Michael Lissack company has had several years of 10% growth, and its stockholders demand another such year and another from top management. The FBI brags on the percentage of crime reduction each year while all around we feel less safe on the streets. The physicist Freeman Dyson has argued that size matters, and his ar- guments have inspired both Rauch and I. As Rauch put it: Dyson “doesn’t mean size just in the physical sense. Rather, if you want to know whether a machine is worth building or a program is worth undertaking, you have to scale it to make sure it’s flexible enough to adapt to a changing world. ‘Never sacrifice economies of speed to achieve economies of scale, and never let ourselves get stuck with facilities which take ten years to turn on or off. Otherwise, projects are out of date by the time they open for business Judging by the experience of the last fifty years, it seems that major changes come roughly once in a decade. In this situation it makes an enormous dif- ference whether we are able to react to change in three years or in twelve. An industry which is able to react in three years will find the game stimulating and enjoyable, and the people who do the work will experience the pleasant sensation of being able to cope. An industry which takes twelve years to react will be perpetually too late, and the people running the industry will experience sensations of paralysis and demoralization.’” Though he didn’t know it, Dyson was writing about government. Our government. Governmental entities have to build their organizations on the basis that they can only prosper if they deliver what we ask of them. Organization means more than just who reports to whom. It also includes how perfor- mance review and compensation systems work, how decisions are taken, what style and set of values are communicated from the top, how new staff members are trained, and all the other facets of day-to-day life that make one entity different from another. Government managers need to build or- ganizations that focus on and learn about service and goals. Once this initial message has been sent, however, the largest management challenge follows: to make these goals visible within the organization. The service goal has to become a “language” that is spoken throughout an agency, so that all staff members are fluent and can instantly see when the “syntax” of a policy is
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