In contrast to relying on an art of administration to set strategic goals, RAND wanted to develop a science of top-level decision-making: rigorous, formalised and technical. The technologies of management that emerged were designed to mathematically model executive decisions and ground them in apparently objective facts.

It was an ambition that drew not fro the needs of profit-maximising private industry, but from the necessity of organising and refining America's cold war strategy. RAND had been established precisely to capitalise on the innovations in statistical analysis and military planning made during the second world war. Weapons system analysis (soon renamed systems analysis) was its key development. And from this sprang many of the neoliberal managerial techniques that revolutionised the public sector over the second half of the 20th century. [...]