The struggle between Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, and the UK civil service will, for many, bring back memories of their first management job.
You arrive with a plan — that is what got you the position, after all — call everyone together and tell them what they have to do. They ignore you. Not openly. They nod obligingly, and then get on with what they were doing before.
Mr Cummings would have expected this. The Atlantic reported that he was a fan of Warren Buffett’s 1989 letter to shareholders. In it, Mr Buffett spoke of “my most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call ‘the institutional imperative’”.