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Civil servants civilly serve 22 Oct 2019 12:23 AM (5 years ago)

Civil servants are individually and collectively approaching an ethical challenge. That would be dangerous territory at the best of times, but it is made doubly so by the fact that vanishingly few of them have spotted that there is a challenge at all. There is a resounding silence of leadership on the most fundamental challenge to the nature of the civil service in generations.

Brexit has dominated the politics of the UK for the three years since the vote to leave. It is self-evidently an important issue in its own right. But it has also raised constitutional questions of much wider significance, some of which have also been getting increasing attention. One which has so far remained in relative obscurity is the implications for the future of a non-political civil service. Brexit provides its context and in some ways its catalyst, but it is not fundamentally a brexit-dependent question and so is independent of views on brexit itself.

As I have discussed before, the ethical foundations of the civil service have some distinctive characteristics. Civil servants subordinate their personal political and policy preferences to the greater good of a wider political system. They will work tirelessly in support of goals they may not share and ministers whose party they did not vote for. They do so not because they are amoral or immoral but because they – and the constitutional settlement of which they are part – places high value on there being an effective and professional bureaucracy. So ministers decide – in practice as well as in theory – while civil servants analyse, advise and deliver.

That approach requires answers to three fundamentally important questions:

What makes the decisions which civil servants implement legitimate?

Where are the boundaries of that legitimacy and how can they be detected?

What should civil servants do if those boundaries are reached and crossed?

The initial answer to the first question is pretty straightforward: decisions are legitimate because they are made by ministers and ministers have democratic legitimacy as members of a government which enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons. For a very long time that has seemed to be a sufficient answer with little practical need to enquire further.

It has appeared sufficient because of one more element: an intangible, but very real, acceptance that the support of a majority of the Commons was a sufficient test of democratic legitimacy. In practice, it is now unknown for a party with a majority of seats in the Commons to have won them with the support of a majority of the electorate.¹ But very clearly that has not created a crisis of democracy: the decisions of those governments have of course been politically controversial, but they have not in general been attacked for want of legitimacy.²  It’s not surprising that supporters of decisions and governments don’t go out of their way to question their validity. If anybody is going to do so, it is their opponents – and the fact that that generally hasn’t happened is a pretty strong indication of losers’ consent to the underlying system, if not necessarily to the specific outcomes that system generates.

That tacit agreement not to notice that there is a problem is now breaking down. There are two obvious drivers for that, and no doubt many more causal factors which could be identified. One is that the government’s response to the brexit referendum showed little sign of recognising the need for losers’ consent: ‘you lost, get over it’ may be satisfying in the moment but is hardly best calculated to broaden the perceived legitimacy of the decisions which followed. The other is a more direct break in the chain of democractic accountability and legitimacy: the deep confusion which has resulted from the tension between direct and representative democracy, exacerbated by the unintended consequences of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, resulting in a government with very uncertain parliamentary support.

So in short, the aftermath of the referendum has made the underlying problem of losers’ consent much more visible (even if not directly discussed in those terms), and the state of parliament has put further strain on the chain of democractic legitimacy, even in the weak form which has characterised the UK system for many years.

What then should the civil service do?

There is a simple answer, which is to carry on regardless. That is the answer still being assumed, based fundamentally on the idea that the government remains the government until it stops being the government and that for as long as it does so, it is not for the civil service to look behind the formalities of its continuing existence or to question its authority.

That position has some attractions: we don’t want to be in a world where the civil service takes it on itself to decide whether it likes a government enough to be prepared to work for it. But there is also a profound weakness: if this is not enough attenuation of authority at least to require questions to be asked, what would be? And that brings us on to the second question, about where the boundaries of legitimacy should be drawn.

Where are the boundaries of that legitimacy and how can they be detected?

There is no shortage of examples, historical and modern, of states which have kept the forms of democratic government while edging towards authoritarianism. The difficulty is that when those forms fall away, it’s generally too late to do much about it. Before that point, though, there is inevitably judgement and ambiguity, with a very understandable temptation to see the continuity of what is legitimate and fail to see the discontinuity to what is illegitimate.

I do not assert that there is a single objective test of whether we at, approaching, or beyond that boundary. Nor is it the point of this post to assert that any such test has or has not been met. The assertion here is instead that it is an ethical imperative for civil servants to be looking for that boundary and to avoid complicity in crossing it.

