During my first ten years of headship, between 1981 and 1991, the educational landscape was being redrawn by politicians who set out to dismantle Britain’s rather bipolar examination system. The supposedly ‘best’ pupils studied O-levels and the ‘rest’ were funnelled into CSEs. From Sir Keith Joseph’s opening salvos to Kenneth Baker’s ongoing efforts to unify the curriculum across schools in England, a great deal of exceptionally good stuff actually got done. It was a masterclass in structural overhaul, which makes it all the more ironic that nowadays, whenever things go slightly awry at work, my first instinct is to find a small, comforting dial to tweak. We adjust a metric, change the font on a policy document, shuffle the seating plan in the staff room, and convince ourselves that we have engineered a profound turnaround. It is a harmless form of self-delusion, largely because real transformation is exhausting, occasionally terrifying, and begins with an admission that we might not know it all. Jim Collins rather famously burst this particular bubble in 2001, when he followed his landmark 1994 book Built to Last with Good to Great. Organisations, he made uncomfortably clear, do not fiddle their way to excellence at the margins. You face the brutal facts of your own operation, you get the right people on the bus, and you accept that nobody has yet found an overnight shortcut.
Whitehall had to relearn that lesson the hard way, a few decades after Ken Baker’s reforms. On 23 November 2021 Kate Bingham DBE stood at the lectern in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to deliver the Romanes Lecture, From Wartime to Peacetime: Lessons from the Vaccine Taskforce. She had spent months steering the UK’s vaccine procurement through the teeth of a global pandemic, and she did not mince her words. She warned of a serious lack of science, industry and manufacturing skills across government departments. Her criticism was not aimed at the tireless individual civil servants. It was aimed at a stubborn system that prefers generalist managers rotating between unrelated projects every few months, and she was pointing out the absurdity of expecting a committee of process-driven administrators to take command of a fast-moving industrial crisis. Readiness, she argued, needs the humility to bring deep technical specialists into the core leadership tracks long before the storm arrives.
That lack of practical capability is hardly unique to the British civil service. Look across almost any Western economy and you find much the same story, a generation that has mistaken financial engineering and administrative compliance for competence. But even the grandest strategic vision falls apart if frontline execution tolerates casual inconsistency, and this is where Dr Atul Gawande comes in. In The Checklist Manifesto (2009) he showed that catastrophic failures in operating theatres rarely stem from a lack of medical knowledge. They come from simple human error and unmanaged variation. His most sobering example was a UK hospital where a surgeon was not strictly required to be in theatre while the patient’s leg was being prepared for surgery. A series of tiny, unchecked variations compounded, and the surgeon tragically amputated the wrong leg. Across the Atlantic in New York, such a disaster was structurally impossible, because regulations obliged the primary surgeon to remain present throughout the entire setup. If your organisation has its own wrong-leg vulnerabilities, a vague plea for people to try harder will not touch them. What helps is a firm rule that the right person is in the room for every high-stakes handoff.
Enforcing that kind of discipline means getting rid of “Not Invented Here”, the assumption that an idea which did not start in our own building cannot possibly be valid. This November, Brian Smith, head wrestling coach at the University of Missouri, described a wonderful antidote. Every Monday his elite athletes gather in a classroom rather than on the mat for what he calls “Mental Mondays”. They do not study wrestling tapes. They dissect the histories of corporate dynasties such as Apple, Southwest Airlines and General Electric. Smith admits he stole the idea from David Novak, the former chief executive of Yum! Brands, who made his fast-food teams study corporate giants that had nothing to do with tacos or pizza. He works to two rules. The first is that winners leave clues: champions are always telling you exactly how they did it, if you bother to listen. The second is that using an outside idea is not plagiarism, it is a shortcut. The fastest way to stop growing is to believe that your own field is entirely unique, and the trap almost never feels like arrogance from the inside. It feels like focus.
That willingness to look outside the building, to resist the quick tweak and to play the long game came into focus on 26 October 2026, when England captain Harry Kane stood on the stage of the London Palladium to receive the Ballon d’Or. He claimed football’s ultimate individual honour after a season of seventy-three goals for club and country. The detail that caught my eye in the papers, though, was a photograph taken exactly ten years earlier, in 2015, of a young Harry Kane holding Sir Stanley Matthews’s original trophy from 1956. He had not won it, of course. He had been invited to a charity fundraising day to thank the footballers who had given their services for the betterment of the game, and the Matthews family had brought the original award along to raise money for disadvantaged young coaches. Kane was simply there to support the cause. Between that photograph and the Palladium lie a decade of relentless refinement, real changes to the way he plays, and a leap of faith across the Channel to Germany to keep testing his limits. Nothing about it looks like an overnight tactical adjustment or a lucky break. In that room in 2015 he was not a superstar recipient but a young player quietly taking in the clues left by those who had walked the path before him.
The trouble with modern leadership is that we are increasingly led by Pied Piper tunes of overnight solutions. I have believed in democracy all my life, and I say this a little uneasily, but some matters are best kept at arm’s length from the electoral cycle. I suspect that very few of those currently in charge of UK PLC have had much long-term, hands-on industrial or commercial experience, the kind where you watch something become good over years rather than headlines. Policy papers and media cycles teach a different craft, and if we follow their superficial tunes we should not be surprised when the economy wanders towards the cliff edge. That is why I found it so refreshing to hear Harry Kane, on accepting his award, thank the coaches who had stood alongside him in his teenage years. They never offered him a quick tweak or a soundbite. What they gave him was steady expertise, and it kept his chances alive through the wilderness years.
Leave a Reply