Managed Decline

[martin@]

Managed decline is a management theory in which the purpose is to take a business which has reached the end of a lifecycle, and manage it with the goal of minimizing costs or other forms of losses and harm. This is a policy which was once discussed by the Thatcher government as a strategy to deal with the problematic city of Liverpool, but was so controversial, it was rejected by Thatcher herself as too extreme. Seven years on from the heady days of 2006, this looks increasingly like the policy Randy Lerner has decided on for Aston Villa, a policy arrived at as a result of years of consistently poor management from the chairman and his team. Sadly, things currently seem to be getting worse rather than better. In the early days, we had an old school manager in Martin O’Neill, the type who saw himself as the ultimate manager of anything remotely football-related. We had a few different CEOs appointed during his tenure, but none of them lasted very long whilst Martin was in place. Whatever you think of O’Neill – and I wasn’t one of his biggest fans – it is pretty hard not to see that under his management, Lerner and his board and upper management were pretty much protected from worrying about the day to day direction of the club. Put in the simplest of terms, Martin told them who he wanted to buy, how much he’d need, and Randy gave him the money. Looking back now, the money was handed over unquestioningly and not too much attention was paid to the overall direction of the business. It was a fortunate state of affairs, though, convenient for all, and it worked, right up until the time at which O’Neill’s spitefully timed exit forced the upper management to actually run the club themselves. This is what has led to the mess we are in today. Take for instance, the squad. This is the most important asset of the club, but it has been dreadfully mismanaged for years. We seem to