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Government Isn't Business
I'm a government employee-- yeah, one of THEM-- and I'm a little frustrated that the old "Government should be like business" mantra is still getting so much play. Government isn't business and can't be. I'm sure there are hundreds of reasons why, but here are five:
1. We Hate Experience
If you were hiring for a business, you'd want the most experienced, qualified employees you could get. In my state our highest management, the elected officials, are actually prohibited by law from being experienced; they call this "Term Limits." Of course now they're trying to force the most experienced line employees to retire as well.
Not everybody has those exact problems. But it seems to me that everywhere there's a strong inclination to "throw the bums out," with even experienced insiders trying to pretend to be Outsider Outcast Rebels. The theory appears to be that it's better to be run by people who don't know what they're doing-- and then voters wonder why their leaders act like they don't know what they're doing.
2. We're Not For Profit
Businesses exist to make money. Among other things, that makes it easy for them to know if they're successful. Government exists to do the necessary things that don't make money. That means we are inefficiency incarnate, by the ECONOMIC definition at least.
Our "profit and loss" is in the well-being of the citizens as a whole, and that's a darn sight harder to measure than the bottom line of a profit statement. With no easy way to know whether we're winning, it's hard to be efficient, or even know what efficiency is. It's even harder when about half the voters don't want us to be doing what we're doing anyway.
3. We Serve Everybody...
If a customer costs too much or is just too unpleasant, a business can always tell them to take a hike. We can't. No matter how much it costs to provide service in your neighborhood, no matter how much you ask, no matter whether you're pleasant, rude, crazy, or holed up with Your Finger On the Button threatening to blow up the entire neighborhood, we must still work with you.
4 ...Whether They Want It or Not
Which brings up another problem. People like having choices. They hate feeling they don't have a choice. Even when they want our services, people will be angry about paying for them because they have no choice in the matter. What about when they don't want our services? When we're writing traffic tickets, or telling some honest businessman he can't dump paint in the river any more, or escorting some interesting character to his new life behind bars, customer satisfaction tends to be very, very low. I'm not sure there's any way to change that. I'm not sure that we should try.
5. We've Got A Few Hundred Million Bosses
If you work for a corporation, you may work for a million stockholders, but at least you can assume that they all want you to make money. My boss is Everybody, and my millions of bosses can't agree on what they want us to do.
One of the consequences is we are locked into narrow programs. People say we should change with changing times. We should be flexible and take a more holistic approach to things. I don't know anybody out here on the front lines who wouldn't agree. But in order to do it, we'd have to take people and funds appropriated for one purpose and apply them to something else, in ways the Legislature and the voters didn't authorize. And since they set things up so narrowly because they didn't trust us, and didn't want us to decide these things on our own, somehow I think they'd object.
If you want flexibility, you're going to trust the elected officials and even the line employees some latitude to decide what's important and to blow off the rest. That is much of what the various management theories say you should do. And hey, I suppose it could happen. But this is government, not business, and nobody's ever been willing to trust us with that much freedom. Perhaps they shouldn't; I'm not impartial enough to judge that.
I'd love to have the freedom to stop wasting time on the stuff that doesn't matter-- like keeping score to satisfy the critics, the voters, the auditors-- and spend more time actually accomplishing things. But based on past experience, I'm not holding my breath.
1. We Hate Experience
If you were hiring for a business, you'd want the most experienced, qualified employees you could get. In my state our highest management, the elected officials, are actually prohibited by law from being experienced; they call this "Term Limits." Of course now they're trying to force the most experienced line employees to retire as well.
Not everybody has those exact problems. But it seems to me that everywhere there's a strong inclination to "throw the bums out," with even experienced insiders trying to pretend to be Outsider Outcast Rebels. The theory appears to be that it's better to be run by people who don't know what they're doing-- and then voters wonder why their leaders act like they don't know what they're doing.
2. We're Not For Profit
Businesses exist to make money. Among other things, that makes it easy for them to know if they're successful. Government exists to do the necessary things that don't make money. That means we are inefficiency incarnate, by the ECONOMIC definition at least.
Our "profit and loss" is in the well-being of the citizens as a whole, and that's a darn sight harder to measure than the bottom line of a profit statement. With no easy way to know whether we're winning, it's hard to be efficient, or even know what efficiency is. It's even harder when about half the voters don't want us to be doing what we're doing anyway.
3. We Serve Everybody...
If a customer costs too much or is just too unpleasant, a business can always tell them to take a hike. We can't. No matter how much it costs to provide service in your neighborhood, no matter how much you ask, no matter whether you're pleasant, rude, crazy, or holed up with Your Finger On the Button threatening to blow up the entire neighborhood, we must still work with you.
4 ...Whether They Want It or Not
Which brings up another problem. People like having choices. They hate feeling they don't have a choice. Even when they want our services, people will be angry about paying for them because they have no choice in the matter. What about when they don't want our services? When we're writing traffic tickets, or telling some honest businessman he can't dump paint in the river any more, or escorting some interesting character to his new life behind bars, customer satisfaction tends to be very, very low. I'm not sure there's any way to change that. I'm not sure that we should try.
5. We've Got A Few Hundred Million Bosses
If you work for a corporation, you may work for a million stockholders, but at least you can assume that they all want you to make money. My boss is Everybody, and my millions of bosses can't agree on what they want us to do.
One of the consequences is we are locked into narrow programs. People say we should change with changing times. We should be flexible and take a more holistic approach to things. I don't know anybody out here on the front lines who wouldn't agree. But in order to do it, we'd have to take people and funds appropriated for one purpose and apply them to something else, in ways the Legislature and the voters didn't authorize. And since they set things up so narrowly because they didn't trust us, and didn't want us to decide these things on our own, somehow I think they'd object.
If you want flexibility, you're going to trust the elected officials and even the line employees some latitude to decide what's important and to blow off the rest. That is much of what the various management theories say you should do. And hey, I suppose it could happen. But this is government, not business, and nobody's ever been willing to trust us with that much freedom. Perhaps they shouldn't; I'm not impartial enough to judge that.
I'd love to have the freedom to stop wasting time on the stuff that doesn't matter-- like keeping score to satisfy the critics, the voters, the auditors-- and spend more time actually accomplishing things. But based on past experience, I'm not holding my breath.
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