Joseph Muscat: From PM to CEO?

As rumours are ripe that yet another cabinet reshuffle is in the offing, with some Ministers possibly looking at their third move in just under two years, I cannot but wonder if Prime Minister Muscat’s style and approach to running government is more akin to a CEO running a company?  

In the business world, we are very much accustomed to under-performing managers and leaders being demoted, 'moved' side ways or even dismissed. In the business world it’s all about results. Leaders and managers live and die by results but can the same approach be applied to government. 

I am obviously looking at this from a business perspective and not as a political animal that operates within the constraints of democratic institutions; an outside-in perspective. Yet I am intrigued by the leadership style of our new Prime Minister and sense that he is trying to run cabinet like a boardroom and government like a corporation. 

My first observation is that the country needs to change how it employs democracy. In other words, we need a new constitution. We need to replace our current parliamentary democracy (an inheritance from our past British rulers) with a republican type of representative government (the United States of America being a brilliant example).

We need to be able to directly elect our President, who in turn will be granted executive powers, and will be completely separate from the legislative government. We currently have a perverse system that restricts the pool of talent available to the Prime Minister when appointing his/her ministers to a small number (currently less than 39), undeniably non-representative of the country’s available talent.

We need a system of government that empowers the executive to appoint its ministers of government from outside the walls of parliament in order to tap into the country’s talent pool. In so doing, a president could hire-and-fire cabinet ministers based on performance and not votes or parliamentary majorities and the country would really have the best people, experts in their own fields coming from a wider background than just lawyers and doctors, running this brilliant country of ours. 

Another observation is that the same sort of accountability and democratic pressure that applies to the ministers should also apply to the Maltese civil service. In the future, we ought to have the top echelons of the civil service changing with each and every incoming government.

Again the White House in the United Sates or American federal executive departments and federal civil servants are a good model to emulate. Currently, our existing system means that a newly elected and appointed minister has to work with civil servants of a perhaps a different ideology or set of loyalties. Compare this with the business world: if you are appointed as CEO of a company, you’d take it for granted that you can build your own team with people that subscribe to your vision and strategy. 

A third observation is that the government (the executive) simply doesn’t pay like the private sector. With all due respect to past and current politicians, but on the whole and since 1964, I reckon that the best brains and talents that this country has produced have primarily come from outside of politics.

The reason for this, perhaps, is because the business world is so much more rewarding. Therefore, if we want this country to make a quantum leap forward - swapping part-time politicians with full-time professional leaders and managers - we need the best talent this country has on offer to join the ranks of government too. 

My point is that if our Prime Minister wants to run government more like a business and introduce business-management concepts and approaches, which I think is timely and worthwhile, he first needs to facilitate a new Constitution and herald a new way of governing. Otherwise, he will find himself hampered or restricted and unable to bring a business-like approach to governing. 

The world of business, operating in a free-market capitalist economy, is by no means perfect but it has proven over the centuries that  it best delivers progress, innovation and social improvement. As a country, we would do well to learn from business and apply its lessons in leadership, governance and organizational efficiency / effectiveness, in order to govern better and attract the very best talent to run this brilliant country of ours.