X : Thoughts on private companies being on the boards of ICS (integrated care systems).
Me : Conflict of interest question? Supplier determining needs?
X : Yes
Me : It's ok, as long as
a) you have effective spend control
b) those private companies are JVs which Gov owns 51% of.

X : What if they are not 51% owned JVs?
Me : Ah, that's a bad idea. You really want your boards to have your interests at heart.
X : What about experience, partnership?
Me : Those are advisors and you take it with a pinch of salt and as much as possible use critical friends.
Suppliers will always tell you that they want to be your partners, to build a relationship, to be your friends, to find the win/win in much the same way a second hand car salesperson wants to be your buddy ... but their interests are not yours and never can be.
X : Critical friends?
Me : Occassionaly you can find critical friends. People that we willing to tell you the truth as they see it regardless of the consequences. They are not very common and it normally requires a deep sense of duty that exceeds any loyalty to others.
X : Can the relationship be symbiotic?
Me : Rarely but that depends. If the organisation has a core overiding principle of focusing on the customer need and I don't mean lip service to this but absolutely embedded into its very core then yes i.e. places like Amazon, Alibaba etc.
But most organisations, even those that talk about "focus on customer need" won't sacrifice their own self and their own well being in order to pursue that customer need. They will tend to fall back on self interest in hard times and become parasitic.
"Symbiosis" and win/win are very easy when the times are good, however the real measure of any commercial relationship is when the times are hard.
X : Why spend control?
Me : You always need an independent mechanism of challenge (outside the department and contract but within Government) to provide challenge through expertise and to spread situational awareness across many contracts. An intelligence function.
X : Why?
Me : People make mistakes, they can trapped by context, they don't understand the wider landscape, it's a point of learning ... so many reasons. Also, sometimes you get the revolving door between public / private that you want to counter.
X : Intelligence function?
Me : Yes. An effective spend control function including pre and post mortem challenge should also build up your understanding of the landscape, the supply chains, the interconnectedness of components. That would have been useful in brexit, in covid and in a host of other spaces.

More from Simon Wardley

"Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they believed China will become more powerful than the U.S. within 10 years" - https://t.co/3vN4I1TjwP ... I hate to break it to you but it already is in many areas.

When I published this work (originally from 2015) -
https://t.co/GYOItA3StZ - I did tend to get a lot of pushback from US folk when presenting it.

Six years later, less so.


I expect China to start to tackle inequality this year. It's the Achilles heel of the West. We have no response, nor Governments with the required skill, strategy or practice to respond.

We will ultimately face a more advanced, more wealthy and more equal society ...

... as that example of what "is possible" / "good looks like" shift to the East, we will face a painful shift as we question our own values including our kind of democracy. But in reality, the problem is not with our values but our shockingly poor standards of leadership.

X : Is this because of Trump?
Me : No, this has been going on since the 1990s. There has been no effective counterplay to the long game that Deng Xiaoping started. Just hubris, arrogance and exceptionalism with annual Economist articles on "How China will fall".

More from Government

1.
Act of 1871
This is VERY Long but it will end with a MEGA BOOM!
Bookmark it and read it in small bits to digest it all.

This info, comes from some reputable anons and my own digging, compiled together as a superthread!
InevitableET, IPOT... to name a few.

2.
https://t.co/udep5WEYUp
https://t.co/bnzeQek6zv


3.
The TL; DR version is they, by military force, and illegitimate legislature, amended the constitution against the will of The People and legally tricked us into becoming unwitting indentured slaves of human capital and resources to THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA the corporation)

4.
Republic vs Democracy
-They needed to get away from the Republic and create a Democracy in order to drive us towards socialism and inevitably a dictatorship (National Socialist Party aka NAZI)


5.
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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?