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Showing posts with label management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label management. Show all posts

Tuesday 22 November 2022

Management lessons from the next World Cup winners






On December 18th the winners of the football World Cup in Qatar will lift the famous golden trophy. Several rituals will then unfold. The final entry will be made on fans’ wall charts. Pundits will share their lists of players of the tournament. In the victors’ home country, cars will clog the streets and drivers will lean on their horns. And in the days that follow, leadership coaches will post drivel about the secrets to be learned from the successful manager. 

But why wait till the end of the World Cup to find out how Hansi Flick of Germany, Didier Deschamps of France or whoever actually wins did it? Why even hang around for the start of the tournament on November 20th? Before a whistle has been blown and a ball has been kicked, here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to what bosses everywhere can learn from the winning manager (wm). All you have to do is delete anything that doesn’t quite fit the narrative.

Team spirit. The wm instilled a tight bond among the team by showing them unwavering support/creating an atmosphere of fear. He was known for putting his arms around the shoulders/hands around the necks of underperforming players. His oxytocin-releasing bearhugs/scarlet-faced rages ensured that a group of elite performers relaxed/did not relax. “He showed us love/utter contempt and we all responded to that,” said a man in shorts from the winning team. The power of empathy/barely suppressed terror will surely not be lost on managers in the workplace.

Data. The wm obsessively immerses himself in data/does not know how to turn on a computer. In the build-up to each game he took each player through a detailed analysis of his opposite number/encouraged everyone to play table tennis. After the matches were over he watched videos of each game/Netflix. “He planned everything in minute detail/told us to just go out there and have fun,” said another happy man in shorts. In the office, as on the pitch, rigorous analysis/gut instinct is often the difference between success and failure.

Purpose. The choice of Qatar as a venue for the World Cup was mired in controversy from the start; questions have swirled about corruption, human rights and worker safety. The wm turned these concerns to his advantage/seemed totally unaware of them. He made it clear that the team were ambassadors for the sport/only there to win. His decision to always wear a rainbow-coloured wristband/refuse to answer any questions about the host country was incredibly astute. “He gave us a much-needed sense of purpose,” recalled one of his players. “Only an absolute cretin would have wondered what we were in Qatar to do,” said another.

Stars. The wm built his whole team around/eschewed the very idea of a star player. “A superstar like Neymar/Harry Maguire/someone else has to be given freedom to express himself/realise that the team comes first,” he said afterwards. Every organisation will have its own outstanding performers. The clear message from this World Cup is that they should sometimes/never be given special treatment.

There is an alternative way of thinking about the lessons for corporate managers from an event like the World Cup: there are none. First, the jobs are wholly different. Football managers don’t need to change strategy because the market is shifting (“we will use our excellence in the field of spherical objects to diversify into basketball”). Corporate bosses do not tend to get customer feedback from people making hand gestures in a crowd. Nor do their career prospects usually rely on the split-second decision-making of a bunch of talented 20-somethings.

Second, all leadership writing depends on the dubious premise that an entity was successful because a person was in charge, rather than while they were in charge. The “halo effect” is the name given to the tendency for a positive impression in one area to lead to a positive impression in another. But just as a high-flying firm does not necessarily signal a world-beating ceo, so a World Cup winners’ medal does not mean the manager was a genius.

Just one, Vittorio Pozzo of Italy, has ever successfully defended the World Cup title; only eight countries have ever lifted the trophy in the history of the tournament. Whoever ends up celebrating on December 18th, the pool of people available for selection, the role of luck and the quality of the competition will have mattered at least as much as the person at the top. That is one management lesson worth learning.

Never mind that the tournament hasn’t started yet writes Bartleby in The Economist


Monday 26 November 2018

The difficulty in managing things that cannot easily be measured

Andrew Hill in The FT 

If there were a tournament for Peter Drucker’s best-known dictum then “what gets measured gets managed” would make it to the finals, even though nobody seems able to pin the saying directly to the Viennese-born management thinker. Repeated misattribution has gilded the truism and propelled it into the Management Maxim Hall of Fame. 


