THE GENTLE ART OF MANAGEMENT

I have watched mismanagement played out on a micro and macro stage recently. On a micro level – in businesses I know -  I have watched train crashes develop in slow motion as ill chosen words in e-mails have provoked anger and then irreconcilable differences, resignations and recriminations.

I suspect social media and digital communication may  be responsible for more current catastrophes than anyone realises. Recently exposed e-mails from within Oxfam make the point. Most e-mails are poisonously incautious.

On the bigger world stage it’s fascinating that we seem to have collectively embraced a need for the “smack of firm government” … a concept which seems closer to the relationship of the egregious Jacob Rees-Mogg and his nanny than anything else.

What is it that makes Putin, Erdogan, Macron, Trump, Xi Jinping and yes even Kim Yung Un so appealing to so many? Why do people admire dictators or leaders who, with the exception of Kim Yung who is a ‘monarch’ by inheritance, emerge from nowhere. In a recent TV programme ‘Putin; the New Tsar’ the question is asked how a poor boy from a tiny flat in St Petersburg was transformed into an untouchable dictator and the richest man in the world through breath taking kleptocracy? It didn’t answer that question by the way.

Is it because we’re secretly drawn to nasty people that so many monsters succeed? How did Hitler do it? From the “cowardly pig” corporal that fellow soldiers in the first world war allegedly called him, to Supremo Nazi nightmare. Although apparently he was fond of dogs so he wasn’t all bad then. Putin likes dogs too as he showed by introducing his huge labrador to dog-hating Merkel –nice one Vladimir!

The better news is that such rotters are being ousted – Gadaffi, Sadam Hussein, Mubarak, Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma. But the cost of their removal  is considerable.

Jim Collins in a legendary book about leadership “From Good to Great” (2001) wrote about what he called ‘Level Five Leadership’ where humility and fierce resolve triumphs over egocentricity. Leaders who are great listeners and coaches are what we need not loud-mouths.

So do we need more women at the top? Lady Barbara Judge - ironically named following her management misjudgements leading to her departure from the position of Chair of the IOD – suggests not. She sounded tough and rough-talking like most alpha men wielding the managerial mace and chain.

No,  what we need are more good people to run our lives. Kind, well mannered and selfless people. The idea of thieves and thugs being in position of great power may appeal to the students of great dictators like Timur the Lame, Genghis Khan or Bonaparte but is clearly barmy.

Not everything in life is about winning.

It’s about doing things well and collaboratively. And it’s about setting a good example. Nearly all the mistakes in history are made by creating needless offence. Gentleness is a great art. Don’t underestimate it.

"STRONG AND STABLE" - IS THIS REALISTIC IN TODAY'S WORLD?

Apart from an irrepressible desire to giggle when I see or hear this I wonder how and why the Tories ever saddled themselves with such a curious steam-engine of a phrase. Presumably they hadn’t counted it on it being gainsaid so emphatically.

But was it even appropriate?

I imagine focus groups said they yearned for strong leadership. Oh for the days of Attila, Genghis Khan or Frederick the Great the respondents said. We want someone to stand up and fight for us. We want a strong leader to take a firm grip.

The researchers concluded that people want a more predictable and ordered life.

They want hot summers and cold winters. This has become a prosecco and pesto world and people really yearn for bitter, pie and gravy. They yearn for an era of 11 plus, ‘O’ levels, 45rpm, mini-skirts, shipbuilding and capital punishment; an era of upper class, middle class and lower class, of pen and ink, of slide rules, of the TV Test Card and of BBC interviewers who call the Prime Minster “Sir or Ma’am” when they interview them. They want the past because then they know what happens next. The future is just so unstable.

Thus said the researchers…..

But this brave new world isn’t brave at all. It’s a nervy place where what we want isn’t “strong” (if by strong you mean, Trump, Putin or Erdogan.) What we really want and need is “smart”. And “stable” is not what you get on the ice rink of modern life.  Maybe calm and controlled would be better. What we want is to be as good as we deserve to be. And what we need is a top team who’ll help us get there, avoid us making a mess of things and be advised by sensible experts who have no ideological axe to grind.

On Friday I spent a few hours with a very bright 26 year old who’s extremely relaxed in part because he’s resigned from his stressful, busy-busy job where he was offered a seat on the board. Instead of building a glittering, “stable” career he’s earning enough freelancing whilst he reflects on his future.

Chances are he’s got 60-70 years of this adventure left.

He’ll have time to write some great books, have ideas for some successful and entertaining TV series, invent some life-changing products and even eventually become part of a smart, creative and adaptable leadership team.

Whatever else he’ll undergo lots of rich and exciting experiences and never just be what we once called a “wage slave”.

Maybe the world will gradually lose its urge for growth; our Brexit decision may create a platform for economic retreat. Most of all “strong” will be replaced by receptive and “stable” by adaptable.  What we are heading towards is a more natural way of living and possibly a happier and more productive one.

It’s the end of the old normal but strong and stable it’s not.

TWO ESSENTIALS WE CAN DO WITHOUT

I’ve written quite a lot on leadership. Shelves in bookshops are crammed with beastly tomes on the subject (“Leadership Plain and Simple”; “the Top 100 Ways to be a Great Leader”; “The Three Levels of Leadership” and over 24,000 more on this subject). I worked out that being conservative there’s around 1 ¼ billion words on the topic and counting.

And I’m not sure that I really believe in the concept of the leader, well not the Genghis Khan sort of leader we keep pretend we’re seeking. It’s the terminology that goes with leadership that worries me. We don’t talk about the calming of leadership or the guidance of leadership. Instead we talk about the “smack of firm leadership”.

We had the legendary workaholic Harriet Green ex CEO of Thomas Cook who allegedly fired people whilst painting her nails. Nice. We had Steve Jobs who when at Pixar, fired people and didn't give any severance pay. Pamela Kerwin, a Pixar employee, pleaded that employees at least be given two weeks’ notice.

"Okay," he said, "but the notice is retroactive from two weeks ago."

Frank Lowe, the advertising man who founded Lowe Howard Spink, being an insomniac, would summon senior executives at midnight to a meeting. They returned home exhausted and he’d call to get them back saying there was other stuff to go through.

Recent research into football management suggests changing managers in general has little effect. The irony of the David Moyes’ debacle at Manchester United was his successor’s record, whilst he was being praised for being so much better, was actually pretty much the same as David’s.

The nearest to making sense of the leadership cult came from Jim Collins in his book “From Good to Great” when he talked about what he called ‘level five leaders’. These were leaders “in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will.”

The second thing I wanted to comment upon is the pointlessness, indeed the destructive capability, of much market research. Anyone in advertising always knew it was futile to expect the average consumer to know what day it was let alone whether an ad was any good. Steve Jobs was smart as well as behaving boorishly from time to time. Dismissing the idea that people knew what they wanted he said average people just can’t predict. Instead: “We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

The polls in the recent election rather prove the point. The one below was pretty typical of a week ago. Scores an F.

Look at trends and think of basics. The conservatives had a better economic plan which just made more people feel safer. A few weeks earlier Benjamin Netanyahu, predicted to lose badly in Israel, won
comfortably by making more people feel safer too.

So don’t ask people. Just work it out…that’s what we get paid to do