Boris Johnson was so personally careless and irresponsible that it was tempting to think of his prime ministership as an aberration, after which things would return to (relatively) normal. After the chaotic last few weeks, something much darker and more dismaying comes into focus. While the Queen, her funeral watched with awe by the biggest TV audience in history, was doing her best from beyond the grave to burnish the image of a ‘dignified’ British state, her heads of government were playing out a black farce of incompetence and malignity.

Even allowing for Covid, it is clear that beneath the pomp and circumstance, the UK under the Tories has collapsed into a downwardly-mobile country, a state which no longer knows what it is for or doing.

In the last year, while the world has been grappling with global polycrisis, the one thing of substance that UK governments have a chance of succeeding with is the most draconian public order bill in our history – together with mooted anti-strike legislation a grim testimony to the authoritarianism that is the sole common policy denominator of the three prime ministerial regimes that Downing Street has hosted since July. But how could it be otherwise, given a rate of ministerial churn that precludes any but the most simplistic form of government? 

Since 2015, when the Conservative government promised to replace ‘the chaos of coalition’ with ‘strong and stable single party government’, ministers have whistle-stopped through revolving doors at health, education, business and justice departments at the rate of one a year, sometimes more – barely time to locate the office canteen, let alone master departmental briefs or form productive relationships with civil servants.

In one sense that didn’t matter, since government had long since chillaxed into managerial single-mindedness. After 2010 the overriding central policy was austerity, everything else delegated to the market. When results failed to please the electorate, the government pivoted smartly to Brexit – up till then a far-right policy only officially supported by UKIP – which enabled it to outsource blame on to Brussels and immigrants and pitch the idea that ‘taking back control’ would allow John Bull’s sturdy character to trump proximity to the country’s biggest export market as a passport to economic success.

Today’s dominant departmental policy-setting mode is the U-turn, so fast and frequent it is hard to keep track. Thus a long-mooted cross-country Northern Powerhouse Rail project was developed and then downgraded under Johnson, re-pledged under Truss and is now being de-pledged again by business secretary Grant Shapps in his third ministerial manifestation of the year. In his first 10 days as prime minister Sunak U-turned half a dozen times, with more to come as he calculates how many of the promises he made in the summer’s leadership contest he can get away with breaking.

Unsurprisingly, the result of the unravelling of government since 2010 has been uniformly disastrous – for government, for democracy, for the country and for the Conservative party itself. Confounding airy promises of a Brexit dividend, disintegration has accelerated since 2016. A few figures offer a stark snapshot of the precipitous decline. 

Since 2015, GDP has grown by 24 per cent in Germany, 18 per cent in France and just 10 per cent in the UK. That leaves the UK economy 70 per cent the size of Germany’s, against 90 per cent in 2015. UK GDP growth is likely to be zero for the next two years, less than every other substantial nation except sanctions-hit Russia, so the gap can only widen. Blame Brexit, which will slash GDP growth by 4 per cent or 5.5 per cent, depending who you believe, over 15 years. As interest rates rise, latest estimates are that the UK is about to experience the longest recession since the Great Depression.

For the market’s view of Brexit Britain’s prospects, look no further than sterling’s 20 per cent depreciation against the euro and dollar over the last six years, and the ‘moron premium’ now applied to our borrowings. Cheaper sterling notionally makes exports cheaper and easier – but unlike other European countries, which have bounced back over the last year, the UK’s exports remain stuck at depressed Covid levels. In the three years after Brexit, a UK that traditionally ranked in the world’s top five exporters sank from 5th to 11th place, where it resides below Mexico and just above Belgium.

At the level of the individual, the effects of the Great Unravelling have been camouflaged by a decade of easy money and low interest rates that enabled them to keep on buying even as they were getting poorer. But as Sarah O’Connor pointed out in the FT, you know that era is coming to an end when Deliveroo tweets that you can now buy meals with Klarna, a by-instalments payment app. As the dust clears after Covid, it has become startlingly clear how poorly off most of the UK has become. Alongside its richest (inner London) the UK is home to nine of Europe’s 10 poorest regions; and after a lost decade the UK’s poorest people are now an extraordinary 20 per cent worse off than their equivalents in Germany and France. By 2024 the average Slovenian household will be better off than its UK counterpart. The UK is often glibly called the fifth richest country in the world: with the lowest GDP per capita in northern Europe, it is better described as a poor country studded with pockets of the extremely rich . 

Moreover, this understates the inequalities since the poor make greatest use of public services, many of which are nearing collapse. Reviewing the most important, the Institute of Government concluded in October that ‘public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election, which in most cases was already worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010’. There is nothing else to cut. Apart from the BBC, which successive governments haven’t managed to trash, and British government itself, which they certainly have, these services include those that have traditionally underpinned the UK’s ‘soft power’ as a civilised, stable and respected society – police, the justice system and the NHS, all now in meltdown. Add in the appalling Home Office, supposedly the guardian of British values, and the UK holds a full house of decrepitude and shame.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng weren’t wrong about the need for growth. Nor is is stupid to want British workers to be able to find work at home if they want to. But the supply side that the pair enthusiastically trashed in the infamous Britannia Unchained is not made of economic abstractions but people and things, who are now giving them a hard lesson in realism. No one should be surprised that business investment plunged in 2016 when companies faced exclusion from their main markets; and to imagine that will change in response to a few tax changes in an economy that is already lightly taxed and largely deregulated, not to mention in recession, is simply unmoored from reality. It’s equally absurd to expect sectors whose business model has been based on the free movement of labour  – agriculture, hospitality and the NHS, to name but three – to adapt overnight to an exclusively British workforce, and vice versa. Nurses, doctors, chefs, butchers, careworkers, even agricultural workers need encouragement and training – another notorious UK weakness. Whatever happened to common sense? 

The one consolation of the recent carnage is that its most spectacular casualty is the Ayn Rand wing of the Conservative party that created it. Can the Conservative party as a whole survive the bleak period of policy desert bequeathed to it, the only things on offer being austerity and social clampdown? It must be seriously in doubt. As he prepares his weekly interview with the prime minister, the newly installed King Charles might be permitted a wintry smile: while his government, the supposedly ‘efficient’ face of the state, has been turning itself into a spectacle of public ridicule, he can point to the ‘dignified’ branch, the monarchy, as currently the only part of the institutional infrastructure that seems to know what it is doing.

Read my post on the Drucker Forum blog here

There are currently a lot of things wrong in the world. One of the most urgent is management. Compared with war, pestilence and poverty rising as unstoppably as climate-change floods, that may seem a stretch. I hope to convince you otherwise.

Management is the supply-side constraint that incomprehensibly is never addressed. As Gary Hamel noted at the September launch of the Drucker Forum’s ambitious new Vienna Center for Management Innovation (disclosure: I work as editor for the Forum), even in an age of crisis and violent upheaval, it is the one thing that never changes. It’s stuck, and its stuckness, he said, leaves us hostage to a 19th century technology that has sedimented into a liability – a real and present block on our ability to solve problems as a species.

Ossified management is an important factor in the innovation slowdown that has held down productivity and average wages across the OECD over the last two decades. Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate that bureaucratic drag now amounts to a global $18tr in lost productivity, with all the implications for living standards, social mobility and inequality. Peter Drucker’s prediction that 21st century organisations would need half the number of management levels and one-third the number of managers has turned out to be wrong by 100 per cent. Management has grown faster than all other occupations in the US for the last 40 years.

This would be more than enough to mandate the comprehensive overhaul of management practice that the VCMI rightly has in its sights. But we shouldn’t neglect theory either. There may be nothing so practical as a good theory, as Kurt Lewin put it, but the reverse is also true: there is nothing as destructive as a bad one.

That this is the case for management was bluntly put in the title of a celebrated 2005 article by the late Sumantra Ghoshal (this year justly elevated to the Thinkers 50 Hall of Fame): Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices. When, sooner rather than later, every new technology ends up being used either to short-change customers or oppress workers or both (a phenomenon I’m tempted to claim as Caulkin’s Law), rather than for the positive ends initially touted, it is not because of inevitable forces of nature. It is because managers are unconsciously channelling a set of negative ideas and assumptions that were formed under the pressures of history, ideology and very human ambition in the middle of the last century.

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To keep it as brief as possible. In the aftermath of 1945, management had its sole, and all too brief, moment of political salience. Recognized as having played an important part in the allied war effort, it became an arena of competition in the ideological stand-off between the victors. To demonstrate the superiority of capitalism over Soviet central planning, the US authorities were keen to systematise the significant management advances made during the war, and in 1959 two major reports from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations appeared recommending that the teaching of the discipline be put on a more rigorous and scientific footing. The reports were backed with sizeable grants to help it happen.

Taking their cue from economics, academics in the US and at the new business schools being set up in the UK and Europe enthusiastically took up the challenge of turning management, then a loose hodgepodge of practices and processes, into a ‘respectable’ social-science – and set it on the numbers-based, finance-dominated course it has followed ever since.

This path was narrowed, then fixed, by theoretical developments in the 1970s, many emanating from the influential free-markets-oriented Chicago school of economics. Following the earlier Ronald Coase, companies were held to exist because in some cases it would be cheaper and easier to bring activities inside a firm or organisation where they could be better policed, than contracted for in the open market. In other words, companies are the result of market failure, implicitly second best to the ‘marvel of the market’ as a means of organising. Following Milton Friedman, the first and only duty of the manager is to increase returns to the shareholder-owners of the company. And following the agency theory of Michael Jensen and William Meckling, incentives were needed to prevent managers using their position to pursue their own interests instead of those of their shareholding principals. (Look no further for the origin of the stock-options boom of the 1980s and beyond, the excesses of which even Jensen has come to deplore.)

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Buried deep in all three strands of theory are strongly negative assumptions about human nature. As in classical economics – ‘the first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self interest,’ wrote Amartya Sen – humans in dominant management theory are assumed to be ‘homo economicus’, perfectly rational calculators in pursuit of their own self interest. Self interest means opportunistic behaviour such as shirking, skiving and gaming the system, up to and including cheating and lying. Not everyone lies and cheats, but since there is no way of knowing at the outset who does or doesn’t, the worst has to be legislated for. As Friedman helpfully put it, ‘the liberal…regards the problem of social organisation to be as much a negative problem of preventing ‘bad’ people from doing harm as of enabling ‘good’ people to do good.’ Economic man, reductive and instrumental, is explicitly at the heart of agency theory, and the threat of opportunism is one of the key factors to be guarded against in the transaction costs theory of the firm derived from Coase’s insight.

The upshot of all this is a management model based on a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature and the role of companies in society, and, as scholars have pointed out, one decisively skewed towards solving the negative problem of control and monitoring rather than the positive one of doing good things better. This is one important reason why management is blocked: it is up a dead end with no way out.

But, circling round to the beginning, it is this ‘ideology-based gloomy vision’, as Ghoshal termed it, that is replayed in the Kwarteng/Truss spectre of the the UK’s supposedly idle, skiving workers and their threat of repressive response, just as it is in the ruthless, take-no-prisoners behaviour of CEOs like ‘Chainsaw Al’ Dunlap or the early ‘Neutron Jack’ Welch; in the latest manifestation of Caulkin’s Law, the deployment by employers of distance working technology for ever more intrusive surveillance of their remote workers; in the growth of the precarious gig economy that platforms have in effect used to wage war not only on jobs (remember the short-lived ‘sharing economy’?) but on the whole idea of the corporation; in the use of adtech and targeted advertising to harvest and resell consumers’ personal information and the exploitation by social media of the worst side of humanity for their own gain; and so on and so on.

The other reason the current counterproductive version of management is so hard to shift is the densely interlinked supporting ecosystem that has grown up around it. Composed of business schools, big consultancies, governance codes and above all the fund management industry, it is all held together by, lo and behold, the same strong incentives and self interest predicted by the gloomy vision. It’s almost beautiful in its hermetic circularity.

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For all that, even this isn’t the baddest aspect of today’s management theories. That, with deep irony, is something uniquely human: if enough people believe them, their tendency to become self-fulfilling.

If you insist the earth is flat, people may give you a wide berth, but your beliefs will have no effect on the planet’s contours. But cause and effect works differently in human affairs than in physics. Self-fulfilling prophecy, as defined by sociologist Robert Merton in the 1940s, is ‘in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.’

This is exactly what is has happened with management.

Both common sense and research confirm that very few humans are exclusively self-interested. But evidence also shows that the more workers are treated, à la Truss and Kwarteng, as idle, opportunistic slackers, the more likely it is that over time this is what they will tend to become – and – here’s the killer – in so doing confirm the politicians in their erroneous belief that the behaviour is hard wired in all workers.

In other words, through the self-fulfilling prophecy, management was already hacking humanity decades before the deliberate manipulations of social media, refashioning it in its own reductive and desiccated image. As one scholarly article baldly puts it: ’There is a growing body of evidence that self-interested behaviour is learned behaviour, and it is learned by studying business and economics’ – and if the assumptions and language are widely shared, ‘the theory will come to determine what people do and how they think about and design the social and organisational world.’

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That, finally, is why management theory matters so much, why the current model needs a root-and-branch overhaul, and why working out how to achieve that should be at the very top of the agenda of the new-born VCMI. Although the badness of management 1.0 is by now plain to see, It won’t be dislodged until a new and better update is available. Although, regretfully, I am utterly unqualified to contribute to such a great academic undertaking, it’s possible to imagine a list of positive demands to make of it. More of that another time. In the meantime, my case rests.

Liz Truss’s remarks about British workers lacking ‘graft’, and, in the infamous Britannia Unchained text that she co-authored in 2012, being among ‘the worst idlers in the world’, are as frightening as they are ignorant.

Where to begin? Yes, productivity matters – probably more than most people realise. In the real world, as opposed to the abstractions in which it is usually discussed, John Seddon points out, companies create wealth and public services consume resources. If companies create more wealth and public services consume fewer resources, better productivity is a positive double whammy. More satisfied customers and more engaged workers and citizens are a third, although harder to measure. 

And yes again, Britain has an awful productivity record, particularly since the Great Financial Crash in 2008. UK workers are 13 per cent less productive than their G7 counterparts, and the gap is getting wider. Limp productivity is the main reason for the grim reality that the average British worker, unlike almost every other, is worse off than a decade ago in real terms. So both negatively and positively, productivity could hardly be more important.

For a politician who wants to do something about it, however, not more important than having a realistic idea of what productivity is and how to get more of it. And here Truss wants to take us back to the 19th century.

Behind her remarks is the assumption, sadly unquestioned by most managers, that the most important element in performance is human effort. ‘Performance management’ – instructing workers what to do and monitoring to keep them up to the mark – has become a standard part of the manager’s role. Indeed, whole HR departments, equipped with an ever more oppressive surveillance and measurement bureaucracy, have grown up to administer it.

But this is not only the antithesis of productivity, an ongoing generator of friction, bullshit and waste, it is also a roadblock to productivity improvement. The explanation is simple. As Peter Drucker put it, ‘The worker’s effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.’ Quality expert W. Edwards Deming attributed 95 per cent of performance to the system – the way the work is organised – and just five per cent to the worker. Third-year arithmetic decrees that however hard you drive individuals, the effect on overall productivity can only be marginal. 

But worse than that, the obsession with individual effort blinds managers to the real opportunities for improving productivity that do exist, even in – especially in – the most stretched public-sector bodies such as the NHS that most need them. They are won not by working harder but by working smarter. 

Take, for example, foreign-owned manufacturing plants such as Nissan in Sunderland, Toyota in Derby (and Honda in Swindon before Brexit reared its monstrous head), where British workers and managers have consistently been among the most productive in the world. People certainly work hard there. But their outperformance is not due to their sweat; nor is it a mystery. It is due to their willing engagement with demanding and worthwhile work in return for good pay, respect, fairness, a certain control over the work and opportunities to learn and progress. These principles and the practices based on them have been known and tested over decades in many different settings. As Jeff Pfeffer notes in The Human Equation, which documents this research, ‘it is more important to manage your business right than to be in the “right” industry.’

