One organisation, one vision, one way of doing things. No more silos. Shared support services. Taking you share of the pain. Contributing to the greater good of the organisation. It’s been the business and management orthodoxy, the mantra of every new chief executive for generations. But maybe it time for a rethink. 

To the front line manager being corporate means filling that vacancy by taking someone you don’t really want from another department on redeployment. To the chief executive it’s the bigger picture, to the director it’s being required to take your share of the budget cuts. It’s about the leadership exerting control and imposing coordination. It’s about working across silos not in silos. It’s about efficiency. It makes no sense for each department/directorate to have their own training section, their own HR team, a separate IT team, their own communications team, their own policy officers even their own finance officers. These are all corporate functions, corporate teams answerable directly to the chief executive. It also made it possible to outsource support services if that was considered an appropriate efficiency. It’s a shift in power from directorates to chief executive and board.