bozo's return

Capello's contract

Today I had intended to pursue some more snippets from my recent client paper on the reward lessons from the sporting world...and lo and behold, we had a fresh, ripe, smelly example at Wembley last night.

I just watched the highlights of the England defeat to France at Wembley last night.

Leaving aside the obvious personnel question of:

Exactly how many goals does peter Crouch need to score to actually be considered as a starter?

Aside from the grim horror of it all we are presented with a simple factual basis for analysis.

• France were actually worse than England in South Africa!
• In the intervening four months or so:
  • France seem to have climbed something of a mountain under new coach Laurent Blanc
  • England seem to have got worse under Fabio Capello

Now I know all about the new faces etc. How many of that French team played in South Africa do you think? That is, the herring red.

Grim reality is old France were as bad as old England in the summer, new France are better than new England in the winter. End of Story.

The other herring red is to think this has anything to do with football.

The FA foolishly awarded Fabio a new and very long contract before the awful truth of the World Cup. They now don't want to be castigated for sacking him and paying him off.

Fabio is a man of pride, but seeing as we are expected to put the flirting-with-fraud-excesses of the sub prime disaster down to bankers displaying 'human nature', let us accept that thinking Fabio will walk away from the FA's millions by resigning is a dim idea given 'human nature'

Henry Winter on the ITV said "we are locked in a loveless marriage"

How very apt.

I know I have rattled on about Dan Pink and his views on the weakness of money as a motivation and you might all be bored with it. I know some readers have commented how they see money as a very important motivation.

All I will say is there is no absence of money in Fabio Capello's motivational package. There was no absence of money in any of the England players motivational packages. Not at the World Cup and not last night.

And, sorry, but it has to be said, there was no absence of money in the motivational packages of all those senior traders and decision makers at all those banks we had to bail out.

Absence of money is to be found in the social services budget. In the wage packets of nurses and bin men. in the wage packets of teachers.

You tell me where the money will do more good.

 

 

Charity pub Quiz

YOU'RE INVITED TO A PUB QUIZ!
22 November 2010
Arrival 7pm, Quiz begins 7.30pm
Venue: Our Pastorate Pub: The Star Tavern, 6 Belgrave Mews West, Belgravia, London, SW1X 8HT
Map and more info on their website:
http://www.fullers.co.uk/rte.asp?id=243&itemid=287&task=View

Nearest Tubes: Knightsbridge (6 min walk) / Hyde Park (8 min walk) or Victoria (10 min walk)
Entry: £10 per person on the door
The Star serves great classic food.

GET your teams of four together and join us on Monday night next for an evening of facts and fun, as teams pit themselves against each other to be crowned 'The Star's Stars'.  Our four brainiest teamsters will each win a bottle of very lovely bubbly.
ALL this cerebral exertion on your part will contribute towards an exciting trip five of us will be making to Tanzania in February for Global Alpha Training (GAT). Please feel free to check out our justgiving page for more details:

http://www.justgiving.com/Tanzania-GAT-Skiba  

We are very excited!

IT WOULD be lovely to see you and we really hope you can make it.
Please RSVP to tanzaniagat@hotmail.com by Friday, 19 November.  (Let us know if you're likely to order a meal so we can give the pub a 'heads up'.)
Much love,
Michael, Claudia, Kelly, Sarah and Belinda

Why Major League Baseball is more interesting than the Premiership

Many you know that Bozo has followed the  major US sports since he was a teenager.

A client actually asked me to do some analysis on what business can learn from sport in the pay and performance management arena, and as i was doing the research and the number crunching I unearthed some interesting facts about the last ten years.

Let us have a look at winning the championship.

Year            Premiership        World Series                       Superbowl

2001            Man U                Arizona Diamondbacks        Baltimore Ravens

2002            Arsenal                LA Angels                            New England Patriots

2003            Man U                  Florida Marlins                Tamba Bay Buccaneers

2004            Arsenal                Boston Red Sox                New England Patriots

2005            Chelsea                Chicago White Sox            New England patriots

2006            Chelsea                St Louis Cardinals            Pittsburgh Steelers

2007            Man U                Boston red Sox                    Indianapolis Colts

2008            Man U                 Philadelphia Phillies            NY Giants

2009             Man U                NY Yankees                        Pittsburgh Steelers

2010            Chelsea            San Fran Giants                    New orleans Saints

 

So... in ten years the premiership has been won by 3 different teams; the superbowl by six different teams and the World Series by 9 different teams.

What we are discussing here is competition. I make no claim that baseball is a better game than football... or more popular - or anything.

I merely say that in the past ten years 30-35 different teams have participated in the premiership - yet only three different teams have won it...

30 teams have participated in Major League Baseball, and, 9 different teams have won it.

I think I know which competition is more interesting.

I would state that back in August there were only five teams that had any hope or prayer of winning the premiership. The three that have won it in the past, plus outside bets man City and Liverpool.

I would state that on January 1st 2011 we will have -at most - a three horse race and the likelihood is that at least two of those three will come from the list of three who have won it in the past ten years. Let;s face it - in the eighteen years of the premiership;s existence, those three teams have won seventeen titles.Please don't try to tell me its an interesting league. More fans will be involved in the relegation battle than the title battle.

It;s not competitive, it's not fun - unless you are Arsenal Chelsea or Man U.

There are additional reasons why  Major League Baseball is more interesting.

There is clear evidence that you cannot buy success!

The premiership club by club wage bills are hard to locate online. Not so MLB salaries.

