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Gov't must learn from the private sector
Thursday, July 02, 2009
This morning, junior minister for foreign affairs, Senator Ronald Robinson and Professor Neville Ying, the executive director of the Jamaica Diaspora Institute, will stage a soft launch of the "Future Leadership Jamaican Diaspora Conference".
We, of course, hope that this conference will offer more than the usual talk shop, because the ideas framed from the deliberations may hold the key to the building blocks of the future. May we be bold enough to offer some thoughts on how governments, in shaping future policy, can learn from their private sectors.
We admit that while not every management technique can be transposed from the private sector into the administration of government, there is much that can be learnt from the operations of successful companies.
True, civil servants are not likely to exhibit the innovativeness and initiative of individuals rewarded handsomely for these qualities. Even less may be expected from the politicians of the Caribbean who generally are not the sharpest tools in the shed.
But we are entitled to expect our governments to respond quickly to changing circumstances with new or modified policies. This is not the experience of the Caribbean where our governments do not learn from the private sector.
The first barrier to communications is that both sides give lip service to genuine dialogue because each is sceptical of the value and applicability of what the other has to say. Civil servants see the businessman as a source of endless unreasonable demands aimed at gouging the economy, and what is required is more regulation to control rapacious profiteering.
Entrepreneurs and managers see government employees as uncivil bureaucrats devoid of any empathy for private enterprise and too set in the culture of "why do today what I can do tomorrow".
Second, channels of communication are not open. Most exchanges of views between governments and their private sectors take place through the media where posturing and profiling make for the exclusion of constructive dialogue.
Both sides are totally convinced that they operate in different worlds between which little can be transferred. Business persons on boards of public entities are frustrated because their presence legitimises policies and decisions they would never tolerate in their own firm. Civil servants tolerate with barely concealed disregard what they see as idealism of business persons who just do not understand why things have to be done the way they have always been done.
In a dialogue of the deaf everybody is talking but nobody is listening. The cost of governments refusing to learn is enormous both in real terms and in opportunity cost. Given the patent need to improve the efficiency (cost of delivery of services), productivity (quantity of public goods) and effectiveness (the extent to which results attain goals) there must be something to be learnt from the private sector.
Douglas Orane has informed us that the day that Goldman Sachs imploded, GraceKennedy's top management immediately met and formulated a plan for how to survive and succeed in the new and unprecedented business environment of a global economic crisis. The result was increased profits.
Compare this with the governments of Caricom which, a year after the financial crisis exploded, are awaiting a report on how to respond to it. They will discuss it at the Heads of Government meeting in the first week of July.
Hopefully they will do more than note the content and establish another committee to study it.
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