K O Knausgaard - A Death In The Family

The book started with a bang for me as I really loved the discussion about death on pages 4-7. Among other examples, it spoke about how everyone likes to hear about death on the news but no one wants dead bodies on the street.  It pointed out how many people die in films, novels and videogames but how taboo footage of cadavers being eaten by birds would be in the same context.  It is really excellent.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill for me.  A lot of the prose is lacklustre and uninspiring.  Every minute detail is described but not in a colourful or beautiful way, rather, it is quite dull and simplistic.  The result is rather mundane and not evocative.  The endless details never combine to paint a vivid scene.  For me, it seemed more like heaping boring description upon boring description.  I suppose you could describe the style as distinctive but I didn’t enjoy it.  I also wondered, given the chronology of the book, how he could possibly have remembered such a multitude of inane details about his youth.  So, when I reached ‘Part 2’ I was a little confused to read, ‘I hardly remember anything from my childhood.  That is, I remember hardly any of the events in it’ (p211). I began to wonder whether this guy really knaus what he’s talking about!  In some way, this seemed to make all the boring recollections of how he had prepared his lunch, or from what angle he had approached his father, or how black and steamy his coffee was rather less forgivable!  On finishing the book, the adjectives ‘black’ and ‘shiny’ stick in my head as overused.  I feel like an effort to remember details from one’s childhood can be a worthy endeavour insofar as it can be helpful in reconstructing a ambience or environment.  However, simply making up a mountain of tiny details seems rather pointless to me and perhaps this is why I find the author’s prose underwhelming.  Perhaps I’m being too black and white about whether this is a work of fiction or autobiography and I don’t think it really matters so long as what’s created is effective and here, crucially for me, most of it wasn’t really.   

One possible exception to this general stylistic gloom and lack of ambience is the section describing his father’s descent into alcoholism and his death around pp 250-270.  It seemed more authentic and contains the honesty that many people have praised in Knausgaard’s writing but it’s still a bit bland and mechanical for my tastes.  Another brighter section was pp 316-334 where he describes the state of his grandmother’s home that she and his father having been living in prior to his father’s death.  Alongside the forensic descriptions of the filth and chaos of the house there’s also a lot of detail on the floor plan.  The same is true for descriptions of his childhood home.  I’m not sure whether I am alone in this but I found these descriptions difficult to follow and was never left with the feeling that I had a working knowledge of the floorplan described.  Despite all the description I remained confused!  It’s more the descriptions of the filth that ring true and are evocative.

Another stylistic gripe I have with the book is that it contains a number of impossibly long sentences.  For reasons that I hope will be obvious to the reader I will refrain from reproducing them here.  However, three of the most heinous examples occur at pp 353/4 (17 lines), p366 (16 lines) and p429 (16 lines).  In some cases, like p366, he obscures a lovely idea of books being everyman’s access to ‘the supreme’ with quite a lot of pretentious rambling about ‘Orpheus’ gaze’.  In others, such as p429, he probably does the reader a favour by distracting from the banality and self-aggrandisement of the subject matter; in this case, how his wife likes how good he is at reading people.  My point is not simply restricted to these three examples, although these are perhaps some of the most extreme cases of it.  In general, I feel the sentences are too long, a bit rambling and suffer from a lack of clarity and crispness owing to the large amounts of information crammed into them.

There are stylistic highlights too.  There is an excellent and perceptive section around pp 368-9 about the role playing nature of early identity:

“So there I was, playing roles, pretending this and pretending that...There was something furtive and dubious about my character, nothing of the solid pure traits which I encountered in some people during the period, people whom I therefore admired.”

Also, a section on swimming in the sea from p401:

“the sun burning down through the high blue sky and sea.  The water streaming off your body as you haul yourself up using hollows in the rock face, the drops on your left shoulder blades for a few seconds until the heat has burned them off, the water in your trunks still dripping long after you’ve wrapped a towel around yourself.”

Both are powerful pieces of prose.  The first because of the idea it contains and the clarity with which it is expressed, it’s also unusually pithy.  While the latter is, perhaps, an example of how the author’s chosen method of forensic description can bear fruit.

