Os gestores públicos são melhores que os gestores privados?
Na média são iguais, no entanto não têm limites na capacidade de gastar e têm de satisfazer mais partes interessadas.
Um exemplo retirado de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt:
"In 1972 NASA claimed that it could build a reusable space shuttle such that “the cost of placing a pound of payload in orbit can be reduced to less than $100.” In actuality, the system as designed and operated had an average cost per pound of about $28,000.
How did that happen? Like the case of Project T, the complex projections were cooked. People within NASA and its contractor community desperately wanted to justify a new program. Estimates of cost and risk were adjusted to Congress’s funding thresholds. In the process, they trashed the successful Saturn family of rockets and crippled the US space program for decades. The risk Congress apparently ignored was that the economic analysis was a fabrication. The fancy capital budgeting analysis of the proposed shuttle was a distraction, drawing attention away from the crux issue of reusability.
The design incoherence came out of committee thinking: to get approved, a project or program has to be all things to all people. NASA had wanted to go beyond the moon, build a space station, and explore the asteroids and Mars.
...
In a discussion with an air force colonel about fighter-jet performance, I once asked what the “perfect” fighter would look like. He said, “The perfect design would have contractors in each state and a part made in each congressional district.” In the case of the space shuttle, it wasn’t perfect, but by the colonel’s standards it was very good. There was virtually no dissent in Congress—the very complex project had something for almost every interest group."
