Monthly Archives: November 2010

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says his next targets will be major corporations. He told Forbes magazine that fifty percent of the documents he is waiting to release relate to the private sector and that he is planning to publish material about a major … Continue reading →

Christmas is a time for telling old stories and legends. Eric Pickles has started early with an annual favourite – Winterval. The Conservative Party’s web-site reports: As the lights are turned on for Christmas all over the country, Mr Pickles urged councils to … Continue reading →

I’m off overseas for a few days. (Does anyone else apart from the British say ‘overseas’?) Some good stuff on the Irish debacle from  Mary-Anne Sieghart, Chris Farrell, Lisa O’Carroll and John Naughton. I liked this from the Redundant Public Servant too: The … Continue reading →

The folk at the Guardian have been having some fun with the government’s recently released public spending data. Among other things, they have discovered that the spending on agency staff went up by 65% after the recruitment freeze. Well who’d … Continue reading →

For some reason, probably my state of mind at the moment, this made me roar with laughter this morning: The Queen, Baroness Thatcher, Parliament and flagship West End stores have only just escaped an extraordinary plan by Conservative-controlled Westminster council … Continue reading →

By now, you have probably heard about Sarah Baskerville, the Department for Transport civil servant who was attacked by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. His article has been thoroughly fisked by Adrian Short so I won’t bother to do a line-by-line … Continue reading →

Was anyone surprised when the House of Commons public accounts committee found that only £6bn of the promised £35bn government efficiency savings had been delivered? Well, I have to admit that I was surprised but only by the fact that the … Continue reading →

This week, it’s the Redundant Public Servant’s turn to tell us what he’d like to change about HR. To the point, as usual, he lays into HR, and to other managers in his organisation, for slavishly sticking to processes, even … Continue reading →

‘People are our greatest asset’ is one of those clichés that chief executives repeat at conferences or in the annual report but, more often than not, don’t really believe. For many companies, though, their assets really are in the heads … Continue reading →

According to the Independent, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell is planning to ask business leaders for help with downsizing government departments and identifying those ever elusive efficiency savings. The government is refusing to say who the private sector bosses are … Continue reading →