It was, he observes, "not an uncommon story in 19th-century America".
Mr Leighton says that the Post Office's problems neatly mirror those he found at Asda. "When everything is going backwards, it's basically a leadership challenge," he observes, not needing to spell out the implication for former top managers.
"I remembered that this was how we often defined the time in which we lived," he observes, "not 'before the war,' or 'after the war,' like everyone else in England, but 'before the flood,'afterer the flood.' It made the island biblical".
Just as he'd observed: not many.
The studio business, he observed, was not easy because "not a lot of people showed up for lessons" at the outset.
He observed, tried not to stand out — not so simple for someone nearly 7 feet tall — and committed to memory how it felt that September night in Toronto when he dodged a Champagne bath he thought he did not deserve.
This, he observed, is not the way the American system of government is supposed to work.
"He said, 'You're out of order.' I said, 'Remove him immediately.' " "A local attorney," he observed, "would not have done that".
"The most stringent protection of free speech," he observed, "would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic".
Administrative departments, he observed, did not require 'scientific support' but 'applied R&D, to achieve specific predetermined objectives' [ 17].
