Leadership… redux… September 23, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.trackback
Dr. Eoin O’Malley of the School of Law and Government in DCU is musing in the Sunday Business Post about ‘leadership’ on foot of the Cowen interview last week. Consider the following:
To go by Liveline and the capital’s taxi drivers, people in the country crave ‘leadership’ and obviously feel that Cowen is not delivering.
Do they though? There’s a counter-argument that it’s not so much leadership as a sense that the policies being pursued by the government are wrong – even if on the details that latter sentiment is a bit vague. Away from the media although I’ve heard some thoughts about Cowen’s leadership qualities, it’s not those so much as the actual policies, NAMA, CDPs, mortgages and so on, which exercise people.
And it’s difficult to see how a well crafted or well delivered speech could fundamentally overturn that. It’s possible that early in the crisis if, rather than depending upon proxies and attacks on various sectors there had been a genuine effort to ask people to pull together that might have been a feasible tactic. But now? Too much water under the bridge, too many astounding numbers, too much time has passed.
O’Malley notes that the traditional view of the leader as the Great Man (intriguing how he doesn’t think to mention the Great Woman – Margaret Thatcher came to power a third of a century ago if we’re looking for examples – or contextualise the potential for leadership outside of a male role. Irritating too actually now I think about it).
This treatment of leaders is associated with what we often think of as the Great Man. In this view of leadership, some people with certain traits will inevitably rise to the top.
These people are intelligent, articulate, brave and even physically powerful.
These heroes emerge to lead a nation or organisation.
With Great Men, followers should be thankful for having such a leader and will readily forgive him any faults, such as an excessive taste for drink, money or women.
And he notes that that is not a viable route in the 21st century.
The Great Man idea is problematic because it sees leaders detached from the needs of followers. In any case, Cowen lives in the 21st century where even Great Men don’t get the deference they might think they deserve.
And yet O’Malley still seems to hanker after such ‘leadership’. Consider the following:
He’s infused with civil service-speak.
Top civil servants are generally bright and hardworking, but they’re hardly known for innovative thinking.
This is not where new ideas or leaders are going to come from. But Ireland’s political system isn’t particularly suited to producing radical or new political leaders.
Hmmm… well, there’s that troubling little thing called democracy. But that too is a problem…
The last three Taoisigh -Cowen, Ahern and Bruton – were all first elected to the Dáil in their 20s. Perhaps only Albert Reynolds and Garret FitzGerald could claim to have had careers outside politics. It is virtually impossible for someone with a successful career outside politics to move into politics in a senior position in the way that many US presidents have.
But the obvious response to that is whether FitzGerald or Reynolds were any much better at leading the country than their successors? Hard to argue that they were. And the same caveat is applicable to US presidents. Does a business background or not, as in the cases of the more recent George Bush and Bill Clinton, respectively, guarantee anything very much at all? Indeed what careers outside politics are best suited towards optimising political/policy outcomes? And he continues…
If the public craves leadership in times of change, it is unlikely to get it when we can only choose from a small number of people who have served long apprenticeships in the Dáil.
This might seem a bit contradictory, given that he accepts traditional leadership doesn’t function in the way it did. But yet he’s given to aligning with the ‘leadership’ trope as if that would assist us.
But it wasn’t leadership that was the problem in the 1990s or 2000s. It was almost the opposite, an inability to deal with fairly simple processes that required a strong regulatory framework and a more rational tax system. That’s in some ways dull stuff, but the sort of thing that Cowen, and Ahern, and indeed McCreevy were all well suited to. But what happened instead was that they agreed with a prevailing consensus that regulation should be feather light, that taxation could be cut in a virtuous cycle that would continue to replenish public coffers in all and every event.
But now, now after everything that has come before – massive systemic policy failures – we’re all meant to believe that some ineffable quality of ‘leadership’ will convince us that despite the closing of community services, or cutting welfare or seeing the public sphere eviscerated to serve the needs of the private everything is okay really and all will someday be fine.
The condescension of that view (and in fairness to O’Malley he articulates at least some of the contradictions and doesn’t wander down some of the byways others have taken in this sort of discussion) is remarkable.