There is though a precautionary principle which is relevant to making the judgement. The dominant political myth in the UK is that its political system is inherently stable, bending and adapting to changing times, but never breaking. There are some pretty obvious perspectives from which that has never been true, of course, but that hasn’t challenged (and, to a remarkable degree, still doesn’t challenge) the myth. If that dominant myth were well founded, all of this would matter much less, we could safely treat it as part of the routine ebb and flow of politics, with which the civil service is entirely comfortable. But if the wider political system is more brittle than that dominant myth allows, we should be much more worried, and at the very least looking out for signs that we may be going beyond the point at which everything just springs back to normal.³ It is true that the UK has not had some of the radical discontinuities of government and constitution which many other countries have had to go through.⁴ But while that may be an indication that the elastic limit has not been reached, it cannot be evidence that the limit does not exist.

In their study of How Democracies Die Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put forward four behavioural warning signs for recognising authoritarian leaders:

We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

And they stress that:

A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern.

The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill provides the basis for a thought experiment.⁵ There is no suggestion from the government that it should do anything other than go through all the normal parliamentary stages in both houses. There is in that formal sense nothing at all unusual about it. But the proposal is that a complex bill with very substantial constitutional implications should go through all its Commons stages in three days, starting only hours after the bill was published, in dramatic contrast to the time given to past bills of equivalent significant and complexity.⁶ That won’t happen, of course, without the consent of MPs, but irrespective of that, it’s reasonable to ask whether a bill passed in that way enjoys the same depth of democratic legitimacy as one given time for reflection and fuller debate. Again, it is not the purpose of this post to answer that question, but to suggest that it is one which needs to be asked, because, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe:

there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

If we accept that there is a boundary, however imprecise and hard to discern, and that it might have been crossed or might be crossed, we need to go to the third question.

What should civil servants do if those boundaries are reached and crossed?

In principle the answer to that is simple. At the point any civil servant judges that the democratic legitimacy of ministers has broken down, they must also accept that their ethical authority has also broken down. Whatever a civil servant does after that, they do as an independent moral agent, personally responsible for their decisions and actions. They may nevertheless choose to continue, accepting that responsibility. Or they may choose to walk away.

Again, my point here is not to dictate a course of action. It is to argue that whatever course is chosen, that choice should be deliberate and conscious. There will always be tempting arguments to stay a little longer, to do a little more, to believe that the spring is still elastic. The right course of action will probably be fully clear only in hindsight, and not necessarily even then. So these are hard choices in difficult circumstances. We should be reluctant to jump quickly to criticise how those choices are made. But civil servants need to recognise their responsibility to have these issues in mind and the civil service needs to be much more ready to support them in doing so.

The institution, of course will remain. Authoritarian governments have civil services, just as democratic ones do. But the surface form hides a profound difference. In such a civil service, loyalty is ultimately to the holders of power, not to the idea of good government, and the consequences are very different. Those who choose to be part of them are choosing to accept those consequences. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept – and that applies doubly to the standard you sit down with.

Perhaps all this is unnecessary fear mongering. Perhaps the political and democratic institutions of the UK are not only not at risk of immediate harm, but not even close to danger. I hope that proves to be the case. But there is a better chance of avoiding the dangers if we are prepared to recognise the risk.

People, patience and systems – first thoughts on leaving the civil serice 24 Sep 2019 12:42 AM (5 years ago)

I joined the civil service many years ago and now I am leaving it – though the Public Strategist intends to be as public and strategic as ever. There is a slight but, fortunately, resistible temptation to pontificate on the experience of those many years, but in the spirit of looking forward rather than backwards, I am instead going to share four thoughts, prompted in different ways by the experience of being about to leave.

Be nice

It turns out that when you announce that you are leaving, people remember some of the nice things they have never quite got round to saying to you. As a counter to imposter syndrome it’s fantastic – though perhaps a little drastic. But what’s really striking is how much even small gestures which really touch people are remembered and treasured for years. Being generous with time and attention is something we can all do more of – and if we do it without expectation of any return, the return is enormous. Kindness is perhaps the most underrated leadership quality and it’s one we can all be better at.