But such outcomes are out of reach of the many managers, and politicians, who do not share the positive assumptions they are based on. Instead, they are locked into the industrial-age, top-down, hierarchical thinking that in vain pursuit of economies of scale through standardisation and automation has given us a parody of service: dehumanised products and services provided by remote and unreachable companies, and employment as precarious and tightly supervised gigs when it is offered at all. The result is unsatisfied customers and epidemics of stress, anxiety and alienation, not to mention record levels of disengagement, in the workforce. As current labour market developments demonstrate, this is a recipe for a Great Resignation rather than a kickstart for productivity.

if a deregulated labour market, longer-than-average work hours and weakened trade unsions were the key to higher productivity, the UK would already be a world leader. Rather than promising more of the same, would-be UK prime ministers would do better interrogating UK bosses about their bottom-of-the-table record for capital investment and spending on R&D and training. The figures tell a consistent story of preference for the low-road model of relying on cheap labour and underinvestment, and chronic addiction to incentives favouring payouts to shareholders, including themselves, over reinvestment in new opportunities and better service – in the eyes of a number of seasoned observers the kernel of the UK’s productivity, poor service and low-wage problem. (The UK’s negligent water companies offer a malodorous current example of this nexus.)

There are many reasons to be concerned that of the five co-authors of the crude and caricatural Britannia Unchained, no less than four – Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng, along with Truss – will have top seats in the next cabinet. In the case of productivity, their ‘remedies’ – more curbs on collective action, harsher legal restrictions – will have a doubly negative effect. First, they are the opposite of what is needed; and second, through the well-documented effect of self-fulfilling prophecy, they risk turning already disengaged employees into implacable enemies of even positive change.

The irony is that we know perfectly well what works. Visit Sunderland or Derby; read John Seddon, or listen to Jeff Pfeffer on YouTube in Gary Hamel’s New Human Movement series. For any new prime minister – or anyone serious about levelling up, alleviating pressures on the NHS, or addressing growing poverty – the urgent priority should be to address the UK’s real productivity issue: the reluctance of companies and managers to adopt principles and practices that are dependably effective, to the benefit of all parties – and the failure of shareholders, fund managers and politicians to call them out for not doing so.

As Lenin reputedly said, ‘There are decades when nothing happens. And there are weeks when decades happen.’ Management, long becalmed, is in the middle of one of those periods of accelerated evolution now.

Innovation in management (as in regulation) always lags technology innovation, sometimes by decades. If management 1.0 emerged in the Industrial Revolution, management 1.5 in the industrial age and management 1.75 with the governance revolution launched by Milton Friedman in the 1970s and 1980s, could it be that the pandemic of the 2020s will mark the long-awaited shift to management 2.0?

If so, ‘the biggest global shift in a century’, as Gary Hamel hailed it, will be the result of the unprecedented turmoil roiling the world of work in the wake of Covid, and the unexpected unfolding revolt of the knowledge workers.

Most attention today focuses on the widespread industrial unrest and recurrent labour shortages that have UK CEOs bracing themselves for a period of rocky workplace relations. It’s a similar story in the US, where after decades of decline unions are making a comeback. Starbucks is progressively unionising; unions have been formed for Amazon and Alphabet (Google), and the third A, Apple is in union sights. 

Yet these pale into insignificance beside a Great Resignation that rumbles on unabated. Last year record numbers of people quit their jobs in the US and the UK, and even now there is little sign of a slowing down. Even those without a job to go to say they are thinking of leaving.The Great Resignation has morphed into the Great Attrition, not just in lower-paid trades like care, retail and hospitality but across the industry spectrum.

Most CEOs assumed that when Covid faded, the workplace would automatically resume its pre-pandemic shape. They can’t wait. In a recent piece for the FT, Gillian Tett reported that at top-level gatherings from Davos to Aspen, never mind inflation or war in Ukraine – all corporate leaders wanted to talk about was how to get employees back to the office, pronto.

They’ll have a long wait. ‘Right now, a lot of wishful thinking is guiding the return from remote working,’ McKinsey warned recently. ‘[CEOs] think it’s both easy and desirable for companies to move on quickly. But their people aren’t begging to disagree. They are voting with their feet’. 

Now, it’s not surprising that stress and anxiety increased during the weirdness of the last two years. But to expect them to subside again now is to ignore the fact that, as documented iby Gallup, discontent and dissatisfaction with work were trending upwards years before the pandemic; and to miss the profound psychological effects of the lockdowns. Something snapped. In effect, says LBS’s Lynda Gratton, Covid ‘unfroze’ ingrained work habits that had remained unchallenged for half a century. Yanked out of unquestioned daily routines, working from home, office workers found themselves asking what they really wanted from work and life; and whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t the bureaucracy and bullshit jobs of the status quo ante.

In truth, this too shouldn’t have come as a surprise. What people want from employment remains remarkably consistent: namely, a steady job with a regular pay packet, and a relationship based on respect, dignity and fairness. What they are offered, on the other hand, is something that looks like the opposite: work as a thin, affectless, precarious transaction – a gig.

As a result of this misapprehension, companies continue to get things wildly wrong. Their clodhopping attempts to get people back to the office with offers of cash or a couple of days remote working reflect the belief that they were the reasons employees were quitting in the first place. Wrong. When polled by McKinsey, employees fingered human issues – feeling unvalued by organizations or managers, or not feeling they belonged – as their top reasons for leaving (the last being especially a problem for employees of colour). 

Even more damningly, another large-scale survey linked high people churn above all with a toxic corporate culture. Job insecurity, failure to recognize performance and a poor response to Covid also contributed. Yes, it’s management, stupid. Sectors with very high turnover included quintessentially knowledge-based businesses such as consultancy and enterprise software, and firms with high innovation rates, as well as the expected retail and hospitality.

All this might be of academic interest but for one thing: the nature of knowledge work, which, as Peter Drucker foresaw, at a stroke ejects management from the driving seat.

