Reflections on failure

It has become a truism of at least some parts of the research literature on leadership that to focus on successful leaders is to neglect the importance of the other side of leadership, namely followership (see Uhl-Bien et al, 2014 for a summary). Less discussed, so far as I know, is the other side of success, namely failure.

This thought was prompted by the US Presidential election result, where much attention has focussed on Trump’s success but less on Clinton’s failure. What does it feel like to fail, especially when coming so close to success? A clue may be in Hillary Clinton’s exhausted-looking appearance since the election and her statement that since her defeat that there have been times when “she never wanted to leave the house again”.

It is generally the case that when leaders – whether in politics or business – fail they disappear from public view. They don’t want to be seen and we, apparently, do not wish to see them (perhaps especially if we were their followers, as if their shame has become ours). And whatever prior success they may have had, their names become forever associated with, and their lives defined by, the failure with which their careers ended.

I suppose there are some exceptions to this. Leadership theory seems always sooner or later (usually sooner) to mention Churchill, and he is an example of someone who came back from failure and isolation to lead wartime Britain. Or, to take another stock icon, this time from business, Steve Jobs having been forced out of Apple in 1985 came back in 1997 to successfully lead the company again. But such cases are rare, I think. In general, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

The stigma of failure is profound. There are many books about successful leaders, very few about those who fail even though these might yield more valuable insights. Or, if the maxim that “all political careers end in failure” is true then perhaps success and failure are not the opposites that one might suppose. But the issue is wider than that of leaders. In the US Presidential election (as with Brexit) much was made of how the result reflected the vote of those who had lost out from and been left behind by globalization. I’ve written elsewhere about my scepticism of this explanation, but acknowledged that it is partially true. And to the extent that it is true, it must partly be to do with the anger induced by failure.

For to have ‘lost out’ and ‘been left behind’ is surely a deeply hurtful experience. In the US, where the ideology that anyone can be a success ('from the log cabin to the White House') is especially strong, being a loser is galling. In a more general way, the idea that was at the core of the western liberal post-war settlement that if you ‘worked hard and did the right thing’ security and success were available makes it humiliating if you have done these things and yet find yourself a failure. All of this becomes even more humiliating if, every hour of the day, you see media images of the rich and successful, and adverts for a lifestyle that you can never have.

Of course there is no automatic association between failure and humiliation. But when winners take all, and are lauded as they do so, and failure is absolute and stigmatic it is very likely also to be humiliating. Humiliation is a complex and powerful emotion, which may provoke hatred of oneself and/or of others, anger and violence in both inter-personal (Walker & Knauer, 2011) and political (Fattah & Fierke, 2009) relations. One way it may be assuaged is, indeed, a matter of leadership. As Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ had it, both triumph and disaster are imposters. The etymological twin of humiliation is humility. Perhaps if the successful exhibited more humility, failure would be less humiliating?
 

References

Fattah, K., & Fierke, K. M. (2009), ‘A clash of emotions: The politics of humiliation and political violence in the Middle East’, European Journal of International Relations, 15, 1: 67-93.

Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014), ‘Followership theory: A review and research agenda’, The Leadership Quarterly 25, 1: 83-104.

Walker, J., & Knauer, V. (2011), ‘Humiliation, self-esteem and violence’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 22, 5: 724-741.

Flying too high?

In my book I talk a lot about issues around bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy, and make the point (p.86) that for all that post-bureaucracy arguably allows freedom and innovation it necessarily entails additional risks when the checks and procedures of bureaucracy are done away with.

The British education system has been a particular site for the application of the idea that the shackles of bureaucracy should be thrown off and head teachers – or school leaders as they are more likely to be called within post-bureaucratic discourse – given freedom from rules. Indeed ‘academy schools’ and ‘free schools’ – exempt from the national curriculum and from local authority control – have been a flagship policy since 2010. It is therefore unsurprising that schools have become vulnerable to malpractice. If you strip away controls it does not make malpractice inevitable, but it increases the likelihood that it will occur.

In a post on this blog back in June 2013 I drew attention to the case of a head teacher who was at that time accused of (and in 2014 admitted) misconduct in the form of abuse of funds. This case was significant because she had hitherto been lauded as an outstanding head teacher, headed an academy school, and was widely praised by politicians including Tony Blair.

I'm returning to this theme following the news that on 30 September another free school head, again the subject of Prime Ministerial praise (this time from David Cameron), has been jailed for fraud, along with two other staff members. I wondered if there was a pattern in this and I think there is. An internet search of ‘head teacher fraud’ throws up an enormous number of cases. Some of them do not result in criminal trials (being rather professional malpractice cases), and some which go to trial do not result in convictions – but even in these cases there is evidence of lax accounting and monitoring. Not all of the cases are about money – many seem to be about employing family members who should not have been employed, the kind of nepotism that Weberian bureaucracy stamps out. Many of the cases involve academy and free schools.

