However, within the phrase there is something of great importance: it's one of the things that makes a successful business successful, makes many fail and is the major difference between the way things work in the private sector and the public.

Accountability, and we're not just talking about whether someone is using double entry book keeping or not, nor whether they've signed off on the chittys. What we actually mean by this is that everyone is actually taking responsibility for what they do: more importantly, for what they don't.

An organization can only work if those within it will actually take such responsibility: imagine, for a moment, a company that is planning a new product. At some point along the planning process responsibilities will be parceled out: Jim, you need to get this done, Bob, you that. Jill, that's yours and so on. Now when and if there are problem with any one or other part of the new product, Bob, Jill or Jim are responsible for whatever has gone wrong, if it be in their area: that's the only way it can in fact work.

Contrast that with the way government works: it's always some unnamed civil servant, or the previous administration, or the contractor, or world events, never, never ever, is it actually the responsibility of the person standing up and doing the explaining.

Well, yes, comparing the effectiveness of the two systems I think we can see the importance of accountability then? One, with some steps backward and a few more forward actually manages to make progress: the government has been passing laws for a millennium and they don't seem to be finished yet.

An interesting method of ensuring accountability is of course to only pay people after they have completed whatever task it was that they were hired to do. This is of course a little difficult to do with employees but it can work with contractors: Talisman, the recruitment consultants for example. They are working on a fixed fee basis for their clients, the prospective employers, and they only get paid when they have found that round peg for the round hole: the employee who meets the criteria set out originally.

We're not quite sure if you can have greater accountability than that: do what you said you would and get paid, don't do it and get nothing. Pity accountants won't work that way on the preparation of tax returns really.