Be grateful

You don’t have to wait until people are leaving to express your appreciation. A word of thanks, a gesture of appreciation, a little bit of reciprocal help, a touch of empathy and kindness – they are all easy to give and they can all have an impact beyond what you might think possible. And of course by being appreciative we encourage the behaviour we appreciate. That’s not really the reason for doing it, but that doesn’t stop it being a good thing.

Be intolerant

It’s very easy to get used to what is usual. In everything from the tacit assumptions we make about the boundaries of policy possibilities to the way we manage our working environment, we all become institutionalised. What is seen to be possible is constrained by what is experienced as normal. But knowing that is the first step to challenging it. I have spent much of my civil service career in a customer service organisation which is not good enough at customer service; a department of state with policies which have not solved the social problems which are its core remit; a workplace where the tools fall short of modern standards and where efficiency and collaboration are harder than they should be.

None of that is to say that we should be negative about everything or that the work of the civil service does not have value. Quite the opposite. But it is precisely because it matters – in very different ways – both to the millions of people affected by that work and to those who spend so much of their time and energy doing it, that our ambitions should be commensurately demanding.

One of the nice things somebody said to me in a conversation prompted by my leaving is that they saw me as somebody who was very patient with people and very impatient with systems. I would love that to be true – I can’t guarantee the first part, but I do aspire to the second. More than that, I strongly encourage others to share that aspiration, to be impatient with systems, to be intolerant of not quite good enough, to ask the awkward questions and not to settle for “that’s just how it is” as being an adequate answer.

Move forward

And that in turn takes me to one of the reasons for moving on after so long in the civil service. It becomes all too easy to accept that the way things are are the way they should be or the way they have to be. We can counter that by making sure that we bring people in with fresh perspectives and different experiences. But we can also counter it by being the fresh pair of eyes and taking all the richness of our civil service experience to other parts of the wider public service world – and that’s what I am about to do.

Government blogs and government bloggers 15 Feb 2018 1:56 AM (7 years ago)

Dafydd Vaughan has produced an interesting data rich analysis and reflection on the state of UK digital government blogging. On the face of it the picture is gloomy: the rate of blogging has sharply decreased, and entire blogs are moribund. If you start – as he does – from the principle Make things open: it makes things better that looks like bad news. It does though prompt three questions: what’s actually happened, does it matter – and is the data carrying a slightly different message?

One reason there may be less government blogging is that there is less blogging going on in general. More interestingly, blogging has migrated. Medium didn’t exist before 2012, but has seemed to soak up an increasing amount of the blogging capacity of people who work in government. The weeknote phenomenon was unknown until relatively recently. And it’s hard to argue that there is no insight into the ways of digital government in the week of the publication of a post of the calibre of Will Myddelton’s magnificent account of his mistakes, to take just one example of a higher order of openness.¹

But separately, and rather more heretically, it’s worth asking whether all those blog posts had the significance being ascribed to them. Certainly, things were more open. But did that make them better? Dafydd’s post ends with a persuasive list of reasons why being open is good, but they are perhaps more about promoting visibility and understanding than about the benefit of the thing being blogged. In other words, the thing made more open is not necessarily the same as the thing made better – though that’s certainly not an argument against doing it.

There’s another reason worth considering too. GDS – and digital government generally – have always been political, but they haven’t always been politically contentious. But that was never guaranteed to last, and indeed there were good reasons to expect it not to last.

Writing about this more from a policy perspective a few years ago, I came up with this two by two – from technical to political on one dimension and from process to substance on the other. The point was that the further you move upwards and to the right, the harder it is for civil servants to be completely open in real time about what they do. In the sense I am using it here, GDS blogging – and government digital blogging more generally – has been predominantly in the lower left quadrant, where being open is most straightforward. That might be changing, for two reasons. The first is that, as GDS moves beyond the forming and infrastructure stage of its life, its work might naturally be moving towards the trickier areas of the matrix. The second is that the upper right quadrant might be expanding. It can be hard to remember now how apolitical GDS was perceived to be when it started, to the extent that it was worth writing a post pointing out that digital is political. The more GDS is institutionally a matter of political contention, the more openness will tend to be constrained.

