FICTION
All in the Mind
Maya
My Name Is . . .
NON-FICTION
The Blair Years
The Alastair Campbell Diaries
Volume One: Prelude to Power
The Alastair Campbell Diaries
Volume Two: Power & the People
The Alastair Campbell Diaries
Volume Three: Power & Responsibility
The Alastair Campbell Diaries
Volume Four: The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq
The Irish Diaries
The Happy Depressive:
In Pursuit of Personal and Political Happiness
‘Too many coaches teach technique when they should be teaching strategy.’
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA
STRATEGY IS GOD. That is why it has to come first in the holy trinity of Strategy, Leadership and Teamship. This is not meant to offend believers, but to stress the importance of strategy to achieving success. Good leaders excel at devising strategy. Good teams excel at implementing strategy. You can have all the talent and ambitions you need, but without clear strategy, understood by everyone from the top of the organisation to the bottom, the ambition will not be fulfilled. So: strategy first, last, always.
‘We don’t do God’ is one of my most quoted sound bites. That wasn’t meant to be offensive either. It was a throwaway remark to an American journalist, but once it stuck, I thought, ‘Why not use it?’, so the words ‘We don’t do God, but we do do strategy’ were on a card on my desk for the 2005 election campaign two years later, alongside my perennials: ‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ (Benjamin Franklin), and ‘It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’ (Harry Truman). By then, my co-strategist Philip Gould and I were long-time co-believers in ‘SIG’ (Strategy is God) and we had our SIG rules.
Like God, strategy is open to different interpretations and so has become one of the most misused words and concepts. Many ‘strategies’ turn out to be vague goals or wild tactical gestures. It’s therefore essential to understand from the outset what the concept does and does not involve. It’s also essential to appreciate that strategy incorporates distinct phases and principles, and that if you fail to appreciate them or – as many people do – confuse them, it’s a recipe for defeat and disaster.
OST, THE ABC OF WINNING
The simplest way to view strategy is to consider three letters, letters which have been on my desk and on the inside cover of my notebooks since 1994.
O for Objective
S for Strategy
T for Tactics
Objective comes first because it’s the most important initial step, and to an extent it’s also the easiest one to define: it’s where you want to get to, what you want to achieve. It’s the ‘what’ in Margaret Thatcher’s famous injunction to a senior civil servant: ‘I know the what. Don’t tell me the what. Tell me the how.’
Getting to where you want to end up doesn’t automatically entail ‘winning’ pure and simple. Winning requires definition or, at least, calibration, according to circumstances. A struggling football team might start the season with the objective not of winning every match but of avoiding relegation. If Manchester United or Barcelona fail to win their domestic title or the Champions League, as happened in 2014, they have ‘lost’ over the season. But if a team that struggled the previous season loses numerous matches but staves off relegation this time around, it has achieved its objective and ‘won’. Crystal Palace manager Tony Pulis was one of the standout English Premier League performers of the same 2014 season, taking a club from the bottom of the league when he took over to a comfortable position. He ‘won’, and was named Premier League manager of the season by his peers. Barca and United ‘lost’, despite winning more games. Costa Rica ‘won’ their World Cup 2014 journey. Spain and England, out in the early stages, left as losers.
‘I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.’
WAYNE GRETZKY
Or compare the world of Formula One, where according to McLaren chairman and chief executive Ron Dennis, ‘The objective is not merely to win a Grand Prix or a championship but to dominate’ – in other words, it’s about the here and now, winning the race, then the title, and staying at the top – with the even more long-term view of a business leader such as former BP CEO John Browne who believes that the definition of winning in business is ‘Sustainably making money better than others in the sector; it is all about the long-term value of the company’. Browne acknowledges that it hasn’t always been thus: for a man like Jack Welch at General Electric, winning involved ensuring all the divisions within his empire were number one or number two in the market. But Browne argues that these days, when there are ‘more inquisitive boards, shareholders, activists, employees, and people hear so much about corporate pay that they assume all the time they are being ripped off’, a more nuanced business approach is required when striving for success and measuring it.
Deciding where and how to set the bar applies to personal performance too. When I took up running in my forties, and entered the 2003 London Marathon, I knew I wouldn’t ‘win’ the race, not least because some of the greatest runners on the planet were also running – indeed, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe set a new women’s world record that year. But I needed motivation to ‘win’ against the clock, against myself, against people of my age and standard. So I took advice, from athlete turned commentator Brendan Foster, from Sebastian Coe, and from my near neighbour Hugh Jones, the first Brit to win the London Marathon back in 1982, who helped with my schedule, and trained with me for hundreds of miles. They agreed that for someone closer to fifty than forty, who had taken up running only recently, breaking four hours was a ‘win’. So that was the objective, and the training – my strategy, developed and overseen by Hugh – was geared towards it. When I crossed that finishing line in 3 hours, 53 minutes and 1 second, I knew I had ‘won’, and felt delirious and fulfilled.