It’s important to keep monitoring such cases because the effects of public policy are long term, and it is therefore easy to view them as isolated events rather than systemic changes. There is of course a need for caution here. I do not know whether fraud and malpractice amongst head teachers is more frequent than before schools were given more freedom from central and local government and control. I don’t recall there being so many cases in the past, but that is only an impression. Moreover, the fact that many of the schools involved are free schools or academy schools might just reflect the fact that so many schools now have this status. Nevertheless, the recurring theme in many of the cases is the way that the head teachers involved were able to treat their schools and budgets as personal possessions rather than acting as public custodians, and that I think does reflect the lack of the ‘ethics of due process’ that Paul du Gay (2000) argues are the hallmark of bureaucracy (see p.24-25 of the book).

But I wonder if there is not something else, related but slightly different, going on here. In the specific cases referenced above the head teachers involved had been regarded as exemplary and had attracted high level praise, awards and adulation. In another case, an “inspirational super head” knighted for his services to education (though subsequently stripped of his award) admitted false accounting and in 2013 received a suspended prison sentence.

Is it possible that somehow these things are linked? That those who are lauded are somehow given licence by themselves and by others to behave as they wish, to be above and beyond the normal rules? That is to say, the issue is not just the suspension of bureaucratic, organizational rules of conduct but a kind of Icarus complex (these are related, since, in Weberian terms, the erosion of rational-legal authority and the rise of charismatic authority are linked). Immune, apparently, from the earth-bound constraints, these high-flying leaders - super heads, no less! - fly too close to the sun and crash. I haven’t mentioned the names of the individuals in these cases because, if that analysis is right, the fault lies not so much, or not simply, with those individuals as with those of us who adulate them.

Reference

Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy. London: Sage.

A story about leadership

The other day I came across the text of a short story which I submitted to a 2004 competition run by what was then the Times Higher Education Supplement on the theme of leadership in higher education. My submission didn’t win, but reading it again it made me chuckle, and despite some obvious anachronisms that I haven’t changed it still seems to me to say something about leadership in higher education, even twelve years on. So I thought it would be nice to let it see the light of day. Apologies for the small font size which for some reason I can't change ....

 

The Vision Thing

Something strange happened yesterday. Not that that is unusual, so perhaps it can’t be strange. And after all, as I’ve only been in the job for two weeks it’s to be expected that everything will be strange, so strangeness is normal. Stop. I have to remember that I am not an academic any more and these kinds of semantic musings are no longer my concern. Anyway, yesterday’s strange thing was an article in the local newspaper about me: ‘New Broom for Greshingham University’.

It’s not that I am unused to seeing my name in the newspapers, and more prestigious titles than the Greshingham Echo I may say. A few years ago, when I chaired the government watchdog on vegetable pesticides I was often in the national press. (‘Boffin’s Hot Potato’ was my favourite headline). No, what was strange was to see myself described as a ‘new broom’. For if there is one thing that I have learned since I started as Vice-Chancellor it is that I spend all my time fulfilling the commitments and carrying out the policies of my predecessor.

It’s fortunate that I inherited his PA, Judy, otherwise I really wouldn’t have a clue what to do. On the other hand, I have to confess that I am rather scared of Judy. This morning was a case in point. I arrived later than I had intended, having drunk more then I should at a dull dinner last night. Judy didn’t actually tell me off for my tardiness, but I had the sense that she would have liked to, and that once I have been longer in post she will have no hesitations about doing so. She pointed out that in ten minutes time I was due to chair a meeting of the university advisory board (a collection of self-important local business people, as it turned out) and then ran through the rest of my engagements before dropping the bombshell. Tomorrow I was to have the first of a series of open meetings with the staff at which I would discuss my vision and mission for the University.

“It’s been in the diary for months,” she countered, seeing my dismay. “Sir David always held these open meetings at the start of the year. He went on a leadership development course that said it was a good way to motivate the staff and ensure their buy-in to the strategic level objectives of the University.”

Sir David was my predecessor. See what I mean about the new broom fantasy?

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, cravenly rather than defiantly, for I have already learned that I am completely dependent upon Judy.

“Why don’t you use last year’s vision and mission?” she offered, and left me morosely sipping a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

It’s fair to say that I paid less attention than I ought to the advisory board meeting. What I wanted was advice on preparing my vision and mission, but that wasn’t on the agenda. Despite my readiness to be guided by Judy, something in me revolted at the idea of simply re-hashing the existing ones. Perhaps it was the new broom phrase. It was time to stamp my mark on Greshingham and tomorrow’s meeting would be an ideal place to start.

I told Judy my intention at lunchtime. I had the suspicion that she was doubtful, but this may just be my paranoia. In any case, I stood firm. I might not have been on a leadership course, but I’m certainly a leader – a natural leader, perhaps, so I don’t need to go on a course – and, equally naturally, I do have a strong vision of what the University should achieve. All that was needed was time to put pen to paper.

As luck would have it I had a couple of hours free that afternoon. According to the diary, I was due to meet the Head of Chemistry which Judy told me had been a regular fixture every term for the last four years because it was in a ‘turnaround’ situation. That meant, apparently, that it had scored poorly in the last RAE, been found wanting in its teaching quality and was so laggardly in meeting its access targets that my predecessor had singled it out for his special oversight. However, in an oversight of a different kind, it had gone unnoticed that, having failed to turnaround, the School had in fact been closed down and so the termly meeting was now redundant.

“As are the members of the School of Chemistry,” I quipped.

“They’ve been re-deployed, Vice-Chancellor,” she said stonily.

