Discussion Responses #4
see word document attached
Respond to two students discussion post. Just type the paragraph under the discussion. It doesn’t have to be in essay form.
Also, make sure that your response(s) are substantial and at least 250 words. In your responses, you must include connections to course learning objectives.
Discussion Post #1
Sakyla Arnold posted Sep 10, 2020 11:16 PM
I found the “Effective Public Management” article to be a great read. When you consider the principles that public organizations stand by, it’s easier to argue more towards the absence of principles rather than the few principles they operate by. I think business management principles would be a great touch to some public organizations. There is a lot of scrutiny by citizens regarding the performance of most public organizations. We often find ourselves wondering if the organizations or agencies have any integrity at all. I personally think of the politics game that happens behind the scene. Whenever there are decisions made or there are policies in place, there are a lot of revolving parts in the equation causing a reaction for every action. I typically ask myself are these moves driven to serve the people or are they driven to serve the people who are supposed to be serving stakeholders. There is so much that goes into the management of public organization, I find it baffling that we question if the organization should adopt business management principles. We won’t find success in public organization until we begin to look at these organization as sole business. While they are government funded and aren’t necessarily a sole individual business, these organization operate similar to sole business in the eyes of the public. Whenever I come into contact with a public organizations, I typically turn to the organizational leadership to rationale my experience. Most of these organizations have an organizational structure where there is a Chief Operating Office or an Executive Director, etc. You rarely think past that as we don’t sit back and ask who are their board of governors, who funds them, who does the head guy report to. We typically accept our outcome with these organizations and don’t push the buck any further. The reality of the situation is that the government are the next level of hierarchy and we typically forget that fact. Business management principles will give public organizations a validity and stamp of integrity that is well needed. It will restore the public trust as well as give guidelines internally for all the individuals who are supposed to serve the stakeholder. Sometimes, public. Organizations feel like a mom and pop business. They always blame everything on the budget and appear to be limited in resources, funding and priority by the government. While this may be true, this is a poor excuse to preach to the stakeholders who you serve. I believe that business management principles would fix these problems as it would give the structure necessary for checks and balances as well as procedures to manage spending. I can remember working in a public education organization where at the end of every fiscal year we would exhaust all of the money left in the department budget because we knew we would lose it. Often times, we would spend this money on useless things. However, we spent at least twenty five percent of the budget on nonsense. Now, imagine if all the departments within the organization did this. What a waste, right? Sadly, they did because they lack effective business management principles.
By: Nathan
I do think that the argument that you cannot use the same management principles as large corporations in public administration. The article Effective Public Management was written in the 1970’s and many of the authors points are still very applicable. The way in which businesses and public organizations are run are fundamentally different. The main point that I want to talk about is the goals aspect of each. Everyone knows that corporations and businesses are profit oriented and compete with each other over the open market. This is why things likes Forbes exists because the competition in the market is fought with net worth and profits which hasn’t changed since this article was written, if anything the market may be more competitive with many new markets in the data field rising steadily. The public sector has also seen much growth since this article and yet are still run essentially in the same way. The national deficit has been a key issue in government for several years now which in turn makes the public sector have to keep competitive with other sectors, provide public services, and carry out legislation from congress with a budget that is limited, they are essentially doing the best with what they are given. This seems to be something that within a public administration is a constant theme, Bower explains it as “In contrast, a public institution’s strategy might be called the art of the imperfect application of limited resources to massive objectives” (Bower pg.137) Another major reason why the public sector and private sector require different managerial principles is because of the return on investment for great managers. I highly proficient and seasoned manager would want to make money, that is why he has worked his way up because in the private sector the companies make more of an investment in managers then the managers then become better and make more money. As Bower points out in the public sector the government does have enough capital to make such investments in the organizations because the money is being spent on that organizations goals set by the legislature. Bower says, “there is no tradition in the United States of training public managers”, this statement would be different today because the government has grown its ability to create better managers through federal training programs and the academic study of public administration. (Bower pg. 137) (OPM) This would be one of the only major changes in the difference between when this was written and now but this doesn’t mean that the government is being run with management principles from the private sector it just means that through the years a specific type of leadership and management has established itself in the private sector. While the private sector competes and takes turns being on top of the market to then fail and go backrubt is something that happens in the market of profit goals whereas the public administration has the need to constantly exist which results in quick adaptation to be able to keep serving the people.