En route, unfortunately, the assumption has taken root that everything can be measured. Worse, anything that does not submit to mathematical evaluation need not be managed, or is simply unmanageable. 

This is the most prominent example of a widespread phenomenon: the tendency to pay more attention to hard facts, targets, outcomes and initiatives than to soft factors that are equally, or sometimes more, important. 

Big data is hard. Culture is soft. Financial goals are hard. Non-financial targets are soft. Gender quotas are hard. Workplace inclusivity is soft. “Stem” subjects are hard. Humanities are soft. (Drucker himself described management as a liberal art.) Machines are hard — very hard. Humans are all too soft. 

The Harvard Business Review tries to reconcile the hard-soft tension annually in its ranking of the “best-performing CEOs in the world”, measured over their whole tenure. Jeff Bezos wins every time. Except he doesn’t, because in 2015, the publication changed its methodology and added soft environmental, social and governance factors to its hard financial assessment, knocking Amazon’s founder from first to 87th. Mr Bezos has crept back to 68th in the latest ranking, topped by Pablo Isla, chief executive of Spanish retail group Inditex with its (soft) family values. I bet, though, that most investors would allocate capital on the hard measures of Mr Bezos’s and Mr Isla’s success. 

The dominance of hard over soft is not uniform, though, and in a few areas it is receding. Would-be leaders aiming for MBAs have for years set equal, even greater, store on the value of the difficult-to-measure human networks they build during their studies. The hard MBA qualification itself has started to crumble, while employers increasingly stress development of executives’ soft skills. 

Elsewhere, companies have finally begun to realise that feedback (soft) trumps forced ranking and even bonuses (both hard) when it comes to appraising and motivating staff. Governance codes now place emphasis on long-term success, healthy cultures and corporate purpose, offsetting boards’ longstanding deference to pure shareholder value. 

Many of these pairs should coexist, of course. Too frequently, though, when a balance of two approaches would be best, the hard solution wins out as soon as pressure is applied. 

In the classic tussle between long-term sustainability and short-term returns, too many directors and executives still obsess about hitting close-range targets. Purpose makes way for profit. The demand to compete overcomes any impulse to reap the benefits of collaboration. 

Even if Drucker did not utter the “what gets measured” axiom, he had plenty to say about measurement. In 1955, he wrote in The Practice of Management how more sophisticated ways of gauging performance would enable managers and workers to direct their own work. But he also warned that if this ability were used to impose control from above, “the new technology [would] inflict incalculable harm by demoralising management and by seriously lowering the effectiveness of managers”. 

Persuading executives to take greater account of soft factors requires a concerted effort. One approach is to play to their utilitarian preference for hard facts and try to measure the unmeasurable. The mania for measurement has extended beyond the production output and profit margins that could be assessed in the 1950s. Start-ups and consultancies frequently pitch to me with new ways of quantifying corporate culture, for instance. 

 Putting a number on the nebulous is one way to give soft achievements a hard edge. Reminding directors of the hard landing that awaits those who ignore, condone or contribute to rotten cultures is another. 

At the same time, managers need to comprehend elements that cannot yet be recorded in 0s and 1s: the strength of team relationships, the importance of empathy, the value of intuition. Ingenious machines may one day put all the mysteries of human behaviour into a spreadsheet. I doubt it, though. This week’s Drucker Forum, in honour of the writer, will explore “the human dimension” of management. At least some of that dimension will always be difficult for chief executives to collect, crunch and codify on their digital dashboards. As a result, they must resolve to try harder to manage the things they will never easily measure.

Wednesday 25 October 2017

Brexit 'more complex than first moon landing', says academic study

Philip Oltermann in The Guardian


Nasa photograph of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. Photograph: Swann Auction Galleries




Britain extricating itself from the European Union will be “incomparably more complex” than the first moon landing, an academic study has found.

