If Friday was a very big day for the BBC Trust, it was a very bad day for BBC management. First, the Trust put a stop to the management's plans for new local video and online services and then it slated them over unacceptable editorial failures. It's hard to say what must have hurt most, although the management time, cost and effort spent on the BBC local plans will leave scars. After years of effort by many senior managers and heaven knows how much money, the proposals were deemed "unlikely to meet [licence-fee payers'] needs" nor improve the service. The decision looked a certainty from the moment Ofcom judged them to be damaging to existing commercial operators and potential start-ups, but the Trust knockback allows no room for manoeuvre. Sir Michael Lyons's message to other local news providers could not have been clearer - the BBC will not turn up on their doorsteps.
By the time it got to the Ross-Brand saga at Friday's press conference, the atmosphere suggested serious management failings going beyond even Radio 2. Further indecent, if coded, references to Georgina Baillie live on Chris Moyles' show on Radio 1 and two further "grossly inappropriate" uses of the F-word by Jonathan Ross on his BBC1 TV show had been authorised for transmission by senior BBC television executives. Lyons even went as far as suggesting that a review of the "calibre and training" of senior executives across the corporation was in the works.
In truth, the idea that the BBC is full of people who don't take taste, decency and fair-dealing seriously, or who set out to flout (or don't understand) guidelines aimed at upholding standards, is just wrong. Nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid some pretty searching questions about how the corporation is being run at the most senior level. Lesley Douglas, erstwhile controller of Radio 2, was held in awe by other more senior managers.
She had done such a spectacular job as the power behind the throne of the previous Radio 2 controller, Jim Moir, and, latterly, in reinventing Radio 2, that the station had become her domain - and hers alone. She was an accident waiting to happen. The art of management in creative businesses is all about giving people the freedom and autonomy they need to do their best work while maintaining an effective line of control and accountability. It all comes down to relationships - which plainly went spectacularly wrong in this case. And that, fundamentally, is an issue of management and organisational culture.
Good management is also about predicting trouble and moving preemptively. For the Trust to have to tell the management they need to take greater care when the talent (or their agent) owns the company making the show is frankly embarrassing. Throw in the fact that the Trust also felt it necessary to issue new instructions to the senior management on how to deal with editorial crises - the DG, his deputy and numerous others were all on holiday at the same time when the Ross/Brand story broke - and you can see why the executive committee may be feeling less than entirely secure.
The BBC is now in a very dangerous situation. More rules and stricter adherence to them can stop untoward things from happening. The trouble is, if applied by writ they can stop much else besides. With the BBC's senior management on the defensive and the Trust more anxious than ever to demonstrate that they have the situation under control, the BBC's creative ecology is seriously at risk.