I don’t think I will try making jokes with Judy any more.

***

When I came to write down my vision I found, distressingly, that I don’t have one. I mean, I want us to do well, obviously. But this seems altogether too anaemic to warrant being called a vision. How about something more grandiose? To be a world-class university? That has a better ring, certainly. It’s difficult to take seriously, though. I haven’t met all my colleagues yet, but those I have seem to fall considerably short of world-class. Indeed, if we exclude the robotics team, it seems unlikely that the world would be perceptibly worse if Greshingham didn’t exist at all. Perhaps that is unfair to the Media Lab people, at least in their own estimation, although I freely concede that I am hazy about what goes on there. Attaching electrodes to journalists’ heads?

I realised that it was now half an hour since I had started, or rather failed to start. In desperation I turned to the pages of the THES to see how other universities position themselves. It seemed to depend on what kind of place they are. The newer universities stressed teaching (‘Luton – education that works’) whereas the older institutions put the accent on research (‘Southampton – at the cutting edge of innovation’). I certainly don’t want us to be thought of as an ex-poly, but then again we mustn’t come across as too ivory tower either. The best bet might be to emphasise teaching and research.

But were these things visions, anyhow? Would anyone imagine in their absence that the aim was education that didn’t work and research which didn’t bother with new discoveries? I thought of last week’s visit to the Philosophy Department and realised that some people might. Even so, I was sure that ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Berkshire’ couldn’t be considered a vision so much as a statement of fact. Surely a vision had to be aspirational: ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Wales’?

Perhaps I should start with the mission instead. But what was the difference between a vision and mission? I had to admit to myself that I had no idea. I could ask Judy, I supposed, but I wasn’t quite ready for that humiliation. Would the dictionary help? For each word there were various meanings, mostly irrelevant. Mission – ‘body sent by religious community to propagate its faith’, for example. On the other hand, was it so irrelevant? Perhaps this kind of outreach activity was exactly what was needed to deal with the access problem which was discussed at last week’s council meeting? Then again, was the university a religious community? Did it have a faith? And might it all smack of colonialism anyway (a bad thing)? As for vision – ‘thing or person seen a dream or trance’ didn’t really work. After all, I’d been sitting in a dream or trance for over an hour and hadn’t come up with anything.

On balance, the best definitions seemed to be ‘statesmanlike sagacity of planning’ for vision (I particularly liked the sound of that) and ‘task to be performed’ for mission. I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Still, it seemed like a thin line. If my vision was to be a world-class university, and despite my reservations this still appealed to me, then surely the mission was also to be a world-class university. The only difference so far as I could see (my vision, according to the first definition in the dictionary!) was that I had the vision and this then became other people’s mission. That seemed like a good idea, but would other people agree?

Irritatingly, just as I was making progress, the telephone rang. Judy told me that my daughter Simone was on the line and needed to talk to me urgently. Simone is a student, in her second year at one of the London colleges. I was worried that something was wrong but it soon emerged that all she wanted was to be picked up from the station that evening. Sometimes I think my family don’t realise how important I have become. I was about to tell her off for disturbing me at work with this triviality when it occurred to me that Simone is studying business management. Admittedly it was vaguely embarrassing to have to ask my own daughter about how to formulate the vision and mission of my university, but there’s no point in being too proud. And wasn’t this the sort of thing she would have learned about?

“Yeah, Dad,” she drawled contemptuously. “We did that in the first year.”

“So what should I say?” I asked, all pretence of superiority gone.

“Depends if you’re a lion, a wolf or a jackal,” she said. “Which are you?”

“Well, I’m not sure” I found myself giggling nervously. “What do you think?”

“Do you lead from the front, hunt on your own or stick with the pack?”

“I suppose a bit of all three,” I suggested.

“Hmm, a hybrid,” she said, disapprovingly. “Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference because whatever you are you have to look into your inner self and ask what you really want and then translate it into a story that can inspire people,” she said, before announcing that her train was entering a tunnel.

After the phone went dead, I tried to take her advice. I looked into my inner self. What was my real vision for the future? The only thing I could think of was getting a knighthood, like my predecessor. My mission? I suppose it boiled down to not making any truly awful mistakes in public. And they fitted together pretty well, because so long as I don’t completely screw up then I should finish with a knighthood. What was the other bit? Translate that into an inspirational story. It seemed good enough to me, but I couldn’t honestly think anyone else would be inspired by it. In fact, if I said this at tomorrow’s meeting then it might well count as making a truly awful mistake in public.

There was a knock on my door and Judy bustled in, reminding me that my next meeting was about to begin. There wasn’t any point in pretending any longer, but still I tried to save face.

“Judy,” I began, “I’ve decided that what we need is a period of continuity and stability. It’s called - um – the golden labrador approach to leadership. So I thought I’d stick for the time being with last year’s vision and mission. What were they again?”

“Greshingham aims to provide education that works and research at the cutting edge of innovation in the heart of the Midlands,” she intoned.

I’d been thinking along the right lines, obviously. Still I wasn’t willing to forget the new broom tag.

“Good,” I replied. “We’ll go with that, but add at the end ‘with world-class aspirations in selected areas’.”

I thought I had had the last word, but a moment later Judy returned and handed me a letter inviting me to attend a workshop entitled ‘Transforming Leaders in Higher Education’.

