If the ability to charm the birds off the trees was one of the core competencies on the list of the panel interviewing the new head of the Central Office of Information (COI), there is little wonder Mark Lund got the job.
Lund, who moves on 1 June from being chief executive of the ad agency he founded, DLKW, to running the government's own ad agency, is every inch the confident, successful adman. But he's going to need more than charm to run the complex set of businesses that comprise the COI.
Lund will reporting to Cabinet Office ministers and will work closely with the permanent secretary for government communication, Matt Tee, who's been in the job since it was created last November.
"Matt is one of the key reasons I'm doing this," says Lund. "He was the first proper civil servant I met and I thought wow this is someone I'd like to work with."
In moving from adland to the civil service, Lund is following a path set by his predecessor, Alan Bishop, who left the COI last year after six years as its chief executive, to run the Southbank Centre. "I didn't want to move into the public sector per se," says Lund, "but in my world of communications, the challenge that the COI job represents is uniquely interesting and diverse and broad."
The COI is indeed unique. It is one of the UK's largest spenders on advertising, with an annual marketing budget of almost £400m and about 650 staff, with a wide range of expertise and skills.
"Given that the diversity of tasks the COI does is now greater than even five years ago, how to keep united and stay whole is a key area the whole organisation will be grappling with," says Lund. He doesn't say how he intends to do that, but there are a couple of clues.
"The importance of what we do and what brings us together is the strongest part of any volunteer organisation – and I strongly believe any creative organisation is a volunteer organisation," he says.
There is also, he adds a very strong sense of shared purpose at the COI that comes from being within the public sector, with almost all its communications targeted towards a "benevolent end".
Lund also says the COI has got better at what it does under Bishop's leadership and has benefited from an influx of staff from the commercial world. "The COI is now seen as an industry leader in quite a lot of new age things like digital engagement, public engagement and the whole idea of genuinely integrated holistic communications," he comments.
It is a genuine centre of expertise. It's certainly no civil service backwater
Working in the civil service will be a new experience for Lund, although he says his three years as chair of the Advertising Association has introduced him to the interface between the commercial world, the public and regulation.
Once inside government, though, Lund acknowledges he will have to learn a "different language", where the metrics are no longer simply about profit and stock price.
"Commerical motivations are potentially more predictable than political motivations, but any organisation has stakeholders and the question is divining stakeholder motivation and what best services those ends and those of the clients. The challenge is to be as adept in that world as I have become in the commercial world. It's about speaking the language fluently."
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
