CHOOSING THE RIGHT JOB

Being promoted to a bigger job is not always the right move to make. In modern politics people ill equipped for a given role nonetheless greedily grab it. Because, they say, that’s what you do.

When Graham Potter left Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club where he earned a “meagre” £2 million a year for a £10 million job steering Chelsea to glory, many of us were sceptical. He was in a great position at Brighton inspiring a club he’d nurtured. He joined the lofty unknown of Chelsea. It was also unknown if he could do it, if his limitations might be exposed, if the players would recognise his authority. It was like going from provincial theatre to the West End before you’re quite ready.

Knowledgeable pundits said he couldn’t say “no” to this golden opportunity. Events are proving them wrong so far. He’s been “luckless” as the Times has said but also he seems out of his depth and lost. Chelsea isn’t just big it’s monstrous. It’s valued at just under $1 billion. It’s had 10 different managers in the last 10 years including Potter and it has 23 players “earning” over £2 million a year (3 of them over £15M.) It’s potty, Potter, as you’re discovering.

In my own career I was occasionally approached by people from much bigger companies trying to lure me to lead their broken, unwieldy businesses. In saying no I never regretted it because I knew the language they spoke was not my language. 

A colleague once took the CEO job at a huge multinational. The perks were great. Vast salary. Chauffeured Jaguar. City-centre skyscraper office. But it was a complete nerve-wracking disaster for him.

Boris Johnson was always self-evidently the wrong man for No.10. Wanting to be the top-dog is not a qualification for getting that job and doing it well. Read “Chums” by Simon Kuper to understand the psyche of this flippant, narcissistic scoundrel. 

It's not easy building a leadership team and true leaders are hard to find. They need time, they need mentoring, they need modesty, the desire to learn, yes -  they also need luck but above all they need to believe they’re really up to the job and are focused on it.

I read about a job description recently for a job in the NHS, a well-paid “Director of Lived Experience” (what on earth is that?) who is “interpersonally talented and a strategic bridge-builder.” It occurred to me that opaque language like this goes a long way to disqualifying people from applying for jobs. But they’d be mighty miserable if they actually got the job and found themselves drowning in a morass of jargon.

I was once interviewed for a job I didn’t really want by people who, soon into the interview, I found I didn’t like. They asked me that dread question – “what do you think you’d bring to this job?” I thought and replied “a touch of levity perhaps”.

The Head of HR (sorry, the People Propagator) looked very shocked and the interview ended.

The mission of any business is to do what it does very well, profitably and to be adept at changing and improving. The leader’s role like the conductor of an orchestra is to recruit the best team, get the best out of them and constantly explore initiatives and new music to excite them, grow them and keep them on their toes.

The one thing a leader, conductor or surgeon shouldn’t be is light on experience. Real leadership is about people’s lives and their dreams. It’s not a game. 

 

HOW MIGHTY IS AMAZON?

I’ve always had this back-of-the-mind worry about Amazon. It’s a huge success, of course, and what would we all do without it? All those late night purchases of books which we forgot to buy at Waterstones but now, refreshed by red wine, we joyfully order another selection to join the piles of the unread when they arrive the next day.

So what’s not to like? Their attitude to people for one. Amazon is an HR nightmare. It’s also breaks all the rules we learnt when small. That profit was king. At 4% or less, profit on sales Amazon sweeps all before it; with Third World man management and price-cutting to destroy smaller, more circumspect competitors. And tax? Last year they paid £220 million on UK sales of just under £11 billion. Go figure.

Yet it provides an essential service to the lazy or forgetful. But I’ve started to detect a few cracks. During lockdown it’s taking longer to deliver and it’s not always so cheap now.

Its secret of success was that its competitors were so dire. Bookshops were expensive, slow and often rude. You sometimes felt they were there for the staff and that customers somehow got in their way.
Suddenly we have entered a new world of home-delivery by bookshops, restaurants, butchers,  greengrocers and wine merchants.

One of the great comic writers – our own version of P.J. O’Rourke – is Rod Liddle. Here’s what he wrote last week about one of the most beautiful sounds in the world – no, not birdsong….
“The growl of a diesel engine, the crunch of wheels on gravel and the squeal of brakes”
This signifying the arrival of a Majestic wine delivery.

I have the same feeling – less growling, crunching and squealing – with a Sussex Peasant delivery of asparagus and other locally-grown delights.

But here’s my story of how the game seemed stuck in the past but then was shown to be totally changed. On March 29th I sent an order worth just over £100 to the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley in response to their heavy catalogue drops. Silence. When we at last put on some pressure we got a slightly aggrieved … “it’s all very difficult and we’re very busy.” More silence. Followed by a cheque returned and a slip of paper saying “we are unable to fulfil you order at this time…we’re sorry for any inconvince (sic) this has caused”…

More than “inconvince” matey. Our garden was naked, drab and forlorn.

I wondered if Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens could help albeit from their small nursery. They could. Hurrah! I sent off an order. Next day they made the 20 mile journey and because they’d been unable to fulfil all the order they’d made intelligent substitutions and bunged in a free bag of compost to say “sorry”. The business is South African owned with people who understand customer service. 

So, I believe in buying from small, local businesses from people we know and who care. Amazon beware.

LETS KEEP THINGS SIMPLE

Yes but - and it’s a big BUT - be very careful. Our very human mind finds it appealing to create stories or conspiracy theories where none actually exist. It constantly tries to simplify and find neat patterns and answers.

 It does not appreciate the idea of things happening at “random” but likes to discover patterns and use simplifying devices like runes and rhymes. Here’s one about my book:-

“Just read this book and have no fear, it’ll help you think and change your career“

It’s strange but expressed like that it conveys a possibility of truth that the blunt “read this and get on” will not. The latter sells assertively, the former wraps up the thought in a kind of irrefutable, pseudo-biblical parcel.

Myers Brigg, a system strongly advocated by many does just that too. For those who don’t know about it it’s the Personality Checking System beloved of HR people. If you haven’t been Myers Brigged then you probably haven’t got a personality in the accepted sense of the word. Ironically it identifies around the same number of types of personality as the number of behaviours performed by the Mexican Green Lizard that have been identified by Californian PHD students. That’s 27.

Well I may be perverse but I think there are more than twenty seven personality types. I think it’s the diversity of people and their attitudes and behaviour that makes humanity so fascinating. So, yes, I am very cautious about oversimplification.

The more one studies the brain and the process of thinking the more inappropriate it seems to dumb down and pigeon hole the issues. The brain is so complex, so magical and so surprising that a bit of messiness in describing it seems not only right; it seems to capture the ability and indeed the need of the brain to juggle and dance in a bizarre way.

In fact Martin Sorrell who runs the advertising giant WPP nailed it when he said:- “The 21st Century is not for tidy minds.”

And now to demonstrate how untidy I can be I’m going off slightly, at a tangent, to advocate a principle about sticking to the obvious whilst not oversimplifying.

There are two so-called laws of psychology worth bearing in mind here.  “Occam’s Razor” which espouses simplification (in an acceptable way) in suggesting that it’s the simplest cause of an event that is likeliest to be the true one. Experience would tend to confirm this is generally the case, but with the proviso that the second law of “Occam’s Broom” doesn’t also apply which is the urge to sweep inconvenient evidence under the carpet that seems to disprove “Occam’s Razor”.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014