Was my life was about to change?

Everyone needs a Willie

The phrase ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’ was uttered by Margaret Thatcher, apparently without realising the double entendre it contained. It was a reference to her sometime deputy as Conservative Prime Minister, William Whitelaw. Whitelaw’s significance to Thatcher lay in the fact that he provided a point of connection between her and the wider Conservative Party, especially during the early years of her leadership in the late 1970s and early 80s. For it is easy to forget that during those years Thatcher was engaged in remaking her party, in a process that was by no means unopposed from within, away from its traditional, pragmatist and patrician form and into a much more ideologically-motivated neo-liberal entity.

This did not happen all at once, by any means, and the presence in her first cabinet in particular of ‘Tory wets’ (the more traditional, centrist, one nation Conservatives) are a testament to this fact. Not only was there an ideological battle here but also Thatcher, both in her class background and her gender, did not fit the established image of a Tory leader. Willie Whitelaw’s significance lay in being both doggedly loyal to his boss but also being trusted by the wider party, since he was very much from its traditional mould (public school, Cambridge, ex-army). He was thus able to be a conduit between traditional and new Tory parties.

In the 1990s, a very similar role was undertaken within Tony Blair’s New Labour party by John Prescott, who also became Deputy Prime Minister. Here again a party was being re-made towards a more neo-liberal posture, but this time against a traditional backdrop defined in terms of socialism, or at least social democracy, and trade unionism. That constituency was alien to Blair’s ideology and his personal background (public school, Oxford, ex-lawyer) but one that Prescott, a working-class former trade union official, was steeped in. Like Whitelaw he formed a key conduit between traditional and new Labour parties.

I have been recalling these two because of the current situation within the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is seeking to re-shape Labour away from Blairism and also, like Thatcher and Blair, has a persona that only appeals to some sections of his party. In some ways his situation is more complicated than Thatcher’s or Blair’s in that he differs from both the new right of his party (too left-wing) and from the old left (too liberal and metropolitan). At all events he faces opposition and mistrust from, at least, its MPs, very few of whom wanted him to become their leader (his support base being, rather, amongst party members). One reason that task is proving so hard, I would suggest, is that there appears to be no one willing and able to act in the kind of conduit role that Whitelaw and Prescott fulfilled; someone trusted by the parliamentary rank-and-file and willing to use that trust in support of the new leadership.

If anything, Corbyn seems more inclined to seek to surround himself with those who agree with him, with this week’s sackings of shadow cabinet members for ‘disloyalty’. That is always a temptation for any leader but it carries with it enormous dangers. In the long run it leads to isolation from dissenting opinions (something that played a part in the downfall of both Thatcher and Blair, and probably of many business leaders) and hence the well-worn problem of ‘group think’, and that of cultism*. But in the short-run it hamstrings the necessary process in any form of politics, including organizational politics, to build what are inevitably forms of coalition. It seems related in some way to the well-known – within critical organization theory, at least - limitations of seeing leadership in terms of individuals: precisely because leadership involves coalition building it also requires a broader set of appeals than are likely to be provided by a single person. Corbyn needs urgently to find his Whitelaw or Prescott or even, given his particular situation of being neither Old nor New Labour, a couple of them.

* For an excellent analysis of cultism in leadership, and indeed of the dangers and difficulties of leadership including the over-focus on the individual, see Dennis Tourish’s The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2013).

The wrong man at the right time?

The British Labour Party has, against early predictions, resoundingly elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn. A veteran left-winger, his success can be seen as an emphatic rejection of the New Labour period in which, under Tony Blair, the party embraced much of the neo-liberal agenda. Many of Corbyn’s policy positions chime with things I have argued on this blog at least as regards his anti-austerity economics and his internationalism with respect to immigration and asylum policy; less so with respect to the EU.

Corbyn’s appeal lies less, I think, in his socialism that might be thought. For that matter, many of his policies would hardly have been considered socialist even a few decades ago. An interesting article compares those policies with those of the 1983 SDP manifesto (the SDP being at the time a breakaway party from the right of Labour): they are not much different. More relevant, I think, is that the really striking thing about Corbyn is that he clearly says what he believes whereas the other three candidates for the leadership were almost visibly worried about saying the wrong thing or saying something controversial. They were constantly calibrating what they said, and as a result ended up saying nothing. Hearing them interviewed during the campaign it was just impossible to know what they actually stood for.

That I think is one of the legacies of New Labour – news management and triangulation - and it now feels very tired. In the 1990s Blair could just about get away with content-free rhetoric about combining social justice and economic efficiency which allowed everyone to read anything into it they wanted, but it doesn’t work anymore. The consequence is that, Corbyn aside, none of the candidates were able to articulate what are the things which are distinctively Labour and non-negotiable for any Labour leader. If there’s no answer to that then there’s no compelling reason to vote for them.

For that matter all the talk during the campaign of winning from the centre doesn’t really mean anything. Where is the centre? And it’s no good saying that because Blair won three elections he had some magic insight into how to win now. New Labour’s approach was formed 25 years ago and, as its acolytes used to say, you have to change with the times. One big part of that change is that the strategy of seeking to appeal to swing voters in southern marginals whilst assuming the core vote will stay solid is a dead duck given what has happened in Scotland. To put it another way, there’s no longer a single ‘centre’ from which to win and that is in large part a legacy of the New Labour project, to which replicating the New Labour strategy can’t be an effective answer.

