Avoiding career or leadership catastrophes: Part 4 (Liberal Democrats)

This is the 4th in a 6 part blog series on the lessons we can all learn from the varying fortunes of the recognised Parties in last Thursday's UK General Election.  Part 1 explained the neuroscientific reasons why emotions and primeval instincts will always obliterate rational argument.  Part 2 analysed the Conservative Party's success and Part 3 the Labour Party's spectacular failure. 

The vast majority of voters who elected 58 Lib Dem MPs and put them a close 2nd in many other seats in 2010 jilted them for two reasons:

• The Lib Dems embarked on a 5 year 'affair' with the Conservatives, otherwise known as coalition government. Many commentators have observed since the Party's debacle on Thursday that it was the right thing to do for the country.  Contrary to voters’ instincts it was selfless, not lustful power-grabbing.  Frankly the Lib Dems had no logical choice. It’s now well documented for instance that Labour offered no concrete, credible, alternative coalition path.  However, the Lib Dems have paid a savage price.  In 2010 many left-leaning voters saw them as far more credible than Labour but were aghast after the election when they parleyed with the Conservatives.  They have not been forgiven,

• Similarly of course the Lib Dems have been savaged for the last 3 years for breaking their 2010 manifesto pledge not to increase university tuition fees.  Again I suspect they had no choice, in which case it was a catastrophic error to have promised it in the first place.  But that's 20:20 hindsight - they could not have foreseen when they made their manifesto commitment that they'd end up in government with the Conservatives.  NO-ONE foresaw that!!  

There was an overwhelming, indeed at times hysterical, outpouring of bile and hatred towards the Lib Dems, and their leader Nick Clegg, for one simple reason.  To adapt a well-known proverb:

Hell hath no fury like an electorate (apparently) betrayed!!!

Like many others listening on BBC Radio Five Live I was moved by Nick Clegg's dignified, statesmanlike, yet distraught resignation speech on Friday morning.  Kicking him has become a national sport for the lobotomised for the last 3 years,  I'm not suggesting he shouldn't be criticised but much of it has gone way beyond that meted out to most politicians, which is bad enough.

I'm sure there were many mindless, insensitive idiots listening who felt a puerile sense of glee over his resignation.  One of them, a crude SNP barbarian, sorry, spokesman, expressed wildly disparaging remarks.  This particular idiot had neither the wit, grace, nor compassion to respect a good man's downfall, irrespective of political differences. He exemplified the reasons for the disgust with which millions of English voters, includng Anglo-Scots, view the SNP.

If that’s the shape of things to come from North of the Border, along with the rabid, spitting rodents who gate-crashed one of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy’s rallies, then the shiny veneer of pristine respectability presented by Nicola Sturgeon and her thousands of enthusiastic and ‘apolitical’ new recruits is, at best, a naive sham.  Whilst I'm not for a moment equating the two, I suspect I'm not alone in seeing certain disquieting parallels between this tsunami of hubristic Scottish national socialism, in which everyone's welcome in Alex and Nicola's brave(heart) new tartan utopia unless they, erm, disagree, in which case intimidation and even death threats are 'appropriate' (as Glasgow lingerie entrepreneur Michelle Mone will attest) and, well......National Socialism, if you see what I mean. 

Commenting on Nick Clegg’s resignation speech immediately afterwards the voice of John Pienaar, BBC Radio Five Live's veteran Chief Political Correspondent, almost cracked – for an instant I thought he was going to break down.  He conveyed a palpable sense of outrage and injustice, all the more so because he contained himself completely, and spoke eloquently.

Pienaar opined that history would judge Clegg's selfless work as Deputy Prime Minister far more kindly than the electorate, driven by a primeval bloodlust (my analogy, not his), had done.  Labour and Conservative MPs paid tribute to Clegg, not least David Cameron, who I long sensed had developed respect for him working alongside him in government.  Clegg’s mentor, Paddy Ashdown, described him as the ‘decentist’ (sic) man in British politics.

Sadly the Lib Dems failed to understand that politics is fundamentally driven by raw, untrammelled instinct and emotion, not sensible, moderate, progressive ideas and values which they attempted to argue for.  Punishment by voters for their perceived ‘crimes’ was always likely to be vicious – the political equivalent of a lynching. 