Even political campaigns, essentially all about winning elections, involve careful consideration of objectives to define winning. Working once in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I quickly learned just how complicated its political system, born out of the Dayton Agreement of 1995, actually is. This is scarcely surprising: the authors of Dayton were grappling with the aftermath of a barbarous civil war so they created a system in which straight ‘winning’ by one side is virtually impossible (unfortunately, this makes governing pretty well nigh impossible too). To devise a strategy for a campaign, therefore, a party needs a clear idea of what winning actually looks like. In the case of the main parties in Bosnia it means getting the biggest share of the vote (20 per cent is about as good as it gets) and securing a share of the top jobs. Whatever your walk of life, it’s only when you are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-limited) about your objective that you can begin to design and implement a clear strategy to meet it.
So how ambitious should you be when setting an objective? Set the bar unattainably high and the result may simply be disillusionment and criticism when the hoped-for results don’t transpire; at worst, you end up being remembered for what you didn’t achieve rather than what you did. Nicklas Bendtner is a case in point. The man who described himself as ‘one of the best strikers in the world’ is likely to be remembered more for his boasts about his objectives – playing for Barcelona or Real Madrid instead of Arsenal reserves – than for what he has achieved (he’s now with Wolfsburg, a mid-table German side). Over-ambition can also lead to dangerous levels of risk-taking, particularly in the spheres of business. Lehman Brothers is no longer with us because they overreached. The Co-op Bank was similarly plunged into crisis thanks to inflated objectives that could not be realised.
And yet setting an objective that fails to inspire is to risk mediocrity. ‘I like to think of seemingly unachievable goals and then work backwards,’ says Dave Brailsford, who set himself the target of leading the first British team to win the Tour de France. ‘Sometimes I set a target and then get home and say “Did we really decide to do that?” Then fear kicks in and the fear of defeat makes me do the things we need to do to win. I won’t allow anyone to imagine an obstacle is insurmountable.’ Perhaps the only way to judge whether an objective is pitched at the right level is to assess the extent to which it sets the pulse racing. It should be ambitious enough that winning really will feel like an achievement. It should also be ambitious enough that failure will feel truly galling. That latter point is worth emphasising. Time and time again, I’ve been struck by just how many very successful people say that what motivates them ultimately is not a desire for success but an absolute dread of losing. ‘I hate losing more than I love winning,’ says Brailsford. ‘That philosophy was always in me,’ says Leigh Matthews, Aussie Rules ‘Player of the Century’, ‘hate losing more than love winning.’ Certainly, in the political sphere the Blair campaign team felt an almost visceral fear of failure, and a belief right to election day that it could happen, whatever the polls said. But this fear of failure made us more, not less, ambitious about our objectives.
FROM OBJECTIVE TO STRATEGY
Having decided what your objective is, you need to put in place the strategy to achieve it. Again, absolute clarity of thinking is required. Above all, there is one lethal but common mistake to be avoided: the confusion of strategy with tactics. Asked to advise a German financial services company recently, I presented board members with identical postcards. On one side of the card were printed the words ‘Our objective as an organisation is . . .’, on the other, the words ‘Our strategy to meet this objective is . . .’. What emerged from their responses was a lack of clarity about both. Some of them clearly did not know the difference between an objective and a strategy, and, worse, several laid out a strategy that was actually nothing more than a set of tactics. ‘We should do a regional tour to rebuild relations with local banks’ was one suggested strategy. A strategy, I pointed out, would be ‘regionalisation’. A tour is a tactic.
They had approached me because they thought they had a communications problem. This particular company, though, had a reality problem, and they were using their poor communications – also a reality – as a shield from facing up to the void in strategy. This is another common mistake, and a symptom of a failing organisation. A business plan is not a strategy; it is one of the means of securing a strategy. As John Browne says: ‘Strategy is the bit between your purpose and your business plan. People with a clear view of winning know that strategy is everything. You have to have a strategy and stick to it, and never lose the plot.’
‘Strategy is like putting together a gigantic puzzle, hard to assemble, but easy to understand once it’s done.’
