Yes, we are still talking about the World Cup!
Did we all see the French debacle last night. It was right up there with Trafalgar and Waterloo. For Bozo, the overiding image was that of the French coach/manager leaning disinterestedly on the wall of the dugout. Or was it all the French substitutes hiding behind the goal so they couldn't be called upon to join in the farce?
It dawned on me overnight that the decline and fall of the once mighty French football juggernaut has lessons in management for everyone of us. Top firms will have a Head of Talent whose job it is to make sure the best and brightest and recruited. The same top firm will have a Head of Reward whose job it is to make sure the best and brightest are properly paid, properly incentivised and that the structures are designed to retain the talent long-term.
Well no one can doubt the talent of the French team can they?
Let's look at the credentials:
Evra (Man U - they seem to be a good team that has won some stuff)
Abidal (Barcelona - ditto)
Diabi, Gallas and Sagna (Arsenal)
Ribery (Champions league finalists - Bayern Munich)
Malouda and Anelka (double winners Chelsea)
I won't mention Thierry Henry because Domenech didn't mention him either.
So the talent is not at issue.
What about Reward, well do i really need to prove a point there? Nicolas Anelka has reputedly got a new contract that will pay him over £4.5 million a year.
The average salary of the particpants in blue last night was definitely into 7 figures. The reward - in cash terms - is clearly pretty good. Now the clever Mrs Bozo, who is a leading world expert on the subject will explain to you that a good reward structure is not just about large wads of cash component.
Regular readers will recall we posted on the subject of the Employee Value Proposition not long ago...
So we are pretty clear (are we not?) that success is not just the talent and the reward. It's what the talented actually DO to earn the reward.
But it's also the influence of management on their performance. The level of management failure is high in pretty much all industries. It falls into two camps.
There is the management doesn't matter camp. I lived in that world for a long while. When i worked in the financial markets the route to management was making a lot of profit. Making profit in financial markets is an ego centric and blinkered process. This is the antithesis of successanagement, and, consequently most of my bosses were dicks when it came to managing. Of course they earned loads of cash through trading, so their bosses let it go, there being no method for analyyzing the negative effects on that persons direct reports. In other words HE made £2-3 million, so we love him. There was no way of assessing that HIS bad managament lessened the earnings of his seven man team by £4 million so senior bankers just assumed he wasn't.
Then there is the management skills are easy, common sense and we all have them school. That's the school where the boss says "I am a great manager!" Or the school where the boss says "Anyone can be a great manager, we don't need to educate anyone!"
The conventional wisdom (based on the spin of the Thatcher years along with the ridiculous media unfriendly nonsense of the Union leaders of the time) is that the Unions killed UK manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s. The truth is that it was bad management. UK managers even today have less management education than their European, American or Japanese counterparts. Even today! It was even worse back then.
Now despite my management education I too belong to the camp that says it makes no sense to have an MBA before you even had a job. I do however feel that good management needs both education and experience. I think too that both education and experience apply to the soft skills of management. Empathy, communication, analysis, motivation etc, etc are driven by experience, but bettered by education. people are employed to do stuff, being good at doing that stuff puts them in line for promotion to management. But managing is DIFFERENT stuff!
Now the football world is actually a much better analogy for the world of business management than you might like to think.
Why? Because many people say "when they go out on the pitch it is only the players that matter." Which is true.
But if its so true then why do some managers, week after week, year after year, get better results than others? Ferguson, Mourinho, Wenger, Lippi, Ancelotti.
You cannot win a major trophy with rubbish players, (although evidence shows that you can avoid relegation.)
The reality is that groups of great players don't win major trophies. Teams do.
We have dealt with the talent and reward of the French team. A collection of individuals which were capable (on talent) of reaching the last eight. If not the last four. Yet they put on the most awful performance. So Bozo, and the French press point the finger at Domenech.
The French team were badly managed and management matters. They qualified despite him, a good team can deliver with a bad manager, to a certain extent.
Bozo works with senior management teams all the time. In the main there are few idiots. Very few. But they doesn't mean they are equally good at managing. But I have to say that spending quality time with the senior management team is the best single way of analysing the prospects of a company.
So look at yourself. Would you relish letting analysts into your world? or dread it?
Sadly not all those that should dread it actually do!!!!
Enjoy tonight's installment of "Grow old fast watching England"
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