The stark truth about management and power

 Stefan Stern in The FT

 

“If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.” 

This quotation is usually attributed to Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University’s graduate school of business. Pfeffer himself is more modest about its origins. He cites it at the beginning of his new book — more on this later — but describes it simply as “a quote attributed to me”. 

This slightly sheepish opening sums up an intriguing paradox about the man. He tells stark truths about management and power and what it takes to get to the top, which some may find unsettling. But, fundamentally, his purpose is compassionate. The challenge embedded in his famous aphorism is this: it is little use criticising the excesses of terrible leaders but then being too squeamish to engage with and win power yourself. 

When I call Pfeffer at his Californian home he sounds a bit distracted, for reasons that become noisily apparent. “I need to move my car,” he says. “My garage is about to be . . . I’m having some construction work done . . . I’ll be back in a minute.” 

He is true to his word, and proceeds to offer a tutorial on the realities of power, revealing why his course on the subject at Stanford, where he has taught for more than 40 years, is so popular with students. 

“Exercising power and being a leader is not about winning a popularity contest,” he says. “It was Gary Loveman [former chief executive of the Caesars casino business] who said: ‘If you want to be liked, get a dog. A dog will love you unconditionally.’ 

“A lot of leaders are not necessarily nice people,” he adds. “Many of the things that leaders have to do are not necessarily nice . . . There is very little overlap — I mean, almost none — between companies on the ‘best places to work’ list and companies led by leaders who are on the ‘most admired leaders’ list,” Pfeffer says. 

His new book, published this summer, is called 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

Get out of your own way — that is, speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself. 

Break the rules — do the unexpected. 

Show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language. 

Create a powerful brand. 

Network relentlessly. 

Use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it. 

And, finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support. 

These rules are not simply plausible-sounding assertions but are in fact based on deep research and decades of social science experiment and observation. These are “the realities on the ground”, as Pfeffer says. 

While clearly not a fan of former US president Donald Trump, Pfeffer notes that he was a skilful follower of these rules. “He was seven for seven,” he says. He describes the winning Trumpian mentality in these terms: “You tell me what I need to do to win, and I’ll do it. I will say anything, I will do anything. The question is: are you willing to do what it takes?” 

This may sound Hobbesian and bleak. But note, too, that Pfeffer’s last book was called Dying for a Paycheck, and was a strong attack on the worst forms of modern management and the harm it can do both to employee health and company performance. An earlier book was called “The Human Equation: building profits by putting people first”. There is a touching passage in the book’s acknowledgements about the author’s late wife, Kathleen, who died last year and to whom the book is dedicated. 

Our call is once again interrupted by an off-stage crash. “Pardon the background noise — they must be doing something serious here — they should be, for what I’m paying them . . . ” 

In this latest work, Pfeffer writes: “One reason why people fail to achieve their objectives or lose out in competitions for high-status positions is their unwillingness to do what is required to prevail.” 

This is his reality check for aspiring leaders and those who want to get on in the organisation. You have to take responsibility and put yourself in a position where professional advance is possible and likely. “Happy talk”, or “leadership BS” (the title of another of his books), will not get you there. 

“I don’t think anybody is going to say that Elon Musk is sweet,” Pfeffer says, “or that Jeff Bezos is sweet, or Steve Jobs was nice, or Jack Welch was going to be picked by anybody to be stranded on a desert island with. Many leaders are narcissists,” he adds, “although their ‘autobiographies’ say that they are lovely human beings . . . ” 

Pfeffer looks power in the eye and does not flinch. He tells it like it is. Can we handle the truth? If we want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

Lessons from British democracy for us in India

 

More on Putin, Russian and Ukraine

 

What makes a great cricket captain?

 

On Stupidity: How do Smart People Outsmart Themselves

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn


What is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists and psychologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists, suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression.

Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, ‘On Stupidity.’ Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. They become mere tools in the hands of the power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords.

So, to Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had almost voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by the rise of an assertive external power.

In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob writes that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. For example, intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’

Golob gave the example of the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the famous fictional character, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, a private detective, was an ideal product of the ‘Age of Reason’, imagined by Doyle as a man who shunned emotions and dealt only in reason, logic and the scientific method. Yet, later on in life, Doyle became the antithesis of his character, Holmes. He got into a silly argument with the celebrated illusionist Harry Houdini when the latter rubbished Doyle’s belief that one could communicate with spirits (in a seance).

The question is, how could a man who had created a super-rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes, begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, Doyle would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.

Golob writes this is what stupidity is. And it can even be found in supposedly very intelligent people too. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. By continuing to insist on the validity of such theories, one is simply using his/her smartness to outsmart oneself.

What about the leaders whose rise to power, according to Bonhoeffer, triggers stupidity across a large body of people? Take the example of today’s prominent populists, whose supporters are often referred to as being stupid. But as mentioned earlier, these leaders too are explained in a similar manner.

The truth is, dumbness, if it means a substantial lack of intelligence, is not what explains prominent political leaders. Had they been dumb, they would never be at the top of the heap. But as we have already established, stupidity and dumbness are two very different things; leaders can be stupid.

In this context, Golob explains stupidity as “the lack of conceptual resources.” By this he means that some leaders lack the right conceptual tools for the job. He writes that this can lead to a ‘conceptual failure’, where a leader is unable to fully grasp the concept of (political, economic or social) reality that he/she is operating in. They may excel in what they understand, but enter the domain of stupidity when they don’t. However, it is quite clear by now that today’s populist leaders may have had the intelligence to propel themselves to power, but they really do not have the conceptual tools to remain there.

Take PM Imran Khan. As an opposition leader, he understood well the concept of fiery, emotional rhetoric that can become a venting vessel for many. However, this tool becomes impotent in the conceptual context of actually being in power. Khan lacks the conceptual tools to understand the many economic and political quagmires the country has slid into. The more he fails in this, the more he falls back on concepts that he actually understands: i.e. fiery rhetoric (but one that does not sound very convincing anymore), and issues of morality.

He understands the latter well because, when he was a dashing ‘playboy’ in his pre-political days, he was often attacked for being immoral. He understood what the concept of morality is in Pakistani society. He now uses this as a tool to distract his thinning support from his obvious lack of understanding of what is actually happening around him in terms of the country’s drastic economic meltdown.

So, politically and economically, as things crumble around him, he stubbornly continues to “address issues of social immorality” because, by now, this is the only concept he can grasp. This is another case of political stupidity and conceptual failure, or of smartness outsmarting itself.

Why a leader’s past record is no guide to future success

Successful leadership depends on context, collaboration and character writes Andrew Hill in The FT

“There goes that queer-looking fish with the ginger beard again. Do you know who he is? I keep seeing him creep about this place like a lost soul with nothing better to do.”

That was the verdict of the then Bank of England governor on Montagu Norman, who, five years later, was to take over the top job. “Nothing in his background suggested that he would be well suited to the work of a central banker,” Liaquat Ahamed wrote in his prizewinning book Lords of Finance.

Plenty in Christine Lagarde’s background suggests she will be much better suited to run the European Central Bank: her political nous, her communication skills, her leadership of the International Monetary Fund through turbulent financial times.

Critics, though, have focused on the former corporate lawyer and finance minister’s lack of deep academic economic training, and her dearth of experience with the technicalities of monetary policy.

But how much should the past record of a candidate be a guide for how they will handle their next job? Not as much as we might think.

The truth is that successful leadership depends on context, collaboration and character as much as qualifications. For all the efforts to codify and computerise the specifications of important jobs, the optimal chemistry of experience, aptitude, potential, and mindset remains hard to define. Throw in the imponderable future in which such leaders are bound to operate and it is no wonder that sometimes the seemingly best-qualified stumble, while the qualification-free thrive.

For one thing, even if the challenge confronting a leader looks the same as one they handled in the past, it is very rarely identical — and nor is the leader. That is one reason big companies offer their most promising executives experience across countries, cultures and operations, from finance to the front line, and why some recruiters emphasise potential as much as the formal résumé of their candidates.

Curiosity is a big predictor of potential — and of success — according to Egon Zehnder, the executive search company. It asks referees what the candidate they have backed is really curious about. “It is a question that takes people aback, so they have to think anew about that person,” Jill Ader, chairwoman, told me recently.

I think there are strong reasons to back master generalists for senior roles. Polymathic leaders offer alternative perspectives and may even be better at fostering innovation, according to one study. In his new book Range, David Epstein offers this warning against over-specialisation: “Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over.”

Take this to the other extreme of ignoring specialist qualifications, however, and you are suddenly in the world of blaggers, blowhards and blackguards, who bluff their way up the leadership ladder until the Peter Principle applies, and a further rise is prohibited by their own incompetence.

The financial crisis exposed the weaknesses of large banks, such as HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK, chaired by non-bankers. Some of the same concerns about a dearth of deep financial qualifications now nag at the leaders of fintech companies, whose promise is based in part on their boast that they will be “different” from longer established incumbents.

In a flailing search for the reasons for its current political mess, the UK has blamed the self-confident dilettantism of some Oxford university graduates, while the US bemoans the superficial attractions of stars of television reality shows. These parallel weaknesses for pure bluster over proven expertise have brought us Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, respectively.

A plausible defence of both Mr Johnson and Mr Trump is that they should be able to play to their specific strengths, while surrounding themselves with experts who can handle the technical work.

Ms Lagarde, too, will want to draw on the team of experts around her. She is wise enough to know she cannot rely on silky political skills and neglect the plumbing of monetary policy.

At the same time, history suggests she should not assume her paper credentials or wide experience will be enough to guarantee success in Frankfurt. The Bank of England’s Norman was eccentric and neurotic, and his counterpart at the Banque de France, Émile Moreau, had a “quite rudimentary and at times confused” understanding of monetary economics, whereas Benjamin Strong at the New York Federal Reserve, was a born leader, and Hjalmar Schacht of Germany’s Reichsbank “came to the job with an array of qualifications”.

Yet together this quartet of the under- and overqualified made a series of mistakes that pitched the world into the Great Depression.

Anyone who wants to be prime minister should have a course of therapy first

Our toxic political system rewards all the wrong traits and produces the worst possible leaders writes George Monbiot in The Guardian 

 

‘Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments.’ John Bercow (centre) mediates during a Commons debate on the EU withdrawal bill. Photograph: Mark Duffy/AFP/Getty Images


Who in their right mind would want the job? It is almost certain to end, as Theresa May found, in failure and public execration. To seek to be prime minister today suggests either reckless confidence or an insatiable hunger for power. Perhaps we need a reverse catch-22 in British politics: anyone crazy enough to apply for this post should be disqualified from running.

A few years ago, the psychologist Michelle Roya Rad listed the characteristics of good leadership. Among them were fairness and objectivity; a desire to serve society rather than just yourself; a lack of interest in fame and attention; and resistance to the temptation to hide the truth or make impossible promises. Conversely, a paper in the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy has listed the characteristics of leaders with psychopathic, narcissistic or Machiavellian personalities. These include: a tendency to manipulate others; a preparedness to lie and deceive to achieve your ends; a lack of remorse and sensitivity; and a desire for admiration, attention, prestige and status. Which of these lists, do you think, best describes the people vying to lead the Conservative party?

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits. Sigmund Freud claimed that “groups take on the personality of the leader”. I think it would be more accurate to say that the private tragedies of powerful people become the public tragedies of those they dominate. For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain. What we appear to see in national politics around the world is a playing out in public of deep private distress.

This could be a particularly potent force in British politics. The psychotherapist Nick Duffell has written of “wounded leaders”, who were separated from their families in early childhood when they were sent to boarding school. They develop a “survival personality”, learning to cut off their feelings and project a false self, characterised by a public display of competence and self-reliance. Beneath this persona is a profound insecurity, which might generate an insatiable need for power, prestige and attention. The result is a system that “consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are”.

The problem is not confined to these shores. Donald Trump occupies the most powerful seat on Earth, yet still he appears to seethe with envy and resentment. “If President Obama made the deals that I have made,” he claimed this week, “the corrupt media would be hailing them as incredible … With me, despite our record-setting economy and all that I have done, no credit!” No amount of wealth or power seems able to satisfy his need for affirmation and assurance.


Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it

I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn’t change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others. I’ve had two courses: one influenced by Freud and Donald Winnicott, the other by Paul Gilbert’s compassion-focused approach. I found them both immensely helpful. I believe almost everyone would benefit from such treatment.

The underlying problem is the system through which such people jostle. Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments. Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that the group of psychopathic traits known as “fearless dominance” is associated with behaviours that are widely valued in leaders, such as making bold decisions and bestriding the world stage. If so, we surely value the wrong characteristics. If success within the system requires psychopathic traits, there is something wrong with the system.

In designing an effective politics, it could be useful to work backwards: to decide what kind of people we would like to see representing us, then create a system that would bring them to the fore. I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?

It would not be a purely representative democracy. This works on the principle of presumed consent: “You elected me three years ago, therefore you are presumed to have consented to the policy I’m about to implement, whether or not I mentioned it at the time.” It rewards the “strong, decisive” leaders who so often lead their nations to catastrophe. A system that tempers representative democracy with participative democracy – citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, the co-creation of public policy – is more likely to reward responsive and considerate politicians. Proportional representation, which prevents governments with minority support from dominating the nation, is another potential safeguard – though no guarantee.

In rethinking politics, let us develop systems that encourage kindness, empathy and emotional intelligence. Let us ditch systems that encourage people to hide their pain by dominating others.

How to create a leaderless revolution and win lasting political change

In an age of insurgency, from gilets jaunes to Extinction Rebellion, non-violence is key to harnessing the energy of protest writes Carne Ross in The Guardian 

The gilets jaunes movement in France is a leaderless political uprising. It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. Occupy, the Arab spring and #MeToo are other recent examples of this new politics. Some of it is good. Some of it is not: a leaderless movement, self-organised on Reddit, helped elect Donald Trump. But leaderless movements are spreading, and we need to understand where they come from, what is legitimate action and, if you want to start one, what works and what doesn’t.


Leaderless movements spring from frustration with conventional top-down politics, a frustration shared by many

The Arab spring began with the self-immolation of one despairing young man in Tunisia; the revolt rapidly spread across the region, just as protests have proliferated in France. In highly connected complex systems, such as the world today, the action of a single agent can suddenly trigger what complexity theorists call a “phase shift” across the entire system.

We cannot predict which agent or what event might be that trigger. But we already know that the multiplying connections of our world offer an unprecedented opportunity for the rise and spread of leaderless movements.

Leaderless movements spring from frustration with conventional top-down politics, a frustration shared by many, not only those on the streets. Polls suggest the gilets jaunes are supported by a large majority of the French public. Who believes that writing to your MP, or signing a petition to No 10 makes any difference to problems such as inequality, the chronic housing shortage or the emerging climate disaster? Even voting feels like a feeble response to these deep-seated problems that are functions not only of government policies but more of the economic system itself.

What such movements oppose is usually clear, but what they propose is inevitably less so: that is their nature. The serial popular uprisings of the Arab spring all rejected authoritarian rule, whether in Tunisia, Egypt or Syria. But in most places there was no agreement about what kind of government should replace the dictators. In Eygpt, the Tahrir Square protests failed to create an organised democratic political party that could win an election. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood, long highly organised and thus prepared for such a moment, stepped into the political vacuum. In turn, this provoked further mass protest, which eventually brought to power another dictatorship as repressive as Hosni Mubarak’s. 

When the demand is for change in social relations– norms more than laws – such as the end of sexual harassment, the results can be as rapid but also more enduring and positive. The #MeToo movement has provoked questioning of gender relations across the world. The British deputy prime minister, Damian Green, was forced to resign; in India, a cabinet minister. The effects are uneven, and far from universal, but sexual harassers have been outed and ousted from positions of power in the media, NGOs and governments.

Some mass action has required leadership. The race discrimination that confronted the US civil rights movement was deeply entrenched in both American society and its laws. Martin Luther King and other leaders paid exquisite attention to strategy, switching tactics according to what worked and what didn’t. King correctly judged, however, that real and lasting equality required the reform of capitalism – a change in the system itself. In a sense, his objective went from the singular to the plural. And that is where his campaign hit the rocks. Momentum dissipated when King started to talk about economic equality: there was no agreement on the diagnosis, or the solution.

The Occupy movement faced a similar problem. It succeeded in inserting inequality and economic injustice into the mainstream political conversation – politicians had avoided the topic before. But Occupy couldn’t articulate a specific political programme to reform the system. I was in Zuccotti Park in New York City, where the protest movement began, when the “general assembly” invited the participants to pin notes listing their demands on to trees. Ideas were soon plastered up, from petitioning Washington DC to replacing the dollar – many of which, of course, were irreconcilable with each other.

This is why a leaderless response to the climate change disaster is tricky. It’s striking that in Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax rises the gilets jaunes opposed the very thing demanded by Extinction Rebellion, Britain’s newly minted leaderless movement: aggressive policies to reduce carbon emissions to net zero. Macron’s proposals would have hit the poorest hardest, illustrating that resolving the crises of the environment and inequality requires a more comprehensive, carefully wrought solution to both. But leaderless movements have largely proved incapable of such complicated decision-making, as anyone at Zuccotti Park will attest.

Conventional party politicians, reasserting their own claim to legitimacy, insist that such problems can only be arbitrated by imposing more top-down policy. But when most feel powerless about the things that matter, this may only provoke further protests.

Ultimately, to address profound systemic challenges, we shall need new participatory and inclusive decision-making structures to negotiate the difficult choices. An example of these forums has emerged in parts of Syria, of all places. Rightly, this is precisely what the Extinction Rebellion is also demanding.

Inevitably, leaderless movements face questions about their legitimacy. One answer lies in their methods. The Macron government has exploited the violence seen in Paris and elsewhere to claim that the gilets jaunes movement is illegitimate and anti-democratic. Mahatma Gandhi, and later King, realised that nonviolent action – such as the satyagraha salt march or the Montgomery bus boycott – denies the authorities this line of attack. On the contrary, the violence used by those authorities – the British colonial government or the police of the southern US states – against nonviolent protestors helped build their own legitimacy and attracted global attention.

Complexity science tells us something else important. System-wide shifts happen when the system is primed for change, at so-called criticality. In the Middle East there was almost universal anger at the existing political status quo, so it took only one match to light the fire of revolt. Meeting people in colleges and towns across the UK but also in the US (where I lived until recently) you can hear the mounting frustration with a political and economic system that is totally unresponsive to the needs of the 99%, and offers no credible answer to the climate emergency.

There will be more leaderless movements to express this frustration, just as there will be more rightwing demagogues, like Trump or Boris Johnson, who seek to exploit it to their own advantage. For the right ones to prevail, we must insist on nonviolence as well as commitment to dialogue with – and not denunciation of – those who disagree. Messily, a new form of politics is upon us, and we must ensure that it peacefully and democratically produces deep systematic reform, not the counter-reaction of the authoritarians. Get ready.

The magical thinking that misleads managers

A handy guide to sorcery and superstitions in modern leadership

ANDREW HILL in the FT

It has been a while since a UK company was accused of sorcery. 

Congratulations, then, to evolutionary biologist Sally Le Page for triggering just such a charge last week. She blogged her astonishment that many of the country’s biggest water companies had blithely admitted to using dowsing rods to help locate pipes and leaks. Another scientist has dismissed the technique as witchcraft. 

The water suppliers themselves have been rowing back fast. Some engineers were part-time diviners, apparently, but the real hard work of leak detection was backed by drones, robots and lots and lots of science. 

I say let us allow the water industry’s warlocks to indulge their medieval pastimes. After all, there are plenty of examples of modern management and leadership based on superstition, credulity and blind faith. Here are just a few: 

Numerology. In China, mumbo-jumbo about feng shui and ominous or propitious flotation dates, trading symbols and stock codes often influences how supposedly sophisticated companies arrange their affairs. Elements of Alibaba’s 2014 listing appeared to revolve around the “lucky” number eight, for example. 

But before western chief executives scoff, they should consider how much they are still in thrall to the cult described in Alex Berenson’s 2003book The Number — the quarterly earnings consensus they conspire with analysts and investors to hit, or better still, to beat. Regular evidence — recently, for instance, from Campbell Soup (a miss), and Home Depot (a “beat”) — suggests the cult is thriving. 

Indeed, the availability and crunchability of Big Data have broadened disciples of the number. They now include company bosses who worship near-term, data-driven answers, rather than holding out for better, if messier, longer-term solutions that take account of human intuition. 

As the veteran management thinker Charles Handy pointed out in a rousing closing address to the recent Drucker Forum, “if the organisation were purely digitised . . . it would be a very dreary place, a prison for the human soul”. 

Leaps of faith. Any chief executive who has ever announced a corporate vision without a clear idea of the kinds of steps needed to achieve the goal is at least partly guilty of magical thinking. 

Richard Rumelt wrote in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy about the dangerous delusion that aiming for success can lead to success: “I would not care to fly in an aircraft designed by people who focused only on an image of a flying aeroplane and never considered modes of failure.” 

Throw a coin and make a wish. Modern companies still close their eyes to evidence suggesting bonuses are at best a blunt incentive, and chuck cash at staff in the hope that it will help them reach their heart’s desire. At least wishing wells swallow the donation with no adverse consequence, other than the loss of your penny. Unfettered bonus culture, as the worst excesses of the financial crisis suggest, can backfire in unexpected ways. 

Chants and mantras. Slavishly applied governance codes and regulations help box-ticking compliance staff and board members sleep easy, by absolving them of the need to make difficult judgments. Meaningless mission statements give executives a mantra to recite as cover for not actually putting their values into practice. 

Human sacrifice. Restructurings and lay-offs are the modern ritual for appeasing the gods (but without the benefits of bringing the community together for a bit of a celebration). 

Hero worship. For all the modish talk of flat hierarchies and distributed leadership, chief executives still become the central figures in a myth that is largely of their own creation. 

The most dangerous part of this self-delusion is that they believe success was achieved entirely through their “skill, preparation and tenacity”, as described by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen in Great by Choice. 

The researchers found successful leaders could generate a greater “return on luck” by being more disciplined at exploiting opportunities and riding bad luck to make themselves stronger. But they pointed out there was a fine line between the best leaders and those who put their organisations at risk through an exaggerated and dangerous belief in their own powers. Such leaders had a tendency to make these sorts of assertions: “Luck played no role in my success — I’m just really good.” 

Here is where humble deference to unpredictable and poorly understood outside forces would be healthy. If nothing else, over-confident leaders should be reminded that their destiny is sometimes out of their hands.

The curse of the ‘strong leader’

Tabish Khair in The Hindu




A strong leadership may be fine, but only if the leaders do not end up turning their political parties into ghosts



One feels for Rahul Gandhi. He has to cope with not one but two ‘strong leaders’: Narendra Modi and his own grandmother, Indira Gandhi.

Rahul Gandhi is haunted by the ghost of a once worker-cadre-based party, the Congress, which ‘strong leader’ Mrs. Gandhi transformed into a family-run, one-boss organisation. Rahul Gandhi’s failure in Uttar Pradesh, Assam, etc. has little to do with his own abilities or inabilities; it has to do with a common feeling among Indians that the Congress needs to be led by a charismatic leader whose surname is not and has never been ‘Gandhi’ or ‘Nehru’.

Indians are not unique in this: given the nexus of politicians and finance capital and the transformation of politics into a kind of initiated profession, where connections matter far too much, the ordinary voter is suspicious of leaders whose prominence seems to be a family- or peer group-inheritance. So suspicious that the voter can even prefer a person with no solution over a better and more deserving candidate, as we witnessed in the U.S. last year, simply because the former is seen as not being an insider.

When Congress lost coherence

Even the ill-gotten millions of an ‘outsider’ candidate no longer disqualify him, as long as his opponent is seen as part of the political establishment. Riches, the voter (mistakenly) believes, can come to him too, but political inheritance — of the sort associated with Hillary Clinton and Rahul Gandhi — cannot. And in this latter supposition the voter is not mistaken. This gets worse, as is the case with the Congress now, thanks to a process initiated by Mrs. Gandhi, when the party seems hardly to exist apart from its top leadership.

No doubt, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru did fight to shape the Congress, but they encouraged much difference too. This showed in the wide variety of pan-national leaders the Congress threw up in that period: Sarojini Naidu, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad, Lal Bahadur Shastri, etc.

It is with the ‘strong leader’ personality cult that Mrs. Gandhi encouraged in the 1970s that the Congress began to lose both its internal coherence and a repertoire of equivalent national-level leaders. At the level of party structure, this led to the gradual evaporation of committed Congress workers at district and village levels and their replacement with careerists and strategists rushing off to party headquarters at the drop of a Gandhi cap. Today, the Congress is far less a worker-cadre-based party than the BJP. This ghostly Congress party — reduced to a family name that most voters are tired of hearing — is Rahul Gandhi’s bane. Despite this, it is not the Congress today but the BJP that seems to be following Mrs. Gandhi’s doubtful legacy: the curse of the ‘strong leader’ which reduces a political party to a ghostly affair in later years.

Conservatives united

I have never dismissed the BJP as a genuine party within a democratic India, as I have considered it a party with various tendencies — not that dissimilar from the Congress of yore — united by a few core commonalities. What passes for the BJP is a collocation of conservatives of various kinds, pro-market ideologists, nationalists, cultural revivalists, religious chauvinists, and reactionaries. All of them are united by a general belief in an India structured along ‘Hindu’ rather than secular lines, even though their understanding of ‘Hindu’ is not identical. Again, as the Congress was before the 1970s, the BJP is essentially a grass-roots party united by a cadre which includes, and is dominated (for better or for worse), by cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The BJP allows more upward mobility for its workers than the Congress today.

This, then, is the BJP as it has been until now. While lacking the azadi-inspired breadth of the Gandhi-Nehruvian Congress, it has nevertheless thrown up major leaders of national visibility such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, many of whom, like Narendra Modi himself, rose from the ranks.

All this might be changing in the BJP today, as it slowly becomes a personality-based ‘strong leader’ party. It is not a coincidence that the only Congress leader that supporters of Mr. Modi sometimes praise is Mrs. Gandhi: ‘Modi’s India’ may not be that far apart from ‘Indira is India.’

There is a pattern — reminiscent of the Congress in the 1970s — of concentrating party power in the top echelons and appointing ministers and Chief Ministers (most recently in Uttar Pradesh) who seem incapable of gaining a national stature. Strong leaders may be fine, but only if they do not end up turning their parties into ghosts.

Cricket Captains aren't that important anymore. Same for high paid Business Leaders

Tim Wigmore in Cricinfo

It has been a seminal fortnight for the England cricket team. The country has a new Test match captain, and Joe Root's appointment could herald obvious changes to the team's approach, on and off the field. Yet whether the change of captaincy will have any positive or negative effect on results is an altogether different matter.

How much does individual leadership really matter? It's a question valid in cricket, sport and beyond.

"Being in charge isn't what it used to be," writes Moisés Naím in The End of Power. He shows how, for all the focus on the figureheads of teams, the powers of leaders are being eroded, in everything from business to politics and the military. "In the 21st century, power is easier to get, harder to use - and easier to lose," Naím says, arguing that, because of the digital revolution, the collapse of deference, and increased accountability within organisations, the powerful now face more limitations on their power than ever before. In the second half of the 20th century, weaker sides (in terms of soldiers and weapons) achieved their strategic goals in the majority of wars. The tenures of chief executives are becoming shorter, and those in charge also face more internal constraints on their power than ever before.

The most successful leaders have never been more venerated: the leadership-coaching industry is worth an estimated US$50 billion every year, brimming with corporate bigwigs attempting to learn the "lessons" of other leaders' success. Yet there is no real evidence of the enduring superstar qualities of those who cash in. Award-winning chief executives subsequently underperform, both against their own performance and against non-prize-winning CEOs, as research by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate shows. A lot of the lauded CEOs' previous success, in other words, might have been simply luck, and their subsequent underperformance regression to the mean.

The obsession with leadership extends to sport, yet leaders' power is being reduced here also. "In early-modern sports - the late 19th century - there was little or no coaching and hence the captain on the field had a significant leadership role to play," explains the sports economist and historian Stefan Szymanski. "As sport became more organised and coaching strategy developed, the role of the captain on the field diminished."

Compared with other sports, cricket is unusual in giving as much power to the captain as it does. Yet the cricket captain has not been immune to the wider erosion in the importance of leadership across sport. "The role is declining as the potential of coaches to add analytical support based on data analysis has increased," Szymanski says.

It is instructive to compare the responsibility of Mike Brearley to that of Root today. While Root will be supported by a coterie of coaches, physiologists and analysts, Brearley operated before the modern coach, and had to oversee warming up and stretching before each day. In the days of amateurism, captains even had to motivate amateurs to play at all. Today the captain is far more important in club cricket, where they have no coaches to aid them and often face an arduous task to even get a full team together, than in the professional game.

The power of individual coaches has also been diminished, because the responsibilities that were once the preserve of one man are now divided up among a multitude of personnel. In international cricket teams today, what were, 25 years ago, the sole functions of the coach are now divided up among what often amounts to a 2nd XI of support staff.

While the narrative of football's Premier League now revolves around managers, each result explored through the prism of their success or failure, perhaps they have never mattered less. In the 1930s, Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman not merely coached innovatively but led Arsenal to introduce numbered shirts, and build floodlights and a new stand. Unless they are named Arsene Wenger, the average Premier League manager now lasts a year in the job. Given the complexities of modern sport, there is a limit to what they can do. Indeed, studies of poorly performing clubs find that performances improve by an almost identical amount whether or not a new manager is appointed. The new boss, then, is rarely much better or worse than the old boss.

The book Soccernomics finds a 90% correlation between wage bills and league finishes over a ten-year period; just 10% of top-flight managers consistently overachieve when wages are factored into account. So, brilliant leadership can make a difference, but only in exceptional cases. It was not merely modesty that led Yogi Berra, when asked what made a great baseball coach, to reply: "A great ball team."



Joe Root will enjoy the services of several coaches, analysts and managers in his role as England's Test captain, thereby diffusing his leadership responsibilities © Getty Images





The captain in golf's Ryder Cup has a job akin to the coach in other sports. It offers a prime example of how narratives are constructed around the leader, assigning them more power than they really have. In The Captain Myth, Richard Gillis explores how victories or defeats are retrospectively explained through a captain's mistakes or shrewd decisions. Every match must consist of a Good Captain and Bad Captain, and the Good Captain is always the victor. The trouble with this simplistic narrative is that, as Paul Azinger, who led the US to victory in the 2008 Ryder Cup, reflects, "There have been some captains who have micro-managed everything and lost. There have been captains who were drunk every night and won. There is no blueprint on winning."

There is a paradox to leadership in modern sport. Leaders have never faced more scrutiny - but most have never had less power. Professionalism and the explosion of money in sport means that decisions once the sole preserve of a captain or head coach are now influenced by dozens of others behind the scenes: specialist coaches, performance analysts who mine data, dieticians, psychologists and those responsible for nurturing academy players. Perhaps the cricket team that has performed most above themselves in recent years is Northamptonshire in the T20 Blast. Reaching three finals in four years has not just been a triumph for Alex Wakely's astute captaincy, but also for the coaching staff, the data analyst, the physio and all those involved in player recruitment.

The reluctance to recognise the limits of leadership has deep roots. We are a storytelling species. People make for much better stories than underlying, impersonal factors; Soccernomics shows that success in international football can broadly be explained by three factors - population size, GDP, and experience playing the sport - that have nothing to do with leadership. In The Captain Myth, Gillis writes that, because of psychological biases "meshed with our obsession with celebrity, it's easy to understand how the captain has become such a prominent figure in the sports world". In cricket, he tells me that "the decisions of the captain can be significant, but the relationship between the decisions and the outcome is not linear, it's far messier than that, and makes a far less enjoyable tale".

As much as coaches and fans crave inspirational leadership, in modern sport, with huge and complex professional structures to manage, perhaps it is easier for a single leader to make a negative difference than a positive one. "Good captaincy and coaching have far less of an impact on outcomes than bad captaincy and coaching does," believes Trent Woodhill, a leading T20 coach. Bad leadership can marginalise and disempower the backroom team, effectively preventing support staff from doing their jobs properly. Beyond sport, Naím believes that we are in an age of "heightened vulnerability to bad ideas and bad leaders". The analysis extends beyond sport. Disruptive technology has not only changed the nature of power, Naím believes, but also led to an age of "heightened vulnerability to bad ideas and bad leaders".

Root has captained in just four first-class games, yet this is in keeping with modern norms. That Virat Kohli, Steven Smith and Kane Williamson have all been successful after their appointments as captain, despite a derisory amount of prior leadership experience in professional sport, suggests that captaincy experience - and, by implication, captaincy skill - is simply not that important. The absence of specialist captains, at both domestic and international level, also reflects a recognition of the limits of what a skipper can achieve.

"Playing in the middle and understanding the demands is more important than captaincy," Andrew Strauss said when Root was unveiled. The greatest potential boon of a Root captaincy lies not in a new culture he might create, or more enterprising leadership, but the possibility of greater run-scoring: if Alastair Cook is reinvigorated without the leadership, while, in keeping with recent England captains, Root's own batting initially enjoys an upswing.

Leadership is not irrelevant. Occasionally cricketers are particularly suited to a leadership role - Brearley, Graeme Smith, or Misbah-ul-Haq, say; some, like Kevin Pietersen, might be the opposite. But the overwhelming majority of captains are bunched in the middle - and, in any case, a captain's ability to do good is marginal, now more than ever. For all the tendency to focus on a team's figurehead, great leadership is a collective endeavour, and operates against wider limitations. Perhaps this is why Strauss is so unperturbed by Root's lack of captaincy experience. Only rarely does the identity of a captain really matter.

How to get People to Follow You

Simon Sinek interview

School leaders quickly forget how tough teaching is

The Secret Teacher in The Guardian

I have recently completed a quest. This quest took several years and led me from the panic-stricken landscape of the newly-qualified teacher (NQT), through the fraught and often terrifying forests of achievement as head of department, to the ivory tower of the senior leadership team (SLT).

Once I stepped inside, the doors closed behind me; I was swept away from the camaraderie of my colleagues and enveloped in a world of administration and posturing. I lived in the darkness there for more than four years, until I had no choice but to escape. Driven mad by bureaucracy, vain nobility and shadowy villains who sought to protect only themselves, I opted to fall upon my sword and return to the chalkface, where I would be reunited with my own morality. And so here I am – older and wiser. 

OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I actually enjoyed being on the SLT most of the time, but some dramatic life events taught me that data, progression and status are not everything. My mother died within weeks of being diagnosed with a terminal illness and I realised life is for living. So I stepped away from the SLT and return to the classroom, thinking that I would have space to pursue my interests and improve my quality of life in the face of such sadness. I was in for a surprise.

I was certain that my move would buy me more time; no more endless piles of admin, no more mind-numbing meetings until 7pm, no more grim governors’ reports to write, no more dour disciplinary panels to attend. But I had forgotten that the windows in the ivory tower are obscured by pot plants so tall that you can’t see the stressed faces of the teachers as they race past. If you do chance to look up from your paperwork, your rose-tinted glasses made their lives look quite romantic. Oh, how the students adored them! How much fun they had together in their teams! I remembered those days …

I had forgotten that my multitudinous leadership tasks were generously accommodated by my timetable. Yes, I had a lot to do, but I was given a lot of time to do it. How did I forget that it’s impossible to plan adequate lessons in five non-contact periods a week? How did I forget that as I reluctantly sat in meetings, angry that I had failed to see any daylight for the majority of winter, my main-scale colleagues were marking and planning in their classrooms or at their dining tables? How did I think that I had it harder than them?

I had also forgotten how differently you are treated when you are not on the SLT; new staff failed to acknowledge me on the first day in the classroom and even the students seemed to think they could try it on now that my power was diminished. As my fingers hover over reporting Jimmy’s fifth instance of insolence in a week, I wonder if my former SLT colleagues are going to pass the blame on to me, as they so often did to others.

My mistake was not in giving it all up, but in forgetting how hard all teachers work and allowing myself to be sucked in to the dark world of judgment that the SLT inhabits.

Life in the tower is reminiscent of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The headteacher would suggest a crazy idea and every single member of the leadership team would nod in agreement and smile. Meanwhile, the minor failures of main-scale teachers would be aired in evening briefing, upon which each member would shake their heads and tut, obstinately refusing to remember the difficulty of full-time teaching. 

The doors close on accountability, too; as one of the accepted few you become the judge, not the accused. Steely-eyed SLT members brandish clipboards and conduct clinical learning walks and observations for dissection later, but are only observed by each other, allowing weak teaching to be dismissed by close colleagues. In fact, the only time the SLT is truly accountable is when the inspectors call, and that’s when the panic arises. But once they have gone, the “inadequate” teachers only have themselves to blame and the “outstanding” ratings are all thanks to us.

On reflection, I’m not sorry that I left. I never really managed to bridge the gap that so obviously exists between the SLT and other staff. The ridiculous and impossible demands on normal teachers’ time are an enigma to most SLT members. Perhaps an enforced main-scale sabbatical would teach many SLT members an important lesson? My own reminder has certainly made me a better person, even if I am denied the time to be a better teacher.

Natural leaders are made in retrospect

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

There is no template for the perfect captain. Some of the game's greatest were not identified as such straightaway


It took five years of not winning and patience before success came for Mike Brearley (centre) and Middlesex in 1976 © Getty Images



So England finished a tour of the West Indies with some widespread areas of consensus. The results were disappointing, the immediate future is dodgy, opportunities were missed and the captain - according to many of the loudest voices - is not a natural leader.

The tour, of course, happened in 2008-09. England lost 1-0. But Andrew Strauss, after that tricky start, became one of the most successful England captains of modern times. Now England are turning to Strauss again, this time as director of cricket, because his leadership credentials are, of course, axiomatic. How quickly people forget views they once vehemently held. Memory is not quite the same thing as intelligence, or even judgement, but it is a good first step on the road towards greater scepticism.

The problem with analysing leadership, especially captaincy, is that people forget how rare it is for successful leaders to stand out as "natural leaders" from the very beginning of their tenure. In fact, the idea of "natural" leadership is usually a retrospective trick - or narrative fallacy - used to make sense of events that, at the time, felt far more contingent and unpredictable.

The most iconic example of great captaincy is also the most misused: Mike Brearley. Perception: Brearley could wander into any team, move gully a bit deeper, and, hey presto, you win by an innings. Reality: by the time Brearley did his Ashes conjuring trick in 1981, he had indeed established a reputation for tactical and managerial brilliance. Crucially, however, that reputation was hard-earned over many years at the coalface. Even more pertinently, Brearley's captaincy could easily have been cut short before anyone noticed how good he was.

