Towards effective governance

EXCELLENCE IN GOVERNMENT - A Blueprint for Reinventing the Government: Mukesh Jain; Atlantic Publishers and Distributors; B- 2, Vishal Enclave, Najafgarh Road, New Delhi-110027. Rs. 595.

WITH THE liberalisation of Indian economy and the introduction of market system, there has been a spurt in the pursuit of management studies in India. Bright and intelligent young men and women, go for a management programme, because management career is in great demand. Hence there is also a proliferation of literature in this subject. The book under review is a welcome addition to the existing literature on management studies.

The author feels that the government, our biggest institutional machanism, has failed to generate effective public response to the problems facing us. ``Our governments have lost sense of mission, they have lost their ethic of public service, and, most importantly, they have lost the faith of the people. We can no longer afford to pay more for and get less from our government. The answer for every problem cannot always be another programme or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates - to shift from top - down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up.

The aim of the book is to seek a government that works for the people, cleared of useless bureaucracy and waste and freed from red tape and senseless rules. To remedy the situation governments have been reinventing themselves. Everywhere the need of information age societies are colliding with the limits of industrial era government. Great Britain has called this effort as ``New Public Management'' and to the Americans it is ``Reinvention Initiative'' and this book is a good exercise over the efforts of reinvention in government.

The 487-page monograph is divided into four parts. The Government's helplessness in providing basic needs and the people's great expectations are examined in lucid language in parts I and II. Part III deals with exploring excellence. One of the reforms under reinventing modern government is to make the governments customer friendly. Government needs to learn how to become customer friendly. But first it has to get over a myth: that government and business are so different they have nothing to learn from each other. The truth is that nearly all the tools and techniques that helped the private sector to get back on their feet could be adapted to make the government work better.

The second major reform should be the introduction of reengineering i.e. many times organisations go through a major reorganisation and call it reengineering. Others reduce their staff by half and call it reengineering; still others will simply take an efficiency programme they have in place and name it reengineering. The third major reform should be the introduction of total quality management (TQM) which is a comprehensive customer-focused management philosophy for improving the quality of an organisation's products and services. It is a way of structuring relationships in agencies to achieve customer satisfaction by involving all employees in continuously improving the work processes of the organisation. Many of the world's leading corporations attribute their success to the adoption of this philosophy.

A fourth component could be measurement based management. Government has long been faulted for being unable to provide some kind of evidence of its performance. Whereas the private sector points to profits as the ultimate measure of success, government has no such equivalent, except perhaps the government's electoral success. Human Performance Technology is yet another method to improve the quality of government services. The book discusses extensively the Hawthorne experiment of Elton Mayo and his team of researchers. First Mayo discovered in his study a shift in attitude of workers from physical and fiscal incentives to psychological. He also has discovered a fundamental concept that seems obvious today. Workplaces are social environments and within them, people are motivated by much more than economic self-interest. He concludes that all aspects of that industrial environment carried social value.

Innovation mindset and government with speed of thought are yet another two things discussed fully under reinventive reforms, as a new type of citizen is emerging in information age - the digital citizen.

The past few years have seen enormous changes in the way information is gathered, stored, moved, manipulated, analysed and disseminated. These developments in information technology (IT) provide opportunities for both the government and the private sector to rethink how they produce and deliver products and services, and in many cases to rethink what their basic function should be.The author has been frequently quoting and citing his ``guru'', Peter F. Drucker, in support of his views and opinions on reinvention in government. Peter Drucker, while talking about structures and organisation theories, cautioned managers and reformers on management, the contradictions and incongruencies between theory and practice. To him most managers, especially in the larger companies learned the hard way that performance depends upon proper organisation. But the practising manager did not as a rule understand the organisation theories and vice versa. To make his views easy for protagonists of reform, Drucker gives an interesting anecdote.

He says ``Until well into the 17th century, surgery was performed not by doctors but by barbers who, untaught and unlettered, applied whatever tortures they had picked up during their apprenticeship. Doctors, observing a literal interpretation of their oath not to inflict bodily harm, were too ethical to cut and were not even supposed to watch. But the operation, if performed according to the rules, was presided over by a learned doctor who sat on a dais well above the struggle and read what the barber was supposed to be doing aloud from a Latin classic (which the barber, of course, did not understand). Needless to say, it was always the barber's fault if the patient died, and always the doctor's achievement if he survived. And the doctor got the bigger fee in either event. There is some resemblance between the state of surgery four centuries ago and the state of organisation theory until recently.'' (Peter F. Drucker The Practice of ManagementChapter 16).

It is a very fascinating work. It discusses very meticulously the defects in government bureaucracy and suggests ways and means to improve the quality of management.

It is a handbook and an excellent manual for managers interested in reinventing modern bureaucracies. The author deserves congratulations for this commendable work in search of excellence.

C. A. PERUMAL

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