Leading Question
This week I asked the assembly on X to send recommendations for the best books on leadership. The response was telling. I received a host of suggestions but almost no book was mentioned twice. We had, among many others, Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy, Turn The Ship Around! by the US navy captain David Marquet, and Business Secrets of the Pharaohs by Mark Crorigan. There was almost no area of life that was not mined for metaphorical significance. Spent your life rearing guinea pigs? Write a book called Guinea Pigs Teach Us About Life. Lots of the books were really about politics or statecraft, such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, a classic of realist philosophy that is far too good to spend time in this company. Two correspondents conducted a courteous exchange on whether Henry Kissinger’s best chapters were on Nixon, Sadat, Thatcher or De Gaulle. It prompted the thought that, while Kissinger might be a good guide to De Gaulle, I doubt his leadership insights are of much use if you need, for example, to know how to lead the under 14s football team or a start-up professional services firm. I suspect De Gaulle would be hopeless at payroll or scheduling monthly catch-up meetings. By the same token, Mike Brearley’s excellent remarks on what makes a good tea in a three-day county match might be of limited value if you are leading the Tet offensive.
The point here is that, though all of these books might be good instruction manuals for their own disciplines, they do not travel. They carry no wisdom across the tight lines of their own territory. The metaphorical claim in the books is bogus. There might just be nothing meaningful to be said about leadership in the abstract. Maybe leadership, for all the courses and the books and the speakers at the corporate away days, is not really an autonomous skill at all. There is no such thing as “leadership” because you always lead something in particular and the difference of the thing in particular is always what counts. This is not to say that there is no such thing as good leadership in practice, but that a leader will get better by emulation and example and by taking in the practical wisdom of those who have travelled the same path before, rather than taking in the lofty banalities of books that purport to teach this non-existent category “leadership”. For all that is said, I suspect there is really nothing to say. I am tempted to say so, in a book, at length.
The Seldom Seen Kid
Celebrating with the release of a new Elbow album, Audio Vertigo, Guy Garvey has reached the grand old age of 50. It is a good moment to remember his best friend, the seldom seen kid, Bryan Glancy who died accidentally in 2006 at the age of 39. Elbow named their most popular album after Bryan and dedicated their Mercury Music Prize to him. Guy gave the trophy to Bryan’s mum when they got back to Prestwich. I was at school with Bryan. He was in the corner of the room at every school party, strumming on his guitar and singing his own songs. It was Bryan who introduced me to the music of Bob Dylan, a greeting which will last all my life. Bryan was a brilliant Hamlet in the first production of Shakespeare I ever saw. Bryan went on to become a mentor to most of his generation on the Manchester music scene. Not just Guy Garvey but also Badly Drawn Boy, David Gray and his band mate John Bramwell, who went on to form the mighty I Am Kloot. But Bryan never broke through himself. It would be nice to boost his numbers. Go to Spotify and listen to A Lovely Message, the posthumous Bryan Glancy album put together by his friends and admirers. The song that contains the character is Propping Up The Bar. Then listen to The Seldom Seen Kid from Flying Dream #1 which is one of the many tributes Guy Garvey has written to the friend defined by a “chaos of charms”.
Labour Review
It is clear that the Labour party will go into the coming election light on policy. The detailed work that is often done in opposition will instead have to take place in office. There are two implications of this. The first is that this is a recipe for a review. Already, Labour is committed to the gender pay gap review, the review of female financial exclusion, the review of ISAs, a review of capital for scaling up small businesses, an independent rail review, a review of HS2, a review of government outsourcing contracts, an independent review of the BBC, a review of early years and a review of the UK's defence capabilities. Expect a lot more. The second implication is that Labour will, as Labour often does, establish a flurry of new institutions that will push responsibility away. Watch out for the Regulatory and Enforcement Unit for Equal Pay, the Office for Value for Money, the Council for Economic Growth, the Single Enforcement Body for Workers’ Rights, the Office for the Football Regulator, the National Curriculum Authority, Skills England, the British Infrastructure Council, the National Wealth Fund, Great British Energy, the Nationwide Climate Export Hubs and the Flooding Agency. Again, expect a lot more.
Gaye, Basie, Cooper
We are now in the era in which the celebrities of the era of mass fame are growing old so more well-known people die now than ever before. Forty years ago, April 1984 was an especially distressing month. Marvin Gaye, the best male voice from the Detroit Motown stable, was shot and killed by his father. Gaye was not done as a singer and the loss tore off talent that was still unused. What’s Going On? is one of the great albums but a little less lightly heralded is this performance, with Tammi Terrell, of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Faster and less melodramatic than the more famous Diana Ross version, this is both loose and under perfect control at the same time.
Count Basie died on April 26, 1984. In the fifty years he led his great orchestra, Count Basie recorded an anthology all of his own. Never better though, in my view, than accompanying Frank Sinatra in Live At The Sands. This version of You Make Me Feel So Young matches Sinatra’s languid-but-precise vocal to an orchestra that served the music by not wishing to outperform it.
Tommy Cooper died a death so modern that it might have been invented by a novelist. Having a heart attack, on stage, live on television, is as much a metaphor for the times as Gatsby floating in the swimming pool. What I love about this joke about Stradivarius and Rembrandt is the way he pauses to allow the audience to get what’s coming with the stretching of the word “Unfortunately…”. Then, having got the laugh for the idea, he gets another with the physical act of destruction. It’s easy to tell this joke and miss the laugh – believe me, I’ve done it and it’s a lesson in the importance of a script. All of Cooper’s many mannerisms are purposeful and the set-up of the joke is perfect, as it must be.
You’re right about the timing of a joke (of which Cooper was a master). When directing comedy in theatre I used to try to establish this in the minds of actors perhaps unused to playing comedy. The way to make a joke work is to ensure that the audience gets it before delivering the punchline, not to deliver it in the hope that they do.
Why should the Labour Party go into the election light on policy? They've had plenty of time to prepare. as well as a heap of good advice. If, as a number of commentators are saying, the honeymoon after they take office will be short, so much stronger the case for effective early action. If they waste this opportunity then they will have only themselves to blame