John Sculley was chief executive of Apple from 1983 – 1993.  He gave an extended account of his experiences and achievements to Fortune magazine, which prompted that journal to pose the question:   ‘Sculley – chump or champ?’   Sculley’s tenure of office included a period of great success –Apple’s graphical user interface brought the present computer within the capabilities of everyone.  And a period of major failure –Microsoft achieved almost complete dominance of the industry.  How could one man have been both so right and so wrong?

The analysis overlooked the obvious answer – that neither Apple’s success nor its failure had much to do with Sculley, an able corporate bureaucrat who rode both up and down on the roller coaster of high technology in.  Our desire to see history through the lives of great men blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance and leads us to find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation.  

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it acerbically ‘when imputed organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought!’   ‘One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the United States is that they do not even succeed controlling their own corporations’.   That was the experience of Chuck Prince and Stan O’Neal.

By describing Napoleon’s Russian campaign through the eyes of individual participants, Tolstoy refuted the notion of history as the lives of great men.  Of the battle of Borodino, he wrote ‘it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were carried out and during the battle he did not know what was going on’.  The hapless chief executives of major financial institutions, and world financial leaders gathered last weekend in Beijing; they share the experience of the French emperor, who issued orders but had no real knowledge or control of what his troops were doing.  ‘It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will’.

This mistaken inference is routinely shared by journalists and historians.  ‘The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticises them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good and serious people fill whole volumes and demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won’.  

What Tolstoy saw among military historians, Phil Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect sees on the business bookshelves.  Enron was a model of new styles of corporate organisation when its stock price was rising, and a hotbed of corporate corruption when it had gone bust.  The financial innovation that was once the means of spreading and minimising risk is now an unmanageable source of instability in the world financial system.  Realities have not changed, only the perspective from which we view them.

The survivor in any bureaucracy, private or public, is not the person who gets things right – rarely a popular figure – but the one who attaches himself to success and distances himself from failure.  In the clumsy hands of Gordon Brown, this behaviour is so transparent as to be almost comical.  But Alan Greenspan deserved the label maestro for the skill with which he deployed this strategy for two decades.  Like Napoleon ‘he did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle, he inclined to the most reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with his great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to command, calmly and with dignity’.  But as Napoleon’s run of victories ended at Borodino, Greenspan’s ran out in the credit crunch.

There are a very few men whose talents are so exceptional that, when they find themselves in the right place at the right time, they change the course of events.  Perhaps Roosevelt and Churchill or Steve Jobs of Apple.  And even they, like Napoleon, tend to go on winning only until they lose.