Adopting Generalists Approach:

♤ Generalists Administration is politics in action. As one rises up the hierarchