The Department for Education has taken decisions away from schools and local authorities; the Department of Health sets targets for hospitals; the Home Office gives firmer directions to the police and judges; the Lord Chancellor tells magistrates how to sentence criminals.
He praised a "well-delivered speech … with a firm direction".
"They're giving us and the Household office very firm direction indeed".
Chairs also need to know when to offer firm direction and when to back off.
And Palestinian negotiators are squabbling among themselves, getting little firm direction from Mr. Abbas.
Still, with firm direction it may be possible to transform even hard-boiled taxmen into soft-centred tax-credit staff.Yet can administrative reforms, however effective, fix the problem?
But six days remains a long time to give firm direction, especially when it is the first few days after a crisis that are most key to saving lives.
Although he proclaimed that he would henceforth rule without a chief minister, he was too indolent and lacking in self-confidence to coordinate the activities of his secretaries of state and give firm direction to national policy.
His style of managing the 26 other commissioners has been autocratic (but given that many of them are political lightweights, he may have been right to give them firm direction).
But under Sawhney's firm direction, the differing timbres gave the set pace and texture, from the ruminative stories spun by Nina Miranda to the percussive bash between the rapper and tabla player Aref Durvesh.
