This weekend I had a delightful conversation with an old friend and a rather senior British civil servant who told me about a new management concept, the single point of blame or SPOB. For large or complex projects the team, or superiors find a single individual who any and all failure can be allocated to regardless of source. It is an extremely powerful concept for complex and risky projects and a formalization of a set of concepts that have been employed in a less structured way since the time of Niccolò Machiavelli, and such a class of formulation is truely worth of masters such as
Stephen Potter and Laurence J. Peter.
In common parlance the SPOB is identified when the potential SPOB articulates the decision to "take ownership" of the project.
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