For Drucker, making knowledge work productive was the most important management task of the 21st century. As in many other areas (although not in his linked hope that by now companies would need one-third of managers and half the number of management layers they did 30 years ago), he was right. The main reason why that productivity has failed to materialise is precisely the toxic, top-down, command-and-control (management 1.75) model that is driving the Great Attrition. Politely but firmly, despite the threats, knowledge workers are saying they aren’t taking it any more, and company after company is having to accept that there will be no ‘return to normal’, and some kind of hybrid working – a combination of office and WFH – is now inevitable.

As smart firms have twigged, though, hybrid working is actually about much more than the amount of time spent in which location. As a deconstruction and recomposition of the office, what it is for and what it should be, it is a proxy for how knowledge work and knowledge workers are managed. With no best practice to guide them, and each company having to test what works in its own culture and context, what is now being unleashed is shaping up as ‘the greatest unplanned experiment in the history of work’.

The stakes are enormous. Will managers take the opportunity to rethink work with people at the centre of a system beyond command and control that gives them agency to use their energy and initiative to further the organisation’s purpose? Or will they double-down on the grim default top-down model, as they did most recently in 2008, using technology to surveille and control rather than augment human skills, prolonging the epidemic of alienation and disengagement at work, and yet again kicking the prospect of making knowledge work fully productive into the distant future?

For management, the Great Resignation might more accurately be called the Great Reckoning.  

Goobye and good night, Boris Johnson, by some distance the most disastrous UK prime minister of our lifetime. His premiership will go down as an object lesson in leadership and management failure. 

Being prime minister is one of those in-the-public-eye jobs where, as the Queen pertinently put it, you ‘have to be seen to be believed’. Unfortunately, in Johnson’s case the visibility that he always courted does him no favours, because what you see is someone who has only to be seen not to be believed. 

Any post of this nature has two components: leading and managing. Peter Drucker, who was quite terse about leadership, maintained that it and management were poles on the same spectrum. Some roles, or people, had larger leadership requirements than others, which were more about management than leadership. What you couldn’t be is just a leader or just a manager. A leader without grounding in the management of the business loses touch with its reality and with it relevance, eventually undermining the organisation. Likewise a manager sans leadership qualities can offer no motivational energy or forward momentum.

For Drucker, for whom managing yourself was a prerequisite for managing anything else, a leader has to play to his or her strengths. Johnson got by during Brexit because he didn’t have to manage. He could leave that to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. In the 2019 election, trading on the successful effrontery of Brexit, he just had to segue to ‘getting [insert task here] done’, and the electorate believed him, or at least gave him the benefit of the doubt, because his cheek, and his ability to speak a different kind of language from conventional politicians, seemed to suggest the possibility of change – any change. 

Which they did – but unfortunately not in a good way. By the time of the pandemic, it was clear that Johnson was incapable of managing anything, particularly himself, and that in the absence of strong principles of his own he was taking his tactical cues not from his avowed hero, Winston Churchill, but from the erratic and impulsive Donald Trump. Witness his flippant initial dismissal of the seriousness of the disease (quickly reversed when he fell ill himself), then in the chaotic response.

The Tory party bears some responsibility for Johnson’s failure. ‘Cakeism’, Johnson’s preferred policy option of having his cake and eating it, was always a delusional solution for the party’s divisions over Northern Ireland and Europe, and the economic demands of its new and traditional voters. But it was an alluring one. The sheer carelessness of what ensued, though, was all his own: the cronyism of the contracting and the furloughs during the pandemic, the massaged figures around testing, the bold initiatives followed by hasty U-turns, were already in plain sight during his time as London mayor – remember his here-today gone-tomorrow bendy buses and the never-used second-hand German water cannon? – and in the made-up quotes and loose way with facts that he deployed in his previous career as a journalist. More concretely, £37bn spent on testing ‘that failed to make any difference’ and £4bn literally going up in smoke as useless PPE is re-routed for the crematorium are hardly trivial entries in the management ledger.

With hindsight, it seems predictable, indeed inevitable, that he would be brought down by another episode of monumental carelessness. Leadership, Drucker said, was a means to an end. When the end was Brexit, Johnson had followers to put himself at the head of (Drucker’s other leadership qualification), and a team of believers who were easy to motivate.

But by the time Partygate broke the dubious glow of Brexit had long since gone, leaving the illegal parties as not just the latest in the line of poor management decisions, but the encapsulation of the entire dysfunctional culture that Johnson trails around him like a miasma – the blithe insouciance about constraints that apply to other people, and that anyone with a gramme, or should we say ounce, of management sense would have taken into account before clinking champagne glasses in the garden of number 10; the subsequent denials, evasions of responsibility, brazening out of conviction for a criminal act and sacrifice of junior staff, all straight from the Trump playbook; and above all, betrayal of the fact that his only end, and the only end of his supine cabinet, was to stay in power.

That self-serving purpose was increasingly obviously out of sync with the extravagant and damaging means, such as proroguing parliament or repeatedly trying to change the law if it stopped him doing what he wanted, that he used to fulfill it. The cynical attempt to replay the Brexit card by weaponising the Northern Ireland protocol, the attention-seeking if welcome display of support for Ukraine (a desperate appeal to Winston), and repeated attempts to invoke divisive culture wars (the BBC, the National Trust and statues, immigration – the list goes on), were the same ploy in more recent disguises. 

