Doing It

The purpose of government is to make fundamental decisions, and to make them effectively. The purpose of government is to focus the political energies of society. It is to dramatize issues. It is to present fundamental choices.

The purpose of government, in other words, is to govern.

This, as we have learned in other institutions, is incompatible with “doing.” Any attempt to combine governing with “doing” on a large scale, paralyzes the decision-making capacity. Any attempt to have decision-making organs actually “do,” also means very poor “doing.” They are not focused on “doing.” They are not equipped for it. They are not fundamentally concerned with it.

There is good reason today why soldiers, civil servants, and hospital administrators look to business management for concepts, principles, and practices. For business, during the last thirty years, has had to face, on a much smaller scale, the problem which modern government now faces: the incompatibility between “governing” and “doing.” Business management learned that the two have to be separated, and that the top organ, the decision-maker, has to be detached from “doing.” Otherwise he does not make decisions, and the “doing” does not get done either.

In business this goes by the name of “decentralization.” The term is misleading. It implies a weakening of the central organ, the top management of a business. The purpose of decentralization as a principle of structure and constitutional order is, however, to make the center, the top management, strong and capable of performing the central, the top-management, task. The purpose is to make it possible for top management to concentrate on decision making and direction by sloughing off the “doing” to operating managements, each with its own mission and goals, and with its own sphere of action and autonomy.

If this lesson were applied to government, the other institutions of society would then rightly become the “doers.” “Decentralization” applied to government would not just be another form of “federalism” in which local rather than central government discharges the “doing” tasks. It would rather be a systematic policy of using the other, the nongovernmental institutions of the society of organizations, for the actual “doing,” i.e., for performance, operations, execution.