JOE TORRE
In fact we set strategies for ourselves all the time, but we’re often not very good at delineating them as such. Take dieting, for example. It’s not difficult to turn a vague ‘I want to lose weight’ into a campaign with a clear O and S and a credible set of T. Objective: lose ten kilos. Strategy: diet (eat less, exercise more). Tactics: record calorie intake and exercise output; visualise ‘thinner me’, possibly with photos on fridge; use stairs not lift; join up with other dieters. Expressed like this, a real sense of purpose is injected into what is being planned. The problem is that, in most situations, we tend not to strive for this clarity of thought.
But great strategists do, constantly, instinctively. Ben Ainslie, seen by many as the world’s most competitive sailor, is a man with a very clear sense of OST. The objective in a race is clear enough, and the strategy, he says, is all about defining how you believe the wind and currents are going to act. ‘We would have in-depth models of what the wind and the current might do, and you define the strategy before you start: if this happens, we do this; if this happens, we do that.’ He makes a clear distinction between this strategic thinking, and the tactical thinking that goes alongside it and which, as far as the world of racing is concerned, is entirely about the competition and what rivals are doing. ‘Strategy is how we manage the weather and the environment. Once you are into the race, it is pretty much all tactical, but within your strategic frame.’
Good strategies can sometimes be almost breathtakingly basic and straightforward. When in 1997 Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company he had founded but from which he had been ousted in 1985, just two words defined his immediate objective and strategy: survival (the phenomenal success came later) and simplification.
That simplification meant an overhaul of everything – products, style, management systems, team structures. It became a philosophy of leadership. ‘That’s been one of my mantras,’ he said, ‘focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.’ Returning to his company after years away, he complained they had ‘a zillion and one products’ – well, more than forty – and he reduced it to four. ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,’ he said. As strategies go, it was astonishingly powerful, helping to create one of the great modern industrial success stories. Apple also took a strategic shift to put design rather than engineering as its driving force, and great innovation followed.
Such clarity of thought, however, is not that easily won. Steve Jobs was brilliant at drilling down to the essentials, but many people struggle to separate the essentials from the white noise. So how do you arrive at that light-bulb moment?
One route is, of course, the Jobs approach – looking within, discovering what is wrong and establishing a strategy to fix it. Arguably, that’s easier to do when things are bad (and they certainly were at Apple when he returned for his second spell there): problems sometimes bring things into sharp focus. That does seem to have been the case with the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s under their former CEO Justin King. He was only too aware how much the company had slipped when he took over, and his objective was therefore a very clear and stark one: ‘Make Sainsbury’s great again.’ To achieve this he came up with three strategic planks: universal appeal (to stop Sainsbury’s being seen as narrowly focused on the more affluent); fix the basics; and understand the customers better. ‘We had grown very complacent,’ he says. ‘We were a number three behaving like a number one, refusing to take responsibility for years of failure and neglect. Better to be a number one behaving like a number two.’ A Manchester United fan, he took inspiration from Alex Ferguson: ‘He would always try to play the underdog even when they were clearly the best.’
‘If you do not have a clear objective, you have no definition of winning. If you do not have a clear strategy, you have no chance of winning. And if all you have are tactics, you have no right to win.’
AC
King’s overall response, however, shows that his strategic approach derived not just by looking within the organisation but also by studying what was going on outside too. ‘I came from ASDA and M&S,’ he points out, ‘and I wanted Sainsbury’s to match ASDA for price and M&S for quality, so everyone would think they could shop with us, because of our approach to pricing, quality, choice.’ And there’s no doubt that seeing what your competitors are doing, and being honest about their merits, can be a powerful aid to strategic thinking. This is most obvious in sport, with the competitive element present in every event. But, as the Sainsbury’s recovery demonstrates, it can work in business too. ‘Getting the right strategy means you have to assume your competitors are damn good, or at the very least as good as you are, and that they are moving just as fast or faster,’ Jack Welch said in his autobiography. ‘When it comes to peering into the future, you just can’t be paranoid enough.’
‘Paranoia’ was the same word used by John Browne, who quintupled the size of BP and turned it into Britain’s biggest company by market capitalisation before being felled by revelations about his personal life. ‘I assumed our competitors were plotting BP’s downfall every moment of the day. I thought it because that is what we were doing to them.’
My own route into this mindset – never underestimate your opponents and always hold on to the visceral fear of defeat – partly came from a presentation I saw on Prozone, a system which allows coaches to analyse in microscopic detail the performance of individual athletes on a team. It was launched in Britain in 1998, and has created an environment in which, as Chelsea manager José Mourinho put it to me: ‘Everyone knows everything about everybody, so you have to be cleverer in the analysis.’