Roland Alter, a professor at Heilbronn University in Germany who specialises in risk assessment, said he had been inspired to carry out his analysis after comments by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, that he was “running a set of projects that make the Nasa moonshot look quite simple”.

But after analysing the two situations Alter said he concluded that Davis’s analogy “missed the point”. “Both project moonshot and project Brexit are in their own way extremely complex projects. The key difference is that the USA was aware of the complexity of its undertaking.”

The paper, to be published in the journal of the German Society for Project Management early next year, analyses the comparative complexity of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and Nasa’s first moon landing using a risk assessment model developed by the Canadian government in 2007 to determine the risk and complexity of public sector projects. 

The study singles out a number of factors that make the mission launched by Theresa May’s triggering of article 50 in March 2017 more complex than the 1969 moonshot. That mission was accomplished within eight years of John F Kennedy setting the goal “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”.

While the then US president had been aware of the complexity of the task from the start and deliberately fudged the timetable of the mission by adding the words “before this decade is out” in his historic speech, developments in the Brexit negotiations had revealed an “ever-widening gulf between the complexity of the project and its organisational capacity”, according to the study.

The crucial difference between the two projects, according to Alter, was that the Nasa mission had a definable “landing zone”, namely the moon. In terms of complexity, its challenges had lain mainly in developing and applying new technologies.

“The situation in Great Britain is completely different in this respect,” his paper concludes. “The project was authorised by a referendum phrased in general terms and does not have a clearly defined ‘landing zone’.”

Alter, who previously worked as a strategist for Siemens, also teaches a course on catastrophically managed projects, which includes modules on Berlin’s much-delayed new airport, the over-budget Scottish parliament at Holyrood, Airbus’s ill-fated A400M Atlas aircraft and the Iraq war. “Brexit is not part of the course yet, but it’s a hot contender for the top spot,” Alter said.

Wednesday 15 June 2016

How to argue with a non listening CEO

Priscilla Claman in Harvard Business Review

A senior vice president I know was working on a merger and had come up against a roadblock.

He pulled the merger implementation team into a room and said: “We’ve analyzed it over and over, but it really isn’t possible to complete this merger in the time frame Walter wants. Now, what do we do?”

Walter was the CEO. He had a reputation for not listening to anyone who disagreed with him. But, missing the merger deadline would be an embarrassing and very public failure. Walter had made a big deal of completing the merger in three months. Someone had to convince him that the merger wasn’t going to happen then, but no one wanted to volunteer. Everyone knew that Walter was a shoot-the-messenger kind of guy.

The team tried several things to get Walter to understand. First, they prepared a data-rich PowerPoint presentation. Walter just waved it away. Then, they hired a respected consultant, who confirmed the fact that it couldn’t be done in the time allotted. Walter just thought she was the team’s patsy. All the while, the clock was ticking, getting closer and closer to failure.

Finally, the SVP came up with something that worked. He knew one of Walter’s buddies who was within months of retirement. Walter wouldn’t fire him. Using all the data the team had prepared, the SVP convinced Walter’s buddy to get the message through to Walter, and disaster was averted.

This true story contains a lot of ideas for how to disagree successfully with a person who is senior to you. Fortunately, there aren’t that many senior managers as unapproachable as Walter out there. Still, disagreeing with someone senior isn’t something you want to do every day. Save it for important issues, even in organizations that say they encourage people to express their own opinions. If you disagree too often, you will get a reputation for negativity.



There are ways to disagree successfully with a senior person without having your head handed to you. Here are some ideas:

Don’t just blurt out your point of view; be strategic about it. Think it through. Why do you disagree? Could your disagreement be perceived as “political?” Or do you have the good of the organization at heart? You are more likely to be believed if you don’t have anything to gain from your point of view.

Make sure you’re right. Senior people usually have access to more information than the people below them. Is there something you might be missing?

