Corporates & Governments?

ok... i wanna start of with a sad truth.. ive wanted to write a funny, easy going blog for sometime, but nothin seems to be popping up in my head. Maybe this worklife has destroyed my sense of humor or maybe i am living a very sad life here... anyways i leave the judgement to u.. and move on to better things....

A recent training at my company made me aware of how huge an organization i am working for and how insignificant I am in the scheme of things. However it also showed me that even if i was insignificant, there were processes and systems built to ensure that even the smallest guy worked his backside off for the betterment of the company.

As one of the speakers was explaining the structure of my company, starting from my level to the myriads of interdependencies and finally ending at the CEO, i was wonderstruck at the size of the organization and wondered who the CEO reported to.. well.. no prizes for guessing, the CEO reports to the shareholders....

Who are the shareholders? People like u and me, employees, pensioners, family men who would be earning a fraction of what the CEO would be earning, but who have the power to question the CEO and his policies every quarter. The CEO must ensure that he maximizes the ROI for these shareholders so as to keep his job :)

In many ways isnt this similair to the structure of a government as well? Think of an imaginary world where every shareholder is allowed to hold only 1 share, and the price of the share is not that significant. In that situation, each share is almost similair to a vote and the quarterly or yearly shareholder meetings are similair to elections...

Following a similair logic, does that mean that therefore corporations can run countries better than governments themselves? In the case of India at least, its quite well accepted that the corporations are far more efficient than the govt, unlike China where the govt is far more efficient than the corporations.

Even the Govt of Singapore runs itself like a corporation, every department is responsible for its ROI. And ROI is measured to even the smallest of items, recently i read that the ROI on some bus stops were dropping and hence the govt was planning to change the advertising rates for them!

Does that mean that the present govt must step down and ask someone like the Tatas or Infosys to take up the job? Well, the concept is possible, however there are some issues with such a scenario:

Firstly an ROI model need not work in allsituations for a Government. An example of taking it a bit too far was when i came to know that some of the colleges in Singapore have classrooms where there are 500 students attending and 1 teacher teaching.. Some smart alec in the govt would have calculated the cost of hiring an extra teacher and come with the recommendation that this is the most profitable way to run the business.. Somehow they lost the common sense factor that so many students in a single class is useless....

Secondly money is not the only criteria to measure the success of a Government, there is a fine line between an expense and an investment when you are running a country. There are issues of individual freedom and accountability.

Anyways too many thoughts for a sleepy Sunday afternoon, however i guess I can conclude that Governments, especially the Indian one has a lot to learn from these corporations on how to run its business of keeping people happy