Janet Morgan’s business is other people’s business techniques – and how to make them more effective

When Dr Janet Morgan talks, corporations and governments listen. ‘Vaguely 40’, she is described ‘rather grandly’ (no formal training) as a management consultant. ‘I am just asked in as myself, to notice things. ‘ In a recent edition of the BBC’s staff newspaper she wrote an article that showed exactly what she had noticed during her four-year stint as special adviser to the then director-general, Alasdair Milne.

The gist of it was that intelligent people frequently run round in circles tripping each other up. ‘People had started to feel paranoid and ground down. I told them to get on with the job and keep their nerve. ‘ She also suggested how they might go about it.

The BBC, she says, is implementing her master plan. ‘The ‘upward referral’ system, whereby difficult decisions are passed to superiors, has been disbanded; meetings have been halved; minutes are shorter; and people have been requested to take the ‘No Entry’ signs off their doors ‘and replace them with more friendly notices’.

Unfortunately, Morgan has not been there to see it all happen, having moved on to become adviser to the board at Granada Television.

She is a glowing example of her own belief that ‘women are good at thinking about lots of things at once’. Apart from exercising the theories of organization learnt as a political historian (she worked in the Cabinet Office and lectured in politics at Oxford University), she has also written a biography of Agatha Christie, edited the diaries of her former employer and mentor Dick Crossman and, according to her entry in Who’s Who, finds time to enjoy making ice-cream. Her tiny stature believes vast stamina and a towering intellect. She has only failed once – when, in 1966, she did not become the first woman president of the Oxford Union Society.

Despite her own dazzling ability to organize, she has no time for the theory that women, by the very nature of their many-stranded lives, are better managers than men. There are, she says, hopeless male managers and hopeless female ones.

‘The sort of woman one tends to see in a senior position is probably excellent or she wouldn’t have got there, because it has been such a hard struggle. So we tend to think of women as being somehow better at it. But really we are not comparing averages.

‘It’s not so much because it is a male-dominated structure that the BBC has got into this organizationally ossified state,’ she says. ‘It is because those who should have been thinking about the way the BBC runs as an organization have been too busy and distracted to do that. ‘

Morgan concedes that women are more inclined to realize that a problem cannot always be solved by the application of a theory pulled from a filing cabinet: ‘They are very good at making judgements by feeling and hunch. And anyone who has looked at how scientific discoveries are made realizes how important that is.

They are also adept at simultaneously thinking of several jobs and the baby at home – ‘they have lots of antennae out’ – and have terrific stamina. ‘All that stuff about women going barmy every three and a half weeks is rot. ‘ She is surprised, she says, by how feeble men can be.

On the down side, she refers to what she calls the Queen Bee syndrome: the type of woman who devours any competing female. She also says some women fail to make the most of themselves – ‘sometimes because they feel sorry for men’. Women also tend to feel guilty. ‘They carry other people as passengers and often feel it is not worth being insistent or making a fuss. ‘

Naturally, Morgan has conquered her own difficulties. She has never been on an assertiveness training course (‘Do you think I should?’ seems a disingenuous response). She admits she may be unable to reach high shelves – ‘but I can always get a ladder. ‘ Somehow, one feels there will always be a tall man standing nearby, or at least someone to pass her a ladder.