Prozone inspired me to suggest that in devising New Labour strategy we should formalise the analysis we made of the Opposition. Philip Gould and I would meet weekly to ask this question: ‘If we were them analysing us, assuming that they had the same information about us that we do, what we would do with that information?’ and based upon that, send a note to Tony Blair. It was, in effect, a reverse political Prozone analysis. Some call it ‘the mirror test’ where you subject yourself to brutal analysis, with a touch of self-hate thrown in. By imagining we were our political opposites, we could better understand their strengths and our weaknesses. It was hard to get Tony to take seriously the idea that William Hague – and even more so Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Howard when they led the Conservative party – would ever be elected prime minister. But it was important that we were better at working out our weaknesses than they were, because then we could hopefully do something about fixing them before they got on to them.
Such an approach – deriving a strategy from an opponent’s potential strength – was brilliantly demonstrated by Pete Carroll, the head coach who led the Seattle Seahawks to a remarkable win in the 2014 NFL Super Bowl Final. It was a clash between a side renowned for its defence (Seattle) against one renowned for its offence (Denver Broncos, complete with Peyton Manning, one of the sport’s greats, at quarterback).
Objective: win the Super Bowl.
Strategy: defensive strength, limit Manning.
Carroll realised that his strategy had to be to curtail Manning’s effectiveness, and play to his own side’s defensive capabilities, but in a way that created counter-attack opportunities. Tactically that meant that Manning could be allowed to play lots of short passes, but be stopped from making long ones. In the event, Manning broke the Super Bowl record for completion of passes, thirty-four out of forty-nine. However, these passes averaged just 8.2 yards, the third worst mark in Super Bowl history. The Seattle players didn’t ‘blitz’ Manning – in other words, send defenders other than linemen to crowd him – because, although this is a standard tactic, they knew he thinks well under pressure. Instead they dropped into coverage, so they had more people deep to limit the quarterback’s options – almost unheard of in the NFL.
Seattle did not just beat Denver; they blew them apart, by 43–8. Carroll came up with a plan and coached the execution of that plan in a way that nullified his opponents’ strengths and maximised his own team’s strengths in line with their season-long objective and strategy.
Note that while Carroll studied Denver’s strong points he didn’t seek to emulate them. Similarly, once ambition and fear were driving Dave Brailsford to build his Tour de France team, he didn’t look at past winners and say ‘Let’s do what they do’. He looked at past winners and said ‘Let’s do things differently because then we might beat them. If we do the same as them, they win, because they’ve been doing it for longer.’ The ability to think big when attempting radical strategic overhaul is essential, and that requires imagination, analysis of every area and the ability to base strategy on both knowns and unknowns, not out-of-date changes by others. As Brad Pitt, aka Billy Beane (of whom much more later), says in Moneyball: ‘If we play like the Yankees in here, we lose to the Yankees out there.’
It’s a point that chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov makes too. ‘You certainly need to take account of who your opponent is and how they play,’ he argues, ‘and you need to be adaptable (as the saying goes, “chess is an attempt to paint a masterpiece while someone tugs at your sleeve”), but you can’t be defined by how your opponent plays. Thus a grandmaster is constantly making calculations to themselves along the lines of: I can play move A, which is objectively better but leads to the type of positions my opponent enjoys, or I can play move B, which isn’t anything special but leads to the type of positions in which I excel.’ This existence of style and areas of preference and competence in grandmasters, Kasparov suggests, is why chess is still a human game despite super-strong computers.
Kasparov, world champion at the age of twenty-one, number one for two decades, is one of the most strategic minds I have ever come across. He applies his chess strategies to life in general – appropriate for someone who is also a leader of the United Civil Front, the pro-democracy movement in Russia, and an activist in the game’s global governing body, FIDE. ‘You may want to match your competitor’s offering simply because he is your competitor,’ he tells me, ‘but what if it distracts your resources away from what you are best at, or what you are best known for? Should Microsoft have gone into building tablet hardware? Such reactions can serve a purpose or they can be like a sushi restaurant starting to sell pizza just because a pizza place opens up next door. It’s a delicate balance. If you change your strategy all the time you really don’t have one.’ He cites the popular quote attributed to Churchill: ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.’ And every politician would do well to delete the word ‘chess’ and insert the word ‘politics’ in the following telling remark: ‘In chess if you play without long-term goals your decisions will be purely reactive and you’ll be playing your opponent’s game, not your own.’
