Public Strategist

Having a strategy is the easy bit, it’s making it work that’s difficult. Bruce Thompson (with thanks to @FlipChartFT) Or, in reverse If you think formulating strategy is the hard part, you haven’t tried delivering it Jon Ayre

Central units excel at producing coherent strategies that departments then don’t implement. William Perrin

Another splendid cartoon from Rob Cottingham. Should be a helpful starting point next time we update the team plan.

Your first design may seem like a solution but it is usually just an early definition of the problem you are trying to solve from. Luke Wroblewski (viaLee McIvor)

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. Clay Shirky

Strategy by the crowd may not always be strategic. Jon Pratty via Janet Davis

How much time am I prepared to spend working. Within that, what’s the most important thing I need to do, and how much time should I commit to doing it. Iterate until time is accounted for. Of course in the real world that needs to take account of other people’s needs and preferences – but it also leads pretty forcibly to the conclusion that responding to every clamour for attention from emails and meetings is a rapid route to perdition.

Most policies and strategies are based implicitly on the principles that: we understand what is going on now and the relevant factors which allow us to explain why it is so we understand the way the new policy strategy, or other intervention will interact with those factors, and therefore understand consequences of its implementation. Put [...]

It’s hardly news that Toyota are the leading lights of lean.  But some of the literature explaining what that means is a little bit heavy going, and there is an inevitable tendency to reinterpret the Toyota experience through our own organisational culture and collective management style – even though those are the two things which [...]

Jorge Luis Borges is famous for the classification of animals supposedly to be found in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable [...]