A country is my company" approach toward government reform is not identical
to well-known business reform models such as Thomas J. Peters and Robert H.
Waterman Jr.'s nine characteristics of successful American companies, and David
Osborne and Ted Gaebler's ten characteristics of an entrepreneurial government.
For Peters and Waterman, the nine characteristics are: managing ambiguity and
paradox; a bias for action; close to customer; autonomy and entrepreneurship;
productivity through people; hands-on, value-driven; stick to the knitting; simple
form, lean staff; and simultaneous loose-tight properties.7 For Osborne and Gaebler,
the ten characteristics of an entrepreneurial government are: steering rather than
rowing; empowering rather than serving; injecting competition into service delivery;
transforming rule-driven organisations; funding outcomes, not inputs; meeting the
needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy; earning rather than spending; prevention
rather than cure; from hierarchy to participation and teamwork; and leveraging
change through the market.8 "A country is my company" approach toward
government reform contains some characteristics of both models, but the difference
is that the bottom line of this approach is how the top executive can make use of business ideas to strengthen control of government, while the other two models are
more general statements of good characteristics of a business enterprise and an
entrepreneurial government.