Kasparov agrees with me that Bill Clinton was a past master in this regard. During the 1992 Democratic primaries his candidacy was under pressure from a host of scandals eagerly lapped up by media and opponents. His team reacted instantly to each unfolding disaster, but in every statement made and every press release published they also made sure to hammer home their candidate’s message. Clinton maintained a similar approach in the presidential election against George Bush Sr. Against each attack the Clinton team responded with a defence that also refocused the debate on their own strategy – the now famous ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – constantly reinforcing the fundamentals of their own campaign. By contrast, four years earlier, the Democrat candidate Michael Dukakis, totally thrown off course by the Republicans’ aggressive tactics, was on the defensive. In campaigns, winners have to make the weather, even when surrounded by storms.
Running through everything Kasparov says is the idea that winners have to be good at strategy and at tactics, as Clinton was. The good strategist who lacks the ability to exploit opportunity will not win. The good tactician who can seize on opportunities but lacks the ability to make progress when no obvious opportunities present themselves will not win. ‘And another thing,’ he says, ‘hoping for your opponent to make mistakes is not a strategy.’ Indeed, opponents must never be underestimated.
Another winning strategist, Clive Woodward, who led England to Rugby World Cup victory in Australia in 2003, has talked me through the journey the England team made. ‘You’re not doing this in a vacuum,’ he says, ‘because there are other countries who think they can win too. I used to say, “OK, we are in this room, and in that room over there you have New Zealand, there is Australia, that room France, over there South Africa. They all have talent, so talent alone is not a prerequisite for success.” So you have to say to yourself, “What do we need to do to be better than them?” And it meant we had to look at what we did, and what they did, from top to bottom, analyse every part of it, where we were strong, get stronger, where we were weak, address the weaknesses, energise all the organisations involved to think and act differently. It’s always a risk to set public goals because you might not meet them but I really believed if we set that goal, and did everything required, we could give it a shot.’
I suggest that if there is a single word for the strategy it’s ‘excellence’ and he nods. ‘In everything we did, I was determined that every individual, and every part of the organisation, should be the best they could be.’ From a standing start – he was the England team’s first full-time professional coach, and didn’t even have an office on his first day – that pursuit of excellence was turned into a revolution for English rugby and its attitudes to team-building, science and innovation, the winning mindset. In Woodward’s experience, rugby still had the English public-school world view that ‘it’s the taking part that matters’. ‘It is great that teams can tear lumps off each other, then shake hands and have a beer, but don’t let that read across into people thinking winning doesn’t count. In professional sport, winning counts for everything.’ Woodward’s strategy, then, didn’t just involve building a team but also changing a culture.
IT’S NOT STRATEGY UNTIL IT’S WRITTEN DOWN
This is an absolutely vital SIG rule. Think in ink, as Marilyn Monroe said in one of her poems. In politics, it’s easier, because so much of political debate is forged through words. These words matter. Yet sometimes the pressures of a hectic life mean that people do not commit to print in the way that they should. The leadership of New Labour tried to ensure that strategy was written down, and communicated as widely as possible. That could be overall strategy – such as deciding the main slogan would be ‘New Labour, New Britain’; or the explanation of a specific act of strategy, such as the decision to alter the party’s constitution as a way of signalling our determination to change, and the plan to bring that about; or the thinking behind a particular speech or interview. If the words didn’t speak to the overall strategy, they were wasted words.
At Apple, according to Sally Grisedale, former manager of the company’s Advanced Technology Group, writing everything down became part of the company’s culture. ‘It’s all written down. It has to be. There are so many moving parts.’ Warren Buffett’s annual reports are much more than yearly accounts; they are expressions of ongoing strategy, pointers to the future as well as analysis of the past. Sir Richard Branson goes everywhere with a school notebook, and habitually writes in it, impressions, observations by others. It is a useful way of clarifying thoughts. As the American writer Joan Didion says: ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’ I do the same, whether writing diaries, books or, more importantly, sketching out strategy.
‘Think in ink.’
MARILYN MONROE
The best strategies can be expressed as a word, a phrase, a paragraph, a page, a speech, and a book. There have been many books about New Labour. But the single word back at the beginning was ‘modernisation’. The phrase was ‘New Labour, New Britain’. The paragraph said that New Labour existed to deliver power, wealth and opportunity to the many not the few; we would provide leadership not drift; our focus would be on the future not the past; and education was our number one priority.
The page would take each of those themes and show what they meant in policy terms, concentrating on the issues that mattered most to people – the economy, health, schools and crime. But instead of focusing on grand claims (though there were plenty of these in the big speeches), we opted to prioritise specific limited pledges, which were turned into the first of our pledge cards, an exercise repeated successfully at subsequent elections. The pledge card was a tactic to illustrate the concrete nature of the policy promises; using these specific policies was a tactic designed to show we got people’s priorities, and were realistic about how we could meet them.
