Tipping point: Leaders like O’Connell and Ferguson not made at seminars

Much of this World Cup has revolved around talk of leadership, to the extent that otherwise grown-up sensible people talk about rugby lessons translating to ‘life’ itself, as if the unique qualities of someone like Paul O’Connell can be learned and applied to everything.

So everyone repeat – I’m not Paul O’Connell. And rugby is just rugby.

Keep repeating until leading yourself away from the dangers of such hysterical flannel: you’re not going to get that promotion even if you do stare, tear and swear with a Limerick accent. And that’s a life lesson, not a rugby one.

You’d think all this would be self-evident but it hasn’t prevented a proliferation of corporate advertising surrounding the Ireland team – often with O’Connell front and centre – which continues to reinforce stereotypical links between rugger and business. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields at Eton but it seems there’s plenty invested on building the impression a World Cup can be won on double classes of Business Org, shoulder to shoulder at the PowerPoint of life.

It’s not just business. Government apparently can learn plenty from sport. The military too; any kind of hierarchical structure in fact: all of them supposedly open to leadership instruction from our playing fields leaders, possessed as they are with that elusive secret to success.

And there has been success, in the sense that a global motivation and inspiration industry has profitably grown up around perpetuating the idea this leadership thing can somehow be taught: sporting luminaries dazzling wannabe suits with sufficient jargon to enable credulity.

No doubt it’s great fun: all selfies and massaged egos, everyone having a great time before the gullible get released back into the real world, presumably armed with ill-founded confidence in the long list of David Brentisms they’ve just acquired.

But a salutary reminder of just how bogus the essential premise is came in the eye-wateringly awful Secrets Of Success, that recent mutual moisturiser between Alex Ferguson and the BBC's politics editor Nick Robinson.

This consisted of Ferguson appearing at the London Business School lecturing wannabe suits on the secrets of management, interspersed with clips of Tony Blair and Alan Sugar proclaiming their wonder at Fergie's generalship.

Not surprisingly Ferguson heartily tucked into this smug-fest, and it’s equally unsurprising he chose not to point out to his audience, or the Harvard professor who introduced him, that it was a long way from such lecture halls where he honed the singular leadership skills that made him a legendary football figure.

Now if it isn’t a golden rule that turning up for lectures about leadership indicate a terminal lack of leadership in the first place, then it should be: just as it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Harvard, the London Business School or other such august institutions are not where real titans of commerce learn the straightforward reality of making money – buy cheap and sell dear.

Battery prices

Michael O’Leary’s education might have included playing rugby at Clongowes but the Ryanair boss famously learned the financial facts of life through bleeding Christmas battery prices in a shop in Walkinstown.

You can argue drawing elaborate analogies between the corporate and sport is a relatively harmless piece of flim-flam, merely a reheat of the old character-building bit; and there’s something to that, even if it is striking how those keenest to make them are often those on top of the heap already, lending an unmistakable whiff of condescension to the whole thing.

But the leadership we have seen from O’Connell over the years is indeed a wonderful thing. And having a pop at Ferguson for allowing the Beeb to so enthusiastically massage his retired ego doesn’t dilute for a second the impact of his football management ability, which was as substantial as the idea it can somehow be learned by rote and transferred elsewhere is bogus.

To pedal otherwise cheapens the talents that allow real sporting leaders to stand up in a dressing-room and command complete respect, encouraging others to fall into line behind them. If that could be learned everyone would learn it, which plainly isn’t the case no matter how much pseudo-managerial jargon is being profitably flung around.

We are talking about unique individuals here. I have no idea why O'Connell, for instance, can deliver a speech and players 'buy' into it, while someone else employing exactly the same words might sound as convincing as Michael Ring.

Maybe it’s O’Connell’s size, or that manic glare: more possibly it’s down to some weird pathological sense that he completely means what he says when he talks about teamwork and fighting for each other and all the rest of it.

Cosy code

What is certain is that it’s not something that can be taught in an afternoon at the Holiday Inn where hopelessly abused words like ‘challenge’ become a cosy code and no one is allowed not look determinedly forward with the aid of their bullet-pointed spread-sheets.

Ultimately it may be as simple as sports leadership coming down to being seen to do what you say you will do. Rugby, indeed all sport, allows that because it assumes a basis of fairness which is nigh on impossible elsewhere since real life survival so often depends on doing the exact opposite.

Anyone paying any kind of attention realises the very things that make you stand out on a pitch actually hold you back in the cold reality of the boardroom, Dáil, or most anywhere else where ‘leadership’ mainly consists of busily covering your own arse.

So everyone continue to repeat – I’m not Paul O’Connell; rugby is just rugby: and getting by can be tough enough without having to listen to cod-merchants flogging tired old sporting cliches about ‘life’.