You don’t have to think that’s a good thing of course. But to the extent that it’s right, there is a real risk of a vicious circle coming in to play.  Dafydd notes that GDS is facing growing public criticism and advocates returning to greater openness as part of their response. But I suspect that it is precisely the fact that GDS is operating in a more contentious environment which causes the reduced openness. Breaking through that isn’t just a matter of more bravery by GDS, but much more fundamentally would depend on thinking differently about how a politically neutral civil service operates in a modern digital world. That is only incidentally about digital subject matter. As I concluded in my 2013 post:

Even if we were to take away the question of political alignment there is still a much more universal question of organisational alignment. Organisations which allow and encourage their employees to think aloud about their employer’s business and its strategic direction are rare oases of self-confidence. Other than a few licensed mavericks (who tend to be smart enough not to bite the hand which is feeding them), that is just not how organisations work. Ending the political neutrality of civil servants wouldn’t stop the secretary of state being the boss.

So my pragmatic view is that starting towards the bottom and the left of the matrix makes good sense. Let’s encourage people to build up confidence, experience and good practice there, moving up and to the right over time. For the reasons I have outlined, the top right corner is much more difficult territory. But if we stop to solve those problems now, we risk getting completely bogged down.

This blog has just passed its 13th anniversary of going public. I suspect the pattern of post intensity wouldn’t be far off the shape of the curve Dafydd has identified for government digital blogs. It’s not going to go away or – I hope – fall silent, but there are many things which won’t now be written about because they have already been written about and there is no strong reason for writing them again. Perhaps that too is part of the wider explanation – there is less that needs saying because there is more that’s been said.

Relentlessness 21 Jan 2018 1:18 PM (7 years ago)

Another cold, damp Saturday in January, another bright warming day of Govcamp.

Today was my first @UKGovCamp and it was incredible: all these people wanting to come together on a Saturday to talk gov. Powerful and inspiring. And *loved* meeting so many online friends in the flesh! I’ve thoroughly out-Tiggered myself and need to go lie down!#ukgc18 pic.twitter.com/F0WIQnE1cT

— Jenny Vass (@JennyVass) January 20, 2018

Unconferences are by their nature somewhat random and formless in their nature, but looking below the surface of that randomness reveals patterns, both within any one event and across time. This post is about some of those patterns, and the directions that might point us in for the future.

Relentlessness

The first session I went to this year was led by Clare Moriarty on action and atmospherics, in which she posed one of those questions which it is easy not to notice, but becomes overwhelmingly obvious as soon as it is pointed out. If we know what it is that needs doing, why is it so hard actually to do it? That question is of course a variant of a broader one: why is change so hard, even when it is clear that change is necessary? Not surprisingly, the question got a wide range of answers (with a sense of the conversation captured in this note). I offered the idea that it had a lot to do with relentlessness. It’s unrealistic to think that any single action will shift an organisation, but there is good reason to think that sustained action can do.

That’s for two main reasons. The first is that it always takes longer than you would think possible to get a message across: keep repeating yourself until tired of your own words and you might just be beginning to be heard. The second is more subtle, but even more important. In order for people to trust that change is real, they need to see that it is sustained and consistent, and that inevitably takes time – often quite a lot of time, particularly if, as is often the case, there is a history of the rhetoric of intended change falling well short of the experience of actual change. No one off event, however brilliant, will lead to sustained behaviour change – except perhaps among those who had a predisposition to make the change anyway. Leadership isn’t demonstrated by setting out a vision of a better future; it is demonstrated by consistently behaving in ways which help to get there.

More relentlessness

Those long sweeps of change show up in Govcamp itself – and its history is now long enough for them to be clearly visible. I first went to Govcamp in 2010 and the notes I wrote then make for interesting reading (to me at least). There was the same sense of energy and commitment, there were some of the same names and the same topics. But while Govcamp has stayed the same, it has become very different. Back then, it was much more narrowly focused:

I found my concerns about personal data and transactions and about government as service provider rather than information broker feeling a bit on the margin.

But what was then on the margin has come to the centre. Digital perspectives, approaches and people still supply much of the energy of Govcamp, but the problems that energy is applied to are broader and deeper than those of the early years. That is emphatically not to criticise the pioneers who made amazing things happen then and sowed the seeds for much that has happened since. It is to make the point that relentlessness has had a very real effect, both as a reflection of changing times and very much as a contributor to the change.

Inclusiveness

As well as being more extensive of scope, Govcamp has become dramatically – and very deliberately – more inclusive of people. Govcamp has always been made new each year with a healthy influx of first time participants, but this year there was a much more active and explicit focus on welcoming, celebrating and supporting all participants. It is deeply admirable that everybody at Govcamp shares an ambition to make the world a better place. It is deeply heartening that that ambition is increasingly applied to Govcamp itself – and Govcamp is, of course, no more and no less than the people who make it up.

That is also a consequence of a decade of relentlessness. There were a lot more user researchers and service designers, for example – but that’s possible because there are many such people working in and with government now and there were none or very few not many years ago. Digital has evolved well beyond its technological roots, to the extent that Pete Grzeszczak led a session (which I didn’t manage to get to) on defining digital and considering whether to abandon the word. For what it’s worth, I think and have argued that the concept is becoming vacuous, but the point here is again that there isn’t a single sudden change, but the maturing of ideas and people which makes both problems and solutions look different.

Uselessness

Back in 2011, I described the people who came to Govcamp as starry eyed pragmatists. That still feels like a pretty good description. More recently I have taken to describing Govcamp as useless. That’s not a pejorative statement, on the contrary I think that uselessness is its undervalued strength. It’s a place for conversations to happen, for connections to be made, for a set of overlapping tribes to gain strength from coming together.

Completely invigorated by #ukgc18 yesterday – a wonderful annual recharge of the spirits to start the year

— Joshua Mouldey (@desire_line) January 21, 2018

Relentlessness is also about not giving up.  For the last couple of years, Govcamp had been losing a little of its magic for me. This year it had returned in full. The frustration of choosing between sessions competing for attention felt more acute, and I deliberately chose to go to more sessions than slots, which adds both breadth and a different kind of frustration. In the time slot in which I was jointly leading a session, there were at least three others which I would almost rather have been at.

Govcamp looks effortlessly relaxed. That is of course an illusion. It takes an extraordinary amount of grinding hard work to pull off that illusion and we luxuriated in the care of an organising team at the top of their game. The fact that so many smart people saw that as a worthwhile thing to do makes a huge contribution to the virtuous circle of becoming even more worthwhile.

And so back to relentlessness

The idea of relentlessness can be seen as an admission of weakness or failure. Can we really do nothing but wait for change to play out over years, limited to minor influence at the margin?

There are three answers to that. The first is that there are big forces playing out and there is power in understanding them. Amara’s law states that:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

The corollary (which I have just invented) is:

We tend to overestimate the pace of organisational change in the short turn and underestimate the impact of change in the long run.

There is nothing new or surprising about that, it’s been true of every technology driven change ever. Diane Coyle put it very well in a blog post a few years ago focused on the innovative impact of cars and electric motors:

With any new technology, people have a tendency to over-hype the short-term effects massively (so we get tech bubbles) and under-estimate the huge long-term effects (for example, that railways made urbanisation possible). The error of hype is because new technologies often have such great wow factors. The error of not noticing profound change is precisely because many people find it hard to see the cumulative effect of all the many contextual changes needed for a technology to be widely used.

The second answer is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of relentlessness. Putting Amara’s law into reverse, while the pace of change can often feel frustratingly slow, we don’t have to look back very far to see a world which looks very different, and from which things have changed in just the ways which govcampers would want them to.

But the most important answer is that relentlessness is a strength. It is not a sufficient strength, but is a very necessary one. After a day of govcamping, I am feeling more relentless. I suspect that  many others are too.

Law, code and systems 16 Nov 2017 11:52 PM (7 years ago)

Should law which results in the creation of new public administrative systems receive different parliamentary scrutiny from law which doesn’t?

That’s the question raised in a recent blog post by Gordon Guthrie which caught my eye for a number of reasons, not least a typically thought provoking recent conversation with John Sheridan.

As so often, apparently simple questions quickly get complicated when you dig into them a bit, and the first complication is to work out what question this special scrutiny is intended to answer. As a first approximation, there are three very different dimensions to this:

How law is translated into code

How law is translated into systems

What role legislative scrutiny has in improving the way in which the first two are done.

Law and code

On the surface, law doesn’t look much like code. Despite heroic efforts by parliamentary counsel in recent years, it mostly looks like arcane wordplay. Looking just a little below the surface, though, patterns start to emerge which look intriguingly like code. Data elements are defined. Conditions are identified and tested for. The test leads execution down distinctive paths. A single text is unlikely to be self-contained but will refer to and draw on other legislative elements – calling functions if you will.