No wonder the public isn’t convinced by any of the options on display. It’s not the people, Cowen seems like a nice enough person, Kenny likewise… it’s the bloody policies and beyond them the system they’re structured within.
And he notes that that is not a viable route in the 21st century.
First thing is – I don’t think this is true. Berlusconi for instance manages well enough – from one point of view he might seem to be permanently embattled, but from another, he’s been permanently embattled for a long time, i.e. he keeps getting away with it. Boris Johnson strikes me as somebody whose personal life is similarly an ongoing story of getting away with it.
I think the truth is that on the Right, you can get away with anything in your personal life, and for that matter almost heroic degrees of corruption, provided your followers considered that you’re delivering what they want and protecting them. (On the Left it’s much harder, for a variety of reasons, but I wouldn’t deny that a similar syndrome exists.)
Secondly, this:
Top civil servants are generally bright and hardworking, but they’re hardly known for innovative thinking.
seems to me to be unfair. A lot of what top civil servants do is to implement policy. But they also originate ideas, schemes, policy changes and so on. However, these have (quite rightly) to go through elected representatives before they are put into practice. If they’re rejected, they’re never heard of again. If they’re accepted, they’re the Minister’s idea.
I have the answer for poor, beleaguered Brian.
Last evening I received an email from something called ‘The Centre for Progressive Change’ inviting me to participate in a course they were running called Leadership for Progressive Change – and who, to coin a phrase, wouldn’t want that?
The benefits appear incalculable: here’s what they promise to teach you, over 5 weeks, for €500, including learning materials, tea and coffee and ‘a delicious lunch’ at the end:
Deep Thinking – Providing current analyses to help leaders engage with fresh ideas.
· Raising the Spirit Level – Mobilising the inner resources for learning, growing and healing; using the soul in social change.
· Exercising Imagination – Developing imagination as the basis of the will to act and the courage for creativity.
· Fluency in Critical Consciousness – Tackling presuppositions, critically examining the mind and the society in which we live.
· Advocating and Communicating Change.
This will provide leaders and aspiring leaders with an avenue to step out of the negativity that pervades Irish public life.
I’m particularly fond of item 2: Raising the Spirit Level…mobilising the soul for social change. Item 5 isn’t bad either – by learning how to advocate and communicate change we can find an avenue to ‘step out of the negativity that pervades Irish public life’. See the problem isn’t that the government is giving all our money to zombie banks, or that, once again, they are sending the young abroad in search of employment, or that they are slashing welfare and services: no the problem is ‘negativity’ and if we all mobilise our souls together, we can get out of this. Fabulous.
Here’s their website by the way – I’m sure you’ll be right on it.
http://www.progressivechange.ie/
Mind you, prescription of anti-depressants and suicide rates have increased in the past couple of years. Maybe this type of chicken soup for the soul shite is a less harmful coping mechanism for people who are looking for a crutch, and who aren’t quite at the point of embracing a socialist analysis of the world to provide them with the hope we all need in our lives.
Yech. Personally I prefer the Tony Quinn approach where you invest in an oilfield off the coast of Belize. Or getting down the chapel and having a good nibble at the altar rails.
Please don’t start discussing religion again!
Arghh … the horror, the horror.
The memory of days of my life stuck in windowless meeting rooms trying to pretend to take this kind of shite seriously flood back in all their nightmarish tedium. One benefit of being a member of the precariat means that I’m spared that!
The phrase I’ve heard used that best sums up the bonding / positivity mania is ‘cumpulsory positivity’. I don’t think it’s caught on here – ever – bespite the fact the ruling coalition are using a version of it as their stated ideology at present.
There was an interesting piece on yesterday’s RTE 9 o’clock news. Mr. Slattery from State Street had made a few waves with his call for 30,000 public sector redundancies ‘to bring down the defecit’, obviously not someone familiar with Michael Taft’s work.
Anyway, these comments were made at a conference on the Croke Park agreement. Said conference being sponsored, from what I could see, by a training consultancy.
Having been sent for coporate re-education to this same consultancy I was struck by the extent to which the 12 people in the room (all public servants) were there at public expense (EUR 500.00 a head for 1/2 day).
