Chris Johns
Imagine the next pandemic is not the like the last one. Covid kills, very approximately, 1 in a hundred of those who catch it. An ebola or smallpox-type epidemic will kill maybe 1 in 3 people infected. What are we going to do? That was the stark question, one of them at least, posed during Dominic Cummings’ seven hours of testimony to British MPs this week.
Cummings’ argument was that the system had no plan for Covid - we knew that - and, given the government’s chaotic response to the Autumn 2020 second wave of the virus, has learned next to nothing. It will be as ill-prepared for the next crisis - which could be much worse - as it was for the current one (which is far from over).
I’ll leave my summary and take on Cummings’ barrage of accusations against the government until the end of this piece. First I want to tease out some broader lessons for how any organisation, not just government, can and should be managed. If you ever wondered why your boss is so hopeless or why your business is so poorly managed, there is lots of insight contained within Cummings’ story.
All yachtsmen know that sailing is, mostly, easy. In steady winds and flat seas you don’t need much knowledge or experience. Problems arise when the wind blows hard, shifts around and the waves begin to build. The wind and waves can combine in ways that you have seen before or in ways that nobody has experienced.
Expert skippers will have studied the theory, passed exams, been mentored by old hands and have plenty of experience. They will know what they have to do when they see something previously encountered but will have the wisdom to expect the unexpected. And when that happens, they will have a set of heuristics - rules-of-thumb - that they hope will see them through. But they also know that a ‘perfect storm’ may well be the one that sinks them because neither they nor the boat or its crew can do anything to prevent what happens next.
Expert skippers also know about their crew. They will know their strengths and weaknesses, what they can cope with and what they cannot. Different conditions require different skills. All crew can be on deck in fair weather. Only some are useful when the wind shifts. Horses for courses is, perhaps, an appropriate cliche. Not-so-good skippers know little or none of this.
Think about elite football management. Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp research thoroughly the opposition: their players, style of play and likely tactics adopted by the opposing coach. The expert football manager will adapt his player selection and tactics depending on the conditions that he will face. Those players and tactics are often changed during the course of the game as the unexpected arrives. If he anticipated an attacking, high-press opposition but encounters a park-the-bus team he has to adapt. It’s possible his plans will never work: Lionel Messi in imperious form is any opposing team’s perfect storm.
Both the expert skipper and elite sporting coach will admit the possibility of luck: stuff happens. But they will always have a rough idea about what to do when randomness strikes. They will also surround themselves with people who are right for the their roles - one or two of them will have potential for the top job, could even be better than their boss.
The Godfather, Don Corleone, correctly guessed that Tattaglia couldn’t have killed Sonny Corleone because he didn’t have the necessary skill-set. It had to have been Barzini, who was the ‘only one who could have out-fought Santino’. Although his judgement was spot on in this case, the Don might have wondered if Tattaglia had just got lucky.
We are talking about good management of any organisation. Of any government. Best practice in all walks of managerial life has common characteristics. Rocket science it is not. So why are so many managers so bad? Many employees think their bosses are crap, as do academic economists:
What we find is a combination of imperfectly competitive markets, family ownership of firms, regulations restricting management practices, and informational barriers allow bad management to persist. (My emphasis) (Bloom, Nicholas, and John Van Reenen. 2010. "Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24 (1): 203-24.)
The academic answers, or some of them at least, are contained in that paper - the title of that article contains all that we need to know. More anecdotally, we see classic mistakes being made over and over again. The great salesman being made head of sales. The top economist being made chief economist. With so little thought being given to the new roles that they are expected to perform. Boards and executive jobs filled with people who look and sound the same: our biases lead us to recruit in our own image and likeness. Diversity has to be forced upon us by regulators.
Just because you are good at one thing does not mean that you are good at everything. Too many management teams are good at one thing, often the same thing. Disaster strikes when managers are shifted into different roles that require different skills. Or when the unexpected hits.