In retrospect Nick Clegg should have resigned on principle ('fallen on his sword') when he realised he would have to break his tuition fee pledge.  That would have paid the necessary price so his Party could recover reasonably under a new leader by the time of this election.  I don’t particularly blame him for failing to do so – he felt he could do more good by staying on in government, and history may well judge that he did.  But the personal and party political cost has been horrific.  I hope he will bounce back in some way – he’s one of dozens of highly competent politicians of all persuasions who, over the years, have not survived judgement day in the amphitheatre facing carnivorous voters.

When I think of the Lib Dems my first reaction is that they are too decent, too nice, and simply not ruthless and strong enough to survive the political jungle.  This election came perilously close to finishing them off altogether.

A good analogy for where the Lib Dems are, and where they need to be, is the book 'Give and Take' (Adam Grant, 2013).  Grant's research found that 'Givers' are the bottom 25% in all walks of life, essentially because they are too weak and/or too nice.  This is the risk that the Lib Dems run constantly, like antelopes trying to stay ahead of lions.  However, Grant found that the top 25% happiest, highest performers were smart givers, NOT takers or matchers (matchers are people who negotiate quid pro quos).

The Lib Dems have now had valuable experience of Government, and of the brutal electoral consequences that can follow it.  They need to become far tougher and more streetwise, be willing to identify weaknesses in their opponents and go for the jugular.

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
Leadership - can you master it?
High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?
10 reasons to stick your neck out!
Do you ever think you've got it tough?
Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove
How the brain works and why you should know
Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?
Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you
Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

Avoiding career or leadership catastophes: Part 3 (Labour)

By contrast with the Conservatives (see Part 2) Labour egregiously failed to learn the lessons of political history, above all its own.  

In Why selflessness is good business I likened ill-advised attempts at neo-cortex to neo-cortex communication, without accepting the brutal realities of the recipients' brainstems and emotions, to trying to jump the Grand Canyon - depressingly futile, and suicidal to boot.  It's like going ‘over the top’ in First World War trench warfare to face machine gun annihilation, or Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.  Yet that's exactly what Labour did.  How?

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On BBC Radio 4 on Friday former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Ken Clarke hit the nail on the head, as he usually does.  He recalled that in 1997 the Conservatives were intellectually and morally bankrupt, engaged in bitter internecine warfare.  So the electorate threw them out and refused to have them back until they had repented, like the wife who changes the locks to keep out her drunk, abusive husband.  

A politician's relationship with the electorate is disconcertingly personal.  It’s like being married to 60 million people and, even worse, having to deal with their mother too!!!

Ken Clarke went on to say everyone knows that Labour mismanaged the economy when it was last in power (1997 - 2010), yet it has never accepted this and 'worn sackcloth and ashes' (my phrase, not his) in front of the electorate.  The Labour Party representative at the interview table immediately objected to his comments.  She indignantly denied that Labour had mismanaged the economy and said the problem was that they had not sufficiently trumpeted their achievements whilst in Government.  Clarke simply replied "There you are - see what I mean?!"

Labour remained in steadfast denial, and potentially may do so for many years to come if it's not ruthless in coming to terms with brutal realities.  On this morning's Andrew Marr show on BBC1 TV Lord Peter Mandelson, Labour party grandee and architect of Tony Blair's New Labour, was blunt.  He said: "When Ed Milliband was elected Leader of the Labour Party we were all told to shake our fists and say we were for the poor, and we hated the rich.  This is not an intelligent strategy to win over voters".

Labour has often struggled throughout its history to understand the brainstems and emotions of the large body of floating voters it needs to win over.  These voters simply aren't going to roll over and surrender to facile bravado.  They don't trust Labour on the economy, period.  Ed Milliband's coterie of metropolitan champagne socialists indulged their followers in a naive grand political experiment.  Meantime as the hefty majority party in Scotland they fell asleep on the bridge whilst the Caledonian liner steamed headlong into the Nationalist iceberg.  They have only themselves to blame that the SNP took them to the cleaners on Thursday. 

