Management of Business and Public Organizations
This writer can only relate to this question from the point of view of 35 years in the private sector, almost all of them in one company. As director of sales, North America, for this company, there is a constant personal concern to make sure that our product is properly positioned in the consumer's mind. We accomplish this by communicating and explaining to the public, the benefits of using our product line. For greatest efficiency, we choose to use an extremely concrete and specific language that leaves little room for doubt. Our position has always been that it is in the "best interest" of our company to maintain such an approach. However, it has often been said that techniques that are effective in the private sector do not easily translate into the public sector (Etzioni, 1993).
There is no doubt that the literature of public administration acknowledges that there might be different decision making processes concerning issues that are in the "public's interest" than there are for issues concerning the "public's best interest." The implication of these two phrases is that there is, in public policy decision-making, often a judgment made concerning what information the public "needs to know." Some guidance for this question can be found in Steers' (1991) discussion of decision making, in which he broke the process down into six phases: A) Recognizing the need for a decision; B) Identifying the objectives; C) Identifying alternatives; D) Evaluating alternatives; E) selecting the best alternative; and, F) implementing the decision (Steers, 1991, p. 243). Possibly the most important of these phases for the public administrator is to learn how to recognize that there is a need for a decision.
Time not only heals all wounds, but, in the case of problems that seem to require decisions, time can sometimes work positively. Sometimes, adopting a "wait and see" policy is justi...