Round pegs, round holes

An anonymous MP who met Theresa May to discuss the EU expressed their surprise at the fact that she read from a script. To this Nick Boles replied, in a wonderful example of counter-advocacy, that:

She always does that. She did the same when I had a private meeting with her to talk about the government’s housing strategy.

This highlights Ms May’s failing. When you’re engaged in multilateral negotiations – in which the EU is only one counterparty and perhaps not the most important – you need intellectual flexibility and interpersonal skills. Which is what Ms May doesn’t have. What she does have is stubbornness which is, as Simon says, “the worst quality for a PM in the current situation.”

This is not to say that stubbornness is a bad thing. Not at all. When you are on the right course and beset by doubters and nay-sayers, it is a virtue. Sadly for Ms May and the country, this is not our current situation. It’s not that Ms May lacks qualities. It’s just that the ones she has are the opposite of those we need. To borrow Noel Gallagher’s metaphor, she's a woman with a fork in a world full of soup.

The point here goes back to Aristotle. Whether something is a virtue or vice depends upon context. In the wrong contexts, courage becomes recklessness, prudence becomes meanness, resolve becomes pig-headedness, an ability to delegate becomes laziness and so on. And in the right context, vice versa. (The skill of the obituarist consists in part in using these redescriptions.)  

When you’re hiring somebody for a job, therefore, what you want is not simply the best person. You want the right person – one who fits the job requirement, whose strengths are those you need, and whose weaknesses won’t be shown up. Whether a hire is a success or failure will depend not merely upon their own qualities but upon the match between their own characteristics and those of their colleagues and the job requirement.

To give a few examples:

 - The performance of both equity analysts and heart surgeons (pdf) varies when they change job: their success depends upon how well they fit their colleagues, not just their own qualities.

 - Football managers succeed or fail depending upon how well they fit the club. Jose Mourinho is considered a failure at Man Utd, for example, in part because he was a defensive-minded coach at a team that had a culture and expectation of attacking football.

 - Bosses who leave General Electric for other firms have very different results (pdf) depending on their match with the job: an engineer in a job that requires marketing skills will fail, for example.

 - Winston Churchill’s pig-headed belligerence made him a liability in politics for decades. But it was just what the country needed in 1940.

Very often, though, hirers and the commentariat don’t sufficiently appreciate this They attribute success or failure to the individual when instead it is the product of the match between the individual and her environment: this is a version of the fundamental attribution error. This leads to what I’ve called cargo cult management - the idea that all will be well if only we hire the best person, whilst failing to specify the precise mechanism through which the “best person” will achieve results.

From this perspective, the opinion poll question “who will make the best PM?” is a stupid one. Nobody is perfect: everybody has weaknesses as well as strengths. What we need is not the best PM but the right one – one whose scant few strengths are those we need and whose many weaknesses need not be decisive.  

Jeremy Corbyn, for example, has obvious weaknesses. He’s a dodgy judge of character, lazy and not intellectual. But he has virtues too, such as a common touch which Ms May lacks. (In this sense, oddly, there might be similarities with Ronald Reagan). What we should ask is whether this bag of virtues and vices is a decent fit for what the country needs. It’s not impossible that it just might be.

Comments

[Scratch]

"To borrow Noel Gallagher’s metaphor, she's a woman with a fork in a world full of soup."

One trusts he acknowledged his debt to HMHB's "Bob Wilson, Anchorman."

[Brian]

It feels like you’re damning Corbyn with faint praise when you describe him as gifted with “the common touch”. I suspect many non-Londoners would also not agree, and simply see him as as a useless socialist. When I was about 17, chatting to our local milkman, he said he could never support Labour as they were just a bunch of “useless badminton-playing swingers and wife-swappers”. The image stated with me, but I could never work out what the milkman had against swingers and wife-swapping.

[Scratch]

No red-blooded milkman wants a round populated with sated housewives.

[Brian]

Haha!

[Tasker Dunham]

A comment on the Daily Mail site has just amused me (as comments there often do): "she's the the kind negotiator to come out of DFS with a full-priced sofa".

[georgesdelatour]

I find Teresa May utterly mysterious.

“Stubborn” is exactly wrong. Her Lancaster House view - “Brexit means Brexit”, “No deal is better than a bad deal” - is the antimatter of her Chequers view: so no idée fixe, no stubbornness there. She approached negotiations by conceding early to Barnier on everything which gave the UK leverage; so no Charles De Gaulle “empty chair crisis” stubbornness there.

The EEC/EU has been the most religion-like divisive issue in UK politics since Hugh Gaitskell’s time. When the Conservatives were the most pro-EEC party, it led Enoch Powell to stubbornly campaign for Labour in 1974, and Roy Jenkins to stubbornly campaign against Labour in 1983.

I understand completely that Dominic Grieve believes in Europe with every fibre of his being. He’d still be stubbornly trying to frustrate Brexit if the Referendum had been 80-20 for Leave. Bill Cash is probably is anti-EU equivalent. But May seems completely agnostic on it.

I have zero evidence for this; but is it possible she’s motivated by some romantic attachment? There’s suggestive evidence that Edwina Mountbatten’s romantic relationship with Nehru may have caused the India-Pakistan border to be secretly adjusted in India’s favour. Could something similar be at play here?

[georgesdelatour]

There’s an obvious comparison to be made, between Harold Wilson’s leadership of Labour in 1974-76 and May’s of the Conservatives today. She doesn’t come out of the comparison well.

Wilson had to navigate extreme party divisions in a minority government, and then in a government with a tiny majority. He was very shrewd at finding the right cabinet roles for people, where they could do least damage, and - if possible - even some occasional good. Moving Tony Benn to Energy, where his evangelising enthusiasm was an asset, was smart.

May started by making a Remainer Chancellor, and a Brexiter Foreign Secretary. It would have been better if she’d done the opposite. Chancellors find it harder to get involved in the day-to-day cut and thrust of political disputation, and they inevitably become the boring killjoy of the cabinet, telling everyone else that the country can’t afford their unrealistic policy ideas. Chancellors soon learn that even their most innocuous comments can cause Sterling or the FT index to yo-yo; so they have to be far more guarded than any other cabinet minister. There’s a reason Tony Blair shrewdly made his bitterly resentful rival Chancellor rather than Foreign Secretary.

While it’s hard to imagine BoJo as Chancellor, I can certainly imagine David Davis in that job. And giving him it would have elevated his status on the Tory Right, potentially splitting any future ERG vote for Johnson as PM. Meanwhile, a Remainer Foreign Secretary would have suggested to non-dogmatic Remainers that her vision of post-Brexit Britain was open and internationalist; not the “w**s begin at Calais” approach BoJo was likely to suggest (and quickly did suggest).

So what to do with BoJo? I’d say Home Secretary. He was an okay Mayor of London, so he might have risen to the task. But if he didn’t, he’d eventually be forced out after ruining his reputation.

[Daniel j Rogers]

It's ridiculous to think stubbornness is a quality.

When did anyone ever conduct a job interview and say "I'm going to hire this woman, love her stubbornness" ?

[cjcj]

Chris has contracted a fatal combination of Brexit Derangement Syndrome and Corbynism. Leaving aside the obvious contradictions, it's becoming all rather odd...