Who’s right here?
Some of you may have already noticed that as a company, we are strongly rooted in our hometown of Bristol. It’s a city where there seems to have been a vogue in the last few years for changing the name of schools in an attempt to shake off associations with an underperforming past. The most recent victim of this process is my old school, Monks Park; soon be carry the significantly more up market moniker of The Orchard School. This lumps my old school into the same category of name-changers as a nuclear waste recycling plant and the singer Prince, or Symbol as he wanted to be called, or AFKAP, as he ended up being called.
As a newly disenfranchised former pupil, I wonder why such name-changes are considered to be an answer in the public sector, but not for their private sector cousins. After all, the newly minted Orchard School will have the same staff, pupils and premises; so can a name change really make a difference? My time at business school and an exhaustive poll of five former pupils suggest not, but do they know something I don’t? And is it an exercise that should be watched with interest by the chief executives of our once mighty financial institutions? If Monks Park can underperform for decades but escape its past with a mere name-change, why shouldn’t our banks erase a few years of mal administration in a similar way? Why can’t RBS become the Orchard Bank? Or maybe it should be the other way round and schools should adopt a more private sector approach: fail and your premises, staff and pupils get sliced and diced into new organisations; taken over by your better performing peers.
Glad to hear from anyone with the time to run this thought experiment.