Hugh

I agree with your post - I find the Dragons Den and The Apprentice show the worst form of confrontational aggressive management style, which has no place in the modern workplace.

To answer your question re save lives or please Patricia Hewitt, I fortunately have never been in that position, but you can guess my approach from my last permanent job - I spent three years re-organising an IT department, making it fit for purpose and able to deliver to the business (whilst ensuring my teams got the required training and appropriate salaries etc for the job) when we got a new board, who decided to cut costs in the "support" areas because their great ideas didn't produce the profit they had promised the City. We were told to reduce costs by 30% (which we did by basically beating up the suppliers) but were told "no, we wanted you to reduce the support staff by 30%, and it's not for discussion").

We did this (with an extremely heavy heart and a lot of sleepless nights, but consoled ourselves with the thought we were keeping 70% of the jobs, big whoopee!). I spent the next year dashing up and down the country, fire-fighting problems caused by lack of staff (which we had forecast would happen, and lo and behold, they did), and then, because their super strategy for increasing sales hadn't worked, more staff cuts were required.

I volunteered to be one of the cuttees, rather than the cutters - managers are here to help the company succeed by helping their teams to do the jobs well; if we are not allowed to do that, we should go somewhere else that will let us.

I was so disillusioned with the Senior Management role that I have been contracting for a year while I decide what to do.

I think the point of the above "sharing" was to point out there are always two sides to a story.