The Exec-Ed Zone

A recent article in The Financial Times by its Capital Markets editor, Gillian Tett, focused on how little British MP's knew about financial markets. The spark for this came from comments made by the Industry and Parliament Trust (IPT) who noted that MP's attending their programs to improve their understanding of how the City operates had a surprisingly poor base knowledge of the finance sector and its operation.

The IPT performs a vital service in educating the UK's political class. It is aided in this venture by WIG, the Whitehall & Industry Group, a not-for-profit organisation that arranges mentorships, networks and "organisational raids" (where a select group from one organisation can discover about the workings of another from the inside). WIG's remit is to increase the interactions and understanding between those that work at a senior level in the public sector and their equivalents in the private sector. So the mentorships and raids will be between senior civil servants and their departments and senior executives in commercial businesses.

Gillian Tett pointed out in her article that the distance between senior government officials and senior City and Business executives is far greater than it ought to be- certainly far greater than the geographic proximity of Westminster/Whitehall and the London corporate HQ's might sugges.

The private sector has an unhealthy disdain for politicians in general - they see them as builders of barriers and obstacles to the efficient flow of business; and in return many civil servants and certainly a significant proportion of the left-leaning MP's are easily persuaded that successful business people have achieved their affluence through dirty dealings, unethical approaches and single-minded pursuit of profit with no regard to the wider world.  

These stereotypes are emboldened by a lack of knowledge which no doubt transforms itself into a degree of defensive aggression when they meet or have to deal with each other. If you don't really understand what the other side is doing or how it operates and you are aware of this knowledge gap - a good way to cover it up is to fallback on perceived stereotypes and react to them on that basis. This "defensive aggression" is probably the poorest way to enter into any discussion or negotiation - and any attempt to unravel it and shine some light on the workings of the other side can only be beneficial.

This could be the purest form of executive education yet!