In the end, with no credible purpose or management qualities to steady him, and no reserves of trust to draw on, Johnson simply ran out of leadership resources. With every week bringing a new example of his astonishing lack of personal judgment, Carriegate and Pinchergate being the final dismal straws, support gradually drained away, whether among officials (Lord Geidt, the second independent ethics adviser to throw in his hand, and the chairman of the Tory party), voters and belatedly, in an abject flood, his own cabinet, until suddenly he was bankrupt.

Leadership is to a large degree situational: Churchill, a notorious chancer as a young man, was redeemed by being handed a supreme purpose by Hitler, to which he was mostly equal, only to be handed his cards by voters after the wartime episode was over and a peaceful purpose took priority. Although Johnson’s day was mercifully shorter, the mayhem he caused will be hard to repair, and his graceless exit, blaming everyone else for his own character failings, was entirely consistent with what had gone before.

Toxic to the last, Johnson’s final act of anti-leadership was to comprehensively poison his succession. He had already purged his cabinet of its more competent and calmer heads. He now leaves his successor, already discredited in the public eye for not having acted sooner to remove someone whose character flaws should have disqualified him from ever holding serious office, a noxious populist agenda of Brexit (not just unfinished but barely begun), culture wars and tax cuts, which can only worsen the country’s dire economic problems. The first commandment of leadership is to leave the organisation in a better state than you found it. Johnson’s legacy is to have done the opposite. In evaluating people, Warren Buffett once said, ‘you look for three things: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.’ It is a fitting epitaph for Boris Johnson’s leadership tenure.

It’s the modern quest for alchemy. Every so often, a commercial idea is touted that quite hard-headed types persuade themselves is immune to the pull of financial gravity. Remember the dot.com frenzy in 2000 – the weightless economy and all that? Then, in the years before 2008, complex financial derivatives were credited with having abolished risk. Even Alan Greenspan bought that one, being ideologically incapable of believing that banks and trading outfits could act against their own self interest. Today’s new thing is, or maybe make that was, cryptocurrencies, which now transpire to have no inherent value as an asset class or hedge, are violently climate-unfriendly and of real use chiefly for buying drugs and arms, and money-laundering.  

The longest alchemical run of faith so far has been achIeved by the digital platforms – Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and their Silicon Valley ilk. These too seemed revolutionary at the time. Instead of, you know, the boring old way of figuring out a good way to make money and then using the returns to do more of it, what if we do the reverse: grow so big that we can’t fail and then figure out a way to make money? If another company acquires us, we might not even have to do that! I exaggerate slightly, but not much. Backed by enormous amounts of VC capital, ‘blitzscaling’, as LInkedIn founder Reid Hoffmann dubbed the new business model, soon became Silicon Valley’s startup mode du jour. 

The idea behind blitzscaling is that when turbocharged by network effects, rapid growth can generate such benefits to scale that the winner takes all – at which point it can turn its mind to capturing the rents of its unassailable market position. Of course, getting to that position costs, big time, but that didn’t seem to matter in the 2010s, when the problem wasn’t finding money so much as something to invest it in. So California is now home to a large number of startlingly-valued high growth companies that not only don’t make any money, but maybe never will, as Airbnb coolly informed investors at its nonetheless successful 2020 IPO.

Yet the glory days of profitless growth may be numbered. The reason is simple and without appeal: inflation. Money is no longer free, and some scared investors even want it back. To appreciate the implications, consider Uber, the poster child for the magical new business model. 

Uber was conceived as the embodiment of Silicon Valley fundamentalism, in particular the technological solutionism that holds that all societal and economic problems can be solved by networked digital technologies, if only the sector’s entrepreneurs are freed up to exercise their basic right to unfettered innovation. Founder Travis Kalanick played the part of Ayn Randian entrepreneur to the full, moving fast and breaking so many things that investors finally intervened to oust him in 2017 to limit the potential damage to Uber’s IPO prospects caused by repeated claims of sexual harassment*.

The scale of Uber’s ambitions was, and is, mind-bending. It currently claims to cover 10,000 towns and cities worldwide, has 3.5 million drivers on its books and carries 120 million active users at its peak. It had to be: nothing less than global domination of the taxi sector would give it the market clout to jack up prices and start paying back its costs. These are equally extradordinary. In its 12 years of operations, Uber has lost more money faster than any other new venture in history. Since 2015, when it started publishing figures, net losses have reached an astonishing $20bn, and they are still rising.  

Inflation is never welcome, but today’s upturn comes at a bad time for Uber. Many of the company’s blitzscaling assumptions have turned out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated. Network effects are much weaker than expected in the presence of fierce competition for both riders and drivers everywhere (all major ridesharing companies are unprofitable), and economies of scale in Uber’s asset-light model much less. Uber doesn’t have a technological lead – Oracle’s Larry Ellison reportedly declared that his cat could have devised a better app. Nor have regulators and city authorities had the grace to roll over in the face of Uber’s daring enterprise, instead insisting at least in some jurisdictions that it take responsibility for externalities like emissions and congestion, and treat its drivers more like employees. Finally, unexpectedly slow progress in bringing autonomous vehicles to reality (in the last two years Uber has ditched its own vaunted driverless car and vertical lift-off aircraft units, along with bikes and scooters) makes it unlikely it will be able to eliminate drivers, and thus its biggest expense, any time soon, delaying world domination still further**.

Inflation only intensifies the smell of burning money. For more than a decade customers have enjoyed rides subsidized by investors at well below cost. They may come to regret it: in that time many smaller, ironically more efficient operators have been driven out of business, reflecting a perverse flow of capital from more to less productive use (another thing to make Greenberg scratch his head). In this situation Inflation is a quadruple whammy – making customers poorer, drivers more demanding and debt dearer at the same time as the capital subsidies threaten to dry up. No wonder that in a recent memo to staff CEO Dara Khosrowshahi declared that the days of plenty were over. ‘Some initiatives that require substantial capital will be slowed,’ he said. ‘We have to make our unit economics work before we go big. The least efficient marketing and incentive spend will be slowed. We will treat hiring as a privilege and be deliberate about when and where we add headcount’.

