WE'VE GOT TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

This is not just about cricket I promise. It’s about management and marketing.

There were two things I came across this week following the Kevin Pietersen debacle. The first was from my wife who having a very sharp sense of the zeitgeist said:

“It’s ridiculous they’ve fired him. He’s our top scorer and he’s cute.”

The second was in an article by Simon Barnes lamenting the folly of his departure. He quotes from an English swimming coach:

“He faced his swimmers and asked “who here wants to be mediocre?” It seems to me had the same question been addressed to the England cricket team they would have been holding up their hands.”

So to a non-cricket fan it’s talent, sex appeal and charisma that counts. And to a highly intelligent pundit the standards have deliberately been lowered to read “England lose harmoniously”.

Let’s lament the following disruptive influences – Ian Botham, Shane Warne, Fred Trueman, Ian Poulter, Nick Faldo, John McEnroe, Steve Jobs, Vincent Van Gogh and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The world would have been better, would it not, without these show-off virtuosos?

I used to work with a talented advertising man called Richard French. He believed the role of management was to manage the unmanageable. I realise now he meant me as well as others. Interesting that Pietersen, who ranks as a self-preening, adolescent genius – but maybe the best batsman to have played for England since Hutton – has divided the ranks so clearly between journeymen and stars. Of course he was a pain and a challenge. The sort of challenge Mike Brearley, the England Captain, faced with Botham in 1981.

If calm, reasonable, group-think HR ran the world none of the mavericks above would have been allowed near a cricket pitch, golf course, tennis court or boardroom. Because talent when it reaches the level of a Jeff Bezos (head of Amazon) or a Steve Jobs (late head of Apple), spills over into outrageous behaviour. Indeed one questions whether a Lloyd George, JF Kennedy or Bill Clinton would have been allowed anywhere near high office in the 21st century.

More to the point why do we all let people with such genius get backed into an isolated corner of disapproval from which disgrace or dismissal seems the best solution? The two jobs of management are to manage these unreasonable people with oodles of talent, not to be scared of them.

And to inspire winning performances whilst marketing is there to delight audiences with spectacular achievements.

I don’t think either course was necessarily best served this week.

In fact I think we settled for bronze.


 

WHO ATE ALL THE PIES?

I am I admit a little smug. Smug is a wretched word describing a condition of self-satisfied, self-restrained righteousness that is most unattractive. I’m smug because I’ve lost 10 kilos since Christmas. I look like Gary Lineker. “Well fit” as they say in my gym (I made the gym bit up, sorry, there has to be a limit).

And then I saw that picture of our leader on holiday in Cornwall.

 

He looks a bit pie-addicted, a bit… how shall I put it?... well tummied. The sort of Tory who hunts and is  “no stanger to the Melton Mowbray.” As Caitlin Moran said he looks like a ham. I’m afraid he does.

David belongs to a particular breed of politician – I refer to well known porkers like the remarkable Alex Salmond seen here describing the size of the haggis he has his eye on for a light snack between bills.

So am I just being fattist in the same way Julius Caesar was thinnist (hating Cassius’ “lean and hungry look”)?

On balance I prefer life affirming enthusiasts who eat and laugh and party. Bill Clinton, naughty in so many ways, was kept in shape by a chef who doctored his food with highly flavoured low calorie stuff. (“No Bill that wan’t a pie it was a calorie free soya and, lentil crispie.”) 

It’s the larger than life bit that worries me. It suggests they may lack the restraint that we seem to need in a crazy world. 

In a book called the Peter Principle written by  Laurence J Peter in 1969, a study of why things always go wrong in business, he has this to say about leaders:

“(Many) simply follow precedents, obey regulations and move at the head of the crowd. Such people lead only in the sense that a carved wooden figurehead leads the ship.”

If we want our figureheads to be slim, fit and attractive we have poor pickings amongst our current front benches. But maybe the zeitgeist has shifted anyway as America suggests looking at future presidential candidates, from Mr cool, sleek Obama to a new breed of figurehead like the hotly tipped Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie.  

I’m tempted to get off the slimming wagon. After all, scrawny suddenly seems so yesterday. But even as I feel like partying I look at the photo of the Cornwall Corpulent again.

 

Diet Coke anyone? 

www.colourfulthinkers.com

WHY RUTTING CHIMPANZEES GET AWAY WITH IT

There are two aspects to the DSK saga that strike me.

The first is why the great and the good seem time after time to get way with inappropriate or sometimes possibly criminal behaviour. Zuma, Clinton, the Kennedy’s and now the man that was born to be the President of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The recent swing from how a previous recipient of his unwelcome attentions described him, “rutting chimpanzee”, to wronged roué is pretty amazing. The high profile arrest, the comic spectacle of the French in the dock, the self-righteous commentaries and the immediate presumption of guilt was always liable to prove troublesome for any prosecution but the speed with which their case is unravelling is bizarre. It argues for all of us to be a lot more circumspect until we have all the facts. As Sean Meehan, Professor of Marketing at IMD said:-“in God we trust …all others need data”.

The truth is, as the editor of the Lady, Boris’ sister Rachel Johnson noted, DSK is sort of fanciable and (I loved this one) seemed to like women a lot. Years ago I was at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival when Bill Clinton was there. Sponsored by the Guardian it was full of feminists who strongly disapproved of his presence. Until they met him at which point “phwoar!” set in and they pretty well all confessed to melting beneath his ardent you-are-the-only-one gaze. Others, like the Kennedy’s had a kind of droit de seigneur about them that meant they got away with murder. Incidentally this sexual entitlement for the boss was known to apply in several British advertising agencies at one time.

None of this justifies rape. None of this justifies lousy behaviour or the sexual equivalent of ram- raiding.

Simply that there’s more to a scandal than meets the immediate salacious media eye. As Rod Liddle notes “sex sells papers” and he was desperate to scoop the Prime Minister being found in bed with the Archbishop of Canterbury and several goats.

The second question is why on earth talented people behave so badly, recklessly and stupidly.

Stephen Ambrose, the late US historian and biographer had the answer:

“God created man with a penis and a brain, but only gave him enough blood to run one at a time”.

So the worst charge would be diminished responsibility. Hmmm!