Good governance 101

Babus should pay attention to cabinet secy’s note on need for gradual and regular improvement

India’s top civil servant has sterling advice for officers on lower branches.

To summarise: when they look back on their careers, at the end of their service, they should see 30 years of learning and improvement, not one year’s experience repeated 30 times.

Though the idea is not original, as a reminder it is timely. The civil service, after all, is still India’s “steel frame”.

When it refuses to grow with time, it hinders the nation’s development. And India is a country held back by old ideas, policies, and its bureaucracy’s reluctance to adapt. But change need not be sudden or dramatic.

Officers anyway can’t make tectonic moves. So the cabinet secretary’s note stresses on the importance of routine things, and recommends getting them right, day after day, year after year.

That is nothing but ‘Kaizen’, the Japanese philosophy that made Toyota the world’s biggest carmaker, by sales. Kaizen literally means “good change”. Practically, it requires gradual and continuous improvement. For example, if the same exam suffers paper leaks twice, there’s no Kaizen in the system. And where there’s no Kaizen, the people in charge aren’t asking, “How can we do this better, at a lower cost?”

There’s something else they’re probably not doing: ‘Gemba’, or going and seeing with their own eyes. How Mumbai’s suburban commuters hang out of trains, and how getting a bucket of water consumes hours of poor women’s lives.

We can all use Kaizen in our lives, at work and at home, and the cabinet secretary’s advice on keeping meetings short and purposeful, is important too. Business leaders like Jeff Bezos have their meeting hacks, like the two-pizza rule – call no more staff than can be fed on two pizzas.

And civil servants should be equally economical, because they operate on the public’s time and funds.

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