Some call this phenomenon management by bestseller or management flavor of the month. Unfortunately, many of these management theories are contradictory. The theories are incompatible, yet many government officials switch among them like couch potatoes channel surfing. It s as if each management technique s viability gets judged not on potential results, but on the number of catch phrases it incorporates. A whole industry has been built around them.
Buzzwords are just the beginning of the problem.
They are adopted without reconciling what makes government fundamentally different from business. The government of novices put into power on election day faces unique challenges for which there is no private-sector analogy. Citizens set their government s course at the polls, yet many officials find themselves bewildered once in office. With dozens of private-sector elixirs offered as a cure, great temptation exists to find the perfect management trick that will mystically fix government s problems. The best known of these tricks was Reinventing Government by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, the 1992 offering firmly embraced by the Clinton administration.