Public Sector Management Quotes

When the private sector fails, the solution is more government. When the government fails, the solution is more government.

Government should do a few things, and do them right

There is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the ‘bureaucrats’. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management.

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

While the invisible hand looks after the private sector, the invisible foot kicks the public sector to pieces.

What I would say is governments need assistance to run their organisations more efficiently just like businesses do.

Sometimes there's not a direct transfer of skills from business to government, but sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government.

While there are differences, there are similarities in terms of cost-cutting and many other things, but you also have to be talking about heart. You need heart. You can't do the same things in government that you do in a company.