How do you define success at work? For a football manager (and I’m speaking as an Arsenal fan here), I would have thought winning an FA Cup trophy and leading your club to its first ever Champions League title in the same season would be enough to qualify.
Apparently not at Chelsea however, where billionaire owner Roman Abramovich continued his revolving door recruitment policy this week by firing manager Roberto Di Matteo and replacing him on the same day with Rafael Benitez. Di Matteo was the eighth coach to oversee the team during Abramovich’s 10 seasons as owner, with only one of the last five managers – Carlo Ancelotti – ending a season which he had started. True, Chelsea have won trophies over the years, but all that instability has unsettled fans and players alike, and the manager’s role is now seen as a poisoned chalice. It was after reading pensions minister Steve Webb’s speech at the European Retirement Federation in Frankfurt this week that I realised just how important stability and time to learn are in a job. For more than a decade, you could be forgiven for thinking the department for work and pensions was run by Abramovich. Incredibly Webb, who only took on the position in May 2010, is now the longest serving pensions minister since the role was created in 1998, a record he’s held since August. The pensions industry is a complex one, and naturally it takes time to learn how its many different fragments fit together. For years those of us working in and covering pensions have longed for a minister to stay in the job long enough to understand it and make a difference. In his speech in Frankfurt, Webb warned of the “devastating” impact Solvency II could have on UK pension funds, arguing it could drive deficits up by as much as £400bn, dismissing the proposals as “wrongheaded”, “reckless” and “dangerous”. Two days later, The DWP set out its proposals for the design of Webb’s flagship defined ambition system, adding new details to its desire to move workplace pensions towards risksharing structures. It’s only been two years and seven months so far, but in Webb the industry seems to have got what it wished for. He understands his subject and even appears to be passionate about it – not something you could say about many of his nine predecessors. Not since Frank Field, who oversaw pensions in his role as minister for welfare reform, has the industry had a minister so willing to enter the debate. Who knows how long Chelsea’s latest manager will last at Stamford Bridge? We can only hope the pensions minister gets a bit longer.
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