Are we celebrating the wrong leaders?

 Here are some examples of the action fallacy as defined by "the best leaders are those that generate the most noise, action, sensational activity in the most dramatic circumstances":

1. Claiming that a political leader is effective simply because they frequently make controversial statements or take divisive actions that generate a lot of media attention and public outcry. This confuses sensationalism with actual leadership qualities like sound judgment, vision, and the ability to unite people.
2. Arguing that a CEO is a great leader because they constantly shake up the company with dramatic reorganizations, high-profile firings, and splashy new initiatives. While such actions create a perception of activity, they do not necessarily translate into positive results or effective leadership.
3. Asserting that a military commander is skilled because they favor bold, risky maneuvers that create dramatic battlefield situations, regardless of whether those tactics achieve strategic objectives or result in excessive casualties.
4. Praising an activist as a great leader solely because they organize attention-grabbing protests, civil disobedience, and confrontational tactics, without evaluating whether their methods are ethical, legal, and effective at achieving their stated goals.
5. Judging the leadership of a sports coach primarily by how much they yell, argue with officials, and create emotionally-charged sideline scenes, rather than their ability to develop strategy, motivate players, and produce winning results.

In each case, the action fallacy occurs by equating leadership quality with the generation of noise, drama, and sensationalism, instead of directly assessing the leader's competence, decision-making, integrity, and ability to achieve positive outcomes through their actions.

Shiv Khera: On Becoming a Leader

 

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.

Niall Ferguson | Ukraine, Zelensky, Putin & China

 

How Brahmins can regain Leadership of India

 

Jordan Peterson's Guide to Speaking

 

Why do so many incompetent men win at work?

 Emma Jacobs in The FT


 “Women are better leaders,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. “I am not neutral on this. I am sexist in favour of women. Women have better people skills, more altruistic, better able to control their impulses. They outperform men in university at graduate and undergraduate levels.” 

This subject is explored in his new book, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). In it, he writes that “traits like overconfidence and self-absorption should be seen as red flags”, when, in fact, the opposite tends to happen. As Prof Chamorro-Premuzic puts it: “They prompt us to say: ‘Ah, there’s a charismatic fellow! He’s probably leadership material.’” 

It is this mistaken insistence that confidence equates to greatness that is the reason so many ill-suited men get top jobs, he argues. “The result in both business and politics is a surplus of incompetent men in charge, and this surplus reduces opportunities for competent people — women and men — while keeping the standards of leadership depressingly low.” 

This book is based on a Harvard Business Review blog of the same title which was published in 2013, and which elicited more feedback than any of his previous books or articles. He is currently professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, as well as being the “chief talent scientist” at Manpower Group and co-founder of two companies that deploy technological tools to enhance staff retention. This book builds on two of his professional interests: data and confidence. 

Too often, he argues, we use intuition rather than metrics to judge whether someone is competent. In his book he argues that confidence may well be a “compensatory strategy for lower competence”. The modern mantra to just believe in yourself is possibly foolish. Perhaps, he suggests, modesty is not false but an accurate awareness of one’s talents and limitations. 

The book’s title has been “too provocative” for many, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic tells me on the phone from Brooklyn, where he spends most of his time, juggling his teaching and corporate roles. “A lot of female leaders said they can’t endorse it as [they are] worried about looking like man-haters.” Some female colleagues feel depressed that his message is being heard because he is a man, whereas if it came from them it would be “dismissed”. Men criticise him for “virtue-signalling”. 

He makes a convincing case for a more modest style of leader, focused on the team rather than advancing their own careers. Angela Merkel is the “most boring and best leader” in politics, he says. In the corporate sphere, he picks Warren Buffett who, he says, started off as a finance geek and taught himself leadership skills. David Cameron, the former British prime minister, is cited as an example of misplaced confidence in a leader — he held a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, sure that he would win, an assurance that, as it turned out, was misplaced. 

A quiet leadership style is often overlooked as heads are turned by bravado and narcissism. “There is a cult of confidence,” says Prof Chamorro-Premuzic. In part this is because confidence is “easier to observe”. It is harder to discern whether someone is a good leader. “What we see is what we rely on, what we see is visible.” 

People “overrate their intuition”, he says. Too often it turns out to be “nepotistic, self-serving choices . . . most organisations don’t have data to tell you if the leader is good.” 

Those leaders who are celebrated for their volatility and short fuses, such as the late Apple boss Steve Jobs, might have succeeded despite, not because of, their personality defects, he argues. 

One common narrative holds that women are held back by a lack of confidence, yet studies show this to be a fallacy. Perhaps it would be better to say that they are less likely to overrate themselves. The book cites one study from Columbia University which found that men overstated their maths ability by 30 per cent and women by 15 per cent. 

It is also the case, he writes, that women are penalised for appearing confident: “Their mistakes are judged more harshly and remembered longer. Their behaviour is scrutinised more carefully and their colleagues are less likely to share vital information with them. When women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored.” 

“The fundamental role of self-confidence is not to be as high as possible,” he adds, “but to be in sync with ability.” 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic’s interest in leadership was nurtured while growing up in Argentina, a country that he describes as having had one terrible leader after another. He came from a pocket of Buenos Aires known as Villa Freud for its high concentration of psychotherapists (even his family dog had a therapist), so it was a natural step to enter the field of psychology. 

