Do you ever get the impression that when Johnson decides on cabinet members he asks if they have any experience and the response is:
Well gosh! No! But I'm willing to give it a bash!
Well gosh! No! But I'm willing to give it a bash!
The cabinet of government should be treated like the board of a multi-national company (no! not filled with cronnies) in my view along the lines of some advice a good friend of mine (who is CEO of a multi-national) once told me.
He said to me, that the job of a CEO is not to know everything about the company. It is to be a generalist and look at the big picture. This is why there are other directors. It is the job of directors to be specialised in the departments they oversee and then give...
EXPERT advice to the CEO which he can act on. And it's the next thing he said to me that has always stuck with me. He said, "It is the job of a CEO to make sure he's the dumbest person in the room".
Obviously, he clarified that statement. What he didn't mean, which seems to be what Boris Johnson does, is that the CEO should be dumb or act dumb for the purposes of later pleading ignorance. What he meant was, that the CEO should ensure the directors below him are...
way smarter than he or she is, with respect to their specific field, and that in comparison, a CEO should himself, or herself feel dumb compared to the level of their subordinates, of knowledge in their given field.
The CEO is supposed to be an intelligent generalist. The subordinates on the board are meant to be extremely intelligent specialists - the same logic should be applied to government cabinets. Unfortunately not the case in the UK Government. It's like dumb and dumber.
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