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| Does the public service have a greater impact than the private sector? | | Date Created: Sep 13, 2005, 07:08 AM |
I was discussing with a long-time civil service colleague of mine about why it was so difficult for private-sector people to adapt to the civil service. This was after a high-flying private sector chap resigned from the top echelons of the civil service after just a year. I will elaborate on my own thoughts in a later posting but I want to just focus on one part of our conversation.
My colleague felt that senior positions in the civil service had greater impact on society, whereas a comparable position in the private sector would only have an impact within the company. I wanted to refute this statement strongly but the bill for lunch came and so I left it at that (especially since she had offered to pay).
But I feel that people in particular private sector companies do have as great, if not greater impact. If you are working as a researcher in Novartis, your work could spell hope for millions of cancer patients. Apple, IBM, Dell are bringing the PC into every home and office. Even a maligned company like Walmart reduces the cost of living for the have-nots, the very segment of the population that they are accused of exploiting. A business manager in a MNC is directly responsible for the livelihoods of a large number of people, and in many cases have a great impact on the communities who depend on their operations.
Conversely, my own observations of how the civil service works is that despite the hype, only a handful of people actually have any impact. Decisions are still top-down (and I mean "very top"-down), and you are only responsible for some low-level intervention work. The contributions of senior management is at many times, confined to writing up papers to explain the decisions of even more senior management.
Essentially, I feel it is extremely presumptious to think that a career in the civil service is somehow on higher moral ground than the private sector. Perhaps we should stop using the words civil service and just stick to public sector. |
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