Leadership in turbulent times

Carlos Ghosn, Mitt Romney, Stuart Rose: In troubled times, we need inspired leaders more than ever, suggests corporate turnaround specialist Anthony Holmes

Leaders are recruited to achieve specific objectives, typically to overcome an imminent threat and return the organisation to stability. Once this task has been accomplished, the leader should step down and the task of rebuilding and consolidation be given to someone with the organisational and administrative skills of a manager.

The classic example of this transition from manager to leader followed by a hubristic attempt to retain power and the return to the manager-leader is that of Neville Chamberlain’s replacement in 1940 by Winston Churchill, followed by his replacement at the height of his success by Clement Attlee.

Chamberlain and Attlee were accomplished managerial politicians with skills that were the antithesis of Churchill’s. In the critical situation of 1940, Prime Minister Chamberlain’s managerial technique failed totally. With the threat of invasion imminent, Churchill, the renegade, inspiring eccentric with a gift for communication, replaced Chamberlain; his success and the adoration that followed are well documented.

After the war was won, Churchill wanted to retain power, but the electorate recognised that the post-war years presented no threat and required someone with the comparatively mundane organisational abilities of Attlee. Attlee became Prime Minister in Churchill’s place, and the cycle of manager to leader to manager over the six years of the crisis that was the Second World War was complete.

The same pattern was followed with Margaret Thatcher’s replacement of James Callaghan’s premiership in 1979 following the winter of discontent – and her own enforced replacement by the managerially inclined John Major.

My own career as a turnaround specialist began during the last serious recession. I realised then the extent to which some directors of major companies deluded themselves about the resilience of their company; they spent too long apportioning blame and too little time making changes to leadership.

The question in the current crisis is whether we can learn from our own past. The artificial suppression of the credit and business cycle, which successfully averted the natural cyclical correction that should have arisen around 2000, means most of those responsible for handling this turbulent phase have little, if any, direct experience of operating in the previous crisis of the early 1990s. As George Santayana said: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

Log on to www.spectator.co.uk/business to view this month’s Strategist round-table Vodcast on Leadership in turbulent times, with Martin Vander Weyer, Matthew Lynn, Anthony Holmes and guests, from Monday 12 May

Email your questions to strategist@spectatorbusiness.co.uk on next month’s Strategist discussion: 21st Century business risks

Anthony Holmes’ book, A Time to Lead, A Time to Manage, is to be published in winter 2008. www.anthonyholmes.org

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Dr Charles Nigel Digges

June 10th, 2008 5:02pm Report this comment

I subscribed to 'the Business' for tthree yas before it stopped therefore I now should receive the Spectator busisnee ,I have received the first addition but do not seem to have acces to the online version ypu sent .Is there a metod of signeing on?

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