Chris Dillow writes an incisive piece on why centralised heirarchies don't work over at the Times. Just a few pages further on (not online) and with a beautiful sense of timing, Nicola Sturgeon, the new health minister in Scotland, is reported as having

ordered the NHS to deliver cancer treatment targets by the end of the year.

Dillow quotes Kenneth Boulding:

The larger and more authoritarian the organisation, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds

Ms Sturgeon seems to have got into the swing of leading a large, authoritarian organisation in no time at all. Quite what difference she thinks that shouting at clinicians from the sidelines is going to make is anyone's guess. It didn't work for the last lot, did it?