Quora Answer: What Usually Happens if You Run a Country Like a Business?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What usually happens if you run a country like a business?”

When a country is run like a business, the closest you get is Singapore.  Singapore is sometimes referred to as Singapore Inc.  In Singapore, most parts of the government, its constituent organs of state, are cost centres with their own key performance indicators.  This means that budgets are taken seriously and there is a lot of emphasis on accountability.  This cuts down waste.

The people who attend to these organs of state are customers, and other parts of the same organisation are internal customers.  This means there is a service standard that is implemented, which includes them being unfailingly polite.  If you are in Singapore, and had the police call you to go down to the station to make a statement, you get called “Sir”, or “Madam”, and they call you within three working days to follow up – even if you are a person of interest.

Citizens are treated as stakeholders, and policy is always geared towards the long-term, so there has to be immediate profitability as well as growth down the road.  This may be good or bad, depending on your perspective.  In essence, there is an emphasis on the collective, and the needs of the majority always outweigh the needs of the few.

On the other hand, there is a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork.  This is the other side of a country run like a corporation.  Everyone is accountable to someone and something.  This means that in certain areas, such as entrepreneurship, there is this inherent discouragement for risk, unless it is calculated and quantified.  This means that Singapore is unlikely to ever have an Apple from a start-up because that involves individualistic thinking that is anathema to the system.