And yet (unlike, I must admit, many of my friends) I can’t at the moment feel that Corbyn offers the answer either. He has a lot of baggage which, fairly or not, will be used against him. He doesn’t have the deep roots and support that might enable him to hold the Labour Party together or to manage the party machine or the parliamentary party: he’s always been a maverick and an outsider. Whilst transparently honest, he’s not a great orator nor an original thinker, and he doesn’t even seem to have any great desire to lead the party or the country (and certainly did not expect to). None of that is bad in itself, but all of it presents severe practical problems for leading a mainstream party.

Politics in the UK is much more unpredictable than in the past because of the breakdown of traditional party loyalties and low turnout in elections. No one predicted Corbyn’s victory a few months ago and it would be stupid to predict how he may fare as leader. In electing him, the Labour Party have decisively rejected the neo-liberalism of the New Labour years, and the carefully-calibrated presentation that went with it. Great. But that is a one-shot deal. If it goes wrong, then it’s hard to see anyone having a second go at effecting the same kind of shift. It is a potentially interesting, important and exciting time, both for Labour and for UK and world politics because a shift from neo-liberal consensus in the UK is a big deal. Leadership theory often tells us that what is crucial is not so much the personal qualities of leaders as the congruence between those qualities and the time and circumstances in which they are deployed. I have a feeling that Corbyn is the wrong man at the right time.

 

 

Right diagnosis, wrong prescription

A long-delayed report into the organization of the British National Health Service (NHS) has belatedly been published this week, with remarkably little media coverage. It was prepared by Stuart Rose, the former boss of retailer Marks & Spencer, and we might wonder to what extent his expertise is relevant to the NHS. Nevertheless, he makes a good fist of explaining how constant and contradictory changes have led to ‘change fatigue’; how targets have had a dysfunctional effect; and that the recent marketization of the NHS in particular has led to a virtually unmanageable situation.

So far, so good, and very much in line with what I have written recently on this blog about unhealthy management and healthy bureaucracy in the NHS. Unfortunately, Rose goes on to wheel out the tired and predictable nostrum that the solution is better leadership and leadership training. We’ve been round this loop endlessly in, especially, the public sector: first it’s better management that’s needed, then better structures, then culture change, then better leadership. Leadership, especially, currently takes on an almost magical character as the universal panacea for what ails organizations. There's an extraordinary impoverishment in the managerial imagination that keeps its proponents going round a hermetically sealed loop of systems (management, organizational structures) and values (leadership, organizational culture).

I don’t actually disagree that leadership (and management, and structure, and culture) matter both in organizations in general and in the NHS. But it is woefully inadequate to think that these things can make very much difference in the face of overwhelming resource deficiencies. As I’ve pointed out before on this blog, health costs are spiralling because of ageing populations, scientific advances and healthcare cost inflation that exceeds general price inflation. UK health expenditure per head is US$3405 or 15 in the world (OECD, 2011 figures), and this does not include the allied issue of care spending for, in particular the elderly.

Now, for sure, expenditure isn’t the whole story because the UK system of socialized health is more efficient than any other. Moreover, I’m very well aware that the situation in the UK is enormously privileged compared with most of the rest of the world. Still, there is a basic arithmetic here. How much difference can leadership make when compared with resources? Suppose, modestly, that it was equivalent to a 1% increase of per head expenditure. Then, the UK would remain at 15 in the league table. Suppose, more extravagantly, it was the equivalent of 10% of per head expenditure. Then the UK would rise to 14 in the list. Suppose, ludicrously surely, it was equivalent to a 20% increase in per head expenditure. Then, by a whisker, it would be 11 in the list. In fact, even if leadership had the capacity to be equivalent to a 100% increase, a doubling, in per head expenditure then the UK would still only be second in the global list. But consider this: no study has definitively shown that leadership makes any difference to organizational performance at all.

 

 

British election: the leaders' debate

This is the second of my posts on the British General Election, this time on the televised debate between the party leaders which was held last night. This is only the second time there has been such a debate in the UK, and the format was different to last time. In the 2010 election only the leaders of Conservative, Liberal Democrats and Labour participated. This time, following various political machinations, they were joined by the leaders of the Greens, SNP, UKIP and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh national party). Thus the full cast was Natalie Bennett (Greens), David Cameron (Conservative), Nick Clegg (LibDems), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru). The debate lasted for two hours and was organized around four questions on the economy, the health service, immigration, and the future for young people.

In many ways it was this format that had the biggest effect. It meant that each leader had relatively little time to speak and when they did it was highly structured. There was little audience participation (I think by instruction from the broadcasters) and it was hard for any of the leaders to really get a sense of audience reaction – there was little applause, no catcalling and just one heckle towards the end. In short, the atmosphere felt quite sterile. Certainly it was difficult for any single leader to dominate proceedings, and none did.

