When journalists want to know whether a business firm is doing well, they look at the bottom line. But government has no bottom line. So journalists look for alternative ways to determine whether government is doing a good job. Similarly, when citizens want to know whether their government is doing a good job, they too cannot look at the bottom line. All this need not be.
Government does lack an automatic, obvious bottom line.
But it can create one - perhaps not one for a government as a whole, but certainly one for each individual agency. And, I would argue, this is the responsibility of the public executive. The leaders of a public agency need to create that agency's bottom line. Such concepts do not apply. As a public manager, you cannot use one of the many financial ratios on which business traditionally draws when it needs a bottom line.