Fletcher Building: "NZ's most useless company"
"Is [Fletcher Building] the only Private Monopoly in the World that can't make a buck? It is time to break up NZ's most useless company. ... "It is time to break up Fletcher Building & end the dubious Fletcher legacy on this country. ... My grandfather ... joked how there was a time when Sir James Fletcher was a National Party supporter but then 'tore his pants climbing through the fence' when Labour came to power and he wanted building contracts from that government. The company has always enjoyed huge monopoly powers. These days, it has shown a special skill at wielding those powers but struggling to make a buck. ...
"It's not the low paid workers in this country who are responsible for our appalling productivity growth. It is the bosses - the management - the CEOs and the Directors of many of the our largest companies - who are failing us due to their ineptitude. When the boss is the wrong person, nothing else works no matter how good the workers on the ground. The Empire State building took just over one year to build - starting in 1930 and opening for business in 1931 (that includes the digging of the foundations). Nearly a century later, how long has it taken Fletcher Building to build the piddly-little Convention Centre? Nearly 10 years and counting."~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'Fletcher Building: is it the only Private Monopoly in the World that can't make a buck? It is time to break up NZ's most useless company.'
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2 comments:
I've observed when working for big companies over my working life that they often display a degree of complacency, ineptitude, and bureaucracy similar to government departments. And that's even without any government protected monopoly. That's because their sheer size and inertia allows survival for a period, even despite those competitive disadvantages. So it's not that the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector, it's that the public sector can generally cheat reality for longer, as can big companies usually but to a lesser degree. In the long run though there's no escaping from reality for anyone.
I entered the workforce in 1983 and when I got together with my ex-varsity mates over a few beers the thing that amazed me was that the work environment of Fletcher Challenge was no different to the NZ Dairy Board that I started with, and no different to every Government bureaucrat that I encountered over the next few years.
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