Brearley took over as captain of Middlesex in 1971. The seasons of 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975 slipped by without Middlesex winning the championship. Brearley has privately told me that in those early seasons he often found the job very difficult. Did he have enough support? Results improved, but not always evenly. In that six-year period, Brearley's gift for patience was tested. So was the constancy of Middlesex. As I write this, only one of the 18 captains of England's first-class counties has been leader for six uninterrupted seasons. Clearly there aren't dozens of Brearleys out there, if only clubs would persevere with them. But if Middlesex had been less patient - or, put differently, less anxious to jump at the first convenience - then England could have been deprived of a superb leader.

Which leads to the second problem with analysing captains. Pundits tend to have a fairly fixed idea of what a natural leader looks like, and then judge the incumbent against their own personal template.

To the alpha-male mindset, the captain should be the leader of the pack, the macho hero. To the Machiavellian world view, a captain should be streetwise and opportunistic. To the progressive, leadership relies on novelty and innovation. To the nostalgic, quite the reverse - the answers always reside in the past. To the laissez-faire, he must be relaxed. To the hard man, a captain must rule with fear.

All valid, none essential. There is no one such thing as the ultimate template for a good captain. All good leaders are different. Indeed, a preparedness to be different - rather than copying someone else - is perhaps the only prerequisite for being any good.

In terms of value added, few managers can match Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. His decisions and the wins that followed have earned Oakland hundreds of millions of dollars (as this article on FiveThirtyEight demonstrates). Despite an emotional temperament, Beane has tried to remove the cult of personality from his decision-making. This is leadership by methodology - thinking, or more accurately calculating, your way to victory.

At the other end of the spectrum stands Sir Alex Ferguson. Anyone who has read Ferguson's autobiography knows that the idea of "copying" Ferguson is inconceivable. His management was founded on the controlling and coercive nature of his personality. Some players seethe with violence. Very occasionally, that survives the transition into management. No leader achieves greatness by punching people. Some, however, clearly benefit from the impression that it would be a grave error for anyone to entirely rule out the possibility of the direct approach. Ferguson ran a pub before becoming a manager. "Sometimes I would come home with a split head or black eye. That was pub life. When fights broke out, it was necessary to jump in to restore order."

Now imagine hearing Pep Guardiola, Roberto Martinez or Arsene Wenger saying that. Inconceivable. Yet all are fine managers.



Despite England's poor finish in the West Indies, there has been no outward sign that Alastair Cook is wilting © Getty Images


Which leads us back to Alastair Cook. It is clear that Cook does not fit some preconceptions of cricketing leadership. He is not restless and ingenious, as Michael Vaughan was. He does not cast a magnetic and charismatic presence over the whole arena, as MS Dhoni does. And yet there have been fine captains who possessed neither of those assets.

Last week, after discussing captaincy in the commentary box, the brilliant statistician Andrew Samson passed me two pieces of paper about the records of two captains, each after 31 Tests in charge. The first read:

Runs: 2478
Average: 45.88
Hundreds: 8
Wins: 13
Losses: 9
Draws: 9

The second read:

Runs: 2792
Average: 60.69
Hundreds: 10
Wins: 6
Losses: 9
Draws: 15
Tied: 1

The first is Cook, the second Allan Border, the man who turned around Australian cricket in the 1980s. (Although, of course, the nature of the opposition should always be taken into account with comparative stats.)

Border had also faced criticism about his manner and tactics. But eventually his resilience and run-scoring provided such an inspiring example that his team fell in step. The two men, so different on the surface - Border was known as Captain Grumpy, where Cook is courteous and self-deprecating - share an epic capacity for endurance. Border outlasted many bowling attacks and, eventually, his critics.

The case against Cook tends to rest on the conviction that he is about to crack, that he can't take much more. This theory is conveniently self-perpetuating because it encourages his detractors to press on with their endeavours. They look eagerly for signs that the strain is becoming too great. This type of thinking contributed to his sacking as ODI captain ridiculously close to the World Cup.

Yet in the West Indies - a patchy tour for England with some poor selection errors - there was no outward sign at all that Cook was wilting. Quite the reverse. His hundred in the third Test was almost faultless.

Many bowling attacks have pinned their hopes on Cook cracking, only to find the wait inconveniently lengthy. I wonder if the detractors of Cook's captaincy will experience a similar story.

'I always tried to think about being a leader, no matter where I was at'

Ricky Ponting talks about imposing himself on the bowler, batting to win, and turns the spot on his strengths and weaknesses

Interview by Daniel Brettig

October 25, 2013

 

	"A strength of mine was a will to win a contest and not ever let a bowler get the best of me" © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links News : Play best batsman at No. 3 - Ponting Players/Officials: Ricky Ponting | Kim Hughes | David Boon |Harbhajan Singh | Mohammad Azharuddin | Rod Marsh | Greg Chappell | Ian Chappell Teams: Australia

Something you've revealed in the opening pages of the book is your batting checklist. From the outside, batting always seemed the most natural thing for you, yet this shows how much effort was required to make it feel commonplace and normal.
That was a big part of my preparation. I was never really one concerned with what I did in the nets. Everything about net practice in our game is so false and fake to what you actually come across in a game that it doesn't have much impact, I believe, on what you take out into the middle. So a good way for me to get prepared was mentally, and make sure I had that checklist all ticked off the night before. The checklist started as a pre-season thing, where if I had a long break and was trying to get back into cricket I needed to get the basic things right so I could start building my game back up again.

Then I started using it in games and having some success and it just became something I felt I had to do before I batted. It's pretty simple stuff, but keeping your mind nice and clear is always one of the biggest challenges, and keeping what you need to in there, which for me was always to watch the ball. I kept the premeditation out of there - about if this one's pitched up I'm going to drive it or if it's short I'm going to pull it. When you have those thoughts in your mind when the ball's about to be released, you generally get out.

Watching the ball is a simple idea to follow, but were there times when you were thinking less about the ball than fighting it out with the bowler who delivered it?
Probably a lot of the time. There was one other thing I used to put into that checklist - if there was an opposition bowler who I knew I could sometimes get a bit fired up against, then I used to have "Don't get involved in any one-on-one battles." Then it was trying to take the bowler or the character out of it and focus on what he was delivering.

Sometimes that could get me going a bit as well. I was always someone who tried to counter-attack and be pretty positive with the way I played and tried to put pressure back on the bowler. But there were other occasions where I went too far, got too fired up and carried away, tried to impose myself too much, and then you're out. Finding that balance between imposing yourself and putting the bowler under pressure without going outside what works for you.

Can you remember times when the one-on-one battle did work for you and others when it didn't?
We as a team had certain bowlers who we felt we could put pressure on and get the better of, and that was always the top three's job to do that.

A guy like James Anderson, early in his career, we were able to keep down for long periods of time. It's not so much targeting guys, but they were younger players coming into international cricket and we knew if we could do that we might get the better of them. But there were others like Darren Gough, who got me out a lot in Ashes cricket, and I always used to impose myself on him. We had some pretty good battles, I made a few hundreds against him but he got me out a few times. And there were occasions where I went a bit hard at balls I shouldn't have that made me think I can't keep playing that way against the bowler, need to focus on the ball.

Kim Hughes was a hero of yours starting out. What most grabbed your attention and made you want to emulate him?
Just the way he played. The flair. The down-on-one-knee cover drives and the fearless hooking and pulling of the West Indians. If you wanted to watch an attractive batsman you'd walk a long way to see anyone play the game in a more attractive manner than Kim Hughes did. I think it was just that.

We all loved the style of Greg Chappell, but it was that Kim seemed to have something a bit more special about him with the way he played. He didn't end up having the record Greg had, but he was fun to watch.

Then Boonie came along after that and played quite differently but became an idol of mine for the fact we both grew up in Launceston and played in the same grade competition and state cricket, and he gave me a path to follow. Those were the two guys I idolised as a youngster.