The point is that at a time when we’re supposed to be cutting public spending to the bone, the state and public sector managers can still find funds to splash out on ridiculously expensive sub-David Brent training courses which, of course, emphasise ‘positivity’, ‘can-do attitude’, ‘entreprenerial spirit’ etc. The public sector spent EUR 6,000 that day for a half-day’s training and that kind of expenditure is multiplied a dozen or even a hundredfold each year.
That kind of outlay might be justifiable in a boom but in the midst of a recession/depression it’s completely intolerable. To draw a close to this rant, to then see the same consultancy (basically subsidised by the state) organising a conference at which neo-Liberals like Slattery can call for tens of thousands of redundancies in the public sector seems to suggest that unless the unions’ ‘polite’ phase ends soon, the likes of Slattery and the private sector goons who feed off the public sector will be laughing all the way to their pension funds and off-shore accounts.
That reminds me that there’s another odd trope in this kind of discussion, which is people calling for round-number redundancies regardless of how much work needs to be done.
The point is that they would never expect a business to do this: it would make redundancies if, in the opinion of the business, it had too many people to do the work that it had on offer. It wouldn’t (except in dire emergency) sack a number of people x and then see how much work it could get done with who was left.
But when they’re talking about the public sector, they can just pluck these figures from nowhere.
Yes, they can just pluck figures out of the air. And this kind of discourse reveals just how craven journalists are here (with, quite literally, a handful of exceptions). I didn’t seen any effort to question Slattery on the impact of his proposal, either on the people who would lose their jobs, or on the broader economy.
That one snippet of this wider debate re-inforces for me (for the n-th time) that the economic orthodoxy is entirely irrational and impervious to either evidence of its destructiveness or the long term consequences of it prescriptions, as we can from the response to the Q2 growth figures.
I remember being part of a pub discussion when Enda Kenny announced his intention to abolish the Seanad. People employed in business and in the public service were present. Everything we cosseted, pensioned ones deplored about it – the attention-seeking, the lack of consultation, the abruptness – was applauded by the private sector contingent: ‘real leadership’, ‘leading from the front’ etc. Two cultures, I suppose.
And a great deal of self-image on the part of at least one of them.
+1 as they say
“And he notes that that is not a viable route in the 21st century.”
Barack Obama??!
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, WBS. Without a simultaneous left-wing commentary it would have been a choice between reading it and keeping down my dinner.
One thing puzzles me about the notion of incubating our future rulers in the world of business and high finance. The experience they’ll thus amass is the experience of generating profit and investing it to accumulate more profit and expand one’s operations, within a competitive framework.
The acknowledged role of the leader of a neoliberal state is precisely NOT to generate excessive surpluses, NOT to reinvest any surplus thus generated, NOT to expand one’s operations, and, above all, NOT to compete with other, private enterprises. The relevance of a successful business background is somewhat questionable.
I quite agree, DD. Maybe law or economics rather? The more I read McWilliams these days the more I’m convinced he angling for a career in politics.
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“A lot of what top civil servants do is to implement policy. But they also originate ideas, schemes, policy changes and so on. However, these have (quite rightly) to go through elected representatives before they are put into practice. If they’re rejected, they’re never heard of again. If they’re accepted, they’re the Minister’s idea.”
I would not let them off the hook for the debacle.They are by and large a self serving crowd. The exemption from the cut shows this. They are paid more than their equivalents overseas.Besides capitalists as such we have a well/overpaid bureaucratic elite which interconnects with the professional classes and takes care of itself.The scandels in FAS were down to a section of the top people.
Look at the excuse culture. The Financial regulator who was/is a fool.And I don’t have much faith in most of the regulatory systems The list goes on and on. A friend once said to me while I was complaining about junkets by County Councillors that at least the electorate could sack them every 5 years but the senior executives on the same junkets were safe from even that.
On a little note we should have Dail committees with real powers to call and interrogate with leagal powers (need for referendum) a la Congress in the USA.
As for the Senate. Get rid of it. The 5 members who are worth something are not worth the price of the drones.
We are a small country we need a small Dail 100 at most. We only need at most 30% of the local goverment bodies. We should amalgamate most quangos into the relevant government or local government body.