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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.

Twitter IPO: why the wrong people ended up with the money

If you think the social media company's stockmarket flotation is an advert for starting your own hi-tech company, just look at what happened to the founders

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 November 2013 20.00 GMT

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Photograph: Rex Features

Every time a Silicon Valley name goes to Wall Street and raises billions, you hear a creation myth. You heard it again last Thursday, as Twitter floated on the stock exchange.

It comes in many flavours, but the ur-myth runs thus: a young man with more ideas than dollars hides in his parents' garage, has a eureka moment and devises some new gadget or program that changes the world – or at least distracts swaths of its population. Then comes the glorious denouement, where our startup hero goes to the stock market and cashes in big. And that, dear reader, is why we have Bill Microsoft, Mark Facebook, and Larry and Sergey Google. The end.

This is capitalism's version of The X Factor.

In the X-Factor economies of Britain and America, you may no longer be able to count on a decent job, affordable home or moderate pension, but still you are offered visions of outlandish success – whether in singing (for the glamorous) or business (for the rest of us). Doctoral theses will some day be written on how, as the arteries of social mobility hardened, the BBC served up ever more versions of the minted entrepreneur: Dragons' Den, Gerry Robinson, The Apprentice. The assumptions are easy to tease out: collective bargaining may be dead, but heroic labour can still earn the individual a string of zeroes.

The story of Twitter, as told over the past few days, snaps perfectly into this bigger jigsaw. A band of T-shirted young men (tick), coding in a flat (tick), come up with a crazy new software application (tick), which soon becomes a global phenomenon. Within seven years is floated on the stock market at a value of $34.7bn – more than most of the companies in the S&P 500. Cue details about how the founders are now paper billionaires, the employees are sitting on options that will make some of them millionaires, and the entire San Francisco HQ celebrated with an "overflowing tower of doughnuts" (tick, tick, tick).

Except the more you look at what has actually happened with Twitter, the more it comes to look like the opposite of the heroic earnings of a few hard-workers. Many of the billions will go to a select group, many of whom have put hardly any work into the company or taken comparatively little risk. That is true of the stock market flotation, of Twitter itself and of its entire business model.

Let's start with what happened last Thursday, when Twitter went to the stock market. On the first day of trading, the company's shares soared 73% – implying that they had been sold for over a billion dollars below what they could have got. By way of comparison, shares in Royal Mail jumped over 40% on opening, forcing Vince Cable to do some explaining.

Yawning gaps between offer price and true value are hardly unusual in flotations: they're often referred to as "leaving cash on the table" – the cash being for the investment banks managing the sale and their mates at other banks and funds who buy some of the shares. If an estate agent asked you to sell your house for £100,000 less than it was really worth, so that they could offer it around their mates in the building trade, you'd probably be straight on the phone to Watchdog. Yet when it comes to flotations, I am still waiting for the BBC report that notes how much the bankers scooped alongside the founders.

Let's also look at the company's story. I spent my weekend reading Hatching Twitter, by Nick Bilton, a biography of the business based on hundreds of hours of interviews with key participants. One of Bilton's achievements is to show how the credit for the idea can be split several ways. First, Jack Dorsey floated the notion of updating friends on one's whereabouts, while Noah Glass championed it and gave the application its name, then Biz Stone was asked to help with building the program by a still-reluctant Evan Williams. Yahoo! tells the minnow team that it's "simply just a messaging service" and a "few engineers could do the same thing in a week".

Look at which of the Twitter team did best from the flotation and the answer is: Evan Williams, who, in Bilton's telling, initially had least to do with the program, and Jack Dorsey. Those two are now worth over a billion dollars apiece. But the other members of the fab four are not even listed as major recipients of company stock. Who is? Typically, finance guys who took big stakes in the business when they could see how it might pay off.

And none of the founders are now anywhere near managing the company: within a few years of it getting off the ground, they'd all been cleared out for managers from big business. I'm not playing a violin for the four founders; but Twitter is hardly an advertisement for the rewards of starting up your own company.