Ed Milliband is a decent man, dedicated to public service, but he and his acolytes behaved as wet-behind-the-ears demagogues.  They never fathomed or accepted that whilst the UK economy has shed thousands of public sector jobs it has created 4 to 5 times that number of private sector jobs, which are NOT all zero hours or minimum wage contracts.  Neither did they come to terms with the fact that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition had turned the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7.

After decades of self-bamboozling the UK, in my humble opinion and David Cameron's too the most creative nation on earth, is finally...FINALLY!!! starting to see that the pinnacle of success is not only becoming a doctor, lawyer or civil servant, and that business is not squalid and sleazy. Thank God for that! Welcome, fellow Brits, to the 21st Century world of China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Scandinavia and the US, plus many other aspirational nations.  You got here just in time - the train is about to leave the station!

Oh, and by the way, where do the taxes come from to pay for our cherished National Health Service, for teachers, social workers, refuse cleaners, etc.  Money doesn't grow on trees, and the world of business is NOT, contrary to popular socialist worker myth infested solely with rapacious bankers and other ne'er do wells!!!

Labour can only start to address these problems effectively once it has started with a prolonged, sincere mea culpa to the electorate, even if it feels this is unjust, and put its economic house fully in order.  All further intellectual policy wonking and vacuous demonising of anyone not in the Labour family should be banned.  And frankly I do wonder whether the two wings of the Party can, and should, be reconciled long-term.  

If I was a strategic advisor to the new Labour leader I might well be advocating much more radical action, along the lines I suggested in Are political leaders an oxymoron?!  To be blunt, if political parties were businesses they would be subject to mergers and acquisitions far more often.  I am no raging free marketeer, but the discipline of the market acts as an important enforcer of the Laws of Evolution and stops organisational dinosaurs living on past their sell-by date, unlike politics.

Of course Labour’s other manifest, depressingly (for them) predictable, problem was electing the wrong Milliband.  Ed was never, ever credible as Prime Minister in waiting – Labour canvassers have confirmed they were told this (the bleeding obvious) ad nauseam on the doorsteps.  His brother David was, but was not elected because his candidacy was too threatening (that brainstem thing again) to the left wing of the Labour Party.

So, many salutory lessons to be learnt from the gun the Labour Party under Ed Milliband pointed at its own foot with entirely predictable consequences.

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

Avoiding career or leadership catastrophes: Part 2 (Tories)

This 6 part blog uses the impact of Thursday's UK General Election result on each recognised Party to explain one of the main reasons why we are frequently blindsided by human attitudes and behaviour, and how to better prepare ourselves. 

This post explains how the Conservatives (Tories) managed to steal an extraordinary triumph from the anticipated jaws of defeat, or at best stalemate, with Labour.

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Under the expert direction of their Australian and American strategy chiefs David Cameron and the Conservatives worked hard and got seriously lucky.  Even THEY didn't expect it.  

The Conservative Party’s impressive strategy gurus by the way are no doubt richly funded by hedge fund magnates resident in the Cayman Islands for tax purposes - that's a well-founded, not jaundiced speculation.  It illustrates the point that well spent, rather than squandered, largesse does provide competitive advantage.

Whatever your politics you have to admire, and learn from, the ruthless, dead-eye professionalism of these strategists.  They identified, and ruthlessly targeted, the Achilles heels of their major competitors - Labour in some seats and the Liberal Democrats in others.  It proved devastatingly successful. They played on the electorate's visceral fears of a Labour/SNP Coalition or Voting Agreement, its mistrust of Labour for apparent economic incompetence when last in power, and mistrust of the Lib Dems due to their broken pledge to freeze university tuition fees.

In the run-up to the election Cameron must have contemplated the feasible outcome that he would lose, or fail for a 2nd time to achieve a majority, and consequently be torn political limb from political limb by the predatory right wingers in his own party who’ve always seen him as one of the weaker antelopes on the veldt.  That could still happen if he fails to meet their agenda or contrives to lose the Union between England and Scotland, as he so nearly did last September.  His grip on power looked pretty shaky then.

The Conservative campaign was frankly workmanlike and lacklustre, with no inspiring vision, but it worked, beautifully.  Hats off to them.  They judged perfectly the brainstems and emotions of those who could be persuaded to vote for them.        

