Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Alex Ferguson and the Manchester United Management School

Footballers are paid too much, are lionised and criticised too quickly, and have a perennial inability to see what constitutes a decent haircut. Alex Ferguson has fought and won against all these things, and having taken his Manchester United side to another Premier League title, he must be seen as one of the most successful managers ever to have walked into a dressing room.

Are there any lessons for managers in more ordinary walks of life? Clive Woodward, the rugby coach that took England to world cup victory in Australia in 2003, has made a tidy name for himself explaining how his sporting strategies can be applied in the workplace. His book  Winning!: The Story of England's Rise to Rugby World Cup Glory has sold well, and Woodward makes a good show on the speaking circuit. His podcast for The Times is well worth a listen too.

How to be a leader

Thanks to Carly, who volunteered me, I have had my leadership skills assessed. I have survived and written an article about the process in The Times's Career section. It was relatively painless. But now I have to do something with the feedback, I got from Piers Hollier at Get Feedback who did the analysis.

Piers tells me I'm not a bad leader: I'm highly motivated, ambitious, inspirational, influential, good at understanding others and a good problem solver. I'm also better at critical thinking than 82 per cent of management consultants - which for some reason makes me laugh.

But I am far from perfect and Piers has recommended, after a tortured series of psychometric tests and a rather strange interview, that the key development areas I need to work on are:

Grangemouth, Life on Mars and having to learn about strikes again

Books and papers about industrial unrest have been happily gathering dust these years. But is it time to blow of the cobwebs? Strikes appear as popular as cop shows starring Philip Glenister, and just as reminiscent of the 1970s. Last week it was teachers, this week it is refinery workers at Grangemouth. Who knows? If we had a car, coal or iron industry worth mentioning perhaps their workers would be manning the pickets and barricades too.

The good folk of Grangemouth clearly have a genuine gripe about retirement incomes but is this dispute really all about pensions? My bet is that pensions are a catalyst, a lightning rod that has uncovered a whole load of other grievances. The management challenge is to understand what lies at the root and what can be done about it.

Management gimmick: your corporate mission on a paper napkin

This month's Fast Company magazine has a piece about the new fashion amongst some managers for distilling a company's business model into a couple of stick figures, some buzzwords and a series of arrows scrawled onto a paper napkin. My first thought was, obviously, "oh look, it's another another management gimmick". (Though in my head there was more swearing and less punctuation).

Then I wondered how anyone had persuaded managers to leave their PowerPoint programmes shut for long enough to use a pen and paper rather than a wizzy logo and laser pointer. Then, weirdly, I began to wonder whether it's actually quite a good idea.

Could you work at T5?

There are, as of yesterday, at least two senior management jobs going at Heathrow's Terminal 5. There may well be more opportunities in the not too distant future.

British Airways has axed Gareth Kirkwood, the operations director, and David Noyes, the customer services director. This is despite chief executive Willie Walsh's claim that the buck stopped with him. He just didn't mention that it would stop then swiftly move on down the line ... to two people who have worked for the company for 20 years.

Don't let that dissuade you though. This a senior management position where you can: work for a notorious boss; complete a difficult project; get yourself on the telly; and get paid. Who needs The Apprentice?

And what better way to polish up your CV than giving this online Terminal 5 baggage handling game a go. Remember you only need to beat a negative score of 28,000 bags to win a place on BA's board.

Bear Stearns

Malice - albeit tinged with a wry smile - leads me to point you in the direction of this part of the Bear Stearns website. In case the page is taken out, as it will be if there is anyone at the US bank able to concentrate on such mundanities as doing their job, I post the relevant quote here, for posterity.

Welcome to Bear Stearns If you're really good at what you do, you probably have a lot of choices when it comes to taking the next step in (or starting) your career. But if you can tackle complex challenges with creative solutions, and want to be able to make your mark quickly regardless of title or tenure, we think your only real choice is pretty clear. Why let someone else drive your career?

Oh dear.

How bright are you?

The recruitment team at Accenture has come up with a novel way of identifying bright sparks. A game called Lights, Camera, Action in which you have to turn on the lights in a grid. If you're a graduate you can enter the competition and win prizes. If, like me, you'd just like to reassure yourself that you can complete a simple task designed for would-be management consultants, then give it a go.

And no, I haven't managed to do it yet!