Do what the SVP did, and bounce your point of view off of a few trusted peers. If you can’t convince them, you’re probably not going to convince the senior person. Ask for their feedback on how to be persuasive. But don’t ask your direct reports — they may not want to disagree with a senior person!

Prepare a presentation – no loaded words or hypotheticals; use data and charts instead. Keep it businesslike. PowerPoint can help keep your presentation brief and to the point.

Find a respected, credible expert to go over your conclusions. She doesn’t have to be an outside consultant, but she should be recognized for her expertise by your senior person.

The SVP’s buddy strategy is also a good approach. People trust people they are friends with, particularly if they are at the same level in an organization. Find someone you know who is the same rank as the more senior person you are trying to convince. Persuade him using the data you have put together. Then, ask him to share that information with his buddy.



It takes courage to disagree with someone senior to you. But it is a professional skill you need to learn. Sooner or later, like the senior vice president in the story, you will face a situation where you have to disagree. Besides, if you just agree all the time, senior people will think of you as a doormat with nothing to contribute. To gain the respect of senior people, you need to learn when it’s important to disagree, and then, how to do it in a strategic way.

Monday 25 April 2016

Management is a ‘dinosaur’ whose time is up

Shubha Sharma in The Hindu

Adman Prahlad Kakkar’s school of entrepreneurship throws participants into the deep right from the word go

Here are some things they will never teach you at Harvard Business School. To begin with, be prepared to throw your Peter Drucker manuals out. Learn from the horses, the sharks, the Himalayas, the tribals of Bastar, at the feet of a spiritual master and the biggest guru of them all: Mr Murphy. He of the Murphy’s Law canon.

Learn that money is not everything. The value you create is just as important to a business. As an entrepreneur, understand your connectedness with all of life.

This unusual curriculum at a Mumbai-based institute of branding and entrepreneurship has been scripted by advertising filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, a man reputed to break every rule in the book. The Prahlad Kakkar School of Branding and Entrepreneurship offers a one-year course on ad filmmaking and branding as well as a two-year fellowship in business and entrepreneurship. It is run in association with Whistling Woods International, a media and communications institute started by filmmaker Subhash Ghai, and is located in an area that churns out more illusions in a year than you can ever imagine: Film City, Goregaon.

This school is for real, though, and has the hard knocks built in. At the core of its curriculum is fear, and learning to ride it. Fear, says Kakkar, prevents the young and old from taking decisions and responsibility. And failure goes in tandem with fear. Kakkar takes pride in the fact that his curriculum does not have a single success story. All success stories, according to him, are doctored in hindsight. “And therefore they are lies. Failure is something nobody wants to be associated with. It is the truth. So we select, for our teaching, almost success stories.”
He believes in throwing the participants into the deep, from the word go. The course begins with a bootcamp. “You go down to survival level. You’re going to come back with new perceptions, alliances, friends and new teams, all of which will last a lifetime,” says Kakkar.

Flying

The next fear it aims to tackle is that of flying. The course requires participants to jump out of a plane in South Africa, and go on a safari down the Zambezi. They will camp in the dark and survive on meagre rations. The next day, students have to find their way back with the help of a map.

Learning to fall from a horse is also part of the class. The students face an animal that is 10 times stronger than they are. And when they fall, they learn that they never ‘remain fallen’. “If we teach you how to fall, then you lose the fear of falling.”

In the larger scheme of things, either you conquer a challenge through sheer strength or join in – in this case, you merge your being with that of the horse. “But don’t join it and lose your personality. So when you do mergers with other companies, it’s not to destroy them and sell. The whole idea is, is it going to take you 10 years to develop the company of that size, that momentum and those clients, or would you rather buy it over and make it a part of your company?”