Finally, look at Twitter's business. Or rather, look at its own assessment of its business, as stated in its S-1 stockmarket filing. Early on comes the delicious admission: "Our success depends on our ability to provide users of our products and services with valuable content, which in turn depends on the content contributed by our users." Read that again: Twitter is in the business of selling us to us – our news and views and idle banter. Without those, without us, it is nothing. As with Facebook and Tumblr and all the other social media, we're also part of Twitter's workforce. But I bet you haven't seen any stock options, either.

How to humiliate brands via social media

'Don't fly @BritishAirways'? 

For those with an axe to grind and a broadband account to exploit, here are a few ways to dot-complain on social media

• 
• • Arwa Mahdawi
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 September 2013 13.40 BST

Hasan Syed, disgruntled with the way British Airways handled his father's lost luggage, paid $1,000 to promote a tweet that read "Don't fly @BritishAirways. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

As the first law of digita ldynamics states, much of the energy expended within the internet relates to a) porn; b) cats; or c) complaining. The irate customer service tweet or Facebook update is familiar to us all. But while we may be used to people venting their frustrations online, Hasan Syed has just taken the power of anti-social networking to giddy new heights. Disgruntled with the way British Airways handled his father's lost luggage, Syed paid $1,000 (£640) to promote a tweet that read "Don't fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous." This has now been seen by tens of thousands of people and promptly picked up by media outlets around the world.

The fine art of complaining has come a long way thanks to technology. Back in the pre-digital day you had to sit down and write a strongly-worded letter if you wanted to call out brands behaving badly. Those wishing to take a more direct approach could go wave a placard or, as a friend of mine once did, superglue your hands to a multinational's revolving doors. Nowadays, however, you can make your voice heard without risking appendages or wasting a stamp. So, for those with an axe to grind and a broadband account to exploit, here are a few ways to dot-complain in the modern age.

1. Bashtag

Last year Starbucks attracted widespread ire after it avoided paying corporation tax in the UK. So, in one attempt to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about its brand again, Starbucks invited the twitterati to display happy holiday messages on a big screen outside London's Natural History Museum in London by using the #spreadthecheer hashtag. Visitors to the Museum were promptly treated to a number of tweets along the lines of "Hey #Starbucks, PAY YOUR FUCKING TAX #spreadthecheer".

Starbucks isn't the first victim of what is termed "bashtagging." Some bright spark at McDonald's once came up with the great idea of letting people share their heart(burn)warming experiences with the brand via a #McDStories hashtag campaign. Voila, tweets like: "One time I walked into McDonalds and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories."

2. Game Google

Google isn't just a search engine, it's a reputation engine. Like it or not, in the eyes of many, you are what you are on Google. And, for several years, former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum found that what he was on Google was a "frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." This, by the way, wasn't down to a series of questionable decisions by the OED, but the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign by columnist Dan Savage. After Santorum ludicrously compared homosexuality to bestiality in a media interview, Savage gamed Google's search algorithm so that the first result for Santorum that came up linked to a what the New Yorker described as the "unprintable definition" Savage had created to protest Santorum's homophobia.

3. Use your Wifi network name as a targeted billboard

If you live in an area full of upwardly pretentious types you may have noticed a trend of creative Wifi network naming. Instead of settling for LINKSYS53z, for example, a 21st century quipster might call their network PrettyFlyForaWifi. However, as well as using it as a vehicle for unoriginal puns, some people are harnessing their network names to passively-aggressively complain to their neighbours. There is one person in my building whose network is called YOURMUSICSUCKS, for example. I severely curtailed my moments of guilty One Direction pleasure after that appeared.

4. But, wait, the luggage?

While some casual bashtagging or Google-bombing may be cathartic, sometimes catharsis is the only payoff. However, it looks like Syed's $1,000 BA-bashing may have resulted in more than just a warm flush of vengeance. As well as providing fleeting fame, it also seems to have delivered his luggage. Early this morning Syed tweeted "I got what I wanted. I win." Revenge may be a dish best served cold but sometimes, it seems, a little digital degradation can make for a satisfying hors d'œuvre.

