Thursday 14 May 2009

Team GB?

There was a great Queen song called, I think, One Vision……and that’s by in large how history moves forward, one vision at a time. A great mover and shaker - whether it’s Genghis Kahn, Jesus of Nazareth or Thomas Elva Edison – will have a vision of the shape of the world to come and impose that vision single-mindedly on their world….for good or ill.

Well…that’s how it used to work anyway. You see nowadays one vision is out of fashion…the ability of a leader with initiative and courage daring to tread new paths, or the innovator ready to push new boundaries…well that’s not really politically correct is it?

Today we live in a corporate, team based, outsourced utopia where all managers are created equal and ‘following the heard’ is merely supporting the home side.

Why do so many products these days look like they were designed by committee? Often it’s because they were. If the vision did indeed start with one person then chances are many layers of boardroom decision making and tampering emasculated the original concept…that is before of course the marketing bods got their grubby mitts on the concept and perverted it even further.

The problem with team decisions is that they are a double edged sword…yes you have the benefit of multiple minds to dedicate to a problem, but you have also ‘inverse gestalt’, whereby the whole can wind up in fact being less than sum of the parts. An army marches at the speed of its slowest recruit, and a committee is as intelligent as it’s most dense member.

Let’s not forget, that today the prestige lies with heading up a shining team…not with ploughing a lonely furrow. As a weak leader can after all hide his or her inadequacies by relying on the team….the ‘you chaps pop over the top and take that trench, there’s good fellows…I’ll just supervise from here’ mentality.

Rejoice…Today none of us is alone: we have a lovely nanny state to tell us how to think, to chastise us when we are naughty and to damn us with faint praise when we come up to societies’ meagre standards. Where once authoritarian Ward Matrons held hospital discipline in an iron grip now the joint is run by droves of lovely civilian managers who have ensured, with their polite corporate efficiency, that one can now leave hospital either with the free gift of MRSA or in a nicely hand fitted pine box from a dose of ‘C Diff’. You’ve gotta love progress!

The problem as far as I can see is that we as a society have totally lost the ability to realise our own limitations. I’m not a brain surgeon because I don’t have the brains/talent for it….my maths chemistry and biology grades stunk up the place therefore I must accept I could never have been one. It is not because I came from an inner city area, or that my parents were crack-heads or that I had poor schooling or that English is not my first language, or that I’m too thin or too fat or not ethnically diverse enough….it’s simply that I’m too thick! This is not to say that us ‘fickkos’ can’t lead happy and fulfilled lives…it’s simply that we have a ‘famous for fifteen minutes’, instant results, don’t bother to think or have talent, Big Brother/X Factor society. The joke used to be the working class chap muttering ‘I know my place’…..well what’s wrong with knowing your place in the scheme of things? If you know where you are you are not lost, you have a direction to move in and you can be to some degree content with your lot. You can even (I shall be pilloried for saying it) have pride in your status…not shame.

The is trouble in our team lead service industry world we have forgotten to provide enough jobs for those of us who are better suited to working with our hands than our copies of PowerPoint. We have taken away any pride in physical labour and replaced it with an aching longing to get rich and always strive for the bigger TV or liposuction.

Yes brothers and sisters we are all part of ‘Team UK’ a team that used to have a reputation for producing colourful and brilliant eccentrics, being strict in our fairness and somehow managing to be ‘cool’ while rigid and anally retentive. Now we have a basket case economy and an international reputation for being the US’s whining sidekick (with worse dentistry). It’s amazing what being part of a team can do!

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