When it comes to social commentary, I have often found music much more insightful than the latest trend report. The Clash, Dylan, The Jam, Nirvana. Poetry, not PowerPoint.
Whatever your personal preferences, Britpop, for example, neatly summed up the attitude of a generation in the UK. So much so that it's only fitting the last word should have gone to Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. His first solo release delivered a great one-liner on the state of the nation post Labour's resurgence under Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"The cream cannot help but always rise up to the top. Well, I say: Shit floats."
And, to be perfectly blunt, I think the same is true of many management teams.
David Maister, the renowned professional services thinker, has always said that at any one time, 10% of your workforce are underperforming and should be managed out of the business. Whenever people hear this view (or is it a statistic?), most automatically assume that means 10% of the rank and file, but that would be a gross oversight given the impact of the decisions made by an organisation's top echelon. And, as Jarvis so graphically explained, the cream isn't necessarily the only thing that rises to the top.
The economic crisis has caused a raft of issues. Few more worrying for your top executive than the unwanted exposure brought on by the fact that many of the so-called cream have received hefty bonuses, seemingly as a reward for failure.
Careers have been killed, but at the same time I have also seen countless underperformers actually promoted through failure. No doubt promoted into a position from where they could presumably do less harm, but hardly the right signal for those surging through the ranks on the wave of success. Jarvis would feel vindicated.
It would be easy to see where this is all heading, if it weren't for the fact that failure is often viewed as a good thing.
In short, if you're not failing, you're simply not trying hard enough. And according to many, this recent failure of our economic systems was inevitable. They say it was the recession that had to happen. We had to fail in order to reset the balance.
So it seems our fate was more in the hands of the gods and fickle fortune than the chief executives and their chairmen. It wasn't their fault, just plain old bad luck.
Not quite.
If we were to take Jarvis at face value, things simply rise and fall. But that isn't quite true, actually they go around in cycles. Which conveniently brings me back to the point where I started. The Britpop revolution of the 1990s (Blur, Oasis, Pulp) took many of its cues from the British Invasion of the 1960s (The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks). Similar trends, similar times. And it won't be long before the 1960s come to life again in another age.
The same can be said for our current economic situation, only none of our financial leaders saw it coming with the same vision or insight as those record executives. History will say that we failed, so let's hope we change our tune in time for the encore. If not, then Kevin Rudd – the cream of Canberra – will be back shouting from the very top of the steaming pile about "the usual political shitstorm". Jarvis would be proud.
I agree with the comment that the music of an era so accurately sums up mood. In response to the reflection on management teams, unfortunately I have often seen the 'promotion beyond ability' in companies both in Australia and overseas. We do we reward failure? Is the holy grail of growth actually a bad thing?
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