Paulo Coelho on Jesus, Twitter and the difference between defeat and failure

P

One of the world's most popular writers, Coelho has survived being sent to an asylum by his parents and tortured by Brazil's ruling militia

• 
• • Stuart Jeffries
  • The Guardian, Sunday 17 March 2013 19.30 GMT

Paulo Coelho: 'Take pride in your scars.' Photograph: David Brabyn/Corbis

In pride of place in the living room of Paulo Coelho's apartment in Geneva is a fan's portrait of the author. A pointillist work, the huge image consists of the colour-coded coffee capsules George Clooney endorses. The background is composed of ristretto capsules (black), while Coelho's eyes seem to have been picked out in decaffeinato intenso (claret). Perhaps sadly, the artist has not used the new linizio lungo (apricot) capsule to perk up the colour scheme.

1. Manuscript Found in Accra
2. by Paulo Coelho
3. 

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This is not the strangest gift he has received, Coelho says. "I'm in my apartment in Rio in 2000 and the doorbell rings and there's a beautiful woman, very tall, very sexy, green eyes. She was carrying a small tree. I said: 'What is this?' She said: 'Don't speak Portuguese.' She said: 'I came from Slovenia because I want to plant this tree here and I want to have a son with you.'" Long story short – Coelho put her on a flight home and saw her only once more, with a boyfriend in Slovenia. And the tree? That's not important now, he laughs.

For the next hour and a half he laughs a lot. A genial funster has today replaced the solemn preacher-novelist damned by one critic for writing "something David Hasselhoff might spout after a particularly taxing Baywatch rescue".

This incarnation may not be what has made the 65-year-old Brazilian an international bestselling author with 9.8 million Facebook fans, 6.3 million Twitter followers, and a fanbase embracing readers in the Islamic republic of Iran and the socialist republic of Cuba. Personally speaking, Coelho in the flesh is more appealing than Coelho the writer.

"Do you want to see my bow?" he asks at one point. Coelho is a keen archer. He has seen The Hunger Games and can confirm that Jennifer Lawrence's archery technique is authentic. "The only thing that relaxes me is archery. That's why I have to have apartments with gardens."

His other favourite activity is walking around Geneva. "I walk every day and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe. It goes beyond everything. It goes to the core of our reason for being here." What if there is no reason for being here and – there's no easy way to put this – nice walks around Geneva are as good as it gets? "It's still a blessing." Good comeback.

Back to the coffee portrait. For Coelho, it demonstrates one of the cardinal virtues he extols in his new book, Manuscript Found in Accra – elegance. Why is elegance important? "I don't know what I wrote in the book, but elegance goes to the basics." He points to his portrait. "This is very elegant because if you take an isolated Nespresso capsule, it would mean nothing but with three or four you can create anything. So for me elegance is this." Nespresso PR people who are liking the way this piece is going so far may want to excise the next sentence from their press pack: "I don't drink Nespresso by the way."

Coelho's colour scheme is as minimalist as his portrait. Today he looks like a BrazilianSweet Gene Vincent: white face, black coat, white beard, black trousers, white shirt over black T-shirt, white wisps of hair, trailing behind him as he struts through the apartment in Cuban heels sipping black coffee. He has a butterfly tattoo on his left wrist.

 Paulo Coelho in his office in 1995. Photograph: Roger-Viollet

The other virtues set out in his new book are boldness, love and friendship. A pedant might note that elsewhere in his writings, Coelho has argued that friendship is a form of love so should not be considered a distinct virtue. Also courage rather than boldness is the virtue you need if you are to realise the the message, expressed in his 1988 novel, The Alchemist, that wherever your heart is you will find treasure. But nobody, least of all Coelho, would suggest the oeuvre of the writer, who has sold 145m books worldwide and been translated into 74 languages, is devoid of contradictions. "If I have to summarise this book in one sentence, which would be very difficult," he says, "it is this: accept your contradictions. Learn how to live with them. Because they aren't curses – they are blessings."

The Jesus of the gospels was, Coelho argues, similarly contradictory. "Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know?" says Coelho, his brown eyes sparkling. "If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity. So Jesus says: 'Turn the other face,' and then he can get a whip and go woosh! The same man who says: 'Respect your father and mother' says: 'Who is my mother?' So this is what I love – he is a man for all seasons."

