‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ Most of us don’t have the power which Humpty Dumpty claimed for himself to make words mean what we want them to mean. We may be able to [...]
Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it. Seth Godin (via Tim Harford)
Translation is an extraordinary process. It is holding on to the essence of a thing while stripping away everything which expresses that essence and replacing it with a different language or a different form. Having pulled off this remarkable feat, the fate of the translator is then to be ignored: the integrity of the original [...]
The skill of a pilot is in bringing vertical speed to zero just at the landing point. The skill of a bell ringer is in bringing rotational speed to zero just at the balance point. The skill of managing change is in making the rate of change as close to zero as possible at the [...]
I have read three blog posts in the last few days which together strike me as indicators of a welcome trend. The first two were both from the new Government Digital Service blog, the first from Mike Bracken on his first few weeks in government as Director of Digital. It’s a very upbeat assessment, but [...]
Public sector organisations have a tendency to be elephantine. I suggested a few days ago that this was at least in part as a result of their size and age, rather than necessarily because being elephantine was limited to the public sector. In a comment on that post, Rik Barker challenged that view: I’ve been [...]
It is well known that elephants cannot dance. It is less well known why that is. Helpfully, this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have thrown some light on the subject. Essentially, elephants have big fat legs because as size doubles, mass cubes, so proportionately fatter legs are needed. Mark Miodownik, the lecturer, demonstrated the effect [...]
In the UK, we appear to have a government. It looks like a government, often talks like a government, and sometimes behaves like a government. But you can’t really understand the way government works until you realise that it doesn’t exist. Bits of government exist, of course, lots of them. Sometimes we call those bits ‘departments’ and [...]
The trouble with best practices is that they worked yesterday. Jean Russell (via Valdis Krebs)
The pope is a catholic, it goes without saying. But perhaps it would be better if sometimes he were not. When papal elections come round, there is always a little comment in the press coverage to the effect that the college of cardinals can elect anybody they please – they don’t have to choose one [...]