At the end of the book, the author returns to the theme of death and its relation to the physical human body.  He repeats the idea that the dead body is just another inanimate object and that the death of a body is just another process like those that inanimate objects undergo all the time:

“for humans are just one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water.  And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor”

But this kind of thinking, like the idea of leaving dead bodies to lie where they die, is highly theoretical at the end of the day.  This same man who has such intellectual regard for death finds himself inescapably moved to tears by the death of his father who he has, intellectually at least, wished dead for several years; not without justification!  It is the strength of the feelings surrounding death and grief that make these kind of approaches to death more or less impossible for most normal humans.  It is not reason and intellect that see the author rooting through his bedroom cupboard in the middle of the night to check his father is not there (p489)!  The strength of the emotions, connections and the sense of loss are too powerful for anyone to be able to treat a dead body like a kettle or view a loved one’s death like a smashed window.  Regardless of the truth of these assertions from an empirical perspective, they are emotionally devoid of all meaning.  

The book contains some interesting ideas and some good passages but overall it was only just good enough for me to view reading it in a vaguely positive light.  I disliked the style and found it cluttered, overly descriptive and lacklustre.  I also found the author’s ideas and his expression of them a bit pretentious in places.  The sections dealing with his father’s death and the aftermath were the highlights for me but, overall, it’s not a book I’d especially recommend and I don’t think I’ll read any more in the series.

Mike Brearley - The Art Of Captaincy

This is a good, interesting and useful book.  For another reader, say one who had a keen interest in cricket during the time when the author was in the pomp of his captaincy career, I’m sure it would be considered a stone-wall classic.  It’s really like four books in one but more about that later.  I’ll begin by getting a couple of stylistic and editorial gripes out of the way.  First, I found two misprints, which is surprising and sloppy.  It also seems totally at odds with the author’s own, seemingly meticulous, style and the evidence provided by the excellent and exhaustive index.  Secondly, and far less significantly, it is amazing how frequently the word-joining-hyphen appears in the text.  I wondered if this is a peculiarity of the author or whether it was a feature of writing at the time; perhaps a bit like the hashtag now.  Lastly, there is one section that I find totally incomprehensible:

“Douglas Jardine was the type to pay attention to such detail.  In 1932, he insisted on all tourists having dental check-ups before leaving England.  He is even said, by Alan Gibson, to have nursed Harold Larwood through, during the interval, with sips of champagne, while outside police were guarding against a riot and Australia was contemplating breaking itself away from the empire” p330

It makes no sense to me and I have re-read it several times and googled ‘1932 Australia Gibson Jardine’ etc.  Is it that Jardine nurses Gibson through his dental inspection with champagne? But why would the police be guarding against a riot? Let alone Australia breaking away from the Empire! The word ‘interval’ implies it was during a game but it couldn’t have been one against Australia as the touring party were still in England; all very confusing!

I wrote before that this is really four books in one and it certainly is in terms of the variety and quantity of the content.  I do not mean to say that each part of the book is different and readily identifiable as belonging to one of four types.  The four ingredients are intertwined and mixed in a way that defies rigid categorisation, however, this was the way the book presented itself to me and I think it is a useful framework; but then again I would!

1.

For a former cricket player and fan of the contemporary game for perhaps about 5-10 years, but no great student of its history, this book contains some fascinating historical insights and perspectives.  As such, this book is in part a historical one and this is my first category.  It’s a seasoned, intelligent professional giving you historical vignettes from his considerable knowledge.  From the inevitable stories about W.G.Grace, which are really a bit hackneyed, to a very interesting discourse on the demise of the leg spinner:

“But why have leg spinners all but disappeared?  Part of the answer lies in the factors that have countered against spin bowlers in general, and helped seamers: the use of fertilisers, the watering of outfields and the changes in ball-manufacture.  More specifically, though, leg spinners have suffered from a change in attitude.  Cricketers have become less cavalier.  It is no longer thinkable that a wicket-keeper should have 64 stumpings in a season, as Les Ames did in 1932.  Contrast Ames’s career record (415 stumpings, 698 catches) with John Murray’s (257 stumpings, 1,270 catches) or Jim Park’s (93 stumpings, 1089 catches).  Tail-enders no longer slog gaily, thereby becoming quick victims for a slow leg-spinner.  Selectors, captains and cricketers in general have become more conscious of containment; and the leg-spinner, especially in recent English conditions, has become a luxury.  One-day cricket, which calls for attacking batting but defensive bowling, has hastened his demise, but it, too, is a symptom as well as a cause.” p241