Like Jesus, he's not expressing a coherent doctrine that can be applied to life like a blueprint? "You can't have a blueprint for life. This is the problem if you're religious today. I am Catholic myself, I go to the mass. But I see you can have faith and be a coward. Sometimes people renounce living in the name of a faith which is a killer faith. I like this expression – killer faith."

Coelho proposes a faith based on joy. "The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are, and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality, it connects you to reality."

In this view, he thinks he has Jesus on his side. "They [those who model their sacrifice on Christ's] remember three days in the life of Jesus when he was crucified. They forget that Jesus was politically incorrect from beginning to end. He was a bon vivant – travelling, drinking, socialising all his life. His first miracle was not to heal a poor blind person. It was changing water into wine and not wine into water."

Paulo Coelho insists he has led a joyful, fulfilling life. It could easily have been otherwise. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, he longed from a young age to become a writer, an ambition his parents frowned upon so much that they sent him, aged 17, to an asylum. "My parents thought I was psychotic. Like now, I read a lot and I didn't socialise. They wanted to help me."

He was eventually released in 1967 and enrolled in law school – one of several attempts to become, as he puts it disdainfully, "normal". Later he dropped out, became a hippy and made a fortune writing lyrics for Raul Seixas, the Brazilian rock star. Brazil's ruling militia took exception to his lyrics (some of which were influenced by the satanist Aleister Crowley). As a result, he was repeatedly arrested for subversion and eventually tortured with electric shocks to his genitals. These experiences, incidentally, account for his scorn for the idea that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was photographed with Coelho's books on his shelves, might have learned anything from the Brazilian's thought: "I think he had never read my books. It was PR. I wonder if he knew the story of the author he would have been proud of having this book on his shelves. I was part of these dreadful years in South America."

Why, given his history, didn't he choose the path of renunciation? "But I did! After the asylum and torture, I said: 'I am tired. Enough. Let me behave like a normal person. Let me be the person who my parents wanted me to be – or society or whatever.' So back in 1975 I married someone in church, got a job. I was normal for seven years. I could not stand to be normal. Then I divorced and married another person who is now my wife [the artist Christina Oiticica] and I said: 'Let's travel and try to find the meaning of life.' I had money because I had been a very successful songwriter, so I had five apartments in Brazil. I sold everything and I started travelling."

His epiphany came in 1986 when he walked the 500-mile road to the Galician pilgrimage site Santiago de Compostela. He described his spiritual awakening there in one of his earliest novels,The Pilgrimage. "Then I said: 'It's now or never.' I stopped everything and said: 'Now I am going to fulfil my dream. I may be defeated but I will not fail.'"

This distinction between defeats and failure is central to Coelho's new book. The former are incidental, chastening wounds risked by those who listen to their heart, the latter a lifelong abnegation of the responsibility to follow your dream. Or as the narrator of Manuscript Found in Accra puts it: "Take pride in your scars. Scars are medals branded on the flesh and your enemies will be frightened by them because they are proof of your long experience of battle." That advice is borne of his life experiences? "Absolutely. I am proud of my scars and they taught me to live better and not to be afraid of living."

He looks at me sharply: "They taught me also to be a cold-blooded killer." Beg your pardon? "When I see people trying to manipulate me, I kill. No regrets, no hatred, just an act of – " He makes a throat-cutting gesture. He's not the fluffy bunny his writings might indicate him to be? "Ha! No! I can be very tough. If people think you're naive, they discover in the next second that they don't have heads. So love your enemy, but keep your blacklist updated."

Coelho clearly thinks highly of his readers and online fans. Indeed, Manuscript Found in Accra could be considered the ultimate tribute to them – the collaboration of sage and his online disciples. Share your fears, Coelho tweeted his followers, that I might offer hope and comfort. The resultant book consists of Coelho's meditations on such themes as courage, solitude, loyalty, anxiety, loss, sex and victimhood suggested by followers. Manuscript Found in Accra might function as an aphoristic grab bag of his principal thoughts. The treacly narratives of such novels as The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes have been excised but the cliches remain. He actually does write stuff like this: "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" and "Don't give up. Remember it's always the last key on the ring that opens the door." Those of you who may so far have resisted the endorsements of Madonna, Julia Roberts or Bill Clinton may now be tempted to read him if only to test the proposition that Paulo Coelho exists to make Alain de Botton look deep.

