Henry Mintzberg (1996), ‘Managing Government, Governing Management’, Harvard Business Review

Key take away:

Business is not all good; government is not all bad. Each has its place in a balanced society alongside cooperative and nonowned organizations.
Business can learn from government no less than government can learn from business; and both have a great deal to learn from cooperative and nonowned organizations.
We need proud, not emasculated, government.
Above all, we need balance among the different sectors of society.
Today the prevailing mood supports the privatization of public services. Some of that thinking is probably useful. But a good deal of it is also just plain silly. And if we are so prone to scrutinizing what doesn’t belong in government, shouldn’t we be equally diligent in considering what doesn’t belong in business?

In this paper Mintzberg covers four broad topics relevant to local government:

Private, public, cooperative and non-owned organisations.
The roles of people in society as customer, client, citizen and subject.
The management myths that activities can be isolated, performance can be fully evaluated using objective measures, and activities can be entrusted to autonomous managers responsible for performance.
The machine model, network model, performance-control model, virtual model and normative-control model available to organise government.

“In my view, we have confounded the whole relationship between business and government,”

There are four forms of ownership:

There are privately owned organizations, to be sure, whether closely held by individuals or widely held in the form of market-traded shares.