Originally Posted by Benjamin

Bureaucracies should be totally closed and replaced with new ones every twenty years. Personnel of old one ineligible for rehire.

Impossible. Simple as that.

If all our systems were built as black boxes, with defined inputs and outputs from each group, everything clearly delineated and formalised, then sure, you could swap personnel in and out at will. Even outsourceing would actually work. But no system is built like that; there are always things that people have to learn at the fuzzy edges.


RK:

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Doesn't matter. What part of "there is no more money" do the British public not understand?

What part of "they're making it worse" do you not understand?

There is a huge difference between wiping out the deficit in 5 years and wiping it out in 10 or even 30 years. Not that there is any compelling basis to the argument that we should not have any deficit at all anyway.

The Tories were dead keen on public debt whle New Labour were in power, supporting the Private Finance Initiative, under which we sold off hospitals and rented them back on a thirty-year lease in exchange for capital investment. But I bet these contracts are not going to be unilaterally altered in the way our pensions etc are. As a further irony, it's the US that has taken the new Keynesianism to heart, while the alleged "socialist" Europe is hellbent on deficit reduction at any cost.

Originally Posted by contracycle

Impossible. Simple as that. If all our systems were built as black boxes, with defined inputs and outputs from each group, everything clearly delineated and formalised, then sure, you could swap personnel in and out at will. Even outsourceing would actually work. But no system is built like that; there are always things that people have to learn at the fuzzy edges.

Uh-oh. Almost sounds like you're saying that experienced managers have irreplacable knowledge and skills.

I didn't mean it, or course. Just repeating a Pournellism. But the truth behind it is that 'new' organizations frequently have great dedication to mission, while they haven't had time to develop all the false limbs and cultural dysfunctions that characterize outfits that have been around a while. This is obvious to many, but attempts to 'renew' bureraucracies are typically done bureaucratically, that is, with total ineffectiveness.

But perhaps much of the goodness I seek might be gained if public organizations had a requirement to fire the bottom 5%, based on performance ratings, of non-traineee personnel every year.

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Originally Posted by Benjamin

Uh-oh. Almost sounds like you're saying that experienced managers have irreplacable knowledge and skills.

Not ins that sense. Anyone would acquire the same information over time. All I'm pointing out is that you can't just sweep clean like that. A system that rotated personnel, or crosstrained them, would be more effective.

A practical example; I worked with a company to which some support funcitons had been transferred. At one point, they arranged for a 3rd party engineer to connect his laptop to the network. What they didn't know, because it wasn't in their remit, was that connecting an unvalidated machine was a gross violation of the security protocols and a sacking offence.

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But perhaps much of the goodness I seek might be gained if public organizations had a requirement to fire the bottom 5%, based on performance ratings, of non-traineee personnel every year.

Well I see no reason but dogma to assume hat this is limited to "public" organisations; private companies are just as bureacratic, which indeed, given the cult of management consultancy, have been exporting bureacracy to the public sector. But your proposition still strikes me as mad, becuase that will certainly create a culture of backbiting, infighting, and "more than my job's worth", which will massively exagerate bureacratic iniquities.