Way back

Learned readers have pointed out that John Birt was not the first in the BBC to turn to consultants McKinsey for advice. In 1967, Harold Wilson appointed Lord Hill, no friend of the BBC thanks to skirmishes over his role as "The Radio Doctor" and Suez, as chairman, to "sort out" the Corporation.

A year later Hill invited in McKinsey, to look at "structure and functioning of the BBC". Stuart Hood, a former Controller of BBC tv wrote a column in the Spectator at the time, commenting, perhaps rather partially, about the aspirations of the staff at the time...

What they hope for, on the television side, is that the television service will be more certainly master of its own destinies and its own economy; but this they feel, cannot be achieved without an assault on what is seen as the central fortress—Broadcasting House, where the central administration and its ancillary services are firmly lodged. Will the managing director of television, they wonder, be able to take decisions or will he be bound—as so often in the past—by decisions which may be relevant to radio but are inapplicable to the operation of running a television station ?

...Radio has remained an archaic structure within which, here and there, patches of professionalism and initiative force their way through the undergrowth. The organisation is top-heavy. There are too many departmental heads who are frustrated and soured and whose effect on programmes is therefore inhibiting. The time spent on meetings and on keeping in touch is out of all proportion to what emerges from them. The lines of command need to be defined afresh and old frontiers broken down. 

Lord Hill's move was also remarked upon by Lord Reith, in a letter to his buddie Jack Maclay aka Lord Muirshiel. Already fuming at Lord Hill's appointment as chairman, he described the consultants as "that terrible McKinsey firm".