But there is a deeper level still where the analogy breaks down again. The compiler or interpreter is not immediately deterministic – it can take years and many levels of the judicial system to work out the correct output from given inputs. Particularly, but not only, in a common law system, many functions are called by interpretation without it ever being explicit that they are being called at all. The idea that law can be some kind of pseudo code is attractive but insubstantial.¹

That’s not to say that there is no connection at all. As one example, Richard Pope suggested a few years ago that there might be scope for using software testing techniques to provide some insight into whether regulations are being applied. More generally, there are many contexts where rules defined in law need to become rules applied in practice, and rules defined in code will almost always be a vital intermediate step.

Law and systems

Law may be a necessary component of an administrative system, but it is never a sufficient one. Data needs to be collected, cases need to be managed, help needs to be offered, processes and roles need to be understood, edge cases need to be identified, transitional arrangements need to be put in place – and the list goes on. In the implementation of a legal change, the capturing of the legal element itself is likely to be one of the smaller and more straightforward aspects of what needs to be done. That doesn’t mean that the project within which such a change is embedded will be small or straightforward – and government is littered with examples of projects which are anything but. It does though suggest that the extent of legislative change may not be the best indicator and certainly isn’t the only indicator of the level of risk in developing or redeveloping a system.

Legislative scrutiny

Law is the responsibility of legislators. They are both the primary decision makers about what the law should be and the primary means by which the executive is held to account for its implementation and application.² Legislative debate is normally strongly focused on the merits of ideas and policies; there is rarely much attention given to the practical questions of implementation, partly because that is rarely specified within the legislation, partly because there is limited scope for preliminary work to have been considered during its passage,³ and partly because that doesn’t tend to be what legislators focus on.

The result is that, as things currently work, legislative approval almost necessarily precedes any point at which it is possible to assess the likelihood of successful delivery. It’s certainly possible to see a model in which legislatures took a more active and more structured role in monitoring whether what was being developed had the characteristics of success, but however that were to work, it wouldn’t be a fundamentally legislative role. So perhaps the question is less whether legislatures should do more of this, and more whether there is a shortfall in the external challenge and oversight of programme management, and if so whether that shortfall is best addressed by legislators.⁴

Back to code

I remain strongly of the view that thinking about law as code (or perhaps better, law as system) prompts interesting ideas and insights. At a more mundane level, it can prompt attention to language being used not just not in line with its natural meaning, but in flat contradiction to it. But that’s not because law is code; it’s because the parallels are strong enough and the differences clear enough that the cross-fertilisation of ideas is useful. The greater engagement of legislators with that debate might have some very interesting consequences.

Aphorism 173 21 Jun 2017 5:20 AM (7 years ago)

Don’t have a digital strategy, execute your strategy digitally

Jørgen vig Knudstorp, quoted by Janet Hughes

Past aphorisms are collected on the aphorism archive page

Strategic writing, strategic reading 19 Jun 2017 8:55 AM (7 years ago)

Things have been a bit quiet round here for a while. The list of posts which have been started continues to lengthen. The list of posts which have been finished and published remains rather stuck.

One reason for that is that I have been spending time over the last couple of months on the rather retro (and so, I dare to hope, achingly cutting edge) idea of a link blog.  It lives at Strategic Reading (a name so boring that it must surely be unforgettable), where you will find links to interesting articles, with no more than a hundred words or so of context setting. The scope is not very different from that of this blog, so if you are interested in what I write here, you are likely to find at least some of what is collected there interesting.

There’s a handy weekly email you can sign up for, if you like that sort of thing, and of course an even handier RSS feed. Or follow @StratRead on Twitter, which automatically tweets new posts.

Aphorism 172 10 Feb 2017 5:39 AM (8 years ago)

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, Chapter 12, §5

Past aphorisms are collected on the aphorism archive page

Aphorism 171 9 Feb 2017 4:12 AM (8 years ago)

You’re not asking the users to be creative on your behalf, your job is to be inspired by their lives and their situation.

Tim Brown

Past aphorisms are collected on the aphorism archive page

Aphorism 170 8 Feb 2017 9:07 AM (8 years ago)

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

Past aphorisms are collected on the aphorism archive page