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Peter Davis's avatar

Thoughtful and balanced. If only we had more of this in the public arena. A classic is Wellington Water. In my view this all comes down to a failure of central government to take on reform in local government. Auckland had a full Royal Commission to allow it to become a proper city, and it has benefited hugely - including turning WaterCare into a proper, independent, professional organisation that can get on and do the work required without political interference, but subject to (one hopes) proper scrutiny and accountability. Wellington had the chance to become a single city some time ago - courtesy of Fran Wilde -but as always parochial interests obstructed it, and so you are stuck with a mess of poorly performing organisations and a region and a city that is suffering accordingly.

If you want something professional on public service organisations, try the UK think tank The Institute of Government https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/. It's UK-focussed, but has generic suggestions - for example, they suggest that public service CEOs should be expected to turn over 1-2% of personnel (annually? not sure), with emphasis being on poor performers. Otherwise they never get weeded out and it is the high performers who look elsewhere.

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Samuel Roland's avatar

Quick question; is there a canon (or recommendations) you're aware of for getting up to speed on civil service excellence? Have read some about Northcote Trevelyan, Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs, Dominic Cummings, and the like, but have been stumped trying to find the sort of case studies that show off these systems in practice. If you could point me in the right direction, would be greatly appreciated.

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