As a stylistic aside, I’d like to note that the hyphen occurs seven times in the last two quotations!  We are also treated to more idiosyncratic titbits, like the possible origin of the term ‘Chinaman’ to signify left arm unorthodox spin.  Happily, this quotation also contains one of the two misprints I was grumbling about earlier:

“...Ellis Edgar Achong, a slow left-armer [sic] bowler of Chinese origin who played for the West Indies between 1929 and 1935.”  p238

Achong sounds like a potentially interesting character!  There are many other examples of the author’s knowledge of, and skill in presenting, the game’s history.  However, one striking observation about the history of the game that I had never considered came from the books 2015 introduction, written by Ed Smith.  Smith is, like the author, a former Middlesex and England batsman and also, like the author, of no small intelligence and writing ability.  I met him at a wedding once and he was charming so there’s my claim to fame! He points out that the leadership of a cricket team has changed drastically in the 20th century.  For instance, in 1962 the game abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals and became fully professional.  This meant that the captain would now be professional as opposed to the previous necessity that this position be filled by an amatuer.  Brearley, whose career began in 1961, recalls changing with the captain in luxurious surroundings while the professionals had to get changed in a shower room!  However, England did not appointment a professional coach until 1986.  As such, Brearley’s career spanned an era whereby the captain was no longer some idiot toff, selected on the merits of breeding and wealth alone, but a first among professional equals.  It also preceded an era where coaching heavily influenced strategy and tactics.  Taken in this historical context, his role was probably more akin to the player / manager role occasionally adopted in football and the book is all the more interesting for it.

2.

The aspect of the book I enjoyed least was what might be called memoir.  I have little or no knowledge of the cast of players and absolutely no contemporary recollection of the events.  Consequently, even though some of the stories are entertaining in their own right, it’s hard for the material to be that engaging.  Clearly, this is not a fair criticism of the book as many readers would have knowledge of the cast of players and events and were probably buying the book for this very reason!  One subgenre of the memoir-esque material that I did enjoy rather more than the rest is what one might term ‘after dinner speech material’.  For example, this story for ancient Greek military history:

“When during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans were about to make a landing from Sphacteria, the Athenian general addressed his troops as follows: ‘Soldiers, all of us are together in this.  I don’t want any of you in our present awkward position to try to show off his intelligence by making a precise calculation of the dangers which surround us.  Instead we must make straight for the enemy, and not pause to discuss the matter, confident in our hearts that these dangers too can be surmounted.’” p318

And in a similar, but more modern and light-hearted vein:

‘It was EM Forster I think who said, “How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?”’ p319

On the whole though, this was the part of the book I got the least from.

3.  

The final two strands of this book I want to write about are far more closely intermingled than the previous two.  I’ll call them ‘A Captain’s Handbook’ and ‘The Philosophy and Psychology of Leadership’ or perhaps PPL in the interests of brevity and ease of typing!  The reason I say they’re far more closely linked is because both essentially address the incredibly broad field of leadership, which in turn encapsulates relationships, families and education.  A person who had just been appointed captain of a team would find this an excellent 101 in cricket captaincy.  Everything is covered in extreme from the technical merits of certain field placements to the practical challenges of arranging winter nets.  In this respect, I wish I had read this book when I was about 11 years.  Sadly, my cricket captaincy career was to be a short one.  Might it all have been so different had I read this book?  I doubt it! However, much of this practical material contains clear parallels in other parts of life.  For example, when discussing finding a new captain for a team:

“The more feeble the side has become, and the longer its decline has lasted, the more reason there is to import” p45

I need hardly point out the multitude of different situations this kind of thinking might be applicable to.  Equally useful is the following passage, which describes the antinomy of the personal vs. the group in cricket while simultaneously providing an interesting analysis of group sizes and their different dynamics that could be applied in a corporate or a social context:

“Team success is, indeed, the product of personal successes.  And it would be possible to have the conflict between self-interest and that of the group in a team game.  Each ball is a mini-drama between two protagonists - a bowler and a batsman; but the protagonists’’ actions take their meaning from, and are strongly influenced by, the group context.

It is not accidental that sporting teams range from around seven or eight to fifteen a side.  For a true group cannot exist with much less than seven members; and with more than twenty it tends to become a crowd.  Two is not a group; they may combine well together , but too much hangs on the individuals and how they happen to get on.  Threes tend to divide into a two and a one; fours into two-two.  Five or six people can make a group, but the absence of one or two individuals makes its identity precarious.” p311

Some passages are more specific to cricket:

“The players’ attitudes are improved by realistic practice matches” p60

But clearly indicate an approval for secondary tasks performed in a serious and focussed manner and the benefits that this kind of environment can bring to a team.  Other reflections, indeed, probably also constitute memoir given that they refer to individual matches:

“We started to have intense, brief meetings before each session of play.  These talks helped revitalise a unit that had become sloppy and even dispirited” p320

But these too have a broader significance and application, which the author sometimes draws out himself:

“RC Collingwood, philosopher, writes ‘A tribe which dances a war-dance before going out to fight its neighbours is working up its war-like emotions’” p321

To me this is great practical philosophical and psychological advice insofar as I am often guilty socially, in my work and in a family context of not being in the right frame of mind for the task in hand or totally focussed on it.  I certainly think it’s good practice to meet with those you’re trying to achieve something with or to state clearly to yourself; what it is you intend to do and what attitude this requires.  

One area I thought the author was excellent on was confidence, its mercurial nature, and its importance as a counterbalance when attempting to correct faults, both personally and in others.  He makes the following suggestion:

“It ought to be a basic provision of the coaching system of any professional club to make an extended tape of each player when in good form.  He should be filmed both in the middle and in the nets such a tape would be a touchstone for the individual; in lean days it would remind him of his strengths.  And it could be used by coach and player to pinpoint the ways in which his method had deteriorated or improved” p72

This is a rare occasion where the practicality of immediate parallels with broader life may be harder to implement.  Sport has the advantageous quality of being visible.  We can easily watch a recognise a player playing well and point out various technical features in a way which is not possible for an academic doing fantastic research or a parent providing excellent emotional support and leadership to their family! However, the concept is, I feel, a really important one.  We all have periods of better and worse performance in almost every complex part of our lives and when things are going badly it can feel like they’ll never go well again.  As such, any tool that can remind us of the temporary, volatile nature of performance in the short term is valuable.  Furthermore, the idea that some praise before addressing the rather more tricky topic of criticism is a good idea strikes me as intuitive and obvious:

“We need constantly to be reminded of our good qualities in order to get into a frame of mind which is suitable for amending our faults” p76

However, having never stated this principle explicitly, I can now think of many instances where I certainly have not followed it!

Managing anxiety and helping others to cope with it was another area where I thought the book was very strong.  Again, as with almost all complex issues, there are elements of antimony in the suggested approach and it is all the more persuasive for it.  First, it is crucial not to frame anxiety as something easily controllable, which the victim should not be worried about.  We’re probably all familiar with response akin to ‘there’s no point worrying about that, you just need to forget it and pull yourself together’.  My own experience is that almost nothing could be less helpful than this strategy!  The anxiety in question must be discussed thoroughly and calmly in a way that is cognisant of its reality and severity before attempting to think of modes of thought or action that might help to alleviate or make its appearance more manageable.  For a captain, attempting to lead and manage a team and its attendant anxieties, this is a desirable and valuable attribute:

“The capacity to take in and take on the pressures of a team, both individually and collectively, and then enable the team to reach creative solutions without denying these anxieties” p353

But also on an individual level, and again the parallels with other areas of life are obvious, it is crucial not to repress or deny feelings of anxiety but rather to try to recognise them when they occur, identify potential causes and try to invent or discover ways of reducing the intensity of the anxiety and the frequency of its occurrence.  Hence, while the focus initially might be on taking the time to recognise and discuss the existence of anxiety once this discussion and analysis has taken place there is, at least partially, a switch towards thinking about it as something manageable.  Or at least, something that can be exacerbated or alleviated by certain patterns of behaviour or thought.  This could be seen as, in some ways, at odds with the initial focus given that part of this was explicitly NOT to see anxiety as something easily controllable by the victim!  However, I feel the process of discussion, recognition and analysis, even if this all takes place internally, really reframes the feelings of anxiety and the way a person can interact with them so that I don’t really see the two as being in conflict.  The author says this of dealing with individuals suffering from anxiety:

“It then has to be conveyed, often subtly, to those in the team that their predicament and anxieties are bearable...containing anxiety and handing it back in a form that can be thought about” p349

You could assume that wanting to win was the clear objective of any sportsman and its dominance of thoughts and emotions would be a given.  However, this would be to understand sport divorced from its wider context in society and from the psychology of its participants.

