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In the space of 10 days, Cricket Australia has again shown why they are hopelessly incapable of dragging the Australian cricket team out of its current mire.
I should declare that I have been Chief Executive Officer and/or on the board of four Human Resources companies (recruitment, search, contracting, retention, training, psych, assessment, career planning) and have turned around seven people-based companies that were at their financial death’s door.
Firstly, Cricket Australia appointed Pat Howard as General Manager of Team Performance.
Howard has a wonderful pedigree in rugby. He was a Wallaby. His father, Jake Howard, was a Wallaby and his grandfather, Cyril Towers was a colossus for Randwick, (231 games), the Waratahs (82 games) and the Wallabies (19 games), including three as captain.
But he was not even close to being the best candidate for the job.
His resume has significant holes in it. His experience of sport is non-existent in the past four years.
He has had five jobs in four years – Leicester, ARU High Performance Manager, family pharmaceuticals business, a property trust and now Cricket Australia.
Each of these jobs is significantly different to each other. As Leicester coach, he was in the front line of a seven-day a week, high profile and very emotive and subjective, people-based business where he determined tactics.
The ARU was still in sport but was more back office and had a blend of tactical and strategic due to the longer time-frame. It had a more traditional managerial component that the Leicester job did not have, particularly in the mid-2000s in the UK.
The ARU job required the skills of an experienced, turnaround manager.
After just 10 months, he left the ARU citing the desire to spend more time with his family. Did he not realise that the ARU job was going to be very demanding on his family before he took the job?
The Wallabies had just returned from an abominable Rugby World Cup 2007. His boss, John O’Neill, wanted a root and branch change. It was never going to be a family-friendly role. It was always going to be a very challenging and demanding role.
Then he changed sectors and made a massive change of direction. He left sport and moved to FMCG and the uniqueness of a family-run business.
After the brief sojourn into the family business, he moved to a property trust. This was again an extraordinary change of direction.
Property trusts, by their very nature, are bricks and mortar rather than skin and bone assets. They are also long-term businesses, and in direct contrast to the short-term nature of both professional sport and FMCG.
He took a Chief Operating Officer role, and another back office low-profile role.
Now Howard has gone the full circle. He is back in sport, in a front-line family-unfriendly role, at the head of a team in dire straits and in an organisation that is as incompetent as the Cronulla Sharks.
The ongoing decline of the team has reached such a point that it requires him to hit the ground running and get quick results.
Howard is not a cricketer. I don’t care if he was not a very good cricket player. I do care that he is steeped in the history and current situation.
This comes from a career path inside the game. He does not know the nuances of the game, he does not know or understand the tectonic shifts occurring in the game in Australia and globally, as India flexes its purchasing power and short-termist, incompetence and disregard for the long-term growth of the game.
He has never met the coaches and managers that he will be garnering opinions from and building his knowledge base from.
He does not have any favours or capital that he can call on from them. He is alone in a leaking boat in very big sea full of very nasty sharks and he is a first-time sailor.
Last Friday, Cricket Australia further shackled Howard with a new full-time chairman of selectors, John Inverarity.
At 67 and nine months, he is more suited to retirement than the rigours of rebuilding the Australian cricket team from the ground up.
Inverarity has been out of the game for the past 30 years. This has included roles as a Maths teacher at Pembroke School and then Headmaster of Hale College in from 1989-2003.
Most recently, he has been Warden of St George’s College, University of Western Australia.
My initial list of candidates, including some who might have needed to be tapped on the shoulder for either or both positions, would have included Todd Greenberg, CEO of the Canterbury Bulldogs, David Gallop, CEO of the NRL, Geoff Lawson or Ric Charlesworth.
Charlesworth is the stand-out candidate.
All are proven performers in sport and know cricket better than either Howard or Inverarity, of whom I will reconsider my assessment if they make the most obvious and essential decision in the near future – remove Michael Clarke from the captaincy.
The General Manager, High Performance and Executive Chairman of Selectors, like Qantas’ Alan Joyce, need to show vision, leadership, courage and decisiveness in the face of ‘Brand Clarke’.
Clarke’s captaincy agenda is not compatible with the needs of the team and the game in Australia at this crucial time.
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