you don't need to control everything."

He adds that, as in the case of Liverpool prison, "you just need to control outcomes".

"You need to concentrate on the things you want to happen, the big things. That kind of control I believe is important, but not the way they happen or the detail of how they're done," he says.

"But if you're not able to choose people you can trust, you're probably not doing the best job in any case. If you have the right people, you can let them get on with it. If you have the wrong people, all the management correction in the world won't help. Delegation happens when you have people you can genuinely delegate to."

Name:Sir Gerry Robinson

Company:Raphoe Management

Job: Corporate troubleshooter

Management advice:Do less

Next week: ESB chief executive Pádraig McManus on strategic planning in an economic downturn.

petercluskey@yahoo.fr