It’s during – and not after – the writing stage of a strategy that any necessary internal debates need to be had. Just days before the 1994 conference, for example, even Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, both at the modernising end of modernisation, felt it might be pushing things too far to launch ‘New Labour’ so soon into his leadership. Tony was worried about John Prescott, the deputy leader, whose instincts were to be loyal, but who was wary of Tony’s modernising zeal. Over the next few days, persuading John to support Tony’s plan to change the constitution and replace the old Clause 4, getting rid of the commitment to wholesale nationalisation of the economy, something Labour had not believed in for years, was essential. Because if Tony had made that announcement, and John had been against it, and said so, we would have been dead from day one. The great thing about John was that the only way he knew how to have an argument was really to have the argument. If you tried to humour him or, worse, kept him out of the debate, you had no chance. If, however, you set out honestly what was intended, and why, he would have his explosions, but that was his way of testing the argument to destruction in his own mind. So we had the argument, day and night, in between Tony and me trying to write the section of the speech in which this bombshell was to be dropped. We were intending to do it subtly, and it was John, finally won round to the argument, who said that if Tony was going to do it, he should be clear and straight with people, not beat about the bush.
That debate with a key member of the team was crucial. Being a control freak is not incompatible with wanting and welcoming tough internal debate. When arguments are driven by ego and position they are tedious, but when they are real, about important issues, they are invigorating, and the means by which policy and strategy are made. Ultimately, decisions have to be made, but there is nothing wrong with big arguments along the way, provided that once agreed, everyone goes along with it.
The Northern Ireland peace process was replete with similar examples, where some participants passionately wanted something, others passionately opposed it, and yet, via the heat of argument, decisions and deals were made. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry springs to mind. Nationalists wanted it. Unionists didn’t. Mo Mowlam as Northern Ireland Secretary wanted it. The Ministry of Defence didn’t. Tony was on balance against but persuaded to go for it. It became a hugely expensive running sore, but its conclusion, under the next government and one of David Cameron’s best parliamentary performances, was seen by almost everyone as a good and healing moment. We got there by argument. A strong leader and a strong organisation will welcome those arguments rather than try to pretend that the possibility of a strategy or policy exists which pleases everyone. Interestingly, Jack Welch of General Electric puts candour right at the top of his list of ingredients for success, and yet lack of candour permeates almost every level of business, he says. It can kill a business, and the opposite – genuine openness at every level – can make a business flourish.
Once strategies have been agreed and have been written down, they need to be repeated – endlessly. One of my SIG rules was ‘just when the communicator is getting bored with saying something, that is when there is an outside chance of it reaching the outer radar of public opinion’.
‘Strategies must be repeated endlessly.’
SIG RULE
Particularly in Opposition, you have limited opportunities to set out your stall. When shadow ministers rebelled at what some saw as excessive command and control systems from the centre, I would endeavour to explain. ‘We are trying to persuade people who did not vote for us last time, to vote for us this time. The strategy that has been agreed is New Labour, New Britain. That means that we are a changed Labour Party. We will show how we have changed, through a new constitution, a new approach to policy, and new ways of campaigning and communicating. In Opposition we cannot make an active difference to people’s lives in the way the government can, so showing we are capable of change in these ways is vital to earning the trust of people to believe we can change Britain. But how are they to know other than through how we tell them?’
I would describe strategic communication as like painting a picture. Every piece of action or communication lands a tiny dot. Over time the dots come together. Counter-messages distort, even destroy it.
Here I call Steve Jobs as a witness, having learned he was a fellow dot-lander, albeit in a different way. ‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,’ he said.
And on the message delivery point, I also call Jack Welch as a witness in support of my rule. He finds it as annoying as I do, but obeyed it nonetheless. ‘You have to talk about vision constantly, basically to the point of gagging. There were times I talked about the company’s direction so many times in one day that I was completely sick of hearing it myself. But I realized the message was always new to someone. And so, you keep on repeating it. And you talk to everyone.’
The sad fact is that most companies have, hanging on their walls, vision statements that are never applied in practice; and they change a message if it doesn’t work quickly, when in fact – assuming they have done their strategic homework properly – they should keep going with the same message until it gets through. I used to love it when the press groaned as I recited my oft-repeated mantras.