In the year that they won the world series, here are the rankings of the salary bill Out of 30 teams) for the world series winners:

2001 Arizona Diamondbacks - 8th highest salary bill

2002 LA Angels - 15th

2003 Florida Marlins - 25th (yup 25th wage will out of 30!)

2004 Boston Red Sox - 2nd

2005 Chicago White Sox - 13th

2006 St Louis Cardinals - 11th

2007 Boston Red Sox - 2nd

2008 Philladelphia Phillies -12th

2009 NY Yankees - 1st

2010 San Francisco Giants - 9th

 

The average rank of wage bill is 9.8 out of 30, and the median is 10 out of 30.

One of the reasons that 30 out of 30 teams start with a shot at the world series is that you cannot buy the title.

Not only to the Florida Marlins prove it - but let us consider the case study this year of the San Diego Padres.

they had the 29th wage bill ($37.8m) and were picked by every pundit to finish last in their division.

Real no hopers.

On the final day of the season they trailed the SF Giants by one game - and were playing those same SF Giants on the final day. A win would have placed them in a tie with the team that went on to win the World Series.

OK - They lost. BUT They finished with 90 wins and SF with 92.

SF's salry bill was $98.6 million.

In salary paid per win the Padres come out top of the league, having paid just $420,000 for each win - compared with SF's $1.070,000 - and the NY Yankees $2.172,000 dollars per win.

I like football - and so do millions of others. They must do - because every year millions of people pay huge ticket prices to watch a tournement which the team they support has no chance of winning.

 

So we can be sure of one thing - those people pay to watch football - they don;t pay to watch the Premiership.

If I were head of marketing for the premiership I would take careful note of that fact.

It is the most boring big money tournament in the world because in its history the title has been won by only four different teams....out of over 30 that have tried - and let us face it Blackburn was a massive abberation - it took management genius from K Dalgliesh - manic scoring from A Shearer and even then only a wierd result on the final day between west ham and man u let the title slip out of the big three's hands.

Aside from one single year it has been - Boring, boring, boring.

In days to come we might look more at the waste of money involved in buying success... and the lessons for the Fulhams and West Hams of this world.

 

Enjoy

 

More Tea Vicar?

I have finally got round to watching the Tea party documentary... priceless!!

 

Andrew Neil has just interviewed some mindless oaf who had described Obama as a tyrant!!

Mr Neil, almost fainting from shock asks him:

"have you ever visited a country ruled by a tyrant?"

The oaf says, yes, but clearly he has no idea what life is like in Zimbabwe for example.

Andrew points out that the very interview they were conducting would have resulted in jail for both of them in Stalins Russia or Hitler's Germany. The oaf counters that Obama is like Hitler because both were in favour of gun control.

And this is what passes for political radicalism in the US?

UN-BE-LIEV-ABLE!!

They then showed a fab comic taking the rise...and pointing out some other intellectual weaknesses:

"They want the free market deregulated and they want their jobs to stay in the US"

They should all go and watch "Roger and Me" to see what capitalism does to US jobs in a nicely deregulated economy.

They have the right to their views...even if they are dim-witted disconnected facile views.

I just wished they went to Zimbabwe with them, and come back qualified to discuss fighting tyranny.

The Tea Party - mad hatters need apply

I saw a photo of a Tea Party protest in the Saturday Times... and decided to record the BBC documentary (which I havent yet watched).

Yet here am I blogging on the subject!

Well I have done some resaerch.

The reason I got interested was the statement on a flag I saw in the photo, which said:

"You have no entitlement to what I have earned"

That's a populist statement that many people can buy into. Isn't it? Here we are in recession, times are hard, and those who are working their socks off really don't want to lose any more of it in taxation. I can understand that.

But who is the placard aimed at? Because the Tea Party seems to have taken off in the wake of the bank bailout. Taxes are going up because of the bank bailout. The US under Barak has not become a socialist state.

One wonders how many mattresses the average Tea Partier would need to have to stash his cash in in order to have been protected from the losses that would have been suffered if the banks had actually been allowed to go down. And lets face it Tea Partiers are not the poor. The recent National Tea party Convention had a ticket price of $549 and Sarah Palin was paid $100,000 to speak at it!

I do understand that people earning money resent giving it away to the government. I do understand that human nature means that recipients of government money can be resented too. (I get a bit puzzled that right wing leaners are more upset by benefit fraudsters than they are upset by the bankers who got 1,000 times more in handouts, but lets leave that for now).

But what do those people and the Tea Partiers actually want to do about the poor and the disadvantaed?

I mean in practice?

Why can we understand that giving the banks a gazillion dollars because its less painful than a financial collapse that throws us back into the dark ages makes sense.

BUT we don't understand that in the dark ages thousands of poor "barbarians" decided to steal land and wealth from the rich nations around them.

The Roman response was simple. Pay more on policing. Pay more on the army. (Taxes are easy to raise it seems when they are spent defending you from the poor - less easy to raise to make people less poor!)

Eventually Rome's money and will power wasn't enough... and Rome fell.

It wasn't a good thing - but to me it was at least as understandable as calling banker's greed 'human nature'.

The poor aren't going to go away. The need for something to be done about them isn't going to go away either.

 

Here is one of the dichotomies I found in my Tea party research though.

According to a Bloomberg News Poll... 44% of Tea Partiers identified themselves as born again Christians. This compares with just 34% of the general population in the US.

Well surely then 44% of Tea Partiers believe that you cannot worship both God and money (Matthew 6). That if you want to follow Jesus you should sell all you own and give it to the poor (Matthew 19).

Shouldn't they?

Some work and some don't... St Paul said people: "...must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need." (Ephesians 4).

 

Jesus, like the Tea Party, didn't believe in big government. He believed in personal accountability. But it seems pretty clear that he felt the poor actually ARE entitled to what you have earned!

It seems to me that 44% of Tea Partiers need to think carefully about their beliefs.