However, when observing his close colleague Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s fate Cameron must be feeling "There but for the grace of God go I".  Cameron must now deliver on Friday’s promise to govern the UK as a compassionate One Nation Conservative.  That will take guts, which he has not previously shown in abundance, humilty, the willingness to stand up (constructively) to the detractors and agitators in his Party, plus principle, dedication to the task, creativity, and a previously unforeseen ability to build bridges with a hostile Scotland that views him as the Devil Incarnate, and in Europe with fellow reformers.  In other words he needs to become an outstanding leader, exhibiting the characteristics of the Top 1% and manifestly governing for the country as a whole, not just talking about it.  It's time for the applied, brainstem-reaching Big Society.

Has Cameron got what it takes?  Has he acqired at last, at least in part, the wisdom he needs to be a truly effective leader?  If so then Nick Clegg’s incalculable sacrifice (see Part 4 of this blog) may not prove to have been in vain, though of course he will never be credited with it by the vast majority, other than dispassionate historians.  Effectively he has laid down his political life for Cameron's, and the country's benefit.  

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

Avoiding career or leadership catastrophes: Part 1 (NMT)

This 6 part blog uses the impact of Thursday's UK General Election result on each recognised Party to explain one of the main reasons why we are frequently blindsided by human attitudes and behaviour, and how to better prepare ourselves. 

The result was totally unforeseen - by pollsters, pundits, politicians or voters, except in Scotland, and even there it seems the victors hardly dared believe it.

No-one believed the exit polls at 10pm, predicting a Conservative majority.  Tony Blair's controversial former New Labour communications chief ('spin doctor') Alistair Campbell said he'd eat his kilt if they were true; Liberal Democrat campaign chairman Lord Paddy Ashdown said he'd eat his hat. Both are now contemplating a textile diet! 

So why did it happen, and what personal lessons can we apply in our own lives?

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Instead of a hung parliament with messy negotiations to form a coalition (and we're told staff at 10 Downing Street had already booked meeting rooms and ordered sandwiches), David Cameron is the first Conservative Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher in 1983 to increase his majority after a first term.

Two electoral lions roared.  As their former leader Alex Salmond pithily put it the Scottish National Party (SNP) was one of them, sweeping 56 of 59 UK Parliamentary seats in Scotland, mainly at Labour's expense. The other lion was so-called aspirational Middle England.  It sustained the rout of the Labour Party and mauled the Liberal Democrats to a pulp.

The reason for this remarkable result was maddeningly stark and simple - right under our noses, in fact:

Politics, and life, is foremost about emotions, NOT ideas!!!

Last November I published two blogs, How the brain works and why you should know, and Why selflessness is good business.  They explained dramatic 'light bulb' revelations I'd had listening to Dr Bruce Perry, one of the world's leading specialists in child trauma psychotherapy and originator of the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT).

NMT uses a 4 level hierarchical structure of the brain.  The 1st (lowest and most ancient, animal) level is the brainstem; the primitive brain. ALL stimuli enter the brain through it and are instantaneously scanned for threat.  It's the home of the hard wired, knee jerk, fight or flight response.
 
Within milliseconds the 2nd and 3rd levels kick in.  The main behavioural factors here are emotional and tribal:

• Does this stimulus make me happy, sad, angry, tense, hostile, afraid, anxious, depressed, betrayed. etc.?

• How must I react to gain approval in my tribe - my family, friends, peers, gang, boss, company, sports team, political grouping, union, religion, denomination, etc. etc.?  What is 'expected' of me?  The brain's need for affiliation (acceptance within a group) overrides rational thought and often leads to irrational action.

The 4th (highest and youngest) level is the neo-cortex, the sophisticated upper brain in which complex, abstract and concrete (rational) thought occurs.  This is the home of ideas, the place where, for example, respectful political debate is supposed to take place.

To explain the shocking chasm that exists between the brainstem and neo-cortex, and the brainstem's perilous power, I equated it to a six year old child who's found the keys to Dad's Ferrari supercar and is taking it for a ride.  You know there's going to be very serious trouble!!

Perhaps you're starting to get a sense of why political, and so many other forms of human disagreement, is so rarely rational?!  More like throwing Christians to the lions in the Coliseum!!

