Running anything – whether it is a national government, vast state industry, world-circling multi-national, small family business, or private club – involves making choices. Indeed, the definition of an executive is one whose job it is to make choices, and the best executives are, of course, those who day in, day out make the most sensible choices – choices between different courses of action, between men and women available for the job, between planning alternatives, between the multitude of opposing expressions of advice volunteered from all and sundry.
What happens is that the nearer the top of any organisation a man or woman gets the more difficult the choices become. Near or at the top, in fact, it often becomes an exercise in choosing which is the lesser of two evils. The top management of anything is a continuous business of deciding between the devil and the deep blue sea. The most heartfelt question which any prime minister or chairman asks colleagues is surely the one which, I think, originated in Trinidad and became the watchword of the late great raconteur and social historian, Godfrey Chin. “You think it easy?”
No, it isn’t easy. In fact, in poor countries nowadays it is impossible. Who, for instance, would wish to have to choose between going under the whip of the IMF in order to suffer the 6 pains of death, and refusing that whip only to