“Some find it hard to play all out to win; if they did so, they might be revealed as nasty and unlikable.  We dislike our own barely suppressed tendency to gloat.  A tennis player often drops his own service the game after breaking his opponent’s, his guilt now assuaged, is stung into uninhibited aggression.  The sportsman, like the doctor, should not get emotionally involved with the his ‘patient’.  Neither should he let pity get in his way.  Hutton’s advice to me on the eve of the England team’s departure for India in 1976 was, ‘Don’t take pity on the Indian bowlers.’  Respecting an opponent includes being prepared to finish him off.” p289

I thought this passage was excellent both in diagnosing the problem and prescribing a solution, however difficult it might be to implement!  I feel like a lot of successful sports and business figures have a single mindedness, sometimes akin to that of a child or someone with a personality disorder, that prevents or suppresses these unhelpful emotions.  This childlike behaviour can cause amusement amongst teammates or colleagues but may also cause friction and ruptures.  Such is the dual nature of most abnormalities, offering gifts with one hand while bestowing problems with the other!  The author makes a fascinating observation, well technically quotes a fascinating observation from the TLS, in this regard:   

“I read in the TLS of 26/6/81: ‘The ability to tap the boyhood sources of energy and illusion is essential in most highly competitive activities, and one would hesitate to back a fully adult person (should one exist) in any serious contest.  There is nothing like a sudden surge of maturity to impair the will to win’” P339

It made me think about what sort of emotional and psychological conditions sporting success is usually an expression of.  Undoubtedly the answer will vary depending on the individual but I thought there was truth to the suggestion most will involve drawing on childlike energy and illusion.

A couple of years ago I visited the Chihuly Museum in Seattle and espied some of his extraordinary glass sculptures.  The art wasn’t really to my taste but the museum was wonderfully curated and Chihuly himself was a truly fascinating individual.  He said of his work that all the steps of the process must be done quickly and freely with little thought so that it is, as much as possible, a product of what he calls ‘nature’.  His take on the act of thinking was that if you have to think then, at some level, you don’t know what you are doing.  So when you are doing something creative, you want to try and think as little as possible or not at all.  In a technical game like cricket, involving repetitive actions to varying degrees, you might think in terms of concentration and focus.  However, with most high level sportsmen their technique is probably naturally good or, at least, naturally effective.  As such, we also find letting go and not thinking too much can be a successful strategy in sportt as well as art:

“I read A Life Of One’s Own by Joanna Field.  The author was writing about table tennis: ‘What surprised me was that my arm seemed to know what to do by itself, it was able to make the right judgements of strength and direction quite without my help.  Here the internal gesture required seemed to be able to stand aside.  

Standing aside feels, to the Puritan mind, shockingly like responsibility.  But it can, often, be the only way to let potentialities flower, to allow one’s body to do what it is capable of.” p75

Of course, there are other times mentioned in the book when quite the opposite is required but this dichotomy encapsulates the essence of captaincy and leadership.  One danger that seems ever present regardless of whether one concentrates or lets go is thinking too much about factors outside of your control. For example, the batsman for a bowler or what other people think of you in life.  In both cases, we must be aware of the external and its character but focus on, and have faith in, our own abilities:

“It is often sound advice to say to a bowler, ‘Just bowl.  Don’t think about the batsman.’  In conditions that help the bowler, this approach is particularly likely to be valid; if you, the bowler, get it right any batsman will be stretched to deal with you.  Everything else may be irrelevant.  The bowler should feel that he will dictate to the batsman, not vice versa.” p226

Inevitably, leading a successful team is usually easier than leading a failing one and because of this it is all the more important how a leader responds in times of low morale or outright crisis.  

“I will end these chapters on captaincy in the field with two general points.  First, the team - and the captain in particular - must never give up.  Occasionally things get so bad that you have to laugh.  But cricket is full of surprises.  A wicket falls, and three more go, for no good reason.  And, secondly, do not mistrust your intuition.  Mike Gatting commented, when asked about taking over at Middlesex, that this was the main lesson he had learned from me; what in fact he would certainly have noticed was my irritation when hunches that I did not follow turned out to have been right.” p264

