Michael Nicholson is not the problem anymore.

I have written a lot of very harsh things on this blog over the last couple of years about Michael Nicholson.

I am not going to say anything particularly nice about him in this piece either, but I am not here to absolutely brutalise the guy.

Because I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and I spoke about it on the podcast the other night.

The real problem with Michael Nicholson may not actually be Michael Nicholson.

It may be the people who hired him, and, more importantly, the people who continue to leave him in the job.

Because I am increasingly convinced that they are not doing the guy any favours.

I have a friend who, in his early twenties, was offered a major job with what I will only describe as a public service organisation. He told me afterwards that he knew almost from the moment he started that he could not properly do the job. It was vastly bigger and more all-encompassing than he had ever imagined.

It takes a lot for anybody to admit that, even privately.

He did not remain in the post for long, and his overwhelming feeling when he left was relief. When I asked him why he had taken it in the first place, he was completely candid. The money was excellent. The opportunity was enormous. It was simply too good to turn down.

That is probably not an alien concept to many people.

I have been in jobs myself where I wondered whether I was completely cut out for what I was doing. In those situations, all you can really do is learn as quickly as possible and narrow your focus to the task immediately in front of you.

There is a mentality taught in extreme training environments which works along those lines: do not allow yourself to become overwhelmed by the entire challenge. Deal with the next problem. Then the next one. Then the next.

Eventually, you either sink or you swim.

I do not know whether Michael Nicholson feels overwhelmed by the Celtic job. I do not know whether he privately wonders if he is suited to it.

He is probably better at it now than he was when he first took it. Experience alone would almost guarantee that.

But when I read transcripts of meetings he has held with supporter groups, and when I read some of the things attributed to him in those meetings, he often sounds to me like a man who is in over his head and knows it.

Being chief executive of Celtic is also a prestigious and extremely well-paid position. He is hardly likely to walk away from it voluntarily. But I sometimes wonder whether, if somebody took the decision out of his hands, his overwhelming emotion might actually be relief.

Because what I am really saying here is that Nicholson did what a lot of people would have done. He was offered an extraordinary opportunity. He took it. Even if he had doubts about whether he was fully equipped for it, that would hardly make him unusual.

He has now been doing it long enough that he probably possesses a degree of competence in the role. But competence is not enough.

The football example which always comes to mind when I think about this is Gordon Smith at the SFA. Smith somehow ended up as chief executive of the association through a process which, to this day, remains not only opaque but something of a scandal.

He looked like the ultimate expression of an old-pals network operating inside Hampden because he simply did not appear to possess the experience which the job itself demanded, and we know what that job demanded because the SFA actually published the requirements when applications were invited. Smith seemed to meet very few of them.

That always reminded me of a story involving Celtic in the 1990s. When Celtic advertised for its own chief executive, the man who eventually got the job told the story of a colleague approaching him and asking whether he had seen the job description.

He had not. So, the colleague read it aloud and then asked him a question: Who does that sound like? When the man shrugged, his friend said “You.”

The man in question was Jock Brown.

Now, Jock Brown is never going to feature highly on many Celtic supporters’ lists of favourite executives. But in terms of the actual skill set required by the published job description, he ticked one heck of a lot of the boxes. He certainly appeared to tick far more of them than Gordon Smith ever did for the SFA role.

That is why, when I put together my own list of potential Celtic chief executives last night, I was careful to look for people who had actually operated at the highest executive level. It doesn’t mean I wanted them in the job; I was concerned with one question. Could they do the job to a better standard than Nicholson?

Some had strong Celtic connections. Others had extensive football experience. But all of them had relevant leadership credentials. All of them would have been discussed around a table of professional head-hunters asked to find a candidate.

Because only people who have operated in serious chief executive roles truly understand what those jobs demand.

And one of the things they demand is visibility. These are public-facing jobs. Michael Nicholson is not a naturally public-facing individual.

That fact alone should have raised a serious question over whether he was suitable to become chief executive of Celtic. Quite frankly, I think it is remarkable that he was ever put into the position without that particular skill set.

Everybody around that boardroom table, including Peter Lawwell, who was instrumental in his rise within the club, must have known perfectly well what his strengths and weaknesses were. Yet he got the job anyway.

Gordon Smith, of course, eventually proved disastrous at the SFA and departed in circumstances which came after criticism from several directions.

But the example outside football which interests me more is Gordon Brown.

Because Brown demonstrates something much more important. You can be extraordinarily intelligent. You can be deeply capable. You can even be brilliant in one enormous job, and still be fundamentally unsuited to another.

Brown vastly underestimated how different being Prime Minister would be from being Chancellor. More importantly, he tried to perform the role according to the skill set which had made him so effective at the Treasury.

That skill set was poorly matched to Number 10.

Brown had spent years developing habits which served him exceptionally well as Chancellor. His thinking was strategic, detailed and exhaustive. He wanted information. Then more information. Then he wanted the implications considered from every conceivable angle. Economic consequences. Political consequences. Public reaction. Polling. Long-term effects.

