The new government is going to need to plan wisely and execute efficiently, but of the two I think the actual doing is where the nation has lately been falling way short and is where a huge improvement is essential.
The argument between the policy-makers and the front-line troops will never end. I have no doubt that in Galilee, after Goliath’s defeat, David’s advisers took the credit for the excellence of their sling-shot design and the smartness of their critical coaching. Just as I am sure that, at Trafalgar, the British sailors on their blood-stained decks must have laughed with scorn to be told that victory had anything to do with Nelson’s brilliant manoeuvring against the battle-fleet of the French. The truth is, of course, that both good strategy and efficient execution are necessary if battles are to be won or projects carried out successfully. In most developing countries, however, I suspect the greatest cause of failure lies not in lack of plans but much more in a depressing absence of efficient, brisk and confident follow-through.
Why should this so? I think it may be because in societies like ours the strategists have become the upper class and the doers down below have been relegated to the also-rans.
The articulation of policy, however brilliant, is useless without the follow-up of efficient and cost-conscious performance. Yet in our society the clever and articulate policy-maker is the much admired person in the limelight while the person who tries hard to get things done, and the frugal steward of the public purse, tend to work in the shadow of neglect.
The trouble is that errors in policy can easily be rationalised away by clever men. They excuse disasters in brilliant explanatory memoranda which even bring them extra kudos for the marvellous skill they show in paper excuse-making. Meanwhile, the unfortunate performer down below, trying to cope with the reams and reams of often contradictory policy-making up above, and dealing as he does with recalcitrant flesh and blood not paper, finds that any mistake he makes is not so easily excused. And thus you find where policy is praised and performance much neglected the man who writes reports is raised and the man who does the work rejected.
It has been written with great truth that any state or business needs both Yogis and Commissars. The Yogi is the thinker; you will find him in the research laboratory or the planning office. But he cannot run or organize anything. The Commissar, on the other, is the man of action. He may not have ideas but he gets everything ship-shape, sets the course by the charts he has been given and rings for full speed ahead. If there is a rock ahead, not on his maps, he will probably run into it – but in ordinary circumstances he gets things done expertly and fast.
In the end efficiency has to be measured at the extremities. You do not merely or even mainly seek the efficiency of an army in its headquarters or of a business in the head office. The efficiency that counts is at the remotest points – the private on border patrol, the salesgirl at the counter, the cane-cutter in the field. That is where the really decisive testing of an army or a business takes place. It is there that policy either bears fruit or withers on the vine.
Plans and projects are all very well – and certainly we read enough about them in the daily press – but they are not poems; they do not in themselves have meaning and value. In this workaday world what gives them substance are precise budgets, realistic time-scales, accurately scheduled performance, honest accountability audits and, most importantly, “action this day” in field and factory.
It is a poet and essayist, not a businessman or politician, who I think summed up best what is needed. The American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 19th century, had a phrase for the emerging America which comes near the truth for us also. He wrote: “We want the Vast and the Exact, we need our Dreams and our Mathematics.”
