There’s a passage on governance in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus that I really like:

‘Groups tolerate governance, which is by definition a set of restrictions, only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. Since that value builds up only over time, the burden of the rules has to follow, not lead.‘

It explains better than I ever could myself why we were on a path to disaster with SOA governance for enterprise IT circa 2004. The governance cart was being put before the SOA horse.

I tried to find this passage in my Google Books copy of Cognitive Surplus by searching for governance. Surprisingly it returned ‘No results found for governance‘. I then grabbed my Kindle (where I had put a note against this passage) and found a nearby word to search for – I chose ‘Strunk’. Again I got ‘No results found for strunk‘. Yet when I found the passage (the hard way) I see ‘Strunk’ highlighted on the page:

Anybody know what’s going wrong here?