Ashley Highfield, taken down a peg or two
Tom Coates, who used to work for the BBC and is now at Yahoo, really lays into Ashley Highfield, the supposed visionary leader of the Beeb’s new media efforts. (Euan Semple, the BBC’s former head of knowledge management, agrees with Tom’s assessment.) An excerpt:
If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!
…[T]he truth is that for the most part - with a bunch of limited exceptions - these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors - the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international - get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting.
Let us not forget that Highfield gets his funding whether he delivers or not, as the BBC is financed under threat of violence to anyone who wishes to own a TV in this country. That is the plain, ugly truth of the matter, no matter how much Tom may like to think that the BBC is a ‘valuable organisation’. I guess I’d want to believe that, too, if my salary had come from working people who faced prison sentences if they didn’t pay up.
Indeed, as Tom notes, Highfield’s miserable failures have resulted in him being rewarded with a much larger role within the BBC. He’ll be managing up to 4,000 people, according to the Guardian. Please, tell me again why we need this ‘valuable organisation’.
And can this please get some coverage in the UK new media press, which seems to lavish praise on Highfield like so much confetti? Hell, NMA should ask Tom if they can re-publish his piece verbatim (and pay him for it). Some debate about matters of interest would be nice.
Filed under: Life
Working with the BBC on a knowledge management project sank my previous employers. Nice enough people, but impossible to deal with - no concepts of budgets, or timescales, only paid for 6 weeks work, and then took the whole “But we’re the BBC” attitude and screwed another few months of basically free work out of us, as our European bosses were really impressed that we were working with them.