NEVER CONFUSE TACTICS WITH STRATEGY
I’ve already mentioned the dangers of confusing strategy and tactics, but it’s a point that needs to be emphasised. Good strategies are big, bold and consistent. Tony Blair wanted ‘modernisation’, Steve Jobs wanted ‘simplicity’, Clive Woodward sought ‘excellence’ through attention to detail. Not all strategies can be expressed in just one word, of course, but the great ones have a clarity to them that rings out.
When tactics win over strategy, the result is a muddle; with this in mind it is worth considering what happened in the British general election of 2010.
Remember the context. Labour had been in power a long time. The Blair/Brown narrative had dominated politics since 1994, and while Gordon Brown brought his own style to government and handled some problems well – not least the global economic crisis – there was a palpable sense among the electorate of ‘time for a change’, stoked inevitably by government fatigue and the scandal surrounding MPs’ expenses claims that did most damage to Labour as the governing party.
David Cameron, then, was in a powerful position, and his objective couldn’t have been simpler or, arguably, more achievable: get Labour out of power and establish a Conservative government. But what was his strategy? Pre-1997, Tony Blair would say in speech after speech, interview after interview: ‘We are running as New Labour. We will govern as New Labour,’ and then in government he would say repeatedly: ‘We ran as New Labour, we are governing as New Labour.’ I’ve sometimes asked Conservatives to fill in the blanks on an equivalent statement. ‘David Cameron said: “We ran as –– Conservatives, we are governing as –– Conservatives.’ They have invariably struggled. Modernising? Traditional? Right-wing? Centrist? Compassionate? Austerity? Thatcherite? Heir-to-Blairite? Take your pick. Mine would be that he ran as a strategic butterfly, and went on to govern as a strategic butterfly.
The public aren’t daft. They may not be peering at politicians through my OST lens, but they do get the point. They see things, and they notice. What they noticed about Cameron, I believe, was that ‘yes, he looks and sounds the part, but I’m not really sure what he’s all about’. And that is why they decided to send an uncertain result and ‘instruct’ the politicians to create a coalition from the mess.
To my mind, much that David Cameron did after he became prime minister confirms the electorate’s initial view: quite clear about O, pretty handy with T, but all over the shop on S. Clarity on O or skilfulness with T doesn’t add up to a winning formula unless there is equal clarity and skilfulness regarding S. He proved good at posing for a fabulous picture in a stunning ski suit being pulled by huskies on an Arctic sledge to highlight climate change and promising to lead ‘the greenest government ever’; and promoting his plans for the Big Society, his way of saying he was not as right-wing as Margaret ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcher. Both good tactics. Both memorable. But what was the strategy underpinning them? And how did it relate to what he would do in government, if he met his objective and won?
What’s more, how do you square the inevitable contradictions to which his short-term tactics led? You can’t talk about ‘the greenest government ever’ but then never make a single major speech on the environment as prime minister. You can’t go for a short-term public relations ‘win’ by opposing airport expansion if you know deep down that this is essential if Britain is to recover, prosper and ‘win’ in a globalised economy. ‘Incredibly frustrating, just wrong, big mistake and they will regret it,’ says Willie Walsh, CEO of International Airlines Group. ‘Sad,’ says Richard Branson. ‘Just sad for Britain, because business that would come here is going to go elsewhere because of the short-term trumping the real long-term need.’
As for the Big Society, Cameron essentially dropped it, confirming suspicions that it was not a thought-through strategy for government, but a short-term tactical distancing from Margaret Thatcher, a distancing he reversed dramatically amid the tributes surrounding her death, which if anything served to underline the difference between them – the clarity of her political message and priorities, and the lack of clarity of his. The Big Society was also fatally compromised by Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity strategy – though he, at least, has shown signs of having a strategy and sticking to it. The referendum on Scottish independence also revealed Cameron’s strategic weakness. SNP leader Alex Salmond ran rings around him in setting the terms, chiefly a two-year campaign, the framing of the ‘Yes’ question, and votes for sixteen and seventeen-year-olds. Cameron seemed relaxed because at the time ‘No’ was 20 points ahead of ‘Yes’ in the polls. Complacency set in, and ministers did not galvanise themselves until two weeks before the vote when a poll showed ‘Yes’ moving into the lead. Cameron rushed out measures to give extra powers to the Scottish Parliament, then ceded the idea of more power for England and the regions, all driven tactically as a result of strategic failure. By not doing enough to win the argument, he ended up giving away too much. And when it came to a key issue like Britain’s place in Europe, he essentially subcontracted strategy to another party altogether – UKIP – which is a bit like a football team asking one of the other team’s players to take a penalty for you.
