Is there anyone who didn’t predict that the Big Society would descend into shameless grantsmanship, chancerism, and possibly illegal party financing? Go read; the list of projects is unimprovable, The Thick of It meets Siobhan Sharpe meets the Alan Partridge pitch scene. Much of the money ended up with Tories or ex-Tories and some of…
Read More Jobs through Your Local Budget are 400% of GDP!It seems to be TYR Service! day, so I followed up on a discussion elsewhere about social trust in the UK by analysing Ipsos MORI’s polling series on trust by profession. Having fiddled with various ways of filtering the data in an attempt to get a readable line chart, I decided to look at net…
Read More Who do we trust? Len McCluskey, Jerry Heywood, and SCIENCE!I remember reader Ajay wondering how those godawful “Aberdeen Steak House” things around the West End have a business. I can’t find the discussion now, but I recall I told him that their ideal customer was someone for whom paying over the odds for a really bad dinner was an important part of their night…
Read More Spam, and the art of negative marketingPeople are saying that a section about critical “noises off” was removed from Bob Kerslake’s blog. When I visited one was still present. It may of course have been edited. Here is a grab: Announcement from Sir Bob _ Bob Kerslake – Head of the Civil Service
Read More Bobslake from EricklesA bit more about RBS and HBOS. One thing that sticks out for me is that sense of two institutions with a bitter local rivalry, both with serious resources and ambitions, but perhaps not quite up to the standards they set for themselves, with an identity built on chippy bitterness. We’ve seen that somewhere before…
Read More Local rivalryIt’s been a while. How about a TYR Pub! meetup? Update: OK, no point buggering about any further. Let’s say the 11th July. And let’s say 7.30pm at the Queen’s Hotel, Crouch End Broadway N8.
Read More TYR Pub!Sometimes you look around the Internet for just the right blog discussion and only then realise that it’s the one you will have to write.
Read More Thort.OK, it’s time for one of these. Books: I’ve recently read Mike Martin’s An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, Ian Fraser’s Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank That Broke Britain, Agata Pyzik’s Poor Sexy East, and Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone. I’ve also got the MOD Lessons Learned Compendium on Iraq hanging…
Read More Open newslist 6Steve Randy Waldman appears to have independently rediscovered the idea of a low-trust society and to have quantified a transition point.
Read More trust no one except perhaps interfluidityFollowing up on the Disgorge the Cash x John Seddon post, here is a really good discussion of Clay Christensen, pointing out that his real unique selling point is that he has a theory of innovation that asserts the authority of management, calming the fears evoked by the theorists who demanded worker empowerment as a…
Read More Disrupt the cash