Best way to murder an idea

Over the years I’ve noticed (and written about) a handful of highly effective ways in which ideas may be murdered.

A regular and particularly lethal one is to form a committee.

As Sir Barnett Cox (a former Clerk of the House of Commons) famously observed: “A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured, then quietly strangled.”

Which are your favourite ways?

(By the way, I notice that several things that I wrote – including a piece called “Ways to murder an idea” – are included verbatim in various British government websites on creativity and innovation, completely uncredited. Should I be flattered or pissed off?)

A New Churchill?

Extracts from an outspoken speech, largely unreported, given on 2 June to the House of Commons Defence Committee in London by Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham:

“We are used to the comforting and rather romantic thought that our forces are world class, and that we are military leaders in Europe. I believe this is no longer the case. As just one piece of evidence the French, now indubitably the leading European military power, have flown three times as many sorties in Libya as the RAF…

“UK governments seem today more ready than ever to use military force…

“The world is a more dangerous place than it has ever been. Not my words but those of Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary in the House of Commons in November 2010… The Prime Minister has said that Defence is the first duty of government…

“The nature of threats changes over time, in geographical, ideological, economic and technological terms, and can change quickly… The fact [is]that we have simply been unable to foresee every conflict in which we have been engaged since WW2…

“We shall by 2015 have a Royal Navy which will be the smallest since Pepys day… a Royal Air Force with less combat aircraft than Sweden, and an Army of about 80,000 soldiers, one of the smallest amongst the top 20 or 30 nations… Incoherence has become the name of the game…

“I should mention people too, our people. Their commitment and courage are what makes it all work. They were seriously overstretched, according to the Liam Fox, who was then in opposition. We are now running them down further and yet we have found them a new war…

“I believe we are in some kind of denial. We are continuing to pretend that we can be a major international player and deploy military force without taking the trouble to invest in it and especially without investing in its future… We want something for which we are not prepared to pay the price…”

Scary stuff. At one point Blackham muses that he may be sounding like “disgusted of Greenwich”. Not that I was around then, but it rather brought to mind, for me, Churchill in the 1930s. The difference is that Churchill was front-page news, while these issues no longer seem to engage either the electorate, or the media.

There are major issues of leadership here. And not only in government. Time for some more plain-speaking.