And then, there’s the mother of all fears: navigating the ocean. “It’s the fear of the unknown. The only two unknowns left on the planet today are space and the ocean,” says Kakkar. The course requires you to go through a deep-sea diving course in the Andaman Islands, qualify as an internationally-certified diver, and just when you think you’ve conquered it all, you go into a cage and face the great white sharks under water.

Legendary shark

The legendary shark is far more fearsome in our imagination, says Kakkar. “We put you in a safe, controlled environment to overcome your illogical fear of these magnificent creatures. Behind the safety of the cage your mind opens up to the possibilities of their strength, aggression, instinct and beauty and the ability to survive under any circumstances.”

The next big phobia after the sea is snakes. So the curriculum requires you to spend four to five days in a snake farm, handling the species. “There are rules of engagement with them too. Most of the time they’re aggressive because they think you’re aggressive. We call this the reptile sensitisation programme,” says Kakkar.

The stillness quotient comes from the Isha Foundation’s Inner Engineering course. “When you need leadership and you don’t have the stillness that yoga teaches you, you can never ever command respect,” says Kakkar.

And to cap it all, is a tryst with the mountains. Jamling Norgay, who climbed the Everest, will take participants on hiking. “The mountains and the sea are two most humbling experiences. They knock the hell out of your ego. Norgay teaches you rock climbing, leadership and team building,” says Kakkar. The students will also learn how a restaurant runs, because as Kakkar says, Murphy’s Law, which says if something can go wrong it will, is hugely prevalent in a restaurant.

Kakkar himself has dived into various oceans. Besides Genesis Film Production, one of India’s oldest ad film production houses, he runs a scuba diving school and has also been running restaurants. He broke even with his scuba diving school only after 10 years, so “failure” and “falling” aren't new to him either. The curriculum, then, is born out of his experience — notably his 25 years at Genesis.

One of the key things he realised at Genesis was that youngsters need to be trained to own their jobs, and not just do them. No one, MBAs included, are encouraged to own their jobs. They are simply cogs in a larger machine and everybody works them by remote, he says. At Genesis, Kakkar got mostly “misfits” —16-year-olds whose parents used to ‘dump’ them on him — and he had to mould them. “I knew I had to empower them very early to make decisions. I didn’t believe in people who procrastinated.”

Management, he says, is “like a dinosaur” whose time is up.
A company like Google is flat, and everyone will need to become like them to survive. Decisions need to be taken at the low end. “Middle management people are afraid because they’ll lose their jobs. Youngsters couldn’t care, because it’s their first job anyway.”

Train young people

The institute will train young people to fight for responsibility, to want to own their jobs, to be territorial about what they do, and take decisions fearlessly. Importantly, it will break one big management practice: there will be no summer training. Instead, participants get to form a management company and take over a sick company from banks. They have one year to turn it around. “If they manage to keep it afloat, let alone turn it around, they will be the most wanted people in any organisation.”

The larger idea is to add value. “They have to be independent and confident, highly motivated and flexible on the ground, understand the difference between value and money. To give back as much as they take. If they add value to whatever they do the money will come.”

With this paradigm shift, it’s only logical that the institute keeps the curriculum flexible. For the first year, students will learn the rules of engagement as they exist – this comprises the theory component of the course, built upon by the practical part. The next year, they will be tested on how they want to change the rules for the future, and this will form the basis of the curriculum for the next batch. He compares the process to a commando’s final test — blindfolded, he takes a sophisticated weapon, dismantles it to its last spring, puts it back together within the timeframe and fires it.

The faculty is drawn from the commando-in-action pool. Apart from Norgay and South African cricketer Gary Kirsten, there’s Dhiraj Rajaram, founder of MuSigma — a frontrunner in the analytics space. The course, which costs close to Rs.13 lakh, is a combination of Kakkar’s passions, whether it’s scuba diving or cooking. At the final graduation dinner, the students will even cook for their parents.

“I’ve never worked a single day in my life. I converted all my hobbies into work,” says the institute’s founder-chairperson. And it looks like some of those are still being stirred. “I’ve suddenly decided to have some more fun,” he says. He plans a line of T-shirts that will be “highly abrasive to everybody.”

“We’re doing a whole line on Papa Pancho (the restaurant he runs). Or on sports. There is also an entire line on Savita Bhabhi, which is all you wanted to know about sex but were too scared to ask.”

Convention can go for a run. Or if you’re afraid of the idea, go ride a horse. Because for Kakkar, this is simply about playing it different. “Somebody says, ‘Where do you think of these ideas? How can you make them a business? I say the business happens. First let’s get a product out that is unique.”

That is perhaps why he is clear his course will create “warriors, not wimps”. From a man who has always dared to pursue his innermost calling, this isn’t surprising.

Wednesday 7 May 2014

ECB and Pietersen - Inside the Turtle Tank


turtle-in-tank
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.

Monday 12 November 2012

Management theory was hijacked in the 80s. We're still suffering the fallout.



Financial trading
'Managers abandoned their previous policy of retaining and reinvesting profits in favour of large dividend and share buyback payouts to shareholders.' Photograph: David Karp/AP
This week the City has been congratulating itself on 20 years of UK corporate governance codes. Since the original Cadbury document in 1992, the UK has basked in its role as governance leader, with 70 other countries having followed its example and adopted similar guidelines.
There's just one problem: is it the right kind of governance? The day the FT carried the story, Incomes Data Services reported that FTSE 100 boardroom pay went up by a median 10% last year, a soaraway trend that the best code in the world has complacently overseen. Nor could it prevent the RBS meltdown, Libor or PPI mis-selling to the tune of £12bn, the biggest rip-off in financial history. It didn't stop phone-hacking or BP taking short cuts. It has sanctioned wholesale offloading of risk, whether individual (pensions, careers) or collective (global and financial warming) on to society, while rejecting any responsibility of its own except to shareholders.
So jerry-built is the corporate economy erected on the scaffolding of the City codes that it can no longer deliver even the material progress by which it justifies its privileges: even with a return to growth, living standards for lower and middle earners may be no higher in 2020 than in 2000, according to the Resolution Foundation. The truth is that UK corporate governance has neither headed off major scandal nor nurtured effective long-term management. In fact the opposite is true.
The irony is that we know what makes companies prosper in the long term. They manage themselves as whole systems, look after their people, use targets and incentives with extreme caution, keep pay differentials narrow (we really are in this together) and treat profits as the score rather than the game. And it's a given that in the long term companies can't thrive unless they have society's interests at heart along with their own.
So why do so many boards and managers, supported by politicians, systematically do the opposite – run companies as top-down dictatorships, pursue growth by merger, destroy teamwork with runaway incentives, attack employment rights and conditions, outsource customer service, treat their stakeholders as resources to be exploited, and refuse wider responsibilities to society?
The answer is that management in the 1980s was subject to an ideological hijack by Chicago economics that put at the heart of governance a reductive "economic man" view of human nature needing to be bribed or whipped to do their exclusive job of maximising shareholder returns. Embedded in the codes, these assumptions now have the status of unchallenged truths.
The consequences of the hijack have been momentous. The first was to align managers' interests not with their own organisations but with financial outsiders – shareholders. That triggered a senior management pay explosion that continues to this day. The second was that managers abandoned their previous policy of retaining and reinvesting profits in favour of large dividend and share buyback payouts to shareholders.
Ironically, the effect of this stealth revolution was to undercut the foundations of the very shareholder value under whose flag the activists had ridden into battle. Along with corporate welfare and customer service, among the functions squeezed in the shareholder bonanza was research and development. Innovation has stalled since the 1980s, prompting some economists to query whether the era of growth itself is over.
But it's not economics, it's management, stupid. Unsurprisingly, downtrodden and outsourced workers, mis-sold-to customers, exploited suppliers and underpowered innovation cancelled out any gains from ever more ingenious financial engineering – leaving shareholders less well off in the shareholder-value-era since 1980 than in previous decades. The great crash of 2008 stripped away any remaining doubt: the economic progress of the last 30 years was a mirage. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it in The Black Swan, the profits were illusory, "simply borrowed against destiny with some random payment time."
Over the last decades, misconceived ideologically based governance has recreated management as a new imperium in which shareholders and managers rule and the real world dances to finance's tune. A worthier anniversary to celebrate is the death seven years ago this month, on 11 November, of Peter Drucker, one of the architects of pre-code management, which he insisted was a "liberal art". Austrian by birth, Drucker was a cultured humanist one of whose distinctions was having his books burned by the Nazis. In The Practice of Management in 1954 he wrote: "Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society".

Sunday 12 August 2012

The Waste Management Crisis in Kerala


by Mohamed Nazeer in The Hindu
There is hardly any informed person in Kerala who does not have an opinion about waste being generated in the process of urbanisation, but nobody knows how exactly to manage it.
There is a serious crisis in urban waste management that has manifested itself in the form of deadlocked garbage disposal plans in some municipalities and Corporations in the State. It highlights the gap between accepted standards in solid waste management and their achievement.
Caught in the struggle are the civic bodies, the people and the government. The impasse in garbage disposal and treatment is acutely felt in the Corporations of Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode, Thrissur and Kollam, and the municipalities of Kannur and Thalassery.
With an urban population share of nearly 48 per cent, Kerala comes close to the global rate. The hotspots of garbage management crisis in the State are a reflection of the collective failure to devise an appropriate strategy and technology. The crisis has turned local panchayats against municipalities and Corporations on the one hand and the civic bodies against the government on the other.
Transportation of waste to the landfills triggers protests by local residents, who raise the issue of their right to live in a clean environment. The waste disposal systems of the civic bodies are naturally left in a mess, with mounds of rotting garbage in parts of towns and cities.
The no-holds-barred battle between the Vilappil panchayat and the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation over a solid waste treatment plant set up there continues with no solution in sight. Even a decade after the plant started functioning, the Corporation is unable to put in place a leachate treatment plant. In spite of favourable High Court pronouncements, the district administration had to abandon two attempts to bring the plant-related equipment and clay to the Vilappil plant in the face of local protests.
C.P. John, member, Kerala State Planning Board, says if the Vilappilsala plant set up with private participation for processing biodegradable waste into manure had not failed because of a dispute over the pricing of the manure, it would have been a perfect model for solid waste management for the entire State. Much of the urban garbage woes in the State, he says, expose the absence of proper urban space planning. Such planning would have come about if urbanisation had occurred as part of industrialisation. But it is the service sector that accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the State’s economy, he says, and some of the service sector activities are waste-generating.
The Kochi Corporation, which faced the wrath of the people at the Vadavukode, Puthenkurishu and Kunnathunadu panchayats protesting against the Brahmapuram garbage treatment plant, appears to have learnt the lessons from Vilappilsala.
The Corporation has engaged a private agency for clearing the garbage that has piled up at its plant site.
The agency can also take the manure produced. As the government is in the process of identifying an agency for a new plant at Brahmapuram, the Corporation is planning to have a tie-up with a Pune-based private firm to set up a plant for treating plastic waste.
The previous Left Democratic Front government issued an order on implementation of Lalur Model Project for Solid Waste Management (LAMPS), a decentralised initiative, but the Thrissur Corporation has not implemented it. Garbage removal in the city has been hit for seven months because of protests by Lalur residents. The situation is no different in Kollam as the Corporation’s modernised garbage treatment plant at Kureepuzha is unable to become operational in the face of protest by residents against the erection of a leachate plant. Six biogas plants set up by the Corporation have mitigated the garbage problem.
The dumping ground of the Kozhikode Corporation at Njeliyambra, located previously in the Nallalam-Cheruvannur grama panchayat, (now merged with the Corporation), has also drawn protests. The demand is for the corporation to upgrade the garbage treatment plant, construct a leachate collection unit and get a new landfill site. Waste disposal of the Kannur and Thalassery municipalities has been hit for months owing to protests by residents living in the vicinity of landfills at Chelora and Pettippalam respectively.
The waste management crisis in the State has already emerged as its single major development issue.

Friday 3 July 2009

Privatisation has been a train wreck

 

 

With National Express abandoning a franchise, the system is bankrupt. Railway nationalisation is the only rational solution.


guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 18.30 BST

The temporary nationalisation of the east coast mainline service should be another nail in the coffin of the privatisation of the railways. It shows once again what a bad deal for taxpayers the privatisation of the railways has turned out to be.

The government says it plans to return the franchise as quickly as possible to a private contractor, but it should instead take the opportunity to retain the line in public hands. Following, as it does, the fiasco of Railtrack, which brought the national rail network to the brink of collapse in 2002, and the collapse of Metronet, in charge of two thirds of the misguided public private partnership (PPP) on the tube, this is the right time to plan returning the entire national rail network to public ownership. If the government tossed aside the ideological blinkers of the Treasury and got that message, they would do themselves a great deal of good among passengers and taxpayers alike.

It is a complete con for the National Express group to walk away from the contract, leaving a gap in the national rail budget, forcing the state to bear the cost while the service is re-franchised – possibly at a lower value than the National Express contract – but insisting on its right to continue to operate other franchises unscathed. National Express says it has received "clear and detailed" legal advice that it does not have to hand back its London to Essex franchise and East Anglia routes. So it wants to run away from a problem on one line and let the rest of us pick up the pieces, while continuing to make profits from other lines.

The attempt of National Express to avoid any consequences for their other franchises from their abandonment of the east coast service is just another example of the privateers trying to take the public sector for a ride. As Lord Adonis says, "It is simply unacceptable to reap the benefits of contracts when times are good, only to walk away from them when times become more challenging."

Time and again, we have seen the nationalisation of losses and the privatisation of profits. It's also the latest demonstration that it is a fairy tale that privatisation means the private sector takes the risk as well as taking its profit. In truth, every time a privatisation of a vital public service fails, the public sector picks up the tab. This culture of parts of the private sector fleecing the taxpayer has to stop.

Part of the problem is that civil servants are taken to the cleaners in the construction of the privatisation contracts by the private companies' sharper legal teams. One of the rationales for the tube's PPP was that it made no sense to hand billions of pounds of public money for tube upgrades over to London Underground management and civil servants who had such a poor record of delivering. Yet, these same civil servants were left to draw up the detail of the PPP contracts. They were completely turned over by the private sector.

But the real issue is that it is inherently wasteful to run these services on privatised lines. The nature of the privatising companies is that a significant proportion of the profits of their activities have to be paid in dividends to shareholders rather than reinvested in the service. This is money wasted. A publicly-owned company would be obliged to reinvest any revenues back into the transport system.

Furthermore, privatisation is justified on the grounds that the private sector is driven, through the rigour of competition, to be more efficient and more responsive to passengers' needs. This is a fiction in the case of a natural monopoly like a railway. Apart from the brief period of competition among bidders for contracts, there is no day-to-day competition at all – no one is going to build a rival railway line and poach passengers from the private franchisee. They are under no pressure from any competition at all. In such circumstances, it is more rational, and makes more sense in terms of sustaining investment, for rail services to be publicly-owned.
Nor is it the case that public ownership of the rail network naturally has to involve poorer management than the private sector.

There are many publicly-owned rail companies all over the world that provide services that British transport users can only envy. The task is to build up good quality management, including the best management from around the world, overseeing real investment that meets the needs of rail travellers.

It shouldn't just be the east coast service that's nationalised and it shouldn't just be temporary. Ultimately, the rail network would

be more rationally run in the public sector.


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