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The principles behind public-sector reform served as the subject of this September 1994 programme, which featured Ted Gaebler, co-author of the bestselling book Reinventing Government, and Robbie Alm, a former head of Hawaii's Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs and at the time a vice president of First Hawaiian Bank. The central question was whether the accumulated rules and controls of modern bureaucracy had made government inherently inefficient, and whether the ten principles outlined in the book could be applied to reshape Hawaii's state government. Gaebler argued that bureaucratic dysfunction was not a peculiarly American problem but appeared in virtually every country he had visited, and that the remedy lay in shifting accountability from inputs and processes to measurable outcomes, reducing the layers of overlapping controls that had built up over a century of anti-corruption reforms. Alm confirmed that employees inside Hawaii's state government were themselves frustrated by the system's rigidities and expressed desire for change, while cautioning that reform required sustained hard work rather than slogans. He urged that any political candidate promising to fix government be pressed for concrete plans rather than token gestures such as changing the method of appointing estate trustees.
Transcript
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