One of the things that defines a great organization is great owners; bad owners don’t care about things they own. You may not realize it, but you own the very same government and public agencies that you’re always complaining about. So, owner, when are you going to start fixing your problems?
Even great organizations can’t guarantee success, but they give you a fighting chance; lousy organizations have to rely on getting lucky. The odds of getting lucky are much longer than the odds of working your way to a good outcome.
When it comes to government and public agencies the average citizen is on two sides of the fence – they are both owners and customers. Most have no problem acting like customers – be it police or firefighting, education, utilities or public health – when they need those services, they rarely have choices. When it comes to ownership they have many opportunities, but most citizens fail to exercise their rights or fulfill their responsibilities even when they don’t like the way things are running.
Perhaps dissatisfied customers should write themselves a complaint letter; then they might realize they own the very organizations that are giving them so many problems.
Exercising ownership responsibility means determining what you want to do, how you want it done, directing management and holding them responsible for performance. This applies all the time, not just when there are elections. The idea that you can let the failures and bad decisions pile up for years and then fix everything by occasionally changing the managers is silly on the face of it. Your representatives are your employees and they need your constant oversight, input and feedback. It’s your duty as an owner to make your wishes known and demand the information that you need to make good decisions.
Too many citizens are under the impression that their elected representatives are better qualified than they are, but that’s not true. One of the reasons government is so needlessly complex is to confuse the owners. As long as they can make you completely dependent on their judgment, their jobs and power are secure. It’s easy for me to prove my point, just look at the current mess. Would you have encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to sink $400 billion into worthless mortgages? I didn’t think so.
You could do as well as most policy-wonks just by flipping a coin, perhaps better. It’s only natural that government is always recommending more government, after all many employees have good paying jobs with great benefits – they are not going to recommend the elimination their own positions any more than private sector employees would put themselves in the unemployment line. It may happen in exceptional cases, but it’s a rare occurrence.
Most people can’t go it alone. There is strength in numbers, just ask AARP, the NRA, the unions, the manufacturing groups and the Political Action Committees (PACs) of every stripe. Find like-minded owners, get together and flex your political muscle. If you don’t, you’re sure to lose out to those who do.
It’s up to you as an owner to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse and to keep the cost of running the business to a minimum. The money that is wasted belongs to you and no one is going to watch out for your interests as well as you are; that’s just the way the world works.
Remember that when you’re dealing with the government and public agencies, you’re the owner – start acting like it before the managers you hired run you out of business.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. His column runs Tuesdays. Reach him at [email protected].