In the remaining parts of this blog over the next few days, armed with these rudimentary, but fundamental, neurological insights I'll seek to explain the fortunes of each of the recognised Parties in last Thursday's election and what we might learn from them if we want to increase the chances of a) success; and b) avoiding catastrophe in life ourselves.

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

 If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Is voting a waste of time?

In my previous blog Are 'political leaders' an oxymoron?! I asked if we get the politicians, and governments, that frankly we deserve!  

With just 3 days to go to the 2015 UK General Election I offer here a voting strategy, without stating which party you should vote for if you're in the UK.  Anyone wanting that advice can message me privately!! ;-) 

This strategy is credible because it builds on the well-researched, proven principles of Top 1% leadership and organisational behavour. 

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One of my early blogs last August, Human weakness – a competitive advantage? highlighted key lessons from the powerful, instructive book ‘The Blunders of Our Governments’ by political science Professors Ivor Crewe and Tony King, which chronicles in shocking detail the catastrophic errors made by both Labour and Conservative UK governments over the last 35 years.  Their major failings arose from the following common, oft-repeated weaknesses:

• 'Cultural disconnect’ - the inability of otherwise intelligent people, often in small cliques, to understand or anticipate the attitudes and behaviours of people with differing cultural norms, frequently leading to dire consequences

• ‘Group-think’ – the frightening, sheep-like tendency to suppress internal disagreement that sometimes grips groups of people, even though such debate would highlight potentially serious risks and produce better solutions

• ‘Intellectual prejudice’ - the dangerous habit of using mental models and preconceptions to (over-)simplify complex and uncertain situations, usually for knee-jerk, emotional reasons

• ‘Operational disconnect’ – the ‘ivory tower’ creation of policies or strategies by a remote elite, without seeking any guidance from those who will have to implement them!

• ‘Symbolism and spin’ - the obsession with presentation over substance.

By contrast, decades of widespread research across all walks of life, allied with the lessons of thousands of years of human history, demonstrate unequivocally that Top 1% leaders and organisations:

• Are truly meritocratic, largely free of vested interests, and impervious to factional lobbying

• Largely avoid making promises they may be unable to fulfil (if they do, they learn fast and never do it again!!)

• Face up to harsh realities, and tell the truth about them without distorting, or putting a positive gloss on, them

• Use radically counter-cultural logic.  They know the purpose of leadership is not to impose top down theoretical dogma and solutions, which may be born of sincere passion but nevertheless are all-too-often ill-conceived and/or misguided.  Instead Top 1% leadership is encouraging and enabling – it creates the conditions in which great solutions can be developed empirically to difficult, complex, messy real life problems, instead of providing pre-determined, pre-packaged and/or rigid approaches

• Promote vigorous, respectful and constructive debate between people who disagree, but are nevertheless humble, and who want to see an overall advancement of other people’s interests at least as much as their own (i.e. enlightened self-interest).  These people are ‘smart givers’, not ‘matchers’ or ‘takers’ (see ‘Give and Take’, Adam Grant, 2013) - their approach can be remarkably disarming!  

• Are driven by die-in-a-ditch values and a palpable desire to make a positive difference, even though this will not be recognised or believed by their opponents and other cynics.  In business I call it a ‘purpose beyond profit’; in politics I might term it a ‘demonstrable, selfless, independently evidenced desire to improve the lives and interests of others ahead of their own, or their faction’s, interests’.  Having met MPs from all three mainstream UK parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) I am less cynical and disillusioned about them as a category of society than many folk are.  Many of them have excellent intentions and truly serve the public.  Some of them I would term misguided, but above all it is the political system that is broken. The best politicians are forced to operate with at least one, sometimes two, hands tied behind their backs!