	"It's about finding that balance between imposing yourself and putting the bowler under pressure without going outside what works for you"

Something what is apparent even from your earliest days is that playing pace came naturally but playing spin was difficult. When we look at your career as a whole it was Harbhajan Singhwho gave you most trouble, but Tim May, Greg Matthews and offspin were a struggle right from the start.
It was, and I actually went back to the academy to work on that more than anything. What was difficult about working on playing spin in Australia in the off season, particularly in Adelaide, was, we were doing it all in the indoor nets and it was so false. You could run down the wicket without any fear at all of getting stumped or one spinning past the outside edge. You just had the freedom to hit the ball wherever you wanted to. In the nets there I was a pretty good player of spin, but when you got out into the middle on Adelaide Oval or the SCG, where it used to spin a lot, against two of the country's best spinners it was a different game altogether. It was right-arm offspin out of anything that troubled me the most.

You found reading length against a good spinner the most challenging task?
On the truer wickets it was okay because you could get away with it, but the one thing I learned about playing spin in India… the first couple of tours were horrible, but the last few tours I had there where I actually understood what I was trying to do a bit better, I actually had some success.

It was all about not getting trapped to good-length balls. Not trying to predict where the ball was going to spin to. It was about trying to hit it before it spun or [well] after it spun, and that's what the good Indian players always did.

That's a concept that Australian batters don't have to think about because the ball doesn't spin very much in domestic cricket here. Even our current blokes, if you look at the struggles they had against Swann in the last Ashes series, it was because you're just not brought up seeing and playing quality spin, and more importantly playing it in conditions that actually favour the bowler. Even with our practice facilities in Australia you don't get that very often.

Mohammad Azharuddin was the source of a lot of that advice about playing in India. How did you get talking?
He and I actually got on pretty well. I think he saw similarities in the way I played and the way he played as a younger guy. He played all the shots when he first came on the scene, so we struck up a bit of a relationship early doors. It probably was my first Test tour to India in 1998, and if you watched the way he played, he was always out in front, flicking his wrists, and for us that was so foreign.

Dhoni does it really well as well. He's not actually a great player of spin bowling but he's got the technique there where they work the ball around and never get caught at bat-pad or done on length. When we go there we always get caught at bat-pad because we're predicting where the ball is going to go.

But yeah, I first heard it from [Azharuddin], he talked about getting to it on the half-volley before it has the chance to spin or get back in your crease and wait for it fully spin and play it from there. It sounds pretty easy but it's difficult to do in the heat of battle against good quality spin bowling. But the technique makes a lot of sense.

Against fast bowling, from an early age you'd been used to big guys trying to knock your block off, so it didn't feel too uncomfortable when you entered Test cricket. But was there anything you did in particular that made you relish that?
I think it was just the fact I did it. I was sort of forced to do it as an 11- or 12-year-old on hard, bouncy synthetic wickets. The indoor centre where I did most of my training as a kid was all hard-wicket stuff. And most of the time I'd be in there with no helmet on and trying to find a way to survive. That's the flip side of spin.

And if you go and watch junior cricket now, they're all playing on synthetic and the ball's bouncing up towards head height, so you can see why kids play cross-bat shots at an early age rather than straight-bat shots.

Also my pre-movements - with the way I pick the bat up and get on the front foot, I'm actually in a really good position to play the short ball anyway without having to move too much. If you broke down my technique and looked at Mark or Steve Waugh's technique, guys who weren't natural hookers and pullers, it's pretty easy to work out why. My hands were up and my bat was up, which means I just had to drop the bat on the ball. They - and Damien Martyn was another - their hands were low and their bat was low, which meant to play a pull shot they had to lift their bat up and get it down again. So they didn't have the time I had to do it. But the guys with low hands were beautiful on-side players, because they didn't have to move the bat too far.

Later in your career when the pull shot and the short ball were causing you some trouble, you said it would have been like cutting a limb off to not play it.
It probably was my most instinctive shot. Straight-driving or on-driving was probably my favourite shot, but if you want to demoralise fast bowlers, if they give you all they've got and you can manage to put it away in front of square hard off the middle of the bat, they're not going to bowl too many more there. And that was what I always tried to do.

	"I was more worried about getting out at the end than scoring runs. That was my downfall. I was more worried about survival than hitting the first ball I saw for four" © PA Photos  Enlarge

As things went on and I got out a lot playing that shot… it's like anything, if you play a lot of cover drives and get out nicking them a few times, it's hard to put the shot away when you score so many runs from it. And that's how I looked at it. I just had to play it better like I was earlier in my career. It was so instinctive and as I mentioned with the way I moved, I was already in that position, so to try to get out of that position is pretty tough.

You mentioned Ian Young, Rod Marsh and Greg Shipperd were your three major mentors. How important do you think it is to get the best possible coaching at that early stage, rather than later, when you're already in international cricket?
That's what's missing from Australian cricket. I don't think we've got the calibre of people hanging around club cricket even that we used to. The older guys aren't playing club cricket anymore or 2nd XI cricket for their states anymore, so what you end up having is a huge group of young blokes all trying to learn from themselves, and it just takes so much longer than it would if you had the older guys hanging around.

Ideally you'd like to have guys like me and Mike Hussey hang around and play state cricket for another couple of years, and have the chance to bat with Alex Doolan or Cameron Bancroft or Sam Whiteman and those young blokes in WA. Dan Marsh [the Tasmania coach] brought it up this year. Alex Doolan, he was a guy who averaged high 20s in first-class cricket, but the times I batted with him last year he got a hundred every time. It's just that stuff that can't be replaced and that's not happening down through the system.

Because there's no money in coaching back down the system we're just losing the people we want around. They've got to go and find something else to do because they can't afford to be involved in cricket. Even at the highest level, a state assistant coach doesn't get a lot. If there's one thing that needs to be addressed, it is to have the right people, and more ex-international players, involved in coaching in our country. Until we get to a stage where the coaches are being paid a lot closer to what the players are being paid then we're just not going to be attracting the people we want to keep around the game.

If you look at the England set-up, they've got Andy Flower, an ex-No. 1 Test batsman in the world, Graham Gooch their highest Test run scorer, Graham Thorpe, who is probably their best-ever batsman technically - he's looking after their one-day batters. No disrespect to any of our guys but we haven't got that calibre of player involved around the Australian team.

For a while you had that, with Justin Langer looking after the batsmen and Craig McDermott the bowlers, and with yourself and Michael Hussey still in the team. There seemed to be a good environment of learning.
But even then, why does JL go back to coach a state team? It's easier, you're not on the road as much, you're probably getting paid more, and you're probably running your own programme. It shouldn't be that way. If you're a coach of the national team in any way, shape or form, that's got to be more lucrative than any of the other stuff, and then trickling back down.

We've got to find a way of getting some money back into club cricket as well. Facilities and things like that.

The Centre of Excellence as well, for a long time it hasn't been the ultra-dynamic, best coaching facility it should be. The people they've had there haven't been that. When I was in Adelaide you had Rod, Greg and Ian Chappell, Terry Jenner, the best available people at that time. If you look now, the coaches they've had there were guys who were battling first-class cricketers. You can understand why young kids might not be that excited about getting up and going to training every day. When I was there I couldn't wait to get up and hear what Greg Chappell was going to say about batting, but it's not been that way for ten years. The facility is unbelievable - no secret why Queensland so often start so well - but the states have been reluctant to send young blokes there because they've probably had better structures and coaches in their states.

It's got to go back the other way and be the best training facility not only in Australia but in the world. England looked at our set-up and made theirs better, their academy better, their coaching structure better. Even having somebody like Rod there - he wouldn't have come cheaply. If there was a job he'd have least liked doing, it would have been chairman of selectors for England and running their academy!

	"My view on selection is, you only ever make a change if it's going to make the team better. A lot of the changes we made didn't make the team better, and I don't care what anybody says"

But I asked for this stuff ten years ago, we all asked for this stuff ten years ago and it was always knocked on the head. No, you don't need a batting coach - that was the attitude they had.

When Steve Waugh became Test captain in 1999 and there was a bit of shuffling going on in the batting order, you reckoned he should have been at three at that time. You've always advocated that the best player in a team should be at three.
I still have the same thoughts now. The best batsman should be at three. I said it during the last Ashes series as well. The times where we were 3 or 4 for 30, if your best batsman had been in earlier then maybe we'd have been only 1 or 2 for 30 or 40. You're the best batsman in the team because you've got the most skill. You've got more skill and can handle situations better than others.