The reluctant CEO

My colleague, Julie Daniels, and I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the nicest - and tallest - CEOs in the world yesterday. Jim Buckmaster is the CEO of Craigslist and 6ft 7in. What was nice about him was that he was so understated. He didn't boast or brag. He just does what he likes doing - working on a website giving users what they want. He describes himself as a "tech" and says he's "not super sociable." He finds meetings useless, doesn't rate e-mail, doesn't set deadlines and doesn't obsess about the bottom line. And it pays off. The workers are happy and productive - 25 of them run 450 websites from their offices in San Francisco - and he and founder, Craig Newmark, "are making plenty of money."  What's not to like.

Click here to listen to the podcast and read the article

Are you engaged? Or vacant?

Are you familiar with the "you're all doing very well" speech? You know the one...it happens towards the end of a breeze-though visit the boss makes once every six months. It normally occurs sometime after lunch and coincides with an awkward deadline you'd really rather not miss. It is preceeded by a lot of nodding and includes two frowns, a decisive clap of the hands and a four broad smiles. Oh, and the words: "You're all doing very well."

Perhaps you are one of the bosses who breezes around, nodding, frowning, clapping, smiling broadly and letting people know you think that they are doing very well. And perhaps you, like your staff, will know how these exercises invariably clash with an awkward deadline you'd really rather not miss. And perhaps the rigmarole feels as ludicrously false to you as it does to your resignedly patient audience.

A pay rise? Don't be so old fashioned

Is there any room for the paternalism in corporate life? There was a time when employers sought out opportunities to help workers with the nuts-and-bolts welfare stuff that most people take for granted. Employers had to, partly, because Government legislation obliged them to comply with safety, health, and personal financial issues. Trade unions also pressed boards to do the decent thing. Considerate employers may have believed that good corporate behaviour would stimulate productivity and encourage loyalty. It would be nice to think that companies took care of employees because it was the simply the right thing to do.

Governmentium

This is a copy of an e-mail which is doing the rounds. It was sent to us by Nigel Walsh, deputy editor of Career. It is sure to resonate with anyone who has worked in government or a bureaucratic corporation. 

"Research in South Africa has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons...

Wall Street Bonuses

Catch this post on breakingviews.com, if you can. It highlights the fact that the big five US investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman and Bear Stearns) are paying staff a total of $66 billion this year. Yes BILLION. That's is more than the total annual income of Bangladesh (population 141 million).

This is obscene, as Hugo Dixon, the breakingviews correspondent, points out. It is also 9 per cent higher than last year. It simply makes no sense, considering how the investment banking industry largely created the credit crunch and have (boo-hoo) suffered huge losses from it.

This industry will be found out, eventually. But if your talents and/or inclinations are venal, unscrupulous, parasitic, oh-so-clever and knuckle-headed...I guess you should tuck in while the going's good.

13 lucky management decisions

"Managerial decisions are risks", writes Stuart Crainer in the Winter edition of Business Strategy Review, London Business School's journal. Crainer continues: "Looking back, they may seem obvious. Of course, Intel had to get out of the memory business. IBM? Bound to be globally successful. Mickey? Great name for a cartoon mouse. But did Walt Disney know that he would make millions of dollars from a cartoon mouse? Did he know it was an important decision at the time? I don't think so. It wasn't a foolproof scheme to get rich quick, just a decision that worked".

He goes on to offer a myriad of great management decisions from his book The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made. Here we have picked 13 of our favourites:

Bring me my Machine Gun

I am not sure I know I great deal about politics, but I know a great mission statement when I see one. Step forward Jacob Zuma, would-be successor to Nelson Mandela's free South Africa, which, incidentally, must be one of the greatest management case histories of all time. Zuma's song goes by the title "Awuleth' Umshini Wami" or the rather less edfiyingly, but much more scarily, "Bring Me My Machine Gun." If that doesn't get the goodfornothings in accounts working harder, what will?

If you are having trouble formulating your mission statement, try this tool from Dilbert.

Is your computer smarter than you?

If you are one of those people who hates maths and last punched a calculator button in anger on the last day of school aged 15, then I suggest that you move swiftly on to the next post because what follows will make for grim reading. Yes, you may have moved into the creative industries to blot out the memories of those dreary double maths lessons on a Monday morning - but it seems that the geeks are about to inherit the Earth. Well that's the prediction in Professor Ian Ayres's fascinating new book, Super Crunchers. How Anything can be Predicted.

When the going gets tough...

A study published by the University of Chicago GSB this week suggests that tougher is better when it comes to making it as a CEO. A survey of more than 300 US private equity firm CEOs shows that speedy, aggressive, persistent CEO candidates are more likely to be hired than their good-at-listening, open-to-criticism, team-playing counterparts.