 Paulo Coelho and his wife Christina at home in Rio in 1996. Photograph: Robert Van Der Hilst/Gamma/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Coelho lightly fictionalises this collection of putative aphorisms: the conceit is that we're reading a manuscript lost for 700 years, based on the talk a mysterious scholar called the Copt gave to the citizens of Jerusalem on the eve of its invasion by French crusaders. "The great wisdom of life," the Copt says toward the end of the book, "is that we can be masters of the things that try to enslave us."

How? Coelho says: "By taking responsibility. Today people aren't encouraged to take responsibility. It's easy to obey because you can blame a wrong decision on the person who told you to do this or do that. From the moment you accept that you're the master of your destiny you have to accept responsibility for every single action of yours. So why bother to follow my dreams? Then I can avoid being a failure – which is not true of course: you are a failure from the moment you don't allow yourself to be defeated."

Coelho by contrast snatched victory from the jaws of his several defeats. "Am I hyper rich? Yes. Do I want to prove this? No. Go back to your essence – don't play this consumerism game. This is nonsense. At the end of the day, the day that you die, the last minute, you have to answer this question: Did I really enjoy my life?"

How will he answer this question? "On 30 November 2011 I did," he says enigmatically. In that month, he was prompted to go for a scan by his agent Mônica Antunes, whose father had recently died of a heart attack. "She was worried that both her husband and I were smokers. I said: 'No way, Jose. Come on. I walk every day. I have a very healthy life. I don't smoke much – six cigarettes a day.'" But the day after his wife's 60th birthday he visited the cardiologist for tests. "He said: 'You're going to die.' I said: 'I don't believe you.' He said: 'You're going to die in 30 days. This part of your heart does not respond any more to electric impulses so probably it is blocked.'

"I was shocked of course. But I had time to answer this question that you just asked me. I remember I was in my bedroom and I said: 'If I die tomorrow, I would die very happy. First, I did everything I wanted to do in this life – sex, drugs, rock'n'roll. You name it I did it. Orgies and whatever." Orgies? "Oh yes. Orgies. Ha ha ha!

"Second, I had my share of losing but I did not quit. Third, I followed my road, my bliss, my personal life journey and I chose to be a writer. And I succeeded, which is more difficult, you know?

"Fourth, I've been married for 33 years to the love of my life. So what else can I ask? I will die with a smile on my face, with no fear, and I believe in God. So no problem if I die tomorrow. That is what I thought."

Paulo Coelho, you will have noticed, did not die when his doctor said he would. "But I pray that when I die I will die with the same state of mind I had on the 30th of November 2011."

How would he counsel his followers to die contented? "I can't tell them. I only know that the most important gift that you have is courage – be courageous." He lights a cigarette and smokes it in seeming defiance of what he calls the Unwanted Visitor, death.

In the January of every odd year since 1988, he has tried to find a white feather. Only if he succeeds does he write a book. Unfortunately for some of his critics, he found one earlier this year and so plans to write another book. It won't take long. "I write a book in 15 days. Then I go to social communities – I love social communities."

He means Twitter and Facebook. Why? "Twitter I think is an art. Because if you're connected to people you learn how to summarise. I used to do that when I used to write lyrics. It was always the tendency of my life to be clear without being superficial." He's not superficial? "No. Each sentence is dense, poetic."

Coelho signs a copy of his book for me: "Avoid those who say: 'I will go no further.' Love, Paulo Coelho."

As I walk from his apartment into a city of writers greater than Coelho (Rousseau was born and Borges died here), I wish, though not wanting to be ungrateful, he'd chosen a better quote from his book. For example: "Fate is never unfair to anyone. We are all free to hate or love what we do." That seems to me Coelho at his best, going beyond upbeat banalities and challenging those who make victimhood their identity.

At least he didn't write: "Cross me and you die." Though clearly he could have done.