Able and How

SOUTH KEN — The win seems easily in hand.  It will be more of a TKO than a real back-slapping, headline-grabbing, crowd-pleasing victory.  But that’s okay.

And then the player kind of clumsily sits down and then leans forward and back… and falls down.

Suddenly the game is not over yet.

I think I am describing an indescribably painful final 2 minutes of the SuperBowl this past Sunday.

But I could also be describing the twists and turns of the GOP presidential nomination process in the Land of the Free.

It’s not there that the comparisons end either:

• the vast amounts of money spent on the event consistently exceed its real entertainment value.
• the commercials are more fun than the live action.
• the most important players are not on the field.
• the strategists and power-brokers are in no shape themselves to play the game (physically or morally).
• really, really short bursts of activity are followed by endless replays, analysis… and more commercials.
• the average American sees the whole thing as an excuse to drink and eat more… and complain about everything.

Not bad.  As far as analogies go.

And when you think about how much American voters like a quarterback (Kennedy, Reagan) it starts to actually get quite frightening.

And how far is big business removed from this kind of pantomime?  To what extent are companies run as artifice, with rules that are too complicated, by actors who are standing in for the interests of others?

You can start to think of a compelling case, which institutional shareholders taking on a ‘strategists’ role, and unskilled middle managers stumbling around a field doing a job that is unclear to them.

But the comparison doesn’t hold up for long.  Not in most well-run or actively trading businesses anyway.

Executives and managers are still surprisingly powerful.  The decisions they make can have an immediate affect on the organisation.  The enterprise should — and most often does — show results and involve people in a genuinely consuming way.

In fact, if there is a complaint about the work that we do (as white collar workers in the industrialised world) it is that it is too all consuming and too fulfilling.  People complain about working too hard, getting stressed, not taking enough holiday, etc.  None of those behaviours are driven by real coercion.  

Business strategies are usually fairly coherent.  The implementation sometimes needs work.  But you’ll rarely find a business sitting down when the action starts.

/df