Opinion polls and comments since the debates suggest that no one emerged as a clear ‘winner’or ‘loser’, although Nicola Sturgeon has been the most widely praised. I think this is deserved: she gave a strong, calm and confident performance. One quite likely permutation of the election result is a Labour minority government supported by the SNP and if so that will be an interesting outcome, since Sturgeon is some way to the left of Labour and would be likely to push strongly against austerity economics.

As for the other leaders, David Cameron, who had been resistant to the debates taking place, seemed somewhat ill at ease and disengaged. He can be an accomplished speaker and expectations would have been quite high that he would stand out, so I would think his supporters would be disappointed. Ed Miliband, by contrast, started against low expectations since he is widely seen as lacking charisma. Thus it was relatively easier for him to exceed expectations, so his supporters may be relieved. It would be hard to say that either of these two – the only ones with any expectation of becoming Prime Minister – decisively defeated the other.

Nigel Farage will have had high expectations from this debate. He is often an accomplished and effective speaker, skilled in projecting an image of straight-speaking normality. But his style relies a lot on the use of humour and bombast, and the rigid format and stage-managed audience weren’t a good format for these. He wasn’t able to dominate proceedings as he might have done in a head to head, and it was notable that Cameron and Miliband barely addressed him, treating him as almost an irrelevance. He was also the only one of the leaders who looked physically uncomfortable. His supporters profess themselves pleased but there was no breakthrough moment of the sort they would have hoped for.

Of all the leaders, Natalie Bennett started with the lowest expectations given recent painful media performances (which I discussed in another post). To exceed them all she really had to do was not implode, and she easily exceeded that bar. Leanne Wood was probably the least known of the politicians to a national audience and gave an assured performance, albeit one which (not unreasonably) mainlined on Welsh rather than national issues. Sturgeon, by contrast, had tended to emphasise the role SNP MPs could play in Westminster politics. But it was Wood who garnered one of the few rounds of applause of the night, in a sharp put down of Farage’s claim about immigrants using the health service.

Nick Clegg’s performance in the debate has been less commented on in the media than that of the other leaders. It was actually quite punchy and fluent. But whereas at the last election debate his was the runaway success, attracting by far the most praise and interest, the context has now changed and he has neither the edge of being a newcomer challenging the political establishment nor the significance that attaches to the prospective Prime Ministers.

Overall, we didn’t learn very much that was new, and it seems unlikely to me that many viewers will have changed their voting intentions on the basis of the debates. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating evening and, again, this was because of the format. Firstly, there was a far wider range of views represented than has been normal in British politics, and with each leader being given the same amount of air time these views were represented as all having equal weight. That felt like a refreshing change following an era which, as I wrote in my last post, has been dominated by the shared neo-liberal orthodoxy of Conservative and Labour parties. Secondly, the dynamics of the debate felt changed by the presence of three women – who, relatedly, each represented ideologies at odds with neo-liberalism. Since Margaret Thatcher’s departure, British politics has been heavily dominated by white men in suits and suddenly that domination has evaporated (as regards the men, but not the white bit). It was Thatcher who coined the phrase ‘there is no alternative’ (to free markets), otherwise known as Tina. But Tina, for one night anyway, was banished by Leanne, Natalie and Nicola.

The triumph of accountancy

This week, Natalie Bennett, the leader of the UK Green Party, suffered what has been described as a “car crash” interview on the day of the launch of her party’s election campaign. Challenged about the costing of her party’s housing policy, she experienced what she called a “brain fade” and couldn’t answer the questions. I didn’t hear that interview until later, but I did hear two others she gave that day and, frankly, neither of them was impressive when it came to questions about the funding of Green policies.

Naturally enough this provided ample ammunition to critics of the Green Party, but my reaction was to wonder about the way that political debate is now framed almost entirely in terms of accounting: what are the costs of this or that policy and where will the money come from? This is a relatively new development. In the past, political programmes were articulated in terms of broad commitments, principles and ideologies.

This isn’t a nostalgic false memory on my part. I went back and checked the manifesto of the British Conservative Party for the 1979 election. This was the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power effecting what is agreed by both supporters and critics of Thatcherism to have been a political sea-change. Yet it contains virtually no numbers and nothing in the way of costed policies. I went further back, to Labour’s 1945 manifesto at another sea-change election which created the post-war welfare state. Again, no costing of policies.

It might be argued that this is a good thing, that politicians should make concrete proposals so that they can be held accountable for their delivery, and that policies should be pragmatic. On the accountability point, it is chimerical. Does anyone think that politicians have become more likely to deliver their promises because they were costed? In practice, the earlier costings get forgotten or departure from them is readily explained away by reference to changed circumstances (and perhaps quite reasonably so, again undercutting the case for costings). Actually, this is very similar to the way that public sector management has in recent years been configured in terms of accountability, with more and more information (league tables etc.) being produced in order to give taxpayers and ‘customers’ re-assurance. Yet, at the same time, trust in public institutions has nose-dived.

On the pragmatism point, the problem is that what it validates is a stultifying small-c conservatism. The journalist Zoe Williams wrote an interesting article on Bennett’s interview, where she says:

“We have lost faith in any of the large available understandings of how structural change takes place in history,” the philosopher Roberto Unger said in a recent lecture in London “and as a result we fall back on a bastardised conception of political realism, namely that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it approaches what already exists.” This is the whole of British politics encapsulated in two lines: unless a policy looks exactly like what the mainstream parties are suggesting; unless it can be funded by minor tootling on existing tax instruments (and even that will be called a “raid”); unless it will leave the fundamental structures totally unperturbed – then it is the most outlandish idea that anybody has ever heard.