When things are going well, it seems to me that it is easier to make decisions, because your confidence is high, and that these decisions are also less likely to negatively affect performance as everyone is feeling good.  I feel quite the opposite about when things are going badly.  First, you’re usually afraid or hesitant to make decisions, most probably because you have already made some bad ones! As such, there may be an inclination to make a reckless decision or just to choose any decision because you feel fatigued and disillusioned after making a lot of decisions with bad results.  Here, as the passage above points out, it is important not to let morale get too low and to continue to invest the same time, thought and energy into decisions as, often, the cycle will turn or the psychological dynamics at play will swing in the other direction.  I’m reminded of the earlier passage on playing all out to win and also of my experiences in gambling on sport and in the stock market; it is often when things look absolutely hopeless and a foregone conclusion that the biggest opportunities arise.  For this reason I feel it is crucial not to give up and not to look at the recent evidence and doubt your decision making ability:

“Certainly it is a requirement of captaincy not to panic in such situations.  Another failing is to be reduced to helplessness.  However bad things are there are always options that would be less catastrophic than others.” p14

4.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, the distinction between ‘Captain’s Handbook’ and ‘PPL’ are somewhat artificial.  However, while a lot of the material above is essentially cricketing in nature, albeit with far broader applications, there’s also a lot of material that is explicitly about leadership in all its forms and needs no interpretation.  A good example of this deals with responses to difficult questions and, to me, it represents excellent advice:

“There is something relevantly testing in how you respond to rude or apparently naive questions; are you provoked into a tight-lipped defensiveness?  Do you betray a telling arrogance?  Are you reduced to pleading or irascibility? Can you find, amidst the hectic shards of anxiety and alleged failure, a place to be, if not serene, then at least solidly present, up for the next challenge, neither shrill nor uptight, neither manic nor depressed, optimistic but not triumphalist, bold and cautious?  Do you, in short, have what it takes when the pressures mount whether on the field or off it?” intro, xxi

Again, as with the ultimate example in section three, the focus is on hard times when psychological and emotional conditions are testing and the leader really earns their keep.  However, the author also warns against simplistic interpretations of the role of the leader.  In cricket, as in life, there is a constant state of flux and what may work well in one situation maybe disastrous in another.  As such, it’s wiser to adopt what I would describe as a broadly Stoic approach:

“There are, in the short and the long term, inevitable phases of crisis, drama, calm and aimlessness.  Nothing stands still for long.  There is no recipe.  Some leaders thrive in crises, some on hard work and stabilisation in periods of relative peace and well-being” into xxix

A leader will often find themselves in position whereby they have an unusually large influence over the lives of others and their psychology.  This being the case, leaders may use psychological tricks to motivate and get the best out of the group.  There are examples mentioned in the book, firing up a fast bowler with insults before he bowls, and this kind of motivation and leadership occurs in all walks of life.  One extremely high profile practitioner is the current Manchester United manager, Jose Mourinho.  Zlatan Ibrahimovic is quoted in Carlo Ancelotti’s book Quiet Leadership as saying, ‘“Mourinho is the disciplinarian.  Everything with him is a mind game - he likes to manipulate” (p87).  However, this tactic of manipulation resulted in a spectacular underperformance when Mourinho was managing Chelsea.  Then reigning champions, the players seemed to rebel against Mourinho and refuse to play for him losing an almost unthinkable 9/16 games after starting the season as the bookmakers’ favourites!  Writing some 30 years previously, Brearley is acutely aware of the style and its potential drawbacks:  

“The proximity of leader and led makes cunning a dangerous tool in man-management.  I have always doubted the value of manipulation - that is, the attempt to influence by subtle control in which the controller keeps the strings in his hands - as a method of leadership.  Sooner or later people resent being played upon like flutes or tricked into dancing to a certain tune.  In sport, there is even less room for such dissimulation.” p335

That having been said, Mourinho’s track record amply displays that such a strategy can produce short term results.  It is often mentioned that he has never held a managerial position for longer than three years and perhaps the problems of manipulative man management highlighted here are to blame!