There are many observations in the book that posit women as the superior sex, for example, citing their higher emotional intelligence. Such biological essentialism has been contested, for example by Cordelia Fine in her book Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds. 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says describing such differences as “hard-wired” would be an “overstatement”. Nonetheless, he argues that men score higher for impulsivity, risk-taking, narcissism, aggression and overconfidence; while women do better on emotional intelligence, empathy, altruism, self-awareness and humility. 

The book’s central message, though, is not to make a case for preferential treatment for women, but rather to “elevate the standards of leadership”. We should be making it harder for terrible men to get to the top, rather than focusing solely on removing the hurdles for women. 

He makes the argument against setting quotas for women in senior positions, which, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says, can look like special pleading. Rather, he says: “We should minimise biases when it comes to evaluating leaders, rely less and less on human valuations and use performance data.” 

Raising the leadership game will boost the number of women in such positions, but it will also highlight talented but modest men who are typically overlooked. “There are many competent men who are being disregarded for leadership roles,” he says. “They don’t float hypermasculine leadership roles.”

BME teachers often given stereotypical roles in schools

Richard Adams in The Guardian

BME teachers say they face ‘microaggression’ in the staff room and low expectations from seniors. Photograph: Alamy



Black and Asian teachers in the UK say they are often saddled with stereotypical roles in schools and want more support from senior staff in handling incidents of racism, according to a survey.

The Runnymede Trust’s poll of more than 1,000 black and minority ethnic teachers found that they were most likely to be told to organise school events such as Black History Month, or tasked with behaviour responsibilities rather than being given more challenging teaching or leadership roles.

The survey’s authors said that black teachers in particular feared being labelled troublemakers or being viewed as “aggressive” if they challenged any decisions.

Zubaida Haque, a research associate at the Runnymede Trust, said: “Our survey found that BME teachers were not only overwhelmed with the mountain of paperwork but they are also beaten down by the everyday ‘microaggressions’ in the staff room and the low expectations and support by senior staff in their schools.

“This has led to BME teachers feeling undervalued, isolated and disillusioned with their careers. If BME and white pupils see BME teachers being treated unequally, this sends out unacceptable signals to the next generation. For this reason, both schools and the government must do everything in their power to tackle the barriers faced by BME teachers in schools.”

The survey was conducted for the National Union of Teachers annual conference, which starts on Friday in Cardiff.

The survey’s authors concluded that “institutional racism – often manifested in subtle and covert ‘microaggressions’ by senior staff – still plays a key part in the barriers to career progression for black teachers in many British primary and secondary schools”.

While Asian teachers reported “casual stereotypes” and Islamophobia from both staff and students, the authors said “it does suggest that the experience of racism is particularly insidious and persistent for black teachers in this study”.

In interviews conducted alongside the survey, teachers said that racist comments and attitudes from students were often not dealt with, although others reported a zero tolerance to racism from senior leadership.

Many of the teachers questioned were positive about their treatment, although those working at schools with few other black or minority ethnic staff reported the highest levels of dissatisfaction.

Several teachers said that the government’s Prevent strategy, aimed at tackling extremism in schools, placed an additional burden on Asian and Muslim teachers.

One black British secondary school teacher told the researchers: “Students feel they can be blatantly racist, and there are no consequences for them. These extremist views are not covered in the Prevent agenda because they are not seen as extremism.”

Some 60% of those surveyed reported that they were considering leaving the profession altogether, while more than half said their school was not a welcoming environment for BME children.

Kevin Courtney, the NUT’s general secretary, said: “This report shows us the cost of the gap between the proportion of BME teachers and BME pupils, which is getting wider because diversity in teaching is not keeping pace with pupil demographics. Alongside a proper strategy to recruit and retain enough teachers, the government needs a credible strategy for attracting sufficient BME teachers.”

How to get People to Follow You

Simon Sinek interview

What is Strategic Thinking

Ron Carucci in Harvard Business Review


It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.

How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?

In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.

Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.

Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.

Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
 

Unfortunately, for many executives, the connection between their role and the strategic contribution they should make is not so obvious. As quoted in Horwath’s study, Harvard Business School professor David Collis says, “It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.” He also cites Roger Martin’s research, which found that 43% of managers cannot state their own strategy. Executives with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction. In some cases, shedding the collection of bad habits that have consumed how they embody their role will be their greatest challenge to embodying strategic thinking.

Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.

This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.

For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.

Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.


Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.

That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.

To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.

Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.

Labour has rediscovered its soul under Jeremy Corbyn. If he goes, so do I

Dan Iles in The Guardian


 
Jeremy Corbyn addresses a ‘Keep Corbyn’ rally at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images



Before Jeremy Corbyn, I would never have dreamed of joining a mainstream political party. Brought up in Wales in a progressive humanist family, my politics was totally alien to the endless parade of shiny careerist politicians who ran the show. My parents had long since torn up their Labour membership over the Iraq war and I was resigned to a political identity on the left without a party. To me and many of my contemporaries Labour was a party without a soul, whose leadership had poisoned the party with its blinkered pro-business dogma and their illegal wars.

But Corbyn changed all that: his distinctly socialist approach based on principled politics inspired me and thousands of others to come in from the political wilderness and join a party that we previously distrusted. I found myself and many members of my family, friends and colleagues suddenly enthusiastic and full of hope for the future. There was still the huge challenge of defeating the Tories ahead of us, but at least that challenge finally meant something. No more putting a cross in a box next to the lesser of two evils.

And, yes, the last nine months have been bumpy. Corbyn’s leadership has been undermined from the start by an influential ring of MPs on the right of the party who were never going to accept his mandate. His team had to make a fresh start, isolated in Westminster away from the social movements that backed him and without the polished political machine that had furnished the previous leadership. And yet despite this, we have seen a whole number of successes: a huge rise in membership, four mayoral posts, the victory in the Lords on tax credits and defending disabled people against cuts to PIP payments, to name a few.

But instead of focusing on his policies, the leaders of the recent Labour coup want to attack Corbyn’s personal qualities. They say that he doesn’t have what it takes to lead the party. But I disagree. While his speech-making abilities are not perfect and he’s far from the machiavellian politician that we have grown accustomed to, Corbyn is a man of ideas – something that the party up until now has been lacking. And what actually is leadership? Because if leadership means being a person of integrity who makes time for the marginalised, who inspires those alienated from the political process, and who isn’t afraid to speak uncomfortable truths, then Corbyn shows leadership in bucketloads.

I come at this from a standpoint of someone who voted remain. Corbyn was right to take a nuanced approach on the EU referendum. I believe Corbyn persuaded 60% of Labour’s supporters to vote remain because he didn’t ignore people’s concerns with the EU. By admitting that the EU is not without its faults and then demanding that we should stay in to reform it (from the left) he was able to bypass the binary claims of the two main referendum campaigns. People voted leave because they felt abandoned by politics and scared about immigration.

These structural issues haven’t just appeared in the last nine months of Corbyn’s leadership. But I think many felt his defence of immigration and his determination to turn the debate towards austerity was refreshing at a time when the leave campaign was openly whipping up racism and xenophobia.

If Corbyn resigns, a move to the right in Labour is inevitable. And the left will be locked out of the party for a decade as the centre of the party pulls up the drawbridge to parliamentary nominations. With this I not only lose a party (so soon after finding it) but the left will lose a strong agent in the fight for a progressive exit of the EU. The UK faces a bonfire of workers’ rights, financial regulation and environmental protections as it’s torn from Europe. Without Corbyn we face being locked into neoliberal rules for the next century.
But this isn’t about Corbyn. Nine months ago I and so many others were inspired back into a party that had refound its soul. Labour cannot be a party of airbrushed professionals. If it has any hope of achieving power it needs to be linked to a mass movement. The membership and unions are where the Labour party gets its strength. They are what sets them apart from the Tories. And for MPs to choose to ignore them now could be one of the biggest mistakes in the party’s history.

This is not Labour MPs vs Corbyn. They’re at war with party members

Diane Abbott in The Guardian

My colleagues should have been holding the Tories to account for the Brexit vote. Instead they’ve unleashed self-serving havoc on their own party
 

Labour supporters show their support for Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament Square earlier this week. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters


A swirling red mist has descended over the eyes of many Labour MPs. It is a mist that makes them blind to how their activities look to the world outside the Westminster village. If they don’t like Jeremy Corbyn (and despite their protestations to the contrary they give every appearance of not doing so) then they always had the option of a leadership challenge under the rule book. It could have been conducted in an orderly, perhaps low-key fashion, at least until parliament went into recess in just three weeks’ time. The aim would have been to try to concentrate on bringing the country together in a time of great peril after the Brexit vote. And it would have been important in these early days for the entire parliamentary party to focus on holding the Tories to account.

Instead Labour MPs chose to stage a blood-stained three-ring circus. Instead of putting their energies into fighting the Tories, colleagues have been concentrating on orchestrating waves of MPs – whom no one has ever heard of – into resigning from jobs that nobody knew they had. Colleagues could have been providing leadership against the resurgent racism that so many of their constituents are terrified by.

Instead Labour MPs have spent time in huddles with their fellow inhabitants of the Westminster bubble, lobby correspondents. These journalists, supposed political experts, did not see the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon coming last summer and have never supported him. Accordingly they are now using their columns to tell him to walk away. Colleagues have contrived a “vote of no confidence” that has absolutely no basis in the rule book. There was no notice. It was tabled on Monday and the vote held the following day. No institution would run an important ballot in this way. And it was a secret ballot.
All this was necessary because some Labour MPs expressly did not want any time to consult with ordinary party members. On the contrary they were terrified that their members might actually find out how they voted. Hence the haste and the secrecy. But the climax of all this was Monday’s parliamentary Labour party (PLP) meeting. MP after MP got up to attack Jeremy Corbyn in the most contemptuous terms possible, pausing only to text their abuse to journalists waiting outside. A non-Corbynista MP told me afterwards that he had never seen anything so horrible and he had felt himself reduced to tears. Nobody talked about Jeremy Corbyn’s politics. There was only one intention: to break him as a man.

This attempt to hound Jeremy Corbyn out of the leadership has been planned for months and was entirely outside the rules. Blaming him for the Brexit vote was just a pretext. The truth is that Jeremy travelled thousands of miles mobilising Labour voters. Nearly two-thirds of Labour voted to remain.

If David Cameron had been able to persuade a similar proportion of his Tories to vote for remain, we would still be in the EU. But colleagues went for lynch mob tactics because they didn’t actually want a leadership election with Jeremy on the ballot. Their fear is that he will win. Which brings us to the heart of the matter.

This is not the PLP versus Jeremy Corbyn; this is the PLP versus the membership. It is the inhabitants of the Westminster bubble versus the ordinary men and women who make up the party in the country.

Now, finally, after a hugely destructive attempt to drive Jeremy out of office, his enemies are poised to do what they have struggled to avoid. A formal leadership challenge is imminent. Hopefully the wider Labour party will now begin to leave behind the hysteria that has engulfed the PLP these past few days. Once again party members will be asked what sort of party they want to be and what sort of leadership they want. It can be imagined that they will not look kindly on those who have unleashed the utterly self-serving havoc of the past few days.

Why Virat Kohli has to rid Indian cricket of bad habits

Suresh Menon on BBC website

In cricket, as in any sport, there are two kinds of mistakes.

The bad mistake arises out of confused thinking, lack of focus and a poor understanding of tactics. The good mistake, on the other hand, implies a well-thought out plan gone wrong or an attempt to force the issue backfiring.

Increasingly as his captaincy progressed, India's most experienced and successful Test captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni kept making bad mistakes. Giving his bowlers one-over spells, for instance. Or wasting a fielder at leg gully.

Good fortune and hunches can take you only so far - every captain in the game's history has taken chances with an inexplicable bowling change or an illogical batting line-up and surprised everybody by winning. But that cannot be the basis for captaincy.

Positive attitude

Virat Kohli, at 26, younger than Dhoni by seven years, is not yet tactically sound but has two important things going for him: a positive attitude and enormous self-belief.

Not since Tiger Pataudi has an Indian captain been willing to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory like Kohli in the December 2014 Adelaide Test against Australia.

The essential difference between the past and future of Indian cricket is that while Dhoni was clearly on his way down, Kohli can only improve.

He will face many of the problems Dhoni did - a poor bowling attack, especially abroad, the pressures of being on the field for beyond 50 overs or a single day, the hope that victories in the shorter format will make up for their absence in Tests.

India had caved in without a fight in 13 of 17 Tests abroad before the last Australian tour. They lost the 14th in Adelaide, where Kohli led for the first time, but the texture of the defeat was different. The Anna Karenina Principle applied. "All happy families are alike," wrote Tolstoy in his novel, "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Similarly, all victories are alike but defeats are wildly different.

Kohli is younger than Dhoni by seven years

India went down in a blaze of glory, attempting to make 364 runs in a day and coming startlingly close.

Playing for a draw was never an option, said Kohli, perhaps aware that India had the batting to win the Test, but not to draw it. Still, there was promise of a change in the standard narrative. Optimism is infectious, and it is easy to catch it off a captain who is full of it.

Kohli projected that optimism and spirit right from the days when he led India to the Under-19 World Cup win. He was marked out as future captain.

The IPL has a lot to answer for. But in Kohli's case, it actually helped.

Finding a balance

After initially tasting its many enticements, Kohli settled down. In his corner was his team Royal Challengers Bangalore coach Ray Jennings, who told him that the Under-19 triumph would soon be forgotten, and that he would be judged as an adult cricketer. Anil Kumble helped to channelise and focus all that energy. And he was made captain in anticipation of the bigger job to come.

While Kohli's captaincy in the one-day format has been aggressive and focused on winning, in Tests he will have to learn - as his bowlers too will - the virtues of patience and long-term planning.

Indian cricket will have to find a balance between Dhoni's tendency to let things drift and Kohli's impatience with uneventful overs and sessions. There is an element of fishing in the longer format. You put out your bait and wait. Kohli will have to learn the waiting game.

Whether it is a reflection of the times, a consequence of playing too many matches in the shorter formats of the game or a question of temperament, India's cricket is currently characterised by an impatience that makes them perform well below potential.

Bowlers are in a hurry to take wickets or simply run through their overs, batsmen seem to have forgotten how to play session-to-session. Kohli will have to rid the team of bad habits.

While many believe that a captain is only as good as his team, the best ones have inspired their teams to play above themselves. Pataudi for one, Mike Brearley or another.

Kohli's advantage is that he is the best batsman in the side, and there are no immediate candidates for his job. In other words, he will be left alone to develop his full potential as captain, unhampered by the need to constantly watch his back - an occupational hazard with Indian captains of the past.

He has it in him to stamp his name on an era.

ECB and Pietersen - Inside the Turtle Tank

by Tregaskis in The Full toss • May 5, 2014

I know, I know. We’ve done the KP thing to death now. But we simply had to publish this very insightful article by Tregaskis. It takes a broad perspective and frames events somewhat differently to the norm. If only more mainstream cricket journalists had taken a similar approach ….

I recall attending a conference a few years back when the guest speaker opened with an old joke – “Asked how many people worked in his organisation, a CEO replied “about half of them.” The conference was about motivation and engagement in the workplace, and Paul Downton’s interventions on the subject during the unveiling of Peter Moores as the England cricket head coach struck me as something that deserved a second look.

Downton said there were no specific issues surrounding Pietersen’s sacking – “I arrived in Sydney on 31 December and it was clear from Andy Flower that there were two issues we were facing. He [Flower] was uncertain about his future – and what were we going to do about Kevin? … I watched every ball of [the fifth Test in] Sydney, and I have never seen anyone so disengaged from what was going on. What you need from a senior player is backing and support and everybody working together, but we had got to a stage where that was no longer the case.”

With a mounting cast of injured, retired and disaffected players, Downton’s demand for the backing and support of Pietersen raised a rather awkward question – what kind of backing and support does the ECB gives its players? In balancing the pursuit of financial gain and the well-being of its players, where is the ECB positioned – Primark sweatshop or John Lewis Partnership. How does its record on connectivity stack up?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an organisation lacking effective leadership will experience an endless stream of crises, problems and dropped balls. An analogy is sometimes made to turtle farmers, who buy the baby reptiles and put them in small tanks. The turtles stop growing in response to the limited living space. All the potential for growth is stunted. It is the same in command-and-control hierarchies like the ECB, especially ones headed by a Hippo, where the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion overrides creative input in favour of gut feeling, pride and prejudice.

Enlightened organizations understand that if they are to retain talent and optimise performance, they need to engage with their workforce. Leadership is not about demanding connectivity but creating an environment in which employees can thrive. The best organisations do not see their employees simply as interchangeable cogs in a mechanism for delivering a product or service. They see them as the most important assets of the business; the best may even be a million-dollar asset.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, of Gulf War fame, knew a thing or two about leadership. He said: “I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals, each of whom has aspirations, each of whom wants to live, each of whom wants to do good.”

Russell Jackson, in the Guardian the other day, describes the job done by Darren Lehmann in transforming a dud and dysfunctional Australian team by “creating the environment in which this collection of players could thrive as individuals, take pleasure in each other’s performance and quickly turn themselves into such a dominant outfit.”

There are countless measures for assessing whether a business is engaging with its employees. For instance, does management show it values its employees? Is an employee’s input shown to be important? Do employees feel free to voice their ideas and opinions? Are leaders as quick to praise an accomplishment as they are to criticize a failing? Is the employee’s position secure? So how does the ECB measure up as an enlightened employer?

The list of recent players feeling badly treated by ECB management includes Nick Compton, Michael Carberry, Monty Panesar, Jonny Bairstow, Steven Finn and Kevin Pietersen. I don’t suppose Ashley Giles is feeling particularly well valued at the moment. That is the spine of a pretty decent-looking England test team. As Mike Selvey might have said in a parallel universe, with this many disaffected players around, something must be wrong with the way they are treated.

Kevin Pietersen is a high-profile victim of the ECB command-and-control regime. His is a complex case study because he is both the most successful England batter of his generation and also one of its most neurotically demanding. Pietersen is hard wired to seek achievement and perfection alongside recognition and affection. These are personal and emotional goals that drive most professional cricketers, but in Pietersen’s case they are magnified exponentially because of his brilliance and particular psychological needs.

Disengagement is a recognised coping mechanism displayed by people suffering anxiety through, say, feeling unsafe, unloved, and undervalued. Steven Pye in his Guardian blog on the 1981 Ashes series observed that the concept of Botham being on trial was not helped when he was made test captain on a match-by-match basis only. It was, wrote Pye, far from ideal and unlikely to improve Botham’s ailing form with that amount of tension hanging over him.

Botham was a beast every bit as big as Pietersen, yet he crumbled under the pressure, till rescued by the man-management skills of Mike Brearley. Downton should know – he played in the first 1981 test! Pietersen has been on trial for half his international career; how safe can he have felt? He had to keep his head down. If he had looked up he would have been stabbed in the eye by the sword of Damocles poised perpetually and perilously above him.

Type “Pietersen, unloved” into Google and endless headlines come up like this from the Telegraph in 2010 – “Unloved Cricketer Kevin Pietersen blah blah” and this from the Mail in 2014 – “Gifted but Unloved KP Never Belonged.” Being Kevin Pietersen can’t have been easy in a press environment that targeted him with years of personal antipathy. His wealth, flamboyance and outward self-belief marked him not as a talented and successful individual but as unclubable. He was a marked man whose failures were always embraced with more joy than his successes.

The Pietersen charge sheet lists three principal felonies. First, his removal of Moores (#1) as head coach; secondly, text-gate; thirdly, his disengagement during the Sydney test. On each of these occasions, it can be argued that Pietersen was simply exhibiting recognised behaviour patterns commonly seen in victims of stress-ridden, high-anxiety, alienating environments.

Going back five years or so, it was clear that Moores (#1) did not possess the competence to bridge the gap between county and international cricket. He was unable to connect with senior professionals and failed to progress the team in terms of meaningful results. Michael Vaughan has described how Peter Moores operated first time around – “The team is starting to get irritated by the new management regime – being told what to do and treated like school kids. Peter loves talking and having the last word.”

Vaughan gives as an example an occasion when the team was asked to write down “100 things” that would improve the team. This tripe comes from the same coaching-by-numbers manual employed by Mickey Arthur, the Aussie head coach to be forever remembered as the architect of homework-gate. By all accounts, the headmasterish Andy Flower was more Alcock than Powlett-Jones, more Chief Superintendent Bright than Endeavour Morse. His prescriptive, micro-managing style offered little room for players to voice ideas or opinions of their own, and extended little forgiveness to those that did. The turtle tank was a small, growth-retarding environment under both Moores (#1) and Flower.

This was never just a Pietersen-Moores conflict. Vaughan, Strauss and Collingwood all doubted Moores and his methods. Pietersen, in circumstances not dissimilar to the dressing-room meeting some five years later, was invited to present his strategy for improving England’s performances and in a showdown with Giles Clarke made it clear that his vision for improvement did not include Moores. Pietersen may or may not have given a him-or-me ultimatum but the conflict was leaked to the press. Dennis Amiss, vice-chairman of the ECB, confirmed that Pietersen was not responsible for the leak, though the leak pretty much ensured the matter could not be resolved behind closed doors. It could only have come from within the ECB.

Pietersen’s position was not unexpected or unreasonable. That is why Moores was sacked. Moores’s incompetency was not Pietersen’s fault. Pietersen resigned before he was sacked himself, but his departure flowed not from inappropriate behaviour towards Moores (#1), but because the ECB felt uncomfortable with investing this captain with so much power. Fast-forward five years and the ECB’s decision-making is now built around supporting the captain regardless of his faultlines. Cook is arguably the worst but most powerful captain in a generation. It is hard to see any consistency in the ECB’s ethical baseline.

Pietersen’s tactical mistake was seeking to have Flowers removed as batting coach at the same time. He did so, presumably, because Moores  (#1) and Flowers were close and shared a common coaching philosophy. In those terms, it made sense for the ECB to let both coaches go and appoint someone with a completely different approach to player motivation. The appointment of Flower as head coach will, for Pietersen, have been a hammer blow and the worse of all possible scenarios.

A series defeat to India in winter 2008 triggered the tumultuous double sacking. Over the next three and a half years, Pietersen must have incubated a deep and growing distrust of the ECB. His unfair dismissal as captain, the embarrassing return to the ranks, the devious leak, the regular fines over innocuous Tweets. He was poorly treated, undervalued and picked on for meaningless misdemeanours. Flower’s appointment as head coach will have done nothing to quell Pietersen’s neurotic tendencies and by all accounts the two men made do with a distant relationship that was awkward and good-times dependent.

Flower comes across as a manager long on memory and short on forgiveness, and Pietersen would have been justified in thinking that revenge when it came would be a rasgoola over a vindaloo. While Pietersen’s ashes were not exactly released into the Ganges, January 2009 marked the moment when the ECB first set Pietersen adrift. Even so, Andrew Strauss confessed that he admired how graciously Pietersen behaved, in impossible circumstances, towards management, the players and to Strauss himself as the new captain. Pietersen continued to make an MVP contribution to England’s elevation to No 1 test team in the world.

This was the context in which the hokey-cokey central contract discussions were taking place, with Pietersen wanting to play in the IPL, his natural milieu, and the ECB telling him his contract said no. So Pietersen decided to retire from ODIs, to concentrate on tests and T20, but the ECB again said no. It was an inflexible no, a prescriptive no, a no with knobs on. Every other player in the world of Pietersen’s considerable calibre was playing in the IPL. A cricketer has a short career and needs to make the most of his earning power. The international stars of world cricket apart, it was hardly fair that players like Napier, Mascarenhas, Shah and Bopara could earn big bucks in India while exponentially better players on central contracts could not.

There were tectonic forces at play here, between a command-and-control behemoth and the evolution of the cricketing market. Suddenly, natural selection had become an indefinable concept. It may play out badly again this season if Morgan fails to make the test team after “choosing” to showcase his skills in a damp and cold English April instead of the warmth of a dollar-rich six weeks in India.

Meanwhile, in the dressing room, Pietersen caught wind of a parody Twitter account called KP Genius set up by a wag, who turned out to be a mate of Stuart Broad. The tweets set out to ridicule Pietersen and his perceived ego and hubris. There were a number of followers in the team and Pietersen believed that the tweets were being fed by leaks from the England camp. At a time when Pietersen felt that he was being straitjacketed by the ECB negotiators, the KP Genius shenanigans must have removed any refuge he thought he had in the dressing room. The press largely laughed this off as a light-hearted jape that pricked the thin skin of the resident diva.

Andrew Strauss tells us that Pietersen’s in-out-shake-it-all-about negotiations meant he had major bridge building to do with his teammates, without ever explaining why. This was a hostile environment in which Pietersen was required to go about his work. He was being alienated inside and outside the dressing room, with unsympathetic noises off from the press. Yet while Strauss’s man-management skills were in sleep mode, and the ECB were micro-managing his life, Pietersen went about his day job scoring 149 in the second test against South Africa in one of his most audacious knocks ever.