This is really the key point. By focussing on narrow issues of accounting, wider issues of over-arching principle are not just avoided but stigmatised and rendered illegitimate. One interesting aspect of this is that it reflects the complex, schizophrenic way that the language of politics and of business have intermingled. On the one hand, we have a discourse about ‘visionary leaders’ who charismatically inspire us with broad brush stories about where we, as organizations or societies, are going. Not for them mundane, prosaic budget spreadsheets. On the other hand, we have the ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ accountants, poring over the last penny of expenditure and the detailed cost-benefit calculus of every decision. In politics, leaders who lack the requisite charisma are seen as not looking like prime minister material but if they try to articulate a vision of a better society they are eviscerated for not having done the sums. Somehow, politics manages to fall into two traps: those of individualised charismatic leadership and bloodless accountancy. What gets lost is the sense, present in both the 1945 and 1979 manifestos (albeit in very different ways), of a collective project to re-imagine society, with the sums being left to take care of themselves.

None of which is to say that Natalie Bennett did a good job in those interviews, just that her mistake was to try (and fail) to answer the questions within the terms they were put, rather than to challenge their underlying premise. In that respect, at least, she might take a lesson from Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration party UKIP. When challenged on the dire economic consequences of his policies he said that these mattered less than the principle of controlling immigration. Readers of this blog will be aware that I am by no means a fan ofUKIP, but the idea that politics should be about big discussions of the shape of society is surely right.

The playthings of our leaders

There is a big political row about the US drug company Pfizer’s bid to buy its British rival AstraZeneca. It is interesting that it is a row because for at least three decades it has been claimed in Britain, at least, that ownership does not matter and, as I discuss on pp. 106-7 of the book, there has been a wholesale sell-off of what were once British companies (other countries, including the US, have been somewhat more wary of seeing ownership drift offshore). We have thus had the bizarre disjuncture in political discourse of constantly bemoaning the relatively limited international mobility of labour – immigration – whilst cheerfully accepting the complete mobility of capital. The Pfizer bid has suddenly galvanized an understanding that ownership does matter, because (in this example) there is very little reason to think that Pfizer will care much about nurturing the UK’s science and R&D base, which are widely seen as vital to the national economy.

There is an added poignancy to the situation of AstraZeneca, because it arises out of the case, discussed in the book (p.110) of ICI as a classic example of the disastrous ‘financialised’ organization model of the new capitalism. An excellent article by Aditya Chakrabortty this week tells the story:

“AstraZeneca was originally the corporate child of ICI, which was once Britain's largest manufacturer of everything from paints to betablockers. Then came one of Thatcher's favourite wheeler-dealers, Jim Hanson, who, in 1991, put in a bid to take over the conglomerate and break it up. That approach got bogged down in scandal – but ICI's executives did what Hanson wanted anyway and smashed up the company. The drugs arm was sold to the Swedes, the pesticides division flogged to the Swiss, the dyes part to the Dutch and the adhesives and electronics materials finally parcelled out to the Germans”.

Whether the Pfizer bid will spark a belated recognition of the importance of ownership remains to be seen but, in a sense it is too late for, as Chakrabortty points out, in the meantime the British manufacturing and research base has been eviscerated.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the neo-liberal wasteland, I noticed this week that the former head teacher I discussed in my post The New Barons last June has been banned for teaching from life because of her fraudulent activities. As I said in my original post, this arose because of the idea that ‘leaders’ should be set free from bureaucratic constraints but such freedom carries grave risks, as Steve Richard’s article on this fiasco also explains.

It’s been nagging at me today that there is something that links these two stories. Most obviously, both are outgrowths of neo-liberalism as applied to, respectively, industrial policy and public sector management. But beyond – or perhaps related – to that is the way that both arise from the separation of power and responsibility. Our companies (and with them our jobs), our schools (and with them our children’s education) seem in some way not to figure as real or important. Instead, they are the plaything of our leaders. So whereas neo-liberalism purports to empower the customer or consumer in fact it does no such thing: it enacts, enshrines and endorses the power of elites.

Reflections on power

I have been re-reading George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which I refer to in the book (pp.71-2). This I think is a particularly incisive fictionalization of organization, more particularly totalitarian political organization, and I suppose that no novel, except perhaps Kafka’s The Trial, has so insinuated itself into popular consciousness of ‘organization theory’.

The theme of totalitarianism is a tantalising one when thinking about organizations, because such arrangements seem to represent ‘limit cases’ – both exaggerating but also illustrating ‘normal’ organizations. But this understanding seems flawed if we take Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust (discussed in the book, p.23) seriously. For this implies not that totalitarianism or, more specifically, the organization of the holocaust was an anomaly but that it was an expression of a pre-existing and omnipresent tendency within modernity. Bauman’s analysis seeks to draw a continuity between modern and ‘holocaustic’ modes of the social, and, within that, modern and holocaustic modes of, specifically, organization are central. For the capacity to organize genocide industrially seems to be central to Bauman’s thesis that the Holocaust was a modern phenomenon. Specifically, it represented the ultimate triumph of instrumental rationality – the deployment of morally blind means towards horrific ends. So we can say that for organization theorists, the organization of the Holocaust should not represent a ‘limit case’ or a perversion but rather a crucial moment in the elaboration of organization.

