Strategy power plays by Karen McCreadie

Author:Karen McCreadie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906821173
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Ltd

Here's what the management books you read usually prefer not to tell you. Between now and the time you retire, you're going to have to do something nasty, unpleasant, brutish or unpopular. This will undoubtedly be when the stakes are high, and there is a lot of pressure on you to do the job. This is the time when nothing short of brutality will do.

In The Prince, the rather gruesome Chapter 8 details how rulers of the past seized power by wickedness (if you don't want to consult the original, there's a public massacre, a parricide and a strangling, just for starters). Machiavelli gives us his breezy tour of brutality as examples of what it can achieve – and of the problems when it is done badly.

Most princes, he writes, are far too timid when there's a bloodbath to plan. A successful prince ‘must decide all the injuries he needs to commit and do all of them at once, so as not to have to inflict punishments every day’.

This isn't about the overall number of what he quaintly calls ‘injuries’ the prince has to perform, it's about timing and public perception. If you are too cautious at first, you are ‘forced to stand with sword in hand’ every day. People don't like this, they don't respect it and they will probably decide that you actually like doing it, too. On the other hand, if you can do the necessary work all at once, then you can start to do more generous things the next day – and you can say that you didn't relish the unpleasant job and be believed.

If you have injuries to commit in your job, you have two choices. Either you ask a real leader to do it for you, or you do the job well yourself. In this case, I'm not assuming a happy ‘well’: if you want to be nice to people, become a clown. I'm assuming that you accomplish the task you set yourself.

Once I worked for a company in which half of the staff were made redundant. Instead of the one-at-a-time trek to the boardroom, half of us were herded into an office, and the other half into a neighbouring office. We sort of understood what was happening when our friends next door let up a big cheer when they were told they were keeping their jobs.

More soundproofing in the office building would have made this a better example of best practice in human resources. But the truth is that we did have to go. The people who remained never saw the directors with a metaphorical sword in their hand. If you're going to cut, cut quickly.

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