With cricket known as the divorce sport, it did not need Pamela Stephenson Connolly to point out that a high performing talent alienated in his work environment may well seek friendship and approbation elsewhere. It was, after all, a loveless marriage. Pietersen chose de Villiers and Steyn, both IPL teammates, as his tit-bits on the side. Pietersen got it wrong. It was inappropriate, insensitive and dumb. He should have exercised more self-discipline. But this was to ask him to rise above the provocation and disconnecting tendencies of the ECB and the dressing room.

His actions were professionally unforgivable but emotionally understandable. This was an employee, treated badly by management, having a big moan around the water cooler. There has never been a proper debate about the proportionality of the ECB’s response to Pietersen’s texts. Like the 50 misdemeanours, they have never been published, so they could be something or nothing. At a guess, barely three people in the world knew the content, but there was a great deal of spinning against Pietersen. Sub-editors crafted headlines and journalists pursued a narrative based on threadbare facts that fed an agenda.

Fast-forward two years and the ECB continues to spin a miserable line of empty cares and empty fables. Andrew Strauss has accepted that he does not think Pietersen tipped the wink on the skipper’s batting frailties. Pietersen was a victim of another leak, and once again this prevented the matter being handled behind closed doors. The press seized on the matter with rather less hilarity than it did the KP Genius affair. Strauss was hurt, distraught, let down. Not emotions permitted to Pietersen.

What followed was the most pernicious phase in the ECB’s dismantling of Kevin Pietersen’s career. Text-gate was spun to a frenzy. Pietersen had to publicly mea hisculpa before a schadenfreude press, self-flagellate before Matins, prostrate himself before a system that wanted to bring him down a peg or four. This was not a seamless rejoining with the team in the way Shane Watson and Mitchell Johnson took up their natural place in the Australian team after homework-gate. This was an ugly re-integration with Frankenstein stitching. It was a pejorative “re-integration” tattooed on the miscreant’s forehead in indelible glow-in-the-dark ink. This was three strikes and you are out. This was Flower’s cold-hearted revenge.

From this point, Pietersen’s locker was redesigned to feature a naughty step. It appears disproportionate and a further mismanagement of a key asset. It would have been easier and more financially beneficial for Pietersen to have thrown in the towel and exchanged his flannels for the blue pajamas of the Dehli Daredevils he knew. Yet he swallowed his enormous pride and stayed. He wanted to play for England and had his eye on the 2015 Ashes and reaching 10,000 runs.

It would have been better for the ECB to sack Pietersen and make a clean break. Its half-hearted decision to re-integrate him under probation-like terms simply widened an existing schism and reinforced the detached status of its star batter. So far removed was Pietersen from the heartbeat of the team, he would have needed a 50-foot stethoscope to detect its pulse.

Over the course of the winter, as a buoyant Australia dismantled England like Chittagong ship breakers, the hidden fractures and stress points in the England cricketing vessel were brutally exposed. Faultlines in management and leadership were revealed as success fell away, and these led to the two key incidents that finally did for Pietersen.

First up was the infamous team meeting held at the tail end of the Melbourne test. The team had lost the first four tests with no strategy for arresting a slide into 2006-like ignominy. The most common understanding is that captain Cook and vice-captain Prior called the meeting in an attempt to wrest responsibility for the team away from a suffocating management and back to the players. Flower, Gooch and Saker were out of this loop. The agenda must have written itself – how does the team salvage some pride from the wreckage? The terms of reference were written in the blood of brothers – what was said in the dressing room stayed in the dressing room.

Only it didn’t. The loop turned out to be a Möbius strip with Flower not informed and totally informed both at the same time. In a reprise of events in 2009, Pietersen was asked for his input and gave it. Never shy, given a platform to express his views, these were likely brutal, on the nail and lacking in diplomacy.

I doubt his thoughts on Flower had changed that much over five years, any more than Flower’s thoughts had adjusted to Pietersen’s non-conformity and hubris. Hell, the team was in crisis, he was a senior professional and he was asked. I wonder how much pent-up frustration and resentment spilled out during the few minutes that he held the conch?

It turned out that the sanctity of the dressing room was as semi-permeable as the current confidentiality agreement. Someone betrayed Pietersen to Flower, who seemed more concerned with Pietersen for his unreconstructed views than with Cook for holding a secret meeting. Clearly the captain and vice-captain thought the team was disconnected from management in some critical degree. Pietersen did not call the meeting. He had no power to enforce his views. His was one of maybe two dozen opinions. If he carried the meeting, then he had a point. If he didn’t, then what was the problem? According to Tremlett, he was just honest.

When the ECB’s Orwellian Ministry of Truth justifies Pietersen’s exclusion on the grounds of trust, those outside its totalitarian regime might just marvel at how may times Pietersen has been leaked against, ridiculed, betrayed, humiliated and alienated over the past half dozen years by those in a leadership role. His tormentors have been aided by a compliant, embedded press, including a cabal of former low-to-mid ranking test bowlers, drunk on their proximity to power and privilege. These have lickspittled and polished the ECB’s tampered narrative and undermined the character of the South-African-born Pietersen, as they prefer to call him.