It would be folly to think of Mourinho as a totally inept leader and there are other parts of his philosophy that concur precisely with Brearley’s own ideas on the subject.  Points on which two such different, but both successful, leaders can agree on should perhaps hold special interest.  The most obvious, to me, was the importance placed on being oneself as a leader:

“Without doubt we have to be natural to be captains, too; we must be ourselves.  Every good captain leads his side in his own way, as suits his own personality.  He must be willing to follow his hunches.  The captain, like the batsman or the mother, is impeded and stilted in his performance if his head is constantly cluttered up with theories.” p9

Mourinho, famously a translator and then coach under Bobby Robson at Barcelona, is quoted in Mike Carson’s book The Manager, as saying:

‘With a mentor you can improve and have a base for evolution, but when you try and copy, the copy is never the same as the original.  So I think you have to learn from people with more experience who have had success, but always keep your own personal identity’

No one can pretend to be someone else the whole time and no one can know how another person would react to a new or unusual situation.  Leaders usually face new and unusual situations regularly and for this reason the idea of being ourselves and adapting our style of leadership to our personality seem absolutely central to me.  Another vastly complex area of decision making and psychology I’m familiar with is investment and here we find the discipline’s most famous practitioner saying exactly the same thing.  Warren Buffett did not go on from Ben Graham’s Columbia University course to become a pure value investment and arbitrage specialist, although this was a part of what he did.  Rather, he went on to develop his own style and investment philosophy commensurate with his personality.  When I was reading Alice Schroeder’s Snowball it mentioned that one of Buffett’s favourite movies was The Glenn Miller Story.  Why would this 1954 film about a big band leader hold such special importance for him, I wondered?  After watching it things became far clearer, it’s the story of a man struggling ‘to find his own sound’ and, without wanting to spoil the plot, it doesn’t happen overnight!

What more can we say definitively about leadership?  I hope the preceding paragraph has shown it is paramount to be oneself and to lead in the style of your personality.  However, this advice itself will result in totally contradictory styles of leadership and because of this we might conclude there is very little more we can say on the subject! External circumstances, the personalities of those led, group dynamics all are constantly changing so where is one to look?  Practical experience seems the most obvious answer and one I’m sure Brearley would endorse; he seems to be continually learning.  I would argue also in the reflections and observations of successful leaders.  A constant curiosity for new ideas and perspectives to augment understanding regardless of whether we agree or disagree with the idea in question.  Here, we can look at what has worked for someone else and make some attempt to judge whether it accords with our own beliefs and character.  Brearley is clearly a deep thinker, someone open to, and curious about, new ideas and experimentation, intelligent and emotionally sensitive, he strikes me as highly aware of the importance of psychology.  Clearly, his latter career points in this direction.  In this context,  it is unsurprising to find him focussed on a style of leadership that prioritises the individual:

“The ‘military model’ would stress uniformity and fairness.  The leadership model that I am advocating does not deny the importance of justice, but it suggests that justice does not reduce so simply to the same treatment for each individual, since different individuals have such different needs.” p328

Even within this quote, it's clear how much of leadership must be an unscientific matter of judgement.  The subject does not lend itself well to hard and fast rules or infallible truths.  Rather, for me, it is more akin to an art with the artist struggling to interpret, influence and express the conflicting forces they find inherent in the raw material with which they work.  I liked this book because I feel it is an expression of Brearley’s personality and, because of this, it is a decent account of his skills as a leader.  Of course, there were drawbacks like the memoirs involving players most people under the age of 50 would have no idea about.  At one stage I thought it might be better as three or for different books, such is the quantity of diverse material contained within it.  However, this could arguably damage the book’s expression of Brearley’s personality and it is impossible for me to say that I haven’t enjoyed it in its current format.  He is undoubtedly an expert on leadership and there’s a lot to learn from him!

I’ll finish with Brearley’s concluding comments, initially discussing the Australian Test team under Steve Waugh, as I feel they’re a far better summary of the vagaries of leadership than I could offer:

“The morale, the attention to detail, and the tenacity exhibited have been a lesson to us all.  But these are, in the longer view, merely ships that pass in the night.  Captaincy, leadership, getting the best out of individuals, bringing children up, educating - from the Latin, ‘lead forth’ - these call for universal, but also complex and individually characterised qualities, qualities that are inherently in tension with each other.  We could speak of antinomies of leadership - passion and detachment, vision and common-sense, an authoritarian streak and a truly democratic interest in the team and points of view.  One requires conviction, but also the capacity not to rush to answers but to be able to tolerate doubt and uncertainty...

...In 504 BC, when the Greek city states faced with threats of invasion from Persia, the Greek historian Xenophon wrote the following about the personal requirements for an elected general.  He should be ‘ingenious, energetic, careful, full of stamina and presence of mind….loving and tough, straightforward and crafty, ready to gamble everything and wishing to have everything, generous and greedy, trusting and suspicious.’  Xenophon had it about right.” p355