Obliquity: Guiding Principle or Platitude?

There is, John Kay says, an oblique relationship between intention and outcome.

On Saturday, the 86-year-old Jacques Delors, one of the main architects of the single European currency and head of the European Commission from 1985–1995, told the Daily Telegraph that the eurozone was flawed from the beginning. The lack of central powers to coordinate economic policies allowed some members to run up unsustainable debt. Obviously, this was not foreseen.

Today, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are meeting to discuss joint proposals to be put to a meeting of European leaders later in the week.

The objective is clear – a fiscally manageable European union. From here to there – is there a straight line? Was there a straight line from Jacques Delors’ decision-making to today’s brink?

He blamed a combination of the “stubbornness of the Germanic idea of monetary control and the absence of a clear vision from all the other countries.” The finance ministers, he said, turned a blind eye to the fundamental weaknesses and imbalances of member states’ economies. Everybody, he said, was responsible.

No doubt Delors and his colleagues did as well as they could under the circumstances, as Merkel and Sarkozy are doing today. Their eyes are firmly fixed on the desired objective. They are not – consciously – turning a blind eye in any direction.

But readers of John Kay’s book, Obliquity, might suggest to them that they should remember that complex goals are best achieved indirectly. The happiest people are not necessarily those who focus on happiness, John Kay writes. Success through obliquity is a product of natural selection in an uncertain, but competitive, environment.

It is almost certainly true that, on average, profit-oriented companies are more profitable than less profit-oriented companies. It is very likely that on average people who are interested in money are richer than people who are not. But at the same time that the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, the richest people are not those most interested in money. Outstanding success is the product of obliquity.

Would that lesson be of any use to Merkel and Sarkozy today? Hardly, at this stage, in the heat of battle, when every moment counts.

Still, no doubt Jacques Delors regrets today that he was not more far-sighted. Will Merkel and Sarkozy have cause for similar regrets in their old age? What secondary factors did they not see that they should have seen? Would Obliquity have helped them?