When you say you’re not sure what someone is all about, you are basically saying they do not have a clear strategy. They are ‘trying anything’. Companies whose employees’ complaints go beyond the usual whingeing inside any organisation, into the zone of constant questioning of their superiors’ actions and attitudes, tend to be revealing strategic failure. The sports fan who complains ‘I can’t see where we’re going’ is making the same point, and if Joe Public cannot see a sense of strategy, that could be a failure of leadership and communications, but more likely it is exposing a lack of one. Strategy expert Michael Porter’s quote below applies to businesses, but it can apply to parties and governments too.
‘A company without a strategy is willing to try anything.’
MICHAEL PORTER
It’s what Garry Kasparov meant when he said a constantly changing strategy is not a strategy at all. ‘You may have to adapt,’ he adds, but ‘you should only change strategy when the whole environment and the fundamentals change’.
The fact is that tactics on their own are invariably short-term and can easily trip you up. I recall how defiantly New Labour stood in the centre ground, resisting our opponents’ tactical attempts to push us off it (‘From Bambi to Stalin’ was Tony’s memorable summary of the ways the Tories tried to characterise him). Conservative leaders William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard felt squeezed for space and so ultimately they either went right or went opportunistic. Opportunism, as Howard in particular learned to his cost, is never a strategy, always tactical.
NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF STRATEGY
In November 2005, for many Manchester United fans the unthinkable happened. Roy Keane, for years one of the club’s most important players, had his contract terminated. Had they read Professor Douglas McGregor’s book, The Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960, and applied it to Alex Ferguson’s management style, they would have seen it coming. ‘If there is a single assumption that pervades conventional organisation theory, it is that authority is the central, indispensable means of managerial control,’ says McGregor. As Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger puts it: ‘If the manager is not the most important man at the football club, then why do we sack the manager if it doesn’t go well?’
Ferguson’s objective for Manchester United had been clear from the day he arrived in 1986 from Aberdeen: to win games and win titles, consistently, first in England, then Europe. ‘Conveying authority is essential in order to be an effective leader,’ he tells me. ‘Every time I went into a team talk I bounded in, chest out, making sure I conveyed authority and control. I never slunk in without anyone noticing.’
The key words in his strategy were ‘control’ and ‘talent’. That might seem obvious. But choosing to focus upon those as acts of strategy, alongside an emphasis that no individual is bigger than the club, is far from universal. Indeed, the all-powerful manager has declined considerably in the Roman Abramovich era of super-wealthy foreign owners who do think they are bigger than the club. Ferguson, with the board’s backing, had a clear and consistent management structure that acknowledged him as the single most important person in the organisation. His talent strategy was focused on the recruitment and development of world-class young players who understood that the winning mindset was an essential part of being at Manchester United.
Keane had the winning mindset, for sure, but in attacking his teammates in an interview for the club’s TV channel, MUTV, he was behaving in a way that challenged the authority – control – of the manager. As for talent, Ferguson saw the attacks as seeking to instil a culture of fear way beyond Keane’s remit as captain. Fans who were always quick to praise Ferguson’s strategic approach should have known Keane was on the way out the moment that interview was in the can. Ferguson has always believed ‘values’ have to run through an organisation, and that in building a team ‘you must recognise the value of the team as one in order to achieve your goals’. When Keane criticised the team in public, he challenged the strategy, betrayed this fundamental principle, and therefore had to go.
His exit might have been one of the reasons Manchester United failed to win the Premier League that season. But they went on to win three in a row, and the Champions League in 2008 with arguably Ferguson’s best ever side, spearheaded by his best ever player, Cristiano Ronaldo. Ferguson made a short-term sacrifice in moving Keane on, but he did so with the club’s long-term objective and strategy in mind.
Terry Leahy, CEO at Tesco when it rose to market dominance, points out that working within a clear framework of strategy and values will always gain you respect with employees. Sackings and restructurings will cause resentment and create a reputation for being tough. ‘Yet if that reputation is based on your unremitting focus on the truth, and people see you act according to the values you espouse, then that is no bad thing for a manager, your integrity will grow.’
Unswerving focus on strategy can be found among successful leaders in all walks of life. Take the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel – to my mind the world’s most impressive current national leader, as I will explain in the next chapter – and her handling of the eurozone crisis. She was under enormous pressure to be much bolder and more dramatic than she wished to or she thought sensible. Her objectives were to save the eurozone, while also preserving Germany’s continued pre-eminence. Her strategic moves were all designed to ensure this. She could have made short-term tactical wins by courting popularity in struggling eurozone countries (think how unpopular she became in Greece, for example), but she never lost sight of her own objective and strategy, and emerged strengthened in the longer term as a result.