What Cleverly gets wrong about Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’

Back in the 1980s, the American business guru Tom Peters came up with the advice to companies to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’. The idea behind it was that there was an asymmetry in customer responses to service standards which depended on what they had been guaranteed. A long delivery time could, for example, be perfectly acceptable to them unless they had been promised the purchased item sooner, in which case the reputation of the company involved would be badly harmed. The very best outcome for a company’s reputation was often when it set seemingly modest goals for itself in public but then outperformed them.

The Tory leadership contender James Cleverly seems to have imbibed from this literature, which was all the rage back in the day but is now inevitably tainted by the impact of comic fictional characters such as David Brent (‘There is no “I” in team, but there’s a “ME” if you look hard enough’).