Michael [Clarke] has clearly been the best batsman in Australian cricket for probably the last three years, but he was almost coming in too late, when the damage had already been done. I just think it sends a great statement as well: I'm coming in now. It puts pressure back on the bowlers, and just the way I feel it should be. That's why I said it about Steve, he was clearly the best batsman in our team and ranked the best batsman in the world. I don't think you can ask less skilled or less experienced guys to handle the hardest positions. It should always be up to you.

Many will wonder what you consider your greatest strength as a batsman. But to ask the question two ways: what was a strength you always had and what was another you had to work hard to bring to your game?
A strength of mine was a will to win a contest and not ever let a bowler get the best of me or my partnership when I was at the crease. And I'd like to think that's what others said of me as well. When it was my turn, I did what I did to give my team the best chance of winning.

Something I had to work on was my communication skills around the team when I took over the captaincy. I set good examples and always did the right thing, but once I became a captain I had to find different ways to inspire others and learn about others and work out people's personalities. That was something I was constantly working on through my time as captain. I knew if I didn't do that, I couldn't get the best out of the players.

As for weaknesses, you'd say spin bowling was the one you started with based on nurture?
Yeah, I started with that, but it's interesting, it was only a couple of series around playing spin as well. My record in Australia against spin would be pretty good because I knew how to play on those pitches. It was only on a couple of visits to India where I really struggled. I had some good series in Sri Lanka against Murali on some spinning wickets and found a way to play him. I think it was actually the shape he bowled. Harbhajan troubled me more because when he started he got the ball to drift out, and when the ball drifts out, it lures you into playing. Murali's angle, because he was wide of the crease and coming over the ball, he was almost drifting in and spinning in further. Harbhajan got me a lot early from balls that drifted out, committed me to play, caught a footmark and got caught in close. Murali was always coming that way [towards the leg side], so I could work him around.

Once Harbhajan got me a few times then it was harder to go out and start against him and face him, because he had the wood on me. But I got hold of him in some of the big moments, like the World Cup final and things like that. It was just one of those battles that started the first ODI I played against him in Sharjah [in 1998], and continued on right to the end.

And was there something you never worried about to begin with but crept up on you later on?
I was more worried about getting out at the end than scoring runs. That was my downfall. I was more worried about survival than hitting the first ball I saw for four. When I was batting at my best it didn't matter when it arrived, if it was a half-volley or a short one then I was going to hit it for four. Towards the end it was more getting myself in through the initial period, building an innings, that sort of thing. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't release the handbrake the way I needed to. So the pressure of it got me as much as anything, and I don't mind saying that. I went back to state cricket and played the way I did, then England and played the way I did, I was able to release the pressure I couldn't at the end of my international career. That was one thing that changed.

	"If fast bowlers give you all they've got and you can manage to put it away in front of square hard off the middle of the bat, they're not going to bowl too many more there" © Getty Images  Enlarge

You couldn't fathom the decision to dump Simon Katich from the list of contracted players. Did you feel that among the selectors, media and public there were a lot of calls for you, Hussey and Katich to go without an understanding that there wasn't the talent underneath to replace you?
My view on selection is, you only ever make a change if it's going to make the team better. A lot of the changes we made didn't make the team better, and I don't care what anybody says. The coach [Tim Nielsen] going when he did didn't make the team better. I think a lot of the stuff that happened with the Argus review was premeditated stuff that was already in the pipeline, and they put this panel together to justify it. You can't tell me that didn't happen with Mickey Arthur, the fact he was in WA coaching. And Tim going when he did - we'd just won a series in Sri Lanka.

My meeting around the Argus review lasted less than an hour. I was dressed in a suit, prepared, notes. I thought I was going to be there all day, thrash everything out for six hours, get my opinions and views on everything. But they asked me a few questions, asked me who was accountable, and I was out. I said to James [Sutherland], "I need to have a chat to you outside." We did and it was like they didn't really want to hear it. They knew what they had to do, some of it had already started, and they didn't want to hear any more. That was disappointing.

Something else that was very important to your attitude was that you batted to win matches, to the exclusion of all else, certainly any personal ambition. There is a story of David Boon declaring on you on 94 not out in a Shield match and it really not mattering at all.
Absolutely, and back when I started playing for Tassie we didn't win too many games. We just had to try to set up a game.

I had only just found out we might be going to declare. David Saker was bowling with the second new ball and a ball or two before we declared, I ran down the wicket and hit him back over his head for six and thought, "I've got another over here to get a hundred", and Boonie's got his hand out the window waving me in. But I just ran off, got changed and ran back out.

Haydos with his 380 is an exception, but the reason we Australians didn't hold a lot of those individual records, especially during those glory days, was, we were trying to win the game. It didn't matter how many I got or Haydos or Lang got if we could get them quick and try to get 20 wickets to win the game.

Even really early at the academy, Rod sat us all down and said, "If you guys can't score 300 runs in a day, you may as well pick your bag up and jump on a plane and go home." That was the way I was brought up, scoring quick, playing with aggression and giving your team the best chance to win. I played 168 Tests and won well over 100 of them because we were able to play that way for most of the time.

As a player you were an outstanding batsman but also an outstanding batsman of and for your time. When Australian cricket was becoming dominant, the way you played suited that mindset and that time. The strength of the players around you gave you licence to play the way you did.
That reflects all of us. Gilly's the same. He was able to play the way he did down [at seven] on the back of what had happened. Even someone like Justin turned himself into the player he did with the confidence of the guys around him. He was looked at as a nicker and a nudger and someone who didn't have much talent, but if you look at how he played his last half-dozen years, he was brilliant. He'd score quicker than Haydos. That sort of confidence and trust in your mates around you is what we need to be able to build again now in this current team.

That's happened around the South African team now and was really evident in my last Test, the way they played after lunch on the second day, when Amla and Smith got 180 in a session, that's a team with total confidence in the rest of their mates. If you're ever worried about exposing someone, you can't play that way. They trusted each other that they could impose themselves on us and they did it. That's what we used to do.

	"That team we had, Gilly could've captained, I could've captained, they say Warney could have captained but I'm not sure. Haydos couldn't have been captain, Langer couldn't have been, Marto couldn't have been"

One of the fascinating things about the book is how you reflect on your earlier years. There were momentous things going on around you in Australian cricket but a lot of it passed you by as a young player making your way. There are a lot more guys like that now, and not as much leadership to take them through it.
I've been asked why we haven't got any leaders around Australian cricket at the moment, and to be honest I'm not sure we ever have. I just think there aren't a lot of leaders in the world or in sporting teams. There are a lot of guys who aren't meant to be that. If you went around to a lot of the rugby league or Aussie Rules teams, there wouldn't be a lot of guys in those sides who you'd think could lead.

That team we had, Gilly could've captained, I could've captained, they say Warney could have captained but I'm not sure he could have with all the other stuff off the field. On the field he might have seen the game really well, but I don't think he could have been captain. Haydos couldn't have been, Langer couldn't have been, Marto couldn't have been. So maybe there's not those leaders we always thought there were.

I always just tried to think about being a leader, no matter where I was at. If I was a young bloke in a team I thought I could be a leader just with energy, the way I train and trying to make myself a better fielder and player. Because I thought if someone else saw me doing that, they'd want to do it no matter how old they were. So when I came in the side and Mark Waugh was the best fielder, I was going to train harder every day to make sure I was better than him, and if I got better than him maybe he'd want to chase me. There's not a lot of leadership types around our team at the moment but I think that will grow. Steve Smith's grown, he's maturing well and has led NSW, he might be someone down the track who has got what it takes.

The qualities you need to have to lead have to be evident pretty early, don't they?
You can't manufacture it either, you've either got what it takes or you haven't. I'm a massive believer that leaders are born, not made or created. It's within you to worry about others first rather than yourself.