Daily Inspiration Quote by Elliot Richardson

Tending machinery is the comforting part: it implies a system already agreed upon, a set of knobs to turn, procedures to follow, a job you can finish and point to. Richardson’s line draws a bright, slightly impatient boundary between administration-as-maintenance and governance-as-judgment. The real work, he suggests, begins only after you leave the engine room and enter the messier terrain of purpose.

As a lawyer and public official who moved through the federal state at its most contested moments, Richardson understood how institutions hide behind process. “Defining what we were trying to do and why” is a rebuke to bureaucratic autopilot: the tendency to treat means as ends, to keep the machine humming even when no one can articulate what it’s for. The phrase “something else again” carries the subtext of fatigue with performative competence - the kind that looks impressive in organizational charts but collapses when asked to justify itself.

The kicker is measurement. Richardson isn’t worshipping metrics; he’s warning that without agreed-upon goals, measurement becomes theater. If you can’t define success, you’ll default to what’s countable (throughput, compliance, activity) instead of what’s consequential (outcomes, legitimacy, trust). In an era when public institutions were wrestling with credibility and accountability, the quote reads like an early diagnosis of our modern fixation on dashboards: we measure incessantly because we can’t agree on purpose, then mistake the measurements for meaning.

It works because it elevates strategy and ethics over mere operation, without romanticizing either. It’s the sober voice of someone who knows that “running things” is easy; deciding what “things” should be is the fight.