Budgets are not created the week before the Chancellor stands at the dispatch box. The process begins months in advance.

Brown thrived in that environment because his mind was built for it.

He is an extraordinary strategic thinker. I have no hesitation in saying that. He is immensely well-read and intellectually formidable. When Brown finally arrives at a conclusion, it is usually a conclusion which has been subjected to an enormous amount of thought, and very often that means that the conclusion is on the money.

But the operative word there is when. Because the Prime Minister does not always have time. Issues arrive on the desk and sometimes a decision has to be taken immediately. There is no opportunity to request another paper. There is no time to study another appendix. There may not even be time to sleep on it.

People who worked closely with Brown and Tony Blair have spoken about the contrast in their decision-making styles.

Blair wanted the issue condensed. Give him the key facts. Give him the options. Give him the consequences. Then he would decide.

Brown wanted everything. And once he had absorbed everything, he frequently wanted more. That did not make Brown less intelligent than Blair. Quite the reverse, in my view. I think Brown is unquestionably the greater intellect and the more naturally strategic mind.

But Blair possessed something Brown did not naturally have. He could absorb information rapidly, trust his judgement and make a decision.

Sometimes that instinct served him brilliantly. Sometimes, perhaps, it should have been restrained. One could certainly argue that the decision to follow the United States into Iraq might have benefited from a rather more Brown-like appetite for questioning every assumption. But the broader point remains.

Blair possessed a skill which a Prime Minister simply has to possess if he is going to function in the role, what a colleague called “velocity of decision making.” Brown was often at his best when a crisis landed on territory he had already mastered.

The global banking crisis was a perfect example. Suddenly the Prime Minister was dealing with banking systems, liquidity, financial institutions and economic collapse. That was terrain Gordon Brown knew intimately. He understood the ground beneath his feet, and his performance – the very finest – reflected it.

If the premiership had actually been the job Brown imagined it was, he might have been superb at it. If every decision had come with time to think, analyse and reconsider, his skill set would have been formidable. But it did not.

And that is the point. A person’s strengths can make him outstanding in one role and unsuitable for another.

That brings me back to Celtic.

Being chief executive of a major football club, especially one as exposed as Celtic, requires a very particular combination of abilities. You have to make decisions quickly. You have to negotiate effectively. You have to communicate. You have to face the media. You have to answer difficult questions. You have to articulate a vision.

You have to project leadership when the organisation is under pressure.

Those things are not optional extras. They are part of the job. They are, in many ways, the most critical parts of the job.

Michael Nicholson may be excellent at the minutiae.

I suspect he probably is. He is a trained lawyer. Like Brown, he is likely to understand Annex 16, paragraph four better than almost anybody in the room.

He may be extremely diligent behind closed doors. He may be methodical. He may be intelligent. He may even be very good at a number of senior executive functions.

But none of that automatically makes somebody a chief executive.

I do not want this to become another personal assassination piece. As a senior executive, Celtic could probably do considerably worse than Michael Nicholson. But as the principal figure at the top of the corporate structure, he is, without question, sadly lacking in several of the qualities the role requires.

Only an internal appointment made his elevation to that position seem natural. If Celtic had employed professional head-hunters, conducted a genuine external search and assessed applicants according to the requirements of running a football institution of this size, would Nicholson have emerged as the outstanding candidate?

I find that impossible to believe. Impossible. He might not even have made the final interview stage.

That is not an attack on his intellect. It is not an attack on his work ethic. It is not an attack on his personality. It is simply an assessment of suitability, and whenever I think about suitability for a job, I find myself thinking about Blake.

Perhaps I think about him too often.

He is, after all, a fictional character created specifically for the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross and absent from David Mamet’s original stage play.

But Blake feels frighteningly real because beneath all the aggression, vulgarity and cruelty there is a brutally simple capitalist logic.

He does not care whether the salesmen are pleasant men. He does not care whether they are decent husbands or loving fathers. He does not care what problems they have waiting for them at home. His entire philosophy reduces the workplace to one question.

Can you do the job?

His infamous attack on Moss captures it perfectly:

“Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids! If you want to work here, close!”

It is vicious. It is deliberately dehumanising. But buried beneath the nastiness is a truth which every serious organisation ultimately has to confront.

Personal qualities cannot substitute indefinitely for professional suitability. You can either do the job or you cannot, and if you cannot do the job, you should not remain in it simply because you are intelligent, diligent, well-liked internally or because the opportunity was too good for you to refuse.

If somebody is drowning in a role, it is not the responsibility of the rest of the organisation to pretend he is swimming. The responsibility of leadership is to get him out of the water and find somebody who can actually do what the organisation requires.

That is where my criticism now lies. I do not know exactly how Celtic arrived at Michael Nicholson as chief executive. I do know that the people who put him there have had years to assess whether the appointment works.

Whatever else Michael Nicholson may be – intelligent, diligent, professional, capable in other areas – I simply do not believe that anyone can satisfactorily argue that he possesses the full skill set required to be the chief executive of Celtic Football Club.

And so, the greater failure is not ultimately his; it now belongs to those who know it and leave him there anyway.

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