Government is Gov't and Business is Business

A number of governors promised to run government like a business. Turnover the statehouses to CEOs who know a thing or two about bottomlines and they'll clean up the mess in no time.



Makes about as much sense as putting pyromaniacs in charge of the firehouse.



It's one thing to bring business or other non-political experiences to the job. It's another to think governments can be run like corporations.



It might work for, say, the Saudi royal family and Chinese bureaucrats who treat their subjects like interchangeable cogs on a massive factory floor. It has no place in, let me see if I can dredge up the right word, oh yeah, democracy!



Almost everything state and local governments run is necessarily unprofitable, from libraries to public transit to schools to legal aid to parks and recreation. If private enterprise could make a profit running them -- and not just by creaming off the top like it does with private prisons and schools -- it would. So if it can't, doing what it does best, why should governments be expected to do it mimicking the private sector?



Sure CEOs know about vertical integration, market consolidation, outsourcing, shedding unprofitable business lines, hostile takeovers and asset stripping but what does any of that have to do with arbitrating jurisdictional disputes, managing human services or getting potholes fixed?



One mindset relies on vertical management with a few power centers, opaqueness, insider knowledge and autocratic decision making where consumers' interests are ancillary to corporate profit objectives.



The other relies on horizontal management with multiple power centers, transparency, grassroots input and consensus decision making where consumers' -- citizens' -- interests are the objective.



In fact where politicians inevitably go wrong is when they start behaving as in the first example.



Insisting governments operate as efficiently as possible within the confines of an established budget is a given. But it's nuts to expect governors and mayors, who must indulge throngs of disparate, fractious voters to solve any problem, to act like a CEO who has to satisfy at most three or four fairly compatible stakeholder groups.



And let's not forget the innumerable times business decisions bombed starting with Edsel and New Coke and more recently Enron, Firestone, Vioxx, AIG-Wall Street, BP and, of course, Columbia/HCA. These debacles cost billions of dollars, ruined lives and disrupted commerce. Then there's even JetBlue keeping passengers waiting on runways for 11 hours. So much for the vaunted corporate role model.



So why would anyone think we should run governments like corporations? Let me see if I can dredge up that word. Oh yeah, crackpot-racy!



Every state and local government can do a better job. But the templates for distinctive achievement are found in the poli sci departments not the business schools.