Thus boldly boasted at the start of the year that I/we would focus on single-handedly starting a quality drive. After a lot of hard work, some hot air and a survey conducted with CQI and YouGov Stone, we staged a debate last May entitled ‘Whatever Happened to the ‘Q’ Word?’ Hosted brilliantly by Andrew Neil [...]
Category Archives: Finance
I’ve not been writing about Quality because there’s not much of it about
November 15, 2010 – 1:04 pm
Why Quality is important and why we need more of it
January 5, 2010 – 3:04 pm
A bunch of people out there believe that doing things better is the answer to our economic woes. I can’t argue with that, so I’ve recently joined the Chartered Quality Institute as its External Affairs spokesman, because I firmly believe that until and unless we get to grips with the wholly unnecessary and avoidable malaise which has [...]
It's still true: you can't eat money
August 23, 2009 – 7:33 am
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying. This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so [...]
Industrialising the service sector is a false economy and fatal in the public sector
June 8, 2009 – 10:21 am
Alistair Darling has demanded further £15bn efficiency savings through more IT-led front-office/back-office public-service designs. In the accompanying Treasury report, these totals are justified by ‘proxies, assumptions and estimates’, not evidence. Indeed, the evidence points firmly the other way; the further industrialisation of public services will inevitably lead to higher costs and worse services. By John Seddon. [...]
Update: Two Treasury Select Committee Members fiddled their expenses
May 21, 2009 – 3:01 pm
This morning The Telegraph reported that Conservative MP Sir Peter Viggers would stand down at the next election, at the request of David Cameron, having claimed over £30,000 in gardening-related expenses, including £1600.00 for a floating duck house. Some wags wondered whether it fell under the MPs’ second home category. Another Tory grandee, Michael Fallon, MP, overclaimed £8300.00 in mortgage [...]
A bankrupt budget for a bankrupt country, from a badger and a pixie
April 23, 2009 – 6:50 pm
I can’t be bothered to go into detail about the UK budget, other than to say that fat man and his friend the badger have taken us all to Carey St. It’s our fault for letting loonies run the country into the ground. Or am I being a tad too harsh again? This is NOT [...]
Why is Mandelson trying to push for Royal Mail privatisation?
April 21, 2009 – 7:50 pm
According to the Independent (21 April), Gordon Brown faces growing pressure from mutinous Labour backbenchers to ditch or delay moves to partly privatise Royal Mail. Party whips have warned the prime minister, who is already dealing with the ‘smeargate’ scandal, that the plans have stretched the loyalty of his MPs to breaking point. ‘Lord’ Peter [...]
Devalued Prime Minister of a devalued country – that Daniel Hannon speech
March 30, 2009 – 4:15 pm
Conservative MEP Daniel Hannon thrashed UK Prime Minister and saviour of the world’s banks (but not the Dunfermline Building Society) Gordon Brown in a speech on 26 March in the European Parliament, which over 1,700,000 people have viewed so far. Brown can be seen smirking and taking notes as the tidy Tory details a list [...]
Credit crunch contrition from the commentariat
This morning an Editorial Intelligence (EI) briefing on ‘The Credit Crunch Commentariat‘ debated whether the media had talked us into recession or had downplayed the crisis and thus exacerbated its impact. “What, pray, is all the fuss about?” wrote Ex Economist editor, Bill Emmott, in the Guardian in August 2008. “Unemployment is down, the economy is [...]