Put more brutally: the blitzscaling business model is dead, with a stake through its heart. As the FT’s Sarah O’Connor tweeted: ‘Had to LOL at [the above quote] from Uber, a company whose entire strategy has been the opposite since it began’. Financial gravity has reasserted itself. Turns out ‘losses’ really are losses, and money really doesn’t grow on trees. Uber is only tangentially a tech company, and even its disruptiveness isn’t new, being based on a failed semi-monopoly play worthy of the last century’s robber barons rather than something original. So one more alchemical experiment bites the dust, leaving customers in some areas – food delivery, for instance, as well as taxis – worse off as it clears. Yet the hope of a free ride springs eternal: another one will be almost certainly be along soon enough.

*17 July 2922 Recent revelations in the leaked ‘Uber files’ show just how far the company was prepared to go in evading responsibility for its drivers, misleading regulators and secretly lobbying governments in order to get its way.

** In 2016 competitor Lyft’s CEO predicted that by 2021 most of its rides would be in driverless cars, and that in many US cities private car ownership would be practically extinct by 2025.

Welcome to the new-look site. The new one aims to be more consistent and stable as well as easier on the eye than in the past. Pages should also be easier to read on smartphones and smaller screens from now on.

The whole archive has been transferred to the new site – more than 500 articles going back 20 years and more. We hope to classify the archive by subject in due course and from time-to-time will be making reading lists or collections around particular topics. In the meanwhile, please use the search box (which appears at the top of every page) which, we hope, will lead you to anything you’re looking for.

As ever, thank you for your loyalty, most of you over many years. Don’t hesitate to let me know any issues – and all suggestions welcome!

On the surface, the extraordinary story of the ‘P&O 800’ – the ferry line’s summary firing, without consultation, in March of its entire seafaring workforce and replacement with agency workers earning a fraction of previous wages – is a simple if extreme tale of management ruthlessness. But investigated further, it’s more complicated with that, showing up some of the deep contradictions in the UK’s recent economic history.

Pushing a point, you might call P&O’s actions Putin-style management – brutal, contemptuous of ordinary norms and indifferent to public opinion. As it happens, this is not the only link to Russia. Leaving aside the mechanics of the operation, the shamelessly hypocritical reactions to it are remarkably similar to those that greeted recent revelations about the involvement of Russian oligarchs in the UK economy. Just as Johnson and his ministers were shocked – shocked! I tell you – to discover the extent of the Russian penetration of British economic and political circles that they themselves had not just tolerated but eagerly encouraged over at least two decades, so now they found themselves appalled, disappointed, dismayed, angered and astonished that a large international company should dare exploit the skimpy employee protections, feeble worker organisations and wider institutional incompetence that successive governments have deliberately engineered over an even longer period.

True to form, ministerial protestations were undercut by the subsequent discovery that they had been informed of the sacking the day before it happened in a departmental memo helpfully explaining that the job cuts ‘would align [P&O] with other companies in the market’ and ‘ensure that they remain a key player for years to come through restructuring’; that they themselves had eportedly changed the law as recently as 2018, engaging companies to notify authorities of job cuts only in the country ships are flagged in, and not automatically the UK even if they are based there; and that a letter expressing official disappointment to the previous P&O chairman who had left last year.

The follow-up has been little better. It beggars belief that ministers still had no idea whether the law had been broken at the moment the P&O CEO was admitting to a parliamentary committee that it knew exactly what it was doing from the start and had gone ahead regardless. What on earth is an attorney general for? Finger-wagging that contracts with the ferry company and Dubai owner DP World would be reviewed hardly cut it as retribution (from which state-owned DP World and its investment in UK freeports have in any case been expressly exempted). Nor do Johnson’s suggestion that seafarers take court action themselves, or transport minister Grant Shapps’ threat that ‘many customers, passengers and freight will quite frankly wish to vote with their feet and, where possible, choose another operator’. DP World ‘must be quaking in their boots,’ observed Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer drily.

Whatever happens next, the government’s hopeless response to a ruthless coup leaves it between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it can’t allow a large company to knowingly and deliberately flout the law – and say it would do the same thing again in a similar situation, to boot – and get away with it. But in that case it dares P&O, or more likely parent DP World, to cut the losses and shut the company down entirely, with the loss not only of the jobs of 800 unfortunate UK seafarers but many more dockside and in offices besides.

The oligarch and P&O crises that have now bubbled greasily to the surface wouldn’t have occurred without, respectively, Putin’s murderous Ukraine adventure, and the travel lockdowns brought about by Covid. But under the surface they share the same root: the increasinly servile nature of British capitalism. Oliver Bullough, author of the depressing and self-explanatorily titled Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tyrants, Kleptocrats and Criminals, locates the origins of its latest avatar in Suez and the loss of empire in the 1950s, at which point the City of London was forced to find new ways of leveraging its tentacular international financial reach.

After financing slavery and the empire, its business model would now be as a broker to the rich, selling anything to anyone if the price was right: reputation, social standing and access to political power as well as extravagant mansions and trophy companies ranging from football clubs to posh hotels and iconic British business names – Rolls Royce, Bentley and Jaguar, the Dorchester, Grosvenor House, the Ritz and Savoy, Harrods and Selfridges, technology companies like Arm and Deep Mind, and, as of course we now know, P&O, alongside all the most famous premiership football clubs.