• Understand that life is full of awkward and inconvenient paradoxes.  In other words they accept that multiple pairs of apparent contradictions can and do hold true simultaneously!  The brutal reality is that it’s both this AND that.  To acknowledge this is not weakness or indecision – it’s wisdom, as Top 1% research clearly demonstrates

• Are regularly underrated or misunderstood, do not lie, and are not economical with the truth, though they will constantly be suspected or accused of it by cynics

• Tend to keep a relatively low profile and focus on working behind the scenes to apply their principles and get the best results they can in the long-term

• Have an unusual ability to listen and learn, and accept that they don’t have all the answers, or indeed many of them at all.  When asked about strategy, they regularly say, and are comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but we’ll work it out together”

• Focus on gathering together talented performers, people better than themselves, and enabling them to succeed

• Stick to what they are outstandingly good at, and steer their organisations to do the same

• Strive at all times to do the right thing, irrespective of the personal cost and brickbats they suffer; honestly admit their mistakes and learn from them (unlike the vast majority of us, who repeat them endlessly).  Like the rest of us, they are human!!

OK, if this is the blueprint we cannot point to any political party as being clearly Top 1%.  But I do not accept the counsel of despair that all politicians and political parties are evil and selfish.  It simply isn’t true!

The UK political system is crying out for reform.  It does not represent the views and concerns of large swathes of the population, who consequently feel disenfranchised.  Their disillusionment is understandable.  People’s legitimate concerns, about immigration for example, have been swept under the carpet and submerged in politically correct, liberal (small ‘l’, irrespective of political leaning) fog.  People of all political persuasions are afraid to confront brutal realities – most of them are deeply conservative (small ‘c’, irrespective of political leaning).  

The level of debate in UK politics is invariably puerile – playground stuff, not mature adult discussion.  Vested interests prefer the current two party, first-past-the-post election system and these turkeys aren’t going to vote for Christmas.

Under these conditions it is inevitable that single issue parties and others catering to voter disillusionment have sprung up, and we should welcome this, since it forces the sort of debate that should have been taking place anyway.  The mainstream political parties have only themselves to blame because they have buried their heads in the sand for far too long.

For many years I have largely avoided politics.  However, my emerging knowledge of Top 1% leadership and organisational principles has crystallised my own political beliefs.  What I have learnt offers a compelling logic.  I have already cast my (postal) vote, and I did so on the basis of principle, die-in-a-ditch values, and hard-headed pragmatism.

My ultimate preference would be to see a restructuring of British politics in which bitter, Punch and Judy, factionalism is eventually superseded by a more effective consensus (albeit informed by vigorous debate) of the diverse majority who broadly occupy the middle ground.  The artificial polarisation which the current system engenders is neither effective, nor efficient – Parliament, and the electorate, waste the vast amount of their time fiddling while Rome burns.

I’ve written elsewhere about the Stockdale Paradox, for me perhaps the greatest single defining characteristic of Top 1% leaders and organisations:

“You must maintain an unwavering faith that you can, and you will, succeed in the end, no matter what it takes, whilst confronting the most brutal realities of your current situation, whatever they are, and however unpleasant they are.”

In politics, as in life, we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, whilst always aiming for excellence.  The good exists in British politics, and in some areas it’s very good indeed.  So if you are able to suspend your tribal prejudices and insecurities (and the habits of a lifetime) I pose the following questions:

• Where in current UK politics will you find people exhibiting traits least like those described in ‘The Blunders of Our Governments’ and most like the Top 1% characteristics I’ve defined in this blog?  Remember, no-one is perfect, or even close to it, and you won’t find people you agree with 100%.  So don't use hypocritical tribalism (intellectual prejudice) or unattainable measures of voter satisfaction.  Think calmly, don’t knee-jerk!!

• Can you embrace the Stockdale Paradox, accept that your particular faction is not going to achieve ‘world domination’ in this or any other foreseeable election, and apply a broader set of principles about what is best in this messy, imperfect environment for the country as a whole? 

Having thought objectively about these two questions, are you at all uncomfortable with your political tribe’s propaganda?  And does this suggest you might ignore the bleating tribal herds and vote differently on Thursday, either for reasons of previously unforeseen principle, or because there is no shame whatsoever in tactical voting if you’re doing so sincerely for selfless, big picture reasons?!

See through the fog, and don't let yourself be fooled because you don't want to go to the effort of thinking, or get into the deeply uncomfortable territory of changing your mind.  Let go of any unfounded old 'certainties'.  Confront reality.  Remember, changing your mind for solid reasons is a good thing - it means you're listening!

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton