Starmer, skill and luck

Why is Sir Keir Starmer making such a mess of being Labour leader? A good perspective on this comes from a 2006 article (pdf) in the Harvard Business Review by Boris Groysberg and colleagues: I fear most journalists and Labour activists have overlooked this because the HBR is too left-wing for them.

They looked at what happened when senior managers at General Electric became CEOs of other companies. And they found that bosses with similarly impressive CVs had hugely different performances in their new firms. This, they say, is because what matters is not so much the individual boss’s skills but the match between those skills and the job requirements. So if for example a cost-cutter took over a firm whose priority was to grow rapidly, he failed, whereas he succeeded if he took over a firm that needed to cuts costs in order to undercut its competitors.

Starmer’s problem is that whilst there was a good match between his skills and the job requirements of being Director of Public Prosecutions, there is a less good match between them and what it takes to be a good Labour leader. As DPP one can occasionally get away with dumping blame upon an underling, but this is harder for a Labour leader especially when those underlings have a significant powerbase and mandate of their own. More importantly, a DPP needs mainly to just keep the organization running. He doesn’t need a vision with which to inspire waverers. But a Labour leader certainly does. To use Groysberg’s framing, moving from being DPP to Labour leader is like moving from running a monopolistic utility to a growth company needing to catch customers’ attention in a competitive environment. It’s no surprise that a man can succeed at one but fail at the other.

Of course, there’s nothing at all unusual in a man being a good fit in one job and a bad one in another. It is the story of many football managers: Jose Mourinho was a great fit with Chelsea at least in his first spell there but not so much at Sp*rs, for example. Many successful businessmen who go into politics have mediocre careers. And countless men are geniuses in one field but fools in others: think of Bobby Fischer, William Shockley, James Watson, Richard Dawkins…

You might object here that this assessment of Starmer is founded upon hindsight.

Damn right it is. And that’s the point. We often cannot tell in advance who will be the best fit for the job – which is why so many hiring decisions go wrong. As William Goldman famously and rightly said, nobody knows anything.

We should therefore change our frame. Success can be the product not of skill and intention but of the luck of being the right person in the right place at the right time. Think of politics and indeed business as being like natural selection: randomish chances spring up – particular individuals, companies or strategies – and the environment selects for and against these. For example, whilst they were MPs it was not at all obvious that Boris Johnson would make a more successful Prime Minister than Theresa May – which is why Tories voted her leader in 2015. But he has, because the environment has selected for his mix of strengths and weaknesses whilst it selected against hers. (Whether this will remain the case is, of course, another matter.) To take another example, John Denham says the Tories have “managed extraordinarily well to appeal to English-identifying voters". He's right. But Tory appeals to nationalism failed abysmally in the late 90s and 00s, so why are they succeeding now? Could it be because the environment that once selected against such appeals now select for them? 

People are, however, terrible at distinguishing between luck and skill. The most striking evidence for this comes from experiments by Nattavudh Powdthavee and Yohanes Riyanto. They got students in Singapore and Thailand to bet upon tosses of a fair coin and found that they were willing to pay to back the bet of students who had correctly called previous tosses. “An average person is often happy to pay for what could only be described as transparently useless advice” they concluded. Startling as it seems, this has been corroborated by other experiments.

And people make this error even when they have real money at stake. Investors around the world (pdf) lose money because they buy unit trusts that have performed well for a few months, failing to see that short-term returns are largely due to luck.  They “confuse risk taking with skill” says Christoph Merkle. They “lose money because they buy unit trusts after short periods of good performance, failing to see that this can be due to dumb luck rather than to fund managers’ skill” say Andrew Clare and Nick Motson at Cass Business School.

Most fund managers are not skilful – but some get selected for by the luck of the environment. Maybe the same is true of politicians. And Starmer is being selected against and Johnson for – at least for now.

You might think that my depiction of success as owing more to luck than skill is a leftist mindset. But the left has a long (and I think ignoble and ineffective) habit of ignoring this principle and instead looking for heroes – from Napoleon through Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to Hugo Chavez. But there are no heroes, and even if there were we would lack the talent to find them.  

Comments

[Dave Timoney]

I'd add that the CPS is an institution that is particularly unsuited to developing the skills necessary for a politician - far more so than a typical commercial organisation - having a relatively small, secretive core that relies on highly prescriptive operating procedures to corral sub-contractors (lawyers).

Starmer's performance has reflected this, with poor planning and communications, and a knee-jerk authoritarianism, particularly in his dealings with constituency parties.

[marku52]

"English identifying voters" What is he trying to say here? White people?

" But there are no heroes, and even if there were we would lack the talent to find them."

I thought the PMCers that ran labour simply decided that Starmer was good enough to defeat Corbyn, and that was the only important selection rationale. Much the same was as Obama organizing a "Night of the long knives" to ensure that Sanders was not the nominee. Nothing else mattered.

[R.Rees]

Agree with much in this analysis. Starmer gives every indication he thinks MPs+Members are his employees in an bureaucracy.Yet Labour is a hybrid of bureaucracy (central office) with a need for democratic accountability+some of Weber's charismatic requirements.It's a demanding call+Starmer doesn't appear to have the flexibility to adjust. Not sure about 'luck' or lack of it. In Starmer's case I would translate that into understanding drawing on an appreciation of organisational history. His foot in mouth reference to the matchgirls' struggles shows that kind of 'luck' (historical interpretation) is also absent.

[Guano]

David Miliband would have been worse.

[rsm]

"short-term returns are largely due to luck."

So, prices are arbitrary?

I'm reminded of a trader joke: what are fundamentals? Whatever does not move price.

[MJW]

Starmer is also caught between a rock and a hard place. He can pander to the left wing of Labour with 'woke' style virtue signalling, Corbyn had great success with this noisy minority constituency, but sacrificed the wider support of the UK population because he gave the impression he cared more for people who they believe harm society than he did about them (e.g. Islamists, anti-Semites, terrorists, criminals claiming 'victim' status, professional grievance hawkers, economic migrants claiming refugee status etc...) Or he can try to be more centrist only to find that the Conservatives have the best tunes on most of the stuff that really matters the quiet majority constituency.

Perhaps Sturgeon, for all her faults, is someone he should have aimed to emulate? She has done a reasonable job convincing Scots she has their backs first and foremost, whilst setting the volume on the 'woke' stuff at a level that keeps the more moderate SJWs onside.

[ltr]

The point for a Labour elite and the media was that a Jeremy Corbyn who cared about and represented working class interests had to be destroyed and Keir Starmer was the chosen destroyer using horrid false anti-Semitism attacks. Starmer beyond falsely attacking Corbyn is no more than an inept Lite-Conservative.

Starmer cares nothing for traditional Labour interests and is a transparent sham.

Boris Johnson by contrast is truly openly Conservative.

[ltr]

MJW:

Corbyn had great success with this noisy minority constituency...

[ Rubbish; definitive prejudice. ]

[MJW]

@ ltr
By noisy minority constituency I'm not referring to 'protected' classes; I'm referring to the noisy minority of the population who obsessively virtue signal over a wide spectrum of issues that get labelled 'woke' or ‘SJW’ (the label given is less important than the public's common ability to recognise it). I'd argue the bulk of the 'actual' working class are primarily interested in mundane, prosaic concerns rather than modish virtue signalling overlays. They may be sympathetic to legitimate social issues, but the majority don't live inside the kind of cliched, formulaic, overwrought, commercially manufactured, grievance porn articles copy pasted in the Guardian every day.

[ltr]

MJW:

Ah, I did not understand what you were writing about and properly criticizing. I was wrong and quite agree with you:

"I'd argue the bulk of the 'actual' working class are primarily interested in mundane, prosaic concerns rather than modish virtue signalling overlays..."

This is important and I am grateful for having been corrected.

Well done.

[Blissex]

There is a rather more realistic argument: that Keir Starmer was not nominated for leadership because he was expected to lead the party to win, but because he was expected to be a reliable thatcherite if the party won.

There are some studies that shows that most party leaders have a small to negligible effect on electoral fortunes, also because most voters don't fire the governing party unless they screw up bigm, and because many voters don't even know who the party leader is.

So what matters is who can set the agenda *if* the party wins, more than who can possibly *make* the party win.

[Blissex]

«Boris Johnson by contrast is truly openly Conservative.»

Being "Conservative" means not very much, as the Conservative party does not have a distinctive ideology, beyond the interests of incumbent.

In particular the Conservatives have both a "tory" and a "whig" faction (with some different flavours of each), and I think that while B. Johnson is mostly instinctively a "tory", he has represented mostly "whig" interests, yet he currently is currently the front of the "tory" faction. That seems to me to be an opportunistic spiv, and perhaps in that sense he is "truly openly Conservative".

[ltr]

Blissex:

Being "Conservative" means not very much, as the Conservative party does not have a distinctive ideology, beyond the interests of incumbent...

[ Interesting comment. Why then do I think they have a distinctive ideology which I can identify in, say, about 10 points? I will try for a list in a while, and perhaps find I am wrong. ]

[ltr]

Blissex:

Being "Conservative" means not very much, as the Conservative party does not have a distinctive ideology, beyond the interests of incumbent...

[ Having tried to make a list, I realize just how malleable Conservative policy has been. So, I agree with there being no distinctive ideology. The political strength for now then rests on the leadership being pragmatic. ]

[Blissex]

«just how malleable Conservative policy has been. So, I agree with there being no distinctive ideology.»

To add this, there are several variants of conservative (small "c") ideology, but the Conservative party, while occasionally using one or the other as pretext, is really "malleable".

This is because it is not just driven solely by the interests of incumbents, but because the incumbents that matter most change with time. That is the category "incumbents" is not even a fixed class, as in "Labour", or a fixed constituency of any type.

[ltr]

Blissex:

To add this, there are several variants of conservative (small "c") ideology, but the Conservative party, while occasionally using one or the other as pretext, is really "malleable".

This is because it is not just driven solely by the interests of incumbents, but because the incumbents that matter most change with time....

[ Really, really nice insight. ]

[rsm]

["Incumbents" doesn't mean anything.]

[ltr]

Returning to Keir Starmer and Labour as now presented, I have no idea other than as a bargaining chip locally why I would ever vote Labour and this bothers me as leaving Conservatives increasingly unaccountable.

I can imagine no more ineffectual-inept leader than Starmer, but that may be the point.

[Jim]

Underlying our politics is a fundamental problem for advanced Western democracies - we are too expensive, Or at least our Jack & Jill Averages are. The Tories are the party of the George & Jemima Above Averages and would very much prefer Jack & Jill did not exist and their houses were sold off as BTL investments.

Starmer and Labour represent (in theory) Jack & Jill but has no way of reversing the economics of the class and education structure. Boris and friends run the party of selfishness, something that is much easier to do than cutting across the grain of human nature. The disparity in class costs is greater in the UK than elsewhere and relates to the housing market. That is taking Jack & Jill into a long slow death spiral.

This situation underlies Labours problems and is not helped by the very poor way the political career path for Labour politicians has developed. You would not run a big successful company like this.

[ltr]

What does such testimony mean?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-57254915

May 26, 2021

Key points: Dominic Cummings evidence

Boris Johnson's former chief adviser Dominic Cummings has made a series of explosive claims about mistakes made by the government in handling coronavirus.

[ltr]

Again, what does this mean?

May 25, 2021

Johnson leads a populist government which should not be normalised

-- Simon Wren-Lewis

[ The link to this blog will not post. ]

[ltr]

Dominic Cummings shows us the political tragedy that we were engulfed by.

[rsm]

Big successful companies implicitly rely on the Fed to insure them against panics. We should use the world central bank unlimited currency swap network to insure all of us explicitly with Universal Basic Income ...