Cloughie - Football Genius

I'm watching the excellent ITV documentary on Brian Clough, possibly the most charismatic manager ever to grace English football and one of my childhood football heroes. He provided us with a catalogue of fantastic quotes and one of my favourites is from when he was asked about what he would do if one of his players came to him and said that he had a better idea than Clough about how things should be done. From memory, Clough's response was something like -

"Good, well I'd invite the player into my office, I'd ask him how he thought things should be done, we'd talk about it for 20 minutes and then we'd decide I was right all along!".

Wouldn't it be great (if unwise) to say something like that in a job interview when asked about your management style!?

UPDATE - I don't think much of ITV, but I must say this was a very fine programme - truly excellent...

Nudging Our Way To A Better Future

I'm not long back from hearing Richard Thaler speak at the London School of Economics about his book Nudge which he co-authored with Cass Sunstein who is now Barack Obama's 'nudger-in-chief' at the dull but important sounding 'Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs'.

I'll have more to say about this in later posts but it was an enjoyable and interesting 75 minute session during which Thaler described his ambition as being about, "creating a better world through freedom of choice" - a somewhat surprising self-description given that he often gets described as a nanny-stater. Thaler said that he and Sunstein were experimenting in seeing how far we can go in achieving social change without forcing anyone to do anything against their will.

More to follow...