Both institutions had awesome success around the turn of the millennium. Both then declined before bottoming out circa 2019. Both have entrusted their recoveries to men with hair of the highest class. One of these (Labour party leader Keir Starmer) has a season ticket at Arsenal, where the other (Mikel Arteta) is manager.
Both were creations of the industrial working class in the late Victorian age. Both became synonymous with the metro-elite and with Islington in particular. Both have complex relationships with their last great leader. Both are haunted by a defining underachievement. The grandest club in the biggest city in Europe has never won the Champions League. The main party of the left in Britain has never won two consecutive full terms under anyone but Tony Blair.
Above all, both are, to a freakish extent, ahead of schedule. It was an open question not long ago whether Labour would ever govern Britain again. It was just as moot when Arsenal would next win the Premier League. Now both have a chance of doing so in the near term. If this happens, each story will become a case study of organisational turnround: in management courses, in leadership podcasts, in the profusion of literature on applied strategy and elite performance.
So let me get there first. Two universal lessons stand out from the resurrection of these teams in red.
First, progress isn’t linear. The strangest thing about each project is that it was going so badly just before it started going so well. It wasn’t as though results were twice as good after 12 months as after six, and so on. In fact, had the lockdown not emptied out stadiums, Arteta would have been booed out of his job after a year. Starmer was a figure of fun even later than that.
You might recognise this pattern from language-learning or any other serious undertaking in life: initial gains and then a plateau or even a regression before ultimate breakthrough. The trick is to gauge whether the middle phase is real, in which case there is no shame in quitting, or a deceptive lull in which improvement is happening under the surface. Arteta was certain (“This project is going to go bang”). But I wanted him out. Starmer, by contrast, I always thought a fairly sure thing. To get one so wrong and one right-ish shows how hard it is to judge.
I am now sceptical about any turnround project that doesn’t, in the short term, make things worse. The failed old model was still a model. If it is ripped out properly, there should be a period of entropy before the new model beds in.
The other lesson is that innovation is overrated. It matters to an organisation that is sound but failing to wring out the last 5 or so per cent of performance potential. It has less to offer one that is hopeless at the basics. Starmer has achieved an astronomical polling shift in a mature democracy. With which pioneering insights? Don’t be Marxist. Have nothing to do with antisemites. Offer an unthreatening alternative to the government.
Arteta, though more self-consciously state of the art, is the same. Don’t give big contracts to fading thirtysomethings. Have a tactical plan beyond “Go out there and express yourself, boys.” If each season is ruined by an injury pile-up, fix the conditioning and load-management regimen. To raise their organisations to the absolute top, each man will have to innovate. But what got them this far was a kind of high-class common sense.
I have seen individuals, not just institutions, make this error in their own lives. The shamans of the self-help world give them novel ways of securing marginal gains through sleep, nutrition, exercise, time-management, meditation and half-understood concepts from Marcus Aurelius. But the good life hinges disproportionately on two things: work you enjoy, and a fulfilling romantic life. Without these, no amount of sweating the small stuff will generate “wellness”.
There are people who are ever more productive at a job they hate, or well-rested after eight hours in bed next to someone they should never have married. They evoke a politician using a new digital reach-out strategy to sell a message no one likes. Or a sports coach tweaking the carbs-to-protein ratio of a player that belongs a league below. It is space-age, bleeding-edge failure.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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