Managize Change

The Lib Dems’ recent succession crisis proves that politicians still have a lot to learn from the corporate sector. Never has the phrase “fit for office” seemed quite so appropriate than in the case of Ming Campbell and Co. Contrary to rumour the RPP is not ageist, just youthful in its political outlook and flexible in its approach to disability rights, brain disorders and senile dementia.

Today transparent communication is almost as important as sound political principles, whether you’re trying to prize basic information of entitlement to discounted travel out of Virgin Trains staff or facilitating a PowerPoint presentation to the Orange Democratic Movement of Kenya.

The corporate sector’s copped a lot of flak over the years. Lately, however, I’ve been leafing through the literature and frankly it’s opened my eyes. Inspired by an intriguing mix of Jungian principles and Thai cuisine, the management gurus responsible for the following tomes could teach your average politician a thing or two: 
* Trebor Ein-Farker’s Networkation Theory
* Jaroslav Boxcar’s Utter Relations Hypothesis
* Tommy Johnson’s How to Make Management Stick in a Web 2.0 World 
* and, last but not least, Humph Jenik’s Optimal Performance Roulette.

And I don’t think it would be too candid of me either to reveal my mantras, which have recently been affixed at strategic locations on the walls of the Right Path Party’s new Battersea HQ:


* “Much of this is waste. What we don’t use might kill us” – Lord Coe


* “Winning is nothing. Victory is everything” – Dennis Hopper


* “Celebrate when the cows have come home and the pigs have flown: your work is never done” – The Ballad of Sir John Harvey-Jones, Annie Lennox


* “I wasted time and now time doth waste me” – William Shatner

Last week I went about actualising my enhanced communication skills during a Sappington Bounce Parish Council meeting. The councillor for Chappy Grove ward suggested the mass planting of sugar cane for bio-fuels in the town centre. As temperate as our little Dorset suntrap is, I had to break it to him that we didn’t have the temperatures for that sort of scheme. When he didn’t listen, I kept telling him again and again until he got it. I even wrote it down on a piece of paper and cellotaped it to his forehead when he put his hands over his ears (a classic sign that you’re winning an argument). It worked a treat; now he’s concentrating on persuading farmers to grow soybeans. That’s management advisory in action – to the good of our local environment and those all-important para-global FLOPP networks.

If we transmogrify this type of local experience to the larger playing field then we uncover more than a few pearls of wisdom for the country at large. Here are some other micro-resolutions gleaned from the minutes of previous Sappington Bounce Council meetings:


* Not finding out the facts before mediating in a dispute (direct action)


* Telling people in public that they don’t know what they’re doing (primal workshop approach)


* Likewise, questioning why they’re here in the first place (counter-intuitive motivation)

* Telling them the wrong thing to do, watching them do it and then ticking them off, preferably in front of other employees (reverse psychology)

It’s not quite as you see it portrayed on The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, but not far off the positive role those TV programmes play in promoting the values of risk assessment and internal competition. Management is the new rock and roll now, they say, with news journals like The Sindie giving away free guides and The Guardian newly converted to the fiscal joy of private equity. In actual fact management is much like politics – sign the people up to your vision and enhance the networks of mutual trustability so that when you’re forced to flatly contradict yourself and renege on your promises everyone accepts a share of the responsibility. The first thing they teach you in public relations is to treat every disaster as a blessing in disguise. Think how that message could transform the lives of the terminally ill, park dwellers and homosexuals.

At the Right Path Party, with the indispensable help of organisations such as DUFFF and Claude Whole’s corporate communications assemblage Mind Associates, we are applying this philosophical approach to imminent ecological collapse as well as to the crisis in parliamentary democracy. We are turning voters away from the big three, and proving surprisingly popular in southeast London and the Kentish hinterland. As the Liberal Democratic Party has probably realised to its cost, soon we will be coming hard on their heels and dealing with the issues that matter. It’s time Britain had some new management.

(Originally published 29 October 2007)