Commentary: A Note for Astute Readers
And a lot more about Dominic Cummings than we were ever expecting to write and the starting point of several other reading lists.
Summary
Our usual cautions
Dominic Cummings (yes, seriously)
Cumming's Suggested Reading List
Other Reading Lists
The Blind Spot
BowTied Tetra
Our usual cautions
As we state ad nauseum, and continue to do so.
We have not had an original thought in years: many concepts and models are drawn from, outright plagiarised, or cannibalised from other scholarly and less scholarly works. Rather than (poorly) summarising these concepts we have focused on suggestions for specific behaviours and taking action. You are also reading the badly edited missive of an semi-aquatic dwelling land mammal.
Where we can (a self-assessed threshold and the bar is pretty low) we attempt to attribute sources or at least direct our resources to others who may or may not have had the "original" thought or who at least said it neater and more concisely than we did. Not hard.
A previous post shared “our” reading list which contained recommended books for Operations and for what (for now) we're terming Personal Operations or Self Productivity.
Below are further series of explanatory notes and some other resources recommendations that may be useful.
Dominic Cummings
A large section of our own reading list is wholesale based on a recommendation from Dominic Cummings' Substack. His entire recommended list and comments we've reproduced below.
Given this level of influence we'll spend a little bit more time here.
For those of you unfamiliar with Cummings. He:
is a UK political strategist who is bizarrely actually interested in high performance and improving outcomes (this is quite rare, and not just restricted to UK contexts)
he led the Brexit "no" campaign – see Uncivil War for a BBC dramatisation where he was played by Benedict Cumberbatch
He believes in good ocular health (detractors criticise him for this but he can see them coming)
Has a lovely time on Twitter as an uncontroversial figure and doesn't at all get Reply Guys
Several of his central arguments could be summarised as follows
High performance in government institutions is rare and incentivised against
“You’re a mutant virus, I’m the immune system and it’s my job to expel you from the organism.”
Some institutions should be shut down and replaced with start-up type projects. An often used example he recommends is a cheeky lights off for something called “The Pentagon”.
High performance in politics is rarer still and strongly incentivised against.
Politicians are not focused on governing ( i.e. Having government departments deliver services that are apparently their core mandate) and are instead focused on ingroup signaling to their own parties and the legacy media
High performance is often overlooked and there are strategies available to implement for people and organisations willing to focus, grip and deliver (This dear reader, is where we're aiming!)
Our own past experience in the public service validates or at least very strongly concurs with these points. Personal politics aside, insomuch as we are able to do this, (amusingly this is one of Cumming's arguments that government / defence policy and other strategies can't actually be separated from political aims) what you have is someone who was able to deliver multiple "upsets" to established orthodoxies and writes / rants / tweets about high performance.
Given that a large part of our own writing is aimed at creating efficiencies for yourself to
either help run your side business, or,
Help make your day job run smoother to give you time to be something else other than a line in an .xls
We feel that practitioners such as Cummings are worth paying attention to. If you’re interested in the broader themes that he discusses you can refer to his substack, or to his full reading list.
Cumming's Suggested Reading List
Original question below. We had to use a version of Cumming's dialect which we can understand quite well and speak a little (however sometimes, for real, he gives a certain WhiteBat a run for it's money). We're at the point where our brains will automatically translate for us but to others it probably feels like binary code style bursts of bsnss speak and govspeak. If this confuses and angers you help is available.
Previously you've written about project managers at operating at +3/4 std dev.
Any resources or principles you'd recommend around in managing projects / driving execution
(particularly if overlooked / 'x^100+ GBP bills on the ground'; Your older blog recommends Grove's High Output Management - anything else?)
Defo read the story of George Mueller and how he turned around Apollo.
Defo read Gen Groves' Now It Can Be Told re Manhattan Project, maybe the most impressive project management case study of the modern world.
Theres lots of links in my paper
LINK
Defo read Dream Machine about ARPA-PARC
Also read Colonel Boyd's presentations, e.g on Winning and Losing
Other Reading Lists
One so far that we’re aware of , but before we cover that.
The Blind Spot
A massive, albeit, deliberate blind spot on our list is collated resources to assist you with starting a business (read: WiFi money). We will address this in a separate note with further commentary and assessment. However, as it current stands our view is that the BowTied Jungle provides so many resources that one cannot move for tripping over them.
BowTied Tetra
One of the Jungle's resident affiliate marketers and a SEO Chad. "A few personal quirks but don't we all". Writes Second Income Strategies.
Recommendations are focused more-so on advertising and marketing (not at all a criticism) with a few of the more classic “business” books discussed.
