It’s comforting to see a politician setting any kind of deadline. Their normal attitude is that they can’t do anything because it’s all too bloody difficult, and the Civil Service is set up to reinforce that. But in any organisation, if you haven’t identified what you’re going to do in the first couple of months, you’ll never do it.

Your objectivity is hugely enhanced in that initial period: you can see clearly what the issues are, and you’re not caught up with having to protect person A or person B — or, even worse, your own backside. During that period of clarity you need to make the decisions, and start implementing them. Soon, you lose the capacity to say: “Why are we doing that, why have we done that, what’s that about, what’s that for?” — questions that are too seldom asked.

You should spend the first week having the most senior people telling you what they do, why they do it, and what the issues are as they see them. Thus, you understand two things very quickly: first, what the issues are, and second, the quality of the people you are dealing with. They know what the issues are. They may not always be able to sort them out for themselves, but they always know what they are.

It’s surprising how quickly, once you have that clarity from people, you can separate the wood from the trees and identify the issues you need to resolve first. They almost always involve people: the wrong person in the wrong place, people unclear about what they have to do, confusion over who reports to whom.

Next, forget about the media. If what you do turns out to be right, the media will say they always thought it was the right thing to do. If it turns out to be wrong, you’ll get blasted — but you deserve to be blasted.

With an organisation such as the Home Office, a bit of clarity would do wonders for morale. Mostly it’s about saying, do we have the right people running the key parts? In outline, you structure the departments that need to be sorted out: at the Home Office, there are probably two or three. You’d look at the heads of those departments and decide pretty quickly whether they were the right people. If they weren’t, in most organisations you’d find ways of either bypassing them or putting them into other roles. In the Civil Service I guess that’s probably tricky — but you just have to go at it in a serious way, get the right people into those departments, and make it very, very clear what’s expected. What will be the tests of success? What are you going to look for?

Forget Civil Service waffle: you’ll achieve nothing with that. You need to say: “Here are the things that I want to see working in three months’ time”, and you make it very, very plain what they are. Then you have reviews once a week with the person responsible, looking at where they have got to, what the issues are, what’s causing them problems. Each week you agree what will happen in the next week. It’s a logical process, but I don’t know whether politicians have the time to run departments in that way — whether they get so caught up in the public end of their role that they just don’t have time to manage. My sense is that being a politician takes up too much time that’s not devoted to doing the job you’ve been given. Sounds awfully cynical, doesn’t it? There is this huge diversion of time into other territories, the public side of being a politician. And in the public sector, doing nothing is also a safer option for your own career.

In the bigger picture, in my view politicians shouldn’t run anything. For a start, what is their experience of management? In most cases, none. They have short-term agendas. They want to make noise to show that everything they do is clever. In fact, more often than not, sorting something out isn’t about bringing in a new policy, it’s about making what is already there work. That’s not terribly glamorous, and it doesn’t grab any headlines, and it doesn’t feel like a real solution to people, but it is almost always the only real solution.

Look at the NHS: one day we have a policy about matrons, the next day we have a policy about nurses, then we’re talking about recruiting more doctors, then we can’t afford the doctors. All of that is because politicians want to make the right political noises, whereas most organisational issues need sorting out in a calm, thorough manner.

It’s not about magical solutions, it’s about doggedness: following the thing through day after day, and making people feel good about what they’re doing. It is actually pretty fundamental stuff, management, but it doesn’t rest very well with the political need to show amazing new ideas and turnaround.

John Reid has a reputation for getting on with things and being a practical, down-to-earth guy. In political circles that’s welcome. It feels for the first time that a politician is saying: “We’ve cocked this up, and we’re going to sort it out.”

That feels right and real to me, and less political than you would expect. Good for him for saying the Home Office is not “fit for purpose”. How can it be fit for purpose if it has cocked up in the way that it has?

You need that kind of honesty. Unless, from the start, you genuinely recognise where you are rather than where you are pretending to be, you have no chance of getting to where you should be.

Say to yourself: “These are the facts, this is where we are, this is what’s gone wrong, this is the problem. If you don’t start like that, your chances of sorting it out are not good. Good luck to John Reid. Don’t go off track. Keep battling on.

What can be done in 100 days