“Increasingly, prime ministers are like CEOs or chairmen of major companies. They have to set a policy direction; they have to see it is followed; they have to get data on whether it is; they have to measure outcomes.” – Tony Blair

Laws and sausages are two things one should never watch getting made. Politics is trendy – see House of Cards, Borgen, Homeland, or any of the other political thrillers out there at the moment. What isn’t trendy is delivery, the part where the meat actually gets processed and squeezed into animal intestine. Of course, without delivery, you don’t get any sausages.

Barber presents his 57 rules for effective government programs – not advice in policy, or what you should be doing, but conditional on you knowing what you want to do, how to make sure it happens. Ironically for a man with 57 rules, prioritization is rule 1. Most of it isn’t revolutionary, but it requires a methodical and careful approach, something that is sometimes lost with all the excitement around strategy and blue-sky thinking.

Barber led Tony Blair’s delivery unit, and it’s no surprise he advocates for one in general. Basically, it’s a small team with direct access to the PM (or whoever), which is entirely focused on delivery of programs. They don’t pick what to deliver, but when it is picked, they design metrics, track data, and make sure everything is going to plan. Having a group focused on this means that data can’t just slip through the cracks, or never be tracked at all, and it’s a model that has been adopted in several places, from Malaysia to several U.S. states.

Delivery isn’t flashy, and though Barber does his best, it’s hard to keep the book interesting. It is chock-full of fun ideas, though: he hates 3 point scales, for example, because far too many people just stick in the middle. He always uses 4 point ones. Apparently, he also went through and rated every project done by the UK government by their probability of succeeding at their goals, an exercise I imagine irritated almost everyone. For someone interested in service delivery and how sausages are made, well worth a read.