But considering totalitarianism in terms of instrumental rationality, as Bauman’s thesis might urge us to do, is inadequate because of the particular theorisation of power which it embodies. Within instrumentalism, power has a particular meaning – as a means achieve ends. However totalitarianism entails something even worse. Theorisations of power have traditionally specified either where power comes from or what power leads to. The idea that power comes from somewhere is most manifest in the well known bedrock of organization theory: French and Raven’s bases of power. So power comes from possession of certain resources or capacities (coercion, reward, position, knowledge, personality/charisma), and there are numerous articulations of basically the same idea. The idea that power goes somewhere is present in all the various ways that power is linked to interests. Here power is used to serve some purpose – the pursuit of interests (sectoral, class, gender etc). In another variation, an interest-based theory of power might see it as flowing from interests as well as being directed towards the furtherance of interests.

What is different about totalitarian/Orwellian notions of power? This is the crucial point. Here, power is conceived of as neither coming from nor aimed towards anything other than itself. In other words, power is an end in itself. In Nineteen Eight-Four:

“Power is not a means, it is an end … the object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” (Orwell, 1949:  264)

And this was prescient if we consider Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s extraordinary analysis* of ‘moral life in the concentration camps’, which I urge you to read if you have not done so, where he says that:

“The aim of power is power; the enjoyment it offers is not of the material sort” (Todorov, 2000: 184)

Now, if we regard totalitarianism as a limit case, then this is not of general interest. But if as Bauman suggests it is an immanent, rather than an atypical, case then it is of huge interest. I think that this is so, and one way it is revealed is in the motivation of the archetypal chief executive or political leader:

Q: What motivates you?

A: I love the feeling that I can make a difference

Is this not the everyday equivalent of the totalitarian case: the point of power is (the sensation of) power itself? This sensation of power is only realizable if another feels and experiences your power, whether through happiness and pleasure or, as in the concentration camps, through pain and suffering. Clearly this contains the familiar irony (described most elaborately in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic) that the powerful are dependent upon others for their power. Revealingly, Todorov reports that the most vicious treatment was meted out to those who did not quickly enough show submission. This suggests that the full sensation of power is only possible where resistance is both met and overcome. He also remarks that this desire for power seems insatiable in that it was endlessly repeated with new entrants to the camps. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien makes a similar point when torturing Winston Smith – both that the same scene will endlessly be played out and that the image of the future is ‘a boot stamping on the human face forever’. There is no end to power in two senses: it has no purpose and it’s work is never finished.

The poet W. H. Auden wrote, in his 1939 Epitaph on a Tyrant, as follows:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

It is a damning indictment of those who use power, instrumentally, in pursuit of an ideal. But it is also a terrible reminder of the narcissism of power; of what happens when power has no object but itself: and when he cried the little children died.

 

*Todorov, T. (2000). Facing the Extreme. Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London: Phoenix.

Leading to disaster

Today's post is prompted by the news that Euan Sutherland, the Chief Executive of the Co-op Group, has resigned after just 10 months in the post, saying that the Group was ‘ungovernable’. This appeared to be a reference to the unwillingness of the group to accept the more ‘commercial’ approach he advocated. Much attention has focussed on the fact that Mr Sutherland was paid £3.7M a year, more than twice that of his predecessor. To me what is more interesting (though no doubt related) is the fact that his background was in commercial retailing, his previous post having been as head of B&Q, a large DIY chain.

The roots of the Co-op group are in the co-operative movement and ultimately go back to the 1844 Rochdale Pioneers, so it was animated by a different set of concerns than those of pure commercialism. It emerged from a Victorian tradition of working class self-help that also created mutual building societies and friendly societies, as well as mechanics’ institutes and similar institutions. Most of these have now ceased to exist or changed unrecognizably in form. The fate of mutual building societies is especially poignant: as I noted on p.119 of my book, all those which de-mutualised following deregulation in the 1980s have since failed to survive as independent entities or even to survive at all, most notoriously in the case of Northern Rock which was at the centre of the British end of the 2008 financial crisis. They were done for by precisely the adoption of a conventional commercial approach.

It seems as if there was an obvious mismatch between the Co-op and its now ex-CEO but his appointment reflected one of the central tenets of managerialism (or, perhaps, ‘leaderism’): that management and leadership are generic skills applicable in any and every setting. The same kind of idea informs the recent appointment of the ex-boss of Marks & Spencer to review and advise on management in the NHS.

What is bizarre is that leadership theory since at least the 1970s has recognized what common sense might also suggest: that the effectiveness of leadership is intimately related to and contingent upon ‘situation’ or context. We wouldn’t expect a successful military leader to run an advertising agency well, or vice versa. More recently, it has been suggested that what matters is the complex relationship between leadership and followership. But, somehow, it is imagined by the supposedly hard-headed that leaders from one kind of organization can be transplanted seamlessly into a completely different setting and flourish. The inadequacies of that belief are well-illustrated by the Co-op debacle.