ABSTRACT
Different classes of service institutions need different structures. But all of them need first to impose on themselves discipline of the kind imposed by leaders of the institutions in the examples in the previous chapters.
They need to define ‘what our business is and what it should be’. They need to bring alternative definitions into the open and consider them carefully. They should perhaps even work out (as did the presidents of the emerging American universities) some balance between the different and conflicting definitions of mission.
They must derive clear objectives and goals from their definition of function and mission.
They then must set priorities that enable them to select targets, to set standards of accomplishment and performance – that is, to define the minimum acceptable results; to set deadlines; to go to work on results, and to make someone accountable for results.
They must define measurements of performance – the customer satisfaction measurements of the Telephone Company, or the number of households supplied with electric power, a quantity much easier to measure.
They must use these measurements to feed back on their efforts. That is, they must build self-control by results into their system.
Finally, they need an organized review of objectives and results, to weed out those objectives that no longer serve a purpose or have proven unattainable. They need to identify unsatisfactory performance, and activities which are outdated or unproductive, or both. And, they need a mechanism for dropping such activities rather than wasting money and human energies where the results are poor.