The unwelcome consequences are now erupting in all sorts of places. One was the embarrassing ownership of Chelsea football club. Another is the row over the P&O seafarer sackings. Yet while the government has made much of its efforts to track, trace and immunise the assets of ‘bad’ foreign money, there is suddenly a deafening official silence over P&O – even in May when the DP World chairman warmly complimented P&O’s management on the ‘amazing job’ it had done in restructuring the company. The silence may have something to do with the fact that state-owned DP World just happens to be the largest investor in UK ports, with huge terminals at London Gateway and Southampton. Given that, it may be unwise to count on the avowed culprits suffering more than a token slap on the wrist any time soon.

Meanwhile P&O itself, while back in action, has suffered a number of publicised operating setbacks, including breakdowns and ships being taken out of service after inspections by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency that identified a number of safety and other drill issues It can stand as an apt metaphor for post-Brexit capitalist Britain: corner-cutting, mercenary, unrepentant about breaking the law and its effect on public opinion, and, like the government, not going anywhere very fast.

In 2009, before I left The Observer, I was approached by a private intelligence agency with a story of a London court case concerning shady business deals by rich Russian businessmen. I never got to the bottom of the plot, which was basically a settling of scores between oligarchs, but just as intriguing was the broader narrative that underlay it: the allegation that a wall of Russian money was starting to bend out of shape the UK professional services sector, with potentially disastrous consequences for the integrity of British justice and the honesty of British business in general.

As well as corrupt deals, manifestations ranged from taxi drivers’ tales of lurid mafia-style parties in postcodes they swore they’d never take fares from or to again, London councils unable to take Russian high-spenders to court for multi-storey excavation of superhomes for fear of bankrupting themselves (what’s come to be called ‘lawfare’), to multimillion purchases of UK trophy assets such as newspapers and football clubs, Roman Abramovich leading the way with his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003.

At the time, the ‘corruption’ seemed to be simply the collateral consequence of very rich people flashing around unheard of quantities of cash. With hindsight, it’s tempting to see it as something more deliberate and more sinister: a deliberate institutional softening-up as a prelude for the more ambitious Russian covert attempts to subvert UK (and indeed Western) democracy that would follow.

This has taken two forms. The first is the continued inflow of Russian money, encouraged by successive governments and only halted in the last few months by events in Ukraine, into London. Not for nothing has the capital earned the nickname ‘Londongrad’ and the City of London ‘laundromat’ for the red carpet laid out for wealthy oligarchs – 700 of whom have purchased fast-track UK residency for amounts varying from £2m to £10m – and the efficiency of the laundry service for their wealth provided by a thriving network of law, PR, property, banking and accounting firms as ‘enablers’. The tentacles extend deep into the political parties – Labour says that Conservative Party has taken donations worth nearly £2m from Russian sources, mediated by no less than its co-chairman. One estimate puts Russian investment in the UK at £27bn.

Whatever: by the middle of the last decade, The New York Times concluded that Russia was ‘ensconced in…British life, and has been for so long that, now, it does not draw much notice. It is just another part of the background scenery’. In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee echoed: ‘Russian influence in the UK is “the new normal”’, adding that the current level of integration ‘means that any measures now being taken by the government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation’. Some go further. Reviewing Oliver Bullough’s unambiguously entitled Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tyrants, Kleptocrats and Criminals, the FT’s sober Martin Sandbu noted that ‘America’s and the UK’s enabling industries… are plainly international security risks. It is mind-numbing that it should take a war in Europe to make politicians aware of this’.

In turn the seepage of Russian money and influence helps explain why, despite the probing of the US Mueller Report (widely ignored because it didn’t indelibly compromise President Trump) and the The Observer’s own indefatigable Carole Cadwalladr, the darks arts of fake news, obfuscation and manipulation that were unquestionably at work in the 2016 US presidential election and UK Brexit campaign were brushed aside as nothing special – indeed, just part of the scenery.

Which, as we now know, they were. But that was why they were so dangerous. And what made them so insidiously effective was the ubiquity and reach – both global and deeply personal – of the business plumbing those dark arts depended on: not just the local butlering services, but also at global level the social media platforms. It’s now abundantly clear that the Russians were far faster off the mark than the West to spot and exploit the opportunities they offered for serious political and social mischief. Less appreciated is the central part that advertising and marketing, the fuel that the platforms run on, has played, and continues to play, in furthering the mayhem.

As the outspoken Bob Hoffmann, author of the The Ad Contrarian Newsletter, told British parliamentarians last year, much online advertising would be better described as spyware, tracking users over every inch of their internet travels, the better to keep them online where they can be fed a steady diet of lucrative (for the platforms) advertising. In effect, it is targeted advertising, a $360bn (2020) market owned by Big Tech, that supports and stokes the fake news, distortions and pile-ons that are driving our societies apart as effectively as financial corruption.

Online advertising is notoriously both universally detested by consumers and riven with fraud – much of the money that goes in simply vanishes without trace. Yet the industry unforgivably resists reform of the surveillance marketing model that has been so expertly weaponised against us by unfriendly actors of all kinds, and politicians with their own axes to grind are slow to enforce it. Those who are now loudly demanding redoubled sanctions against rich Russians they have welcomed in the past should be aware that dubiously acquired wealth in the past is less than half the story: unless the business vectors that smooth the translation of money into political influence – ‘butlerisation’ and surveillance marketing – are disabled, the rot will continue to spread. In other words, it’s a business story as much as a political one. I wish I’d written it a decade ago.