It’s easy to see why Matthew Fay, writing at RealClearPolicy, objects to the idea of running the government like a business. His idea of business ends with McNamara and he thinks that the Pentagon is being run like a business.
Organizations like people tend to look back to whatever brought them their greatest successes. For the federal government the period of greatest success was World War II and the present operations of the federal government hearken back to the organizational frameworks and strategies of the 1950s and 1960s.
Perhaps the word “business” in the sense of a for-profit business is off-putting. The federal government is an organization and is in desperate need of being run the way successful modern organizations are run.
Stop thinking GM and U. S. Steel and start thinking of Google or Apple.
This mode of thinking has been dominant in Washington for over twenty years, starting with the Clinton Administration’s “reinventing government” initiative. Introducing markets into public sector arrangements has been the priority across the last three administrations, with results predicted by Polanyi in the 1940s.
Profit-seeking cannot be separated from business organization and methods; it is the reason those things are the way they are. Take the profit out and there’s nothing usable left.
Not-for-profits are businesses, too. They don’t make profits. There’s still plenty left to improve and manage.
What you’re describing is neoliberalism, a very different proposition.
When Bill Clinton became president neither he nor Al Gore had ever worked in business a day in their lives. To whatever extent the purpose of Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” was to make it run more like a business it was run by people who had no idea of what businesses or managers do let alone good businesses or good managers.
My inference is that they were more interested in remodeling government in their own image, that is to say so it was more like a political party.
Government at all levels is a lot like Dilbertland which is a parody of business.
I think by that line of argumentation any non-government institution can be called a business whether it’s religion, family or a local bowling league. What evidence do we have that Apple’s vertical hierarchy, a structure more totalitarian than found in any government agency, would make for a more effective public administration?
CEOs and other corporate officers have been moving back and forth between public and private with regularity since the late 19th century; “more business in government” was a slogan of the Harding Administration. These are not by any means new ideas. Government run like a business has been regularly attempted for a very long time in the U.S.
I can only say that your experience differs pretty dramatically from mine. I’ve worked with poorly-run private businesses and well-run ones. I’ve worked with very poorly-run government agencies at all levels of government and ones that are considered relatively well-run.
My experience has been that relatively well-run government agencies more closely resemble very poorly run businesses than they do well-run businesses and that they are hierarchical to a degree unimagined in modern businesses.
The principles of effective organizational function generally apply to all, well, organizations, be they government, sports teams, businesses, religious institutions……..
However, one of those principles is to modify and adapt details to the situation at hand. You wouldn’t run a rock and roll band tour the same way you would run a steel mill the same way you would run a software startup the same way you would run Harvard the same way you would run a Navy Seal operation the same way you would run the DMV the same way you would run a church the same way you would run the Chicago Blackhawks.
There would be certain commonalities, and certain differences. A system of command and Avoidance of anarchy would be a commonality. Communication of goals and establishment of relevant of metrics would be a commonality. The issue of profit is a third order effect. There are always measures of performance, not at all necessarily dollar profit.
Run like Google or Apple? You mean with lots of immigrants & few blacks, Hispanics and women? I don’t think that would fly, politically.
Lets see google sells “clicks”, access to eyeballs of potential consumers.
Apple makes cell phones in the same way Gucci makes shoes or Coach makes purses. Marketing brand as fashion accessory.
Gov’t creates “money” and distributes according to whim, or “dreams”.
I can’t see how one of these is like the other except when they are partners in crime.
They are organizations. They have organizational objectives. They have business processes.
Well-run modern businesses facilitate continuous process improvement. I’ve seen a lot of government agencies and departments but not one that does that.
Quite to the contrary I’ve seen government departments that are operating about the way that businesses did in the 1950s. They aren’t doing that because it’s effective.
Well-run modern businesses facilitate continuous process improvement. I’ve seen a lot of government agencies and departments but not one that does that.
And why not? Look to motivation. No one in Government wants to rock the boat, they want security for life, and they’ve got it.
Of course a private enterprise run that way wouldn’t last, but you know that.
I suppose you could privatize some Government agencies, but the vested people would fight tooth and nail.
Would we even want to have a private:
military (deadly)
police force (scary)
prison system (not if I gotta go there)
Bureau of Indian Affairs (crooked Indian agents)
tax enforcement agency (I R S on commission)
highway system (toll roads)
Nonsense. The US military is a government organization and it trains harder than anyone, anywhere to improve its performance. Why? Motive, David, the thing you never like to talk about. Soldiers want to live. Businesspeople want to get rich. Bureaucrats want to perform their daily task and go home.
And this is as it should and must be. Different people, different jobs, different motives. Do we want or need bureaucrats training like Marines? Do we want people at the Social Security Administration and the VA looking to get rich? We need people who like taking on risk, but not at the VA, although hey, a real entrepreneur at VA could make some money by ‘volunteering’ old vets for drug trials! Yay! And imagine the savings if the VA just started offing the old farts. We’d save billions!
Are we willing to introduce incentives in government? If you shuffle X number of papers you get an extra 10 grand a year? Shall we treat government bureaucrats like Wells Fargo treated their employees and by extension their customers?
Are we willing to give cabinet secretaries the kind of leeway businessmen have? Can they fire tens of thousands of people and ship the jobs overseas? Can they pull a Trump, declare bankruptcy and just wipe out all their problems and start over? Shall we have the Housing secretary declaring a race to Mars to draw attention to HUD? I have a great idea for government efficiency: let’s eliminate redundant states, consolidate them. Let’s just shutter the underperforming states and cities. Like businessmen do. Maybe the HHS secretary could leverage the department, take on lots of debt, and buy Homeland Security.
Obviously no. So we want government – which shares nothing in common with business when it comes to motive, means or opportunity – to be not only more efficient, but as efficient as Apple, while simultaneously taking off the table every single tool the businessman uses. Right.
When the economy melted down in 2008, who saved who? Did terribly clever and efficient business save weak, flabby old government? No. Other way around.
Michael, stop bullshitting. You’ve had no firsthand exposure with the inner workings of government agencies. I have.
There’s a huge difference between how our military operates in the field and in the Pentagon.
I’m not one of those who’s opposed to government. I just want better government and in the 21st century that includes continuous process improvement. Implementing that will take basic changes at all levels of government.
I’m also not saying that every business does everything right. But there are thousands of businesses today that are conscientiously doing continuous process improvement. Are you opposed to government adopting proven approaches?
” conscientiously doing continuous process improvement. ”
To improve share prices, lower costs at all costs, and above all to secure their own retirement security. Motivation, Motivation, Motivation.
This will never work in Government, which is, after all, in the business of doling out charity.
I am in charge of process improvement for our department. Fortunately, I have tons of help as it is high priority for us. I make it a point to involve our young docs in designing the processes, then have them do the work to follow up and see well things are really working. At his point I think they could do it w/o me, but I do have the administrative time and they don’t.
One thing i have found very disappointing is our EMR, which is EPIC. There are a number of metrics I want to follow that have been difficult to get at in the past w/o an EMR. Now that we have one I find that lot of reports that I think every department would want are not built into their report set. I honestly can’t tell if no one has ever asked for this kind of data before, or if this is just another way for them to make money by having ti individually design each report. iI kind of think the latter, but if so, when I ask for these they should be able to look at what other places do and quickly give me a polished, functional report. Instead, I get mostly OK but hardly polished reports that always need to be tuned. Very frustrating and always feels like we are re-inventing the wheel. (One of my docs trained as a systems engineer before he flew F-18s. We have started exploring the idea with the EPIC people of developing a standard report set that could be sold to every department. They don’t seem that interested so far.)
Steve