Published: October 09, 2007 12:04 pm            

CONFER: The business approach to government

Politicians and bureaucrats are pretty indignant about the size and scope of their government when the concept of shrinking it is broached. A common if not canned response to the need for increased efficiency and lower costs says it can’t be done and you can take away only so much. They would have you believe that government is what it is and it can never be any smaller (and there’s a very good chance it will only become larger).

Such an approach would never fly in the private sector, especially nowadays. During the past two dozen years a couple of things occurred that brought about the need to make businesses much more efficient: The floodgates to increasingly competitive worldwide trade were opened and a greater number of Americans became investors. In order to one, not lose market share, and two, satisfy the needs of their myriad stockholders, the approach to modern business management changed almost overnight. Now, amidst a never-ending battle over dollars and cents at the selling price end and at the bottom line, businesses have found it crucial to their survival that they become smaller, more efficient and almost preposterously pennywise.

While this has taken place in the private sector the public sector has remained markedly inefficient. It has failed to adopt any of the new-age philosophies that are now the norm in the business world, instead allowing maintenance of the status quo. Dangerous. The private sector really can’t afford to be doing things the way that it has been for years, for it’s getting closer to a Zero Hour where it — and the people paying into it — will break. There’s only so much money to go around.

Because of that, it’s imperative the public sector mirror the private sector’s approach to business. It’s not a stretch to make the aforementioned agents of change (open markets and shareholders) applicable to the reasoning for adjustments. All governments are definitely competing against other governments for customers (residents/taxpayers) and the governments that are smaller and less expensive tend to experience an influx of new customers. Case in point, watch people leave tax-heavy New York for better opportunities in tax-light greener pastures across the United States. It’s these very same people who then end up becoming public “shareholders.” By paying taxes they are investing in their community’s well-being and demanding the best return on their investment.

If the same factors that have forced businesses to change exist in the world of politics, why not apply the same tools of change that businesses have been using, those of smaller market baskets, outsourcing, elimination of redundancy and downsizing?

For starters, the services rendered by the public sector need to be decreased. Many businesses have in recent history dropped products and services that they for years had offered, discovering that their ability to gain or maintain market share was independent of the specific offering. Government should follow suit and carefully reevaluate each and every service to determine if it is really something crucial to the common good. Common sense should prevail and show the government shouldn’t wasting its time in offering things like, say, gambling (Off Track Betting).

In a similar bent, government should also consider outsourcing. This does not mean shipping service jobs overseas. What it does mean is government should look inwards and determine if what it is doing matches its core competencies. If not, it should shop out those functions in the private sector, getting the tasks accomplished in an affordable and customer-friendly manner. Local municipalities do so, often outsourcing garbage collection. State-level government should follow suit, looking to outsource a majority of its 750 authorities, putting their duties in considerably-more capable hands.

Were government to cast a critical eye upon itself, just like businesses routinely do, it would discover a system similar to an onion, layers upon layers, some no different than the next. It should then take a business-like approach, eliminating redundancy, waste, valueless activities and people. By becoming leaner and meaner, it would offer a better value for its investment. Look no further than the FDA to see bureaucracy out-of-control and in need of downsizing (9,000 employees, only 1,750 of which are inspectors).

Efficiency in operations is not rocket science. Every day, every business from pizza shops to manufacturers to financial institutions focus on streamlining their ways of doing things in an effort to sustain themselves in today’s — and tomorrow’s — world. It’s high time government did the same. It’s just good business.

        

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