Management By Headfuck

This will make Simon choke on his tea.

Yesterday morning on the radio, they were talking about some management style survey and asking, if your boss was a football manager, which one would he be?

The idea being that the successful ones all have different styles. They claim "emotional intelligence" for Jose Mourinho (which should have read "sackloads of cash"), "screaming and throwing things around" for Fergie (which is a little unfair!), and so on.

And I was saying to the guys at work, I couldn't think of any manager who was quite like one particular boss we know, who is renowned as a complete head-fucker whose chief characteristic is that he will never lose an argument. Ever. That means, if he wanted you to change something and you knew he was wrong about it, he would stand over your desk talking and talking about it - with all the spurious and bogus arguments he could come up with - until you caved in. And you did cave in. Eventually, you learned that you could never win an argument with him, so you just gave in for a shorter discussion and a peaceful life.

Brilliantly, when it all went wrong, he rewrote history so that it was all your idea and he said all along it wouldn't work.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I am not.

So we were talking about this, if he was a football manager, which would he be? And James (genius) said, "He'd sit everyone down and convince them they should be playing cricket."

And that's it. If he was managing Manchester United, they'd be playing cricket inside 6 months.

I'm still chuckling about the accuracy of that, 24 hours later.