Alpha monkeys trump dead fish

Competitive chaps impress their colleagues with firm handshakes because a good grip asserts their social dominance: hardly breaking news. More interesting is the suggestion, published in BusinessWeek, that only 35 per cent of the manly grasp's strength is determined by the shaker's environment; 65 per cent of it is genetically determined, according to research by psychologist Gordon Gallup. He attributes this to our distant ancestors: monkeys with powerful hands swung easily through the trees, thus impressing lady monkeys with their genetic excellence, while their weaker-palmed pals were more likely to drop to earth.

(Note: the article says that there's no correlation between the strength of a woman's handshake and her behavioural competitiveness, although it does suggest good health.)

How to be happy

Most people want to be happy. But what makes us happy?

A paper by Stefan Wills, a programme director at Ashridge Business School, offers a simple explanation in the school's journal 360 degrees.

Wills argues that to be an effective business leader you need to be happy: "If leaders who radiate happiness can achieve better relationships with their followers, who in turn create happier customers, it is worthwhile for leaders to reflect on their own degree of personal happiness."

In short no-one wants to work for a grumpy git.

Cock-Up Watch (part 2): Steve McClaren

Is the manager of the inadequate England football side a scapegoat? Or is he a sheep, a bellwether leading a motley bunch of air-heads around in ever more pointless circles?

Steve McClaren has failed because he has failed to secure what most supporters of this dismal game assume is a minimum requirement: to qualify for each of the two big football tournaments, the World Cup and the European Championship.  In any sensible reading of the situation he is only partly to blame. Yet to listen to supporters now, and in recent weeks, it would appear as if all England's football woes lie at the door of the luckless Mr McClaren. In the sense that players produce - or in this case do not produce - the goods, McClaren is a scapegoat.

Cock-Up Watch (part 1): Alistair Darling, HM Customs and Revenue, and lost computer discs

The story of Alistair Darling's slipped disc will run and run. And as with all big news stories any and all special interest groups will manufacture some sort of angle....here is an early take from the management perspective. As, in essence, this is a failure of management process, the lessons are legion. Here are three that leap immediately to mind.

a) don't have secrets

b) don't do anything even in the slightest bit complicated or fancy (like post letters)

c) take a leaf from that part of the the actors' manual which warns about the danger of working with children and animals. Only add politicians to the list and remember that politicians can be more childish, and more beastly, than any toddler or pooch.

PS. the best coverage of the affair in in my own paper, natch. Alice Miles' column is superbly spiky. But Hamish McRae, easily one of the most under-estimated columnists writing, in The Independent newspaper, is also well worth reading on this one .

Can McKinsey fix the US? Or is it more a job for Bain or BCG?

There was a time when political candidates used to run their campaigns on the basis that they had the answers needed to fix things. Now, says Michael Kinsley in Time, they just promise to call in the consultants to sort things out; the only question is which firm to choose.

But why not skip the middleman? If consultants are going to run government, it would seem simpler for them to pitch their PowerPoint presentations directly at voters so that we can decide who gets their hands on taxpayers' cash. Plus from a career point of view,  "ran the US government, 2008-2012" would look great on any CV.

If you pay peanuts...

This is one of the shortest, and most useful management training videos I have seen for some time. It begs a huge question: is it what you want your people to do, or want your people NOT to do?

Women in business

The Wall Street Journal's latest list of 50 female movers and shakers of the corporate world is well worth combing. It is a good list, but Lubna Olayan, arguably the most powerful business woman in the Middle East, is surely an omission. My own list of wealthy and influential mid east business figures (male and female) can be found at the GulfPower25 microsite. I had Olayan at number 6.

What is the most boring job in the world?

Desert Island Discs must be the best personality interview format ever invented. It is interesting and informative even when the subject is less than either of these things. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the recently retired director-general M15, on yesterday (Sunday, 18 November 2007), was fascinating.

What is the colour of management?

Of all the colours in the rainbow, which is the one that best matches the dismal art of management?

No self-respecting corporate blither can do without green these days, although most environmental evangelism is nothing but a transparent marketing ploy. Is any of it any more than lip-service, disingenuously paid to consumers who are savvy enough to say the right thing but shallow enough to do what suits their pocket? Red is traditionally associated with the City of London, but while crimson may be the colour of money, it cannot be the colour of management. To be in the red, surely, is to be in a terrible place. It might be blue, were it not for the fact that blue-sky-thinking is the stuff only of unreconstructed management dalks. It could be brown, judging by the colour of most aspiring managers' noses.

Bob Nardelli drives Chrysler for private equity

So, Bob Nardelli, the man last seen being marched out of Home Depot, the US retailer, with a cheque for $210 million (£105 milion) in his back pocket, has turned up at Chrysler, the car maker recently bought by Cereberus, the private equity outfit.