Hello Keith. I'm still here. I've had to leave the list for awhile and get
onto other things. Even now I don't have much time to rejoin the debate we
were having. However, I would like to comment briefly. You said:
> Yes, I can see where you're coming from, Ed, but I think you're wrong. I
> think it a counsel of despair to suggest that there's any prospect of
> internal reform of civil service bureaucracies. To quote the Bible, you
> can't pour new wine into old wineskins. There's nothing really objective
> for civil service "efficiency" to be measured against. That's why they're
> coming apart at the seams. And the quicker they do so, the better, in my
> view, because this produces gaps into which new initiatives can be seeded
> and hopefully flourish.
Here I disagree. There are methods of reforming bureaucracies. These range
from the inteligent to the stupid, with the latter tending to dominate
because the politicians who lead the reforms often don't really know what
they're doing. Their reforms tend to ideologically based on notions such as
the private sector being able to do all things better and "getting
government out of the way".
A point I made earlier applies: For any bureaucratic agency, two things are
needed. One is a clear and transparent understanding of the agency's
mandate; the other is a method of measuring the degree to which that mandate
is being fulfilled. Recent innovations such as strategic planning and
results based management provide some pretty effective tools, though how
well they are applied is questionable.
Whether or not an organization is efficient in its operations probably
depends more on its size and the complexity of the issues it has to deal
with than on whether it operates in the private of public sectors. It also
depends a lot on whether it has to be efficient - i.e., on the volume of
resources it can access. Many public agencies in Canada simply have to make
do. Governments are strapped for funding, and therefore have to "do more
with less" as the rather silly slogan goes. In the early 1980s I worked for
a large oil company in western Canada for a few years. When I first joined
the company, money seemed to be pouring in through every window. Anything
was possible. When in the Arctic, instead of waiting for tomorrow morning's
scheduled flight to travel back to Calgary for the weekend, you ordered a
Learjet to come and get you that evening. Company officials had a highly
inflated sense of the value of their time and their importance, so of course
they couldn't travel by "sched". Efficiency, doing things in the least-cost
way, was not a consideration, or at least not an one that bothered anybody.
During my final few months with the company, things had changed radically.
Due to a variety of events, the company was very close to bankruptcy, and
senior management no longer felt that it could afford to make free cookies
available in coffee rooms. And certainly, no more Learjets!
So, in my opinion, whether something should be in the public or private
sectors is not a matter of where it might be done most efficiently.
Ultimately, its a matter of what one believes. I believe in public
education, public medicare and public social services not on any grounds
that are convincingly rational, but, most probably, because I was born in
Saskatchewan during the Great Depression and remember a time when only kids
from well-to-do families could expect to go to high school, when kids died
because proper medical care was too expensive (even though some doctors
accepted chickens as payment), and when ever so many men, my father
included, had to travel long distances on freight trains to try to find
jobs. I would not like to see that again.
Regards,
Ed Weick
