What business can learn from public sector

People working in the public sector get to hear a lot they should run their operations more as a business. And business is considered to be more advanced in management than public sector, so we all think.

Actually, I think business has quite a bit to learn from public sector, when it comes to performance management. I recently did a bit of research with my colleague Nigel Youell, and we found the following five lessons to be learned from the public sector:

Linking aspirational goals to concrete performance indicators

Businesses, particularly in public companies, are run with a fairly short term horizon. Quarterly results, and a year to prove a new strategy is right. The public sector is more used setting aspirational goals, that really speak to the imagination -- and try to measure the progress towards those goals. The City of Boston has found some proxy metrics (performance indicators that are not precise but correlate with a certain goal) to measure "opportunity and hope."  For instance, they measure the annual school dropout rate, the number of young adults so-called BPL programs, or the number of youths and families referred for services by streetworkers.

Transparency

The public sector is much more used to living in the transparent world, perhaps every business executive should function in the public sector to learn how to deal with that. In my Hyperion days I blogged once about school scorecards in my home country, The Netherlands. If you go to www.onderwijsinspectie.nl (School Inspection Board), you can select any school in the country and see how it is rated by the inspection board. Schools are living in a competitive world too, their budget is linked to the number of pupils they have.

 Enterprise-wide

I recently wrote about City-wide Performance Reporting (CPR) in New York City, as an excellent example of performance management. They have shown it is possible to align a complete and complex organization. A total of more than 40 city agencies and organizations were involved in creating city-wide performance indicators.

Cause-and-effect

Business life is largely hierarchic of nature. Performance management shows us how we have contributed to corporate goals, but usually not how we contributed to the goals of our peers. I think in the end peer contributions are equally important than individual rolled-up contributions. Or let me take that back, I think they are MORE important, because if you do peer contributions really well, there is increased leverage in reaching the corporate goals. There are multiple examples in the public sector where managers between services collaborate. For instance, social services (streetworkers) may have a positive effect on school results, by keeping children of the streets. And positive school results are correlated with crime rates. In the public sector, cause-and-effect relationships are more defined horizontally.

Continuous improvement

Ok, public sector is notorious for heavy spending at the end of the year, to get new and increased budgets the next year. That's wrong, but it equally happens in corporate life. Again, New York City shows it can be different. In their CPR initiative they are not measuring towards fixed goals, they are measuring year-over-year comparisons. In other words, going for continuous improvement.

Stakeholder orientation

Network Rail (NR), the railway infrastructure organization in the UK, truly understands performance management "21^st century."  Performance improvement is not about maximizing your own goals, but looking at both stakeholder contributions and requirements. For instance, although passengers are not customers of Network Rail (they are customers of British Rail, Virgin, etc), still they are stakeholders, and performance indicators are put in place to see who NR achieves for passengers. Also, NR actively monitors the success of their suppliers, as part of a strategic relationship. Business, mostly focused on shareholder value maximization, can learn a great deal from this.

 So what can the public sector learn from business? Would love to hear your thoughts...

frank