Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 20, 1995 TAG: 9507200019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The danger is not that private-sector ideas about restructuring and reinventing go too far for government. Quite the reverse. "[B]orrowing private-level prescriptions are [not] enough ...," as Roberts suggests in a recent issue of the center's News Letter.
"Government and public service should not be pale imitations of private enterprise, or they will fall far short of delivering what our communities and free enterprise need."
Business-world techniques for levering organizations from older autocratic ways of working toward newer, more effective participatory models are hardly irrelevant to government. On the contrary. Much of Roberts' article is about how they can be applied to the public sector, Virginia local government in particular.
She is right, though, to distinguish between private-sector reform and the "High Performance Government" she and her colleagues espouse. Moving to the new models may be harder in the public than the private sector - yet it is even more important for government to do so, and more thoroughly.
Why? To paraphrase and build on Roberts' thinking:
Private business has a ready measure of success, the financial bottom line, that government does not. Granted, the business that concentrates only on today's receipts or on current earnings is a candidate for failure. Yet you ultimately either make the sale or you don't, either are profitable or go under.
Elections are comparatively blunt instruments for evaluating performance, and are conducted only once or twice a year. However, the interaction between citizens and government is nuanced and daily. If government is to improve, it must work harder to measure its performance in ways that elections alone do not.
Effective businesses concentrate on creating niches and markets for themselves. Effective government must serve the entire community in all its diversity.
Good government by definition seeks to serve the public weal, the general good. The shareholders of a democratic government are all citizens within its borders. This strengthens, rather than weakens, the call on government to be participatory and not authoritarian, consensus-seeking and not arrogantly bureaucratic.
When a private business fails, the result is hardship for some. If government fails, the result is nothing less than the death of civil society.
That's because government is the mechanism by which rules are set and enforced for the orderly conduct of the rest of our social and economic affairs. The details and extent of those rules are always open to debate and amendment, as are the specific policies for administering them. But government's role as society's policeman is the most fundamental distinction of all between it and the private sector.
This sovereignty of government makes it all the more imperative for it to work well. This, too, entails abandonment of the older bureaucratic and authoritarian models for success. Government needs to become less bureaucratic, more customer-focused and much more efficient. Business bankruptcies are affordable; the chaos that would arise from the death of democratic government is not.
by CNB