Just in time Quotes

“Stepping Stones' overt objective was twofold. First, it was to produce a communications programme that would begin the long process of convincing the public that radical change would have to come, that it would be pretty uncomfortable, and that the alternative would be something much worse. If we were unable to persuade the electorate of all this, then, remembering the Heath years and the miners' strike, they could easily be frightened into staying with the devil they knew, despite stagnant living standards and sterling crises, and despite - or perhaps because of - overpowerful and threatening public-sector unions. The second objective, which in logic was of course a precondition for the first, was to bring together in a coherent way all the key policy measures already in preparation, and perhaps some new ones, so that even though the Conservatives would have to be cautious about how much they said in public, they would at least have a clear internal view of the kind of mandate they were seeking. - page 40”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution

“Politicians seem to be more accustomed to being given words to say than thoughts to consider. Speeches are part of their everyday lives. Sustained, hard thinking about policy is often less familiar. When they are given ideas, they mistake them for speeches; and, too often, when they make speeches, they believe them to be a substitute for ideas.”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution

“What we said probably sounded pretty naïve even to the most open-minded of those present. Conceptual models, matrices, flow diagrams, decision trees - the bread-and-butter tool kit used by business schools and think-tanks to help them make sense of the real world in all its complexity- were unfamiliar and best disposed of by remarks of the 'politics isn't like that' variety. To say that there was no meeting of minds would be an understatement - Page 21”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution

“We decided that the first question was: 'Why, with so many gifted politicians and able civil servants, do British governments always fail?' We had both, independently, come to the view that without a map of the problem - however approximate - we would not find the answer. Unless we could, as it were, take some aerial photographs of the maze from a helicopter, we would simply do what past governments had done: blunder about in one departmental cul-de-sac after another until we died of mental and political exhaustion. Let me labour the point with one more analogy, since this fairly obvious systems insight had apparently escaped ministers, officials and research departments for thirty years. Imagine a group of people planning to build a very large skyscraper. They meet round a table to plan the project. They talk about it. They read prose descriptions of the building. But the need for architects' drawings, structural plans or three-dimensional models does not occur to them. - Page 12”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution

“First in opposition and later in Whitehall, there were cultural barriers to cross. Advisers from the business world were almost unheard of in Whitehall before the Thatcher years Government was confined to career politicians and their career civil servants, with a small sprinkling of journalists and academics on secondment. These four groups appeared to be the only ones entitled to enter the political playground. Their received wisdom was, and probably still is, that businessmen could never succeed in this unfamiliar environment. They tended to overlook the fact that politicians, civil servants and non-business advisers had not been particularly effective either, and that few business people had ever been allowed to take part. I shared Samuel Brittan's scepticism about 'businessmen's economics'. But I did believe that we could learn, and then perhaps offer better thinking than would otherwise be available. - page XIV”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution

“The Thatcher government aimed for much more: a reshaping of the country's entire political economy. But there was no organised body of thought or practice about how to do such a thing.
British politicians at that time had no successful post-war role models of strategic competence. Whatever their political gifts, ministers had no formal training for executive work. There was no political equivalent of the business school, no literature to help them think about the discontinuity of which even the dimmest politicians and businessmen were becoming aware. There was not even a common language for the task they had undertaken to enable ministers and their advisers to think and communicate with sufficient rigour and without misunderstandings, instead of muddling along with an armoury of empty phrases. And so, to start with, most of them had to rely, like their predecessors, on political history, traditional debating style and a collection of institutional assumptions. I suspect that, now things are more or less normal, all this will remain an immutable feature of British democratic government.”
― John Hoskyns, Just in time: Inside the Thatcher revolution