In a recent speech, N R Narayanamurthy, the co-founder of Infosys, suggested that recruitment to the Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service should be done from Business Schools rather than through UPSC examinations.
“It is time for India to move from an administrative mindset to a management mindset. The administration is all about the status quo. On the other hand, management is all about vision and high aspiration. It’s about achieving the plausible impossible,” he said. According to the Infosys co-founder, the current system of competitive UPSC examinations can only produce civil servants trained in general administration. He recommended a management-based approach that focuses on vision, cost control, innovation, and rapid execution to cater to the changing demands of governance.
This comment comes even as Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency in his administration to cut inefficiencies in government (substitute for removing extra staff and deregulating processes).
The underlying premise is that public bureaucracies are inefficient in terms of bloated staff and being mired in red tape. They could be improved by importing management practices taught at business schools and widely applied in the private sector. This is the latest reprise of a well-versed cliche with a long history.
Narayanamurthy and Elon Musk stand on the same side in their deep ignorance of the nature of the activities of governments. Let me try to explain.
Google AI search informs that the core principles of modern management consist of division of work, authority and responsibility, discipline, unity of command, unity of direction, subordination of individual interest, and remuneration. Management 101, as applied in the private sector, essentially consists of enhancing efficiencies and hastening decision-making through process re-engineering and system transformations, minimising costs primarily by shrinking staff, and improving execution by selecting the right people and aligning incentives among them.
I can think of several insurmountable areas of divergence between these management theories and the challenges of actual policy implementation.
1. The core activity of government involves running large and dispersed institutional networks, to deliver statutory (Tahsildar, police, and regulatory offices) and non-statutory (schools, hospitals, anganwadis, municipal, welfare etc.) services, through officials recruited on a lifetime employment basis and who are deeply enmeshed in the local political economy.
These core activities of governments across sectors have hardly changed over time. Neither have the methods and instruments available to them to implement and administer those activities. The problem has been the state’s failure to ensure the effective implementation of those basic sets of activities. This arises from state capability deficiencies and governance failings.
There’s a belief, drawn from the private sector, that public sector problems can be addressed through innovations. But as I have blogged here, it’s misleading to assume that we can leapfrog fundamental state capability deficiencies and governance failings and innovate (or digitise or privatise or outsource) the way out, as is the practice in the private sector. Instead, there’s a need for boring and painstaking work of building capabilities and delivering good governance. Management 101 is unlikely to be of much value in this endeavour.
2. Since governments are trustees of public interest and use public resources, strict procedural safeguards in public-sector decision-making processes are unavoidable. This is especially desirable in weak institutional systems like in India, which are prone to corruption and capture by vested interests. This places inherent limitations on the freedom, flexibility, and speed of decision-making. Besides, decision-making in a political system involves tight coordination between the bureaucratic and political executives. Such coordination happens through institutional processes and rules that further constrain decision-making freedom. Furthermore, important public sector decisions invariably require the mobilisation of electoral support, something which is outside the control of even the political representatives.
These constraints are inherent to public systems across developed and developing countries and have remained so despite all the social, technological, and other changes over time. The private sector is not constrained by any of these factors.
3. Management 101 extols the wisdom of allocation of roles and responsibilities and delegation of powers. However, in public systems, such delegation tends to backfire. The underlying premise is that people once appropriately empowered or authorised are both capable and incentivised enough to fulfil their responsibilities, failing which they can be replaced. These assumptions do not hold with public systems. Complicating matters, measurement or attribution is a challenge with their activities, thereby making the enforcement of accountability very difficult.
Therefore, in public systems where capabilities are weak, most often it’s required to supplement managerial work allocation with direct monitoring of the frontline. At the least on critical tasks, leadership must cut through layers and engage directly with the frontline officials to both limit transmission losses in instructions and ensure reliable feedback.
Management 101 would argue that such direct engagement will weaken the chain of command and distort incentives. And it does. But without it, it’s most likely that execution in public sector contexts will flounder.
4. Traditional management theories can break down when faced with the management of government employees. For a start, organisational leaders cannot select their team (or even deputies) and must work with those available (or unavailable) in systems where incentive misalignment has uncontrollable contextual roots. There are deeply constraining limits to disciplining, let alone removing people. Even the standard role-allocation and authorisation-based management strategies are blunt in systems where meaningful performance accountability and its enforcement are, at best, extremely challenging and normally impossible.
5. Management 101, following the pervasive trend in the private sector and public sector in developed countries, similarly advocates the virtues of outsourcing work to consultants and third-party service providers. In public systems, such parcelling out work is unlikely to be effective for multiple reasons - inherent difficulties in disaggregating core activities, limited or weak supply side for these services, and difficulties in monitoring the quality of service delivery.
6. There’s very little that management theories can teach us in managing relationships with politicians, media, and civil society groups. The very wide variety in the features of these relationships and their interaction with the social and cultural norms of the contexts makes them ill-suited to templates or cookie-cutter approaches. They require good judgment that’s heavily influenced also by the specific context and circumstances.
7. Finally, development contexts exhibit a very wide variance across people, tasks, and situations. This also means that management in such contexts will have to go beyond templates and theories and involve the exercise of judgment, one which emerges from experiential learning. In many respects, public sector management is a specialisation in itself.
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