The second incident was probably fairly innocuous but for being unhappily adjacent to the first. Two days before the final test, Cook decided that the best strategy in the face of Ashes annihilation was to concentrate on fitness levels. Pietersen argued that the time would be better spent focused on sharpening skills in the nets. Cook was so on the wrong side of the argument that it barely deserves analysis. A day of bleep tests and squat thrusts would do diddly squat for fitness levels in a test match just 48 hours away, but it definitely risked player fatigue and stiffness. It was no more a fix than singing a happy song when your parachute fails to open. It might take your mind off the problem for a while, but it would not stop you hurtling towards oblivion. I doubt Pietersen was any more impressed that his attempts to manage a dodgy knee were being compromised by Cook’s desperate embrace of his mentor’s obsessive work ethic.

It has been reported that Flower observed the exchange and called Pietersen into his study and admonished him for questioning the captain and for the views he expressed in the players’ meeting. Whether or not Flower used the occasion specifically to call time on Pietersen’s future in the team, Pietersen must have known that the gossamer thread that held the sword of Damocles precariously at bay was about to be cut. Flower crushed Pietersen’s hopes of clinging to the wreckage by indicting him with a third strike.  In these circumstances, it would have required ninja turtle fortitude to avoid an overwhelming emotional disassociation from the dementors who had sucked all happiness from him.

So when Pietersen walked to the crease for the second time during the fifth and final test in Sydney he must have known that short of scoring a match-winning 300, nothing would prevent his walk back to the pavilion from being the last time he would wear an England shirt. Caught Bailey bowled Harris for three was not a career-rescuing performance.

Whistling a happy tune in the dressing room, far from being an expression of disinterest, was a classic way of coping with the stress and anxiety brought about by the situation. This was not just the shoulder-dropping, hip-holding, foot-staring, head-shaking, confidence-sapping, mind-scrambling dejection suffered by the rest of the team following the humiliation of an Ashes whitewash. For Pietersen, this was also the apotheosis of five years of ECB alienation – the end of his international career and the destruction of his legacy.

If the watching Paul Downton had never seen anyone so disengaged from what was going on, he should have been watching with a wider angled lens. Neither can he have been paying much attention when he played with Geoff Boycott. Nor can he have been in receptive mood as his captain, Mike Brearley, quietly went about his work as one of the great sports leaders of his generation. Imagine Alastair Cook trying to lead a team featuring Boycott and Botham!

The bubble in which England cricketers are confined is characterised by few of the markers that identify an enlightened and connecting working environment. There are other rather different markers at play. The relentless playing schedule leading to inevitable homesickness, burnout and career-ending injuries. Players taking to the field carrying niggles and half-healed strains, kept together with cortisone injections and vinegar and brown paper. 

A work environment in which Jonathan Trott felt compelled to keep mum and carry on while the team doctor allowed the batter’s mental state to unravel before his eyes.

The philosophy of consistent selection, so successful during England’s upward trajectory, transitioned to a more random pick-and-drop policy, leaving in-and-out players confused, under-confident, undervalued and fearful of failure. It could be argued that over the winter, the entire team underwent a mental disintegration, but in spite of having a psychologist among the backroom staff, this was missed or most likely ignored. The word coming out of Lord’s is that Paul Downton intends downgrading the role of Mark Bawden, the team psychologist, which seems a backward step in terms of modern sports welfare.

There is a fascinating piece by Dylan Cleaver in the New Zealand Herald back in October 2013, so a few months before Jonathan Trott’s breakdown, exploring why cricket is widely known as the divorce (sometimes suicide) sport. Quoting Mike Brearley, he observes that cricket is an “uniquely dangerous environment … there are unique pressures associated with the sport that lead, not necessarily to suicidal thoughts and depression, but towards situations that require a reservoir of mental wellness to cope.”

There are big themes at play in the Pietersen story – loyalty and betrayal, truth and deception, justice and punishment, money and personal development, with a dramatis personae to match. But on the ECB’s central charge against Pietersen of disconnection and untrustworthiness, there is a compelling case for saying physician, heal thyself. In a sport where management should have a heightened responsibility to engage with its employees and look after their well-being, the ECB has shown itself to be inward looking, self-serving and ridden with sinecure appointments and insincere platitudes. It is more connected to its financial interests than the interests of its players. Over the past four months it has exhibited an arrogant disregard for large swathes of its fan base, dismissing lay supporters as outside cricket. Like Kevin Pietersen and others, we have all been disconnected.

With casualties in the aftermath of the worst tour in cricketing history confined to a couple of blokes who had least responsibility for it, and the ECB reinforcing its inbred cosiness in the shuffling of its management team, the appointment of Moores (#2) suggests there is little prospect of the turtles getting a bigger tank any time soon. In April 2007, Mike Brearley said the appointment of Moores (#1) smacked of favouritism. I’m afraid the 2014 appointment of Moores (#2) and retention of Cook smacks of turtle-ism.