Consultant’s reverie
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“The devil made me do it.” Or “That wasn’t me, that was just the darn urge that I have somewhere that sometimes takes control.” This is a very natural way of talking and there’s an element of truth in it. That is to say, a person is in fact a rather delicately poised committee—or not even something as well organized as a committee—sort of a crowd of sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing agencies, and one is just the sum total of them. And in fact, when people say, “That wasn’t me,” we very often disallow that, and say “Now, take responsibility.” As I put it in Elbow Room, if you make yourself really small you can externalize just about everything.
- —Daniel Dennett, Free Inquiry, Fall Issue, 1995.
“If you make yourself really small, you can externalise nearly everything.”}} Privatisation and outsourcing are really articulations of the same idea: that organisations should get out of all activities that are purely incidental to their core activity.