Chris Dillow draws our attention to a Harvard Business Review article that explores all this in one particular way: why do so many executives disappoint when they move to a different firm? It might seem obvious - so much of this actually is - because of that horses-for-courses point.Previously successful cost-cutters fail when they are asked to run a firm that is primed for growth. I’ve seen this one many times in my career.
Dillow uses the example of Keir Starmer, a successful prosecutor - that’s how he became ‘Sir’ - but not so good as leader of the Labour Party. Prosecutors don’t need the ‘vision’ thing but political leaders do. Dillow reminds us about the success of Mourinho during his first term at Chelsea but how useless he was at Spurs,
Anyone seeking to hire someone for a managerial job has to identify the necessary skill-set in advance and spot the individual who possesses it. Very hard to do in advance. But not as impossible as the serried ranks of poor managers would seem to attest.
David Cameron recruited his pals - hence his ‘chumocracy’. Johnson wants nobody that can challenge him, hence the ‘idiocracy’ that comprises the current British cabinet. How Johnson must regret his appointment of Rishi Sunak.
Being in the right place at the right time counts for more than most CEOs like to admit. That general problem of attributing all of our success to talent and hard work rather than dumb luck. And the forces of tribalism are so tough to counter: the right school, university and accent still figure large in boardrooms and the corridors of power, notwithstanding all those attempts to impose a ‘meritocracy’. A term coined as an ironic joke by the way.
A thoughtful Prime Minister would have looked at Cummings’ skill-set before hiring him. He would have seen a brilliant mind (really) devoted to the idea that most people are fools and that Britain’s progress is thwarted by the Civil Service and the House of Commons, idiots all. If that’s your agenda, fine, but I doubt that was what Johnson thought he was getting. Cummings brilliance in delivering Brexit and a general election victory convinced Johnson that Dom would, in some ill-defined way, keep him in power. He didn’t devote much thought to Cummings’ well-advertised anarchic desires.
Ironically, someone like Cummings is potentially useful in a crisis. When existing rules have to be quickly torn up and left-field thinking instantly deployed, Cummings is your man. Dom’s apology was about the fact that he wasn’t listened to, his advice wasn’t acted upon, rather than saying sorry for what he did. Assuming he didn’t actually want Cummings to blow up the civil service, Johnson should have kept Cummings and his team of Uber-nerds in the basement, ready to be wheeled out if and when a crisis hit. A bit like an insurance policy, a fire brigade maybe.
All mangers say ‘their door is open’ and they ‘welcome fresh thinking’ as much as they ‘embrace change’. Most of the time these are the great lies that they tell themselves.
Cummings complained there was ‘no plan’. There rarely is. Modern firms are often forced to compile something called a ‘risk register’ of things they can imagine happening that would blow their businesses off-course. Known unknowns as it were. Good management teams take these risks seriously - they know something is coming their way - plan for them and also try to develop resilience, if not actual skills, in the event of turbulence. Individuals are assigned roles that fit their actual skill-sets rather than their polished CVs. Churchill was exactly what you needed during war but should have been nowhere near high-office during peace-time.
Poor managers do none of this, never believing that they can fail, but aware that if they do they will not be judged harshly because all the other firms in their industry are managed in more-or-less the same way. Think banking during the financial crisis. Today, we have a few superstar, winner-takes-all businesses, partly because they are the ones that are well-managed.
Cummings’ list of complaints was long and well-targeted. The UK government was and is chaotic. He’s gone but the chaos will remain. It seems to be what most people want. Or maybe it is simply the success, so far, of vaccinations is all that we care about these days and nothing else, not least all of Cummings’ allegations ‘cut through’. As Lionel Barber, ex-editor of the FT said of Dom’s words:
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me(Sting)
It is almost beyond cliche to compare the Johnson regime to one or more Roman Emperors. For as long as there were ‘Bread and Circuses’ the populace remained docile. My forlorn hope is that people will judge Johnson harshly when, eventually, his failure to deliver anything other than game-show host hilarity is seen for what it is.