It was the mid-1990s and I was working at the BBC on Breakfast News as a Producer. The BBC had spent £30 million (my estimate) on putting every member of the BBC ‘s staff (around 30,000) through a full day’s Internal Communications PR exercise called “Extending Choice, The Workshop” – the idea of the then Director General, John Birt (now Baron Birt and a former strategic advisor to Tony Blair).

We all received an “Extending Choice” pencil, which I kept for several years. McKinsey’s Management Consultants facilitated these “Birt days” at an enormous cost – which was reported at the time as being around £18 million from memory.

I went on one of the Birt days and most people there used it as a networking exercise to move sideways into a better, or more interesting job at the BBC – in the days when there were jobs and moving sideways within the BBC was relatively easy.

It was perhaps as a consequence of this huge spend that the BBC’s then Head of Newsgathering, Chris Cramer decided to create a sort of internal BBC “Brains Trust” to take the BBC forward into the 21st century without paying the huge management fees organisations like McKinsey would charge. He created something called the “Ten Year Strategy Committee” which I joined. Actually, anyone from BBC News could join and it was an unpaid post which demanded several extra hours per week, plus additional extra work outside of formal meetings.

It was testament to how overstaffed the BBC was at national level in those days that there was a clamour to join and the first meeting at one of the BBC’s buildings near Broadcasting House was packed.

I remember how Chris laid out his vision, that we, BBC journalists, collectively had the skills to take the BBC into the 21st Century and did not need the help of management gurus or anything else which cost money. He split us up into groups, each group tasked with coming up with ideas for specific areas.

Breakout rooms were (sort of) organised – it was all a bit random and disorganised in truth. My group had about 5 or 6 people in it and we didn’t really know where to start or what to do. At the time the BBC had a big “Meetings Culture” where virtually everything was discussed at length in endless meetings before real work actually began. Almost inevitably, in hindsight, this small group decided to “sound off”, with one or two people going on for what seemed an eternity about the BBC’s culture etc etc. After about 20 minutes, I suggested that we actually needed to decide on what we were going to do, rather than talk around the “media environment”. This didn’t go down too well with one or two people who thought they were senior figures within the group.

To cut a long story short, a lot of paperwork was created, endless copies were made, and some of this stuff found its way into my BBC “Pigeon Hole” – remember those? It was at the time when the Internet was just entering the mainstream, email was just starting to be used and Facebook was a twinkle in the eye of the parents of Mark Zuckerberg.

I left the BBC soon afterwards, opting for a pay rise and a future in the private sector and “The Ten Year Strategy Committee” was something I never heard of again.

Cramer’s idea was right- but the BBC’s culture was entirely the wrong place for this sort of thing to flourish. Everyone was too intent on hearing the sound of their own voice, in being seen to be sitting on the right Committee to add to the CV and enhance the prospects of BBC promotion and if anyone did have a good idea, it was never implemented or acted upon.

Chris Cramer left the BBC soon afterwards and went on to great things working for CNN where his entrepreneurial talents were better suited. Greg Dyke eventually replaced John Birt at the BBC and was extremely well liked and popular with staff until a “dodgy dossier” about Weapons of Mass Destruction (or not) triggered his downfall.

The point of this story, is that someone, from the BBC’s thousands of journalists, writers, technicians and managers, should have had the vision, if not then, then a few years later to invent something like Facebook, Myspace or even Bebo, which was invented by a husband and wife team in San Francisco, almost literally on their kitchen table, which they later sold to AOL for nearly $1 Billion.

Why wasn’t the BBC creating a Bebo, a Facebook, a Myspace. They had the talent, they had the manpower, they had the technology, they had the budget, but there was no incentive for the staff to do this. Even the high street retailer Dixons, were doing better when one of their bright stars came up with the idea of Freeserve which netted the company hundreds of millions of pounds.

Instead the BBC created iPlayer, which to my mind is simply a storage space for old BBC TV and Radio programmes. Yes, the BBC will argue that they created a commercial services operation selling programmes worldwide and globally. (Ironically Top Gear was their best seller and look what happened to that.)

The point is that if the BBC was so successful at its commercial operations they would not need to charge over 75s a Licence Fee, or anyone else for that matter.

And they should be (very successful at commercial operations). Even while I was there, the BBC had the brightest and best, but it was over-managed and there was simply no incentive for anyone to come up with a multi- billion dollar brainchild like Facebook, other than a promotion from a Band 4 job to a Band 5 one.

Facebook’s natural home should be with the BBC – the home of news, the natural home of the best journalists and the creator of the best news website in the history of online news – BBC Online.

The BBC should be in a position right now where it can generate huge amounts of cash, not need to charge a Licence Fee and be independent of any sort of Government control, so that it can maintain its original set of very simple values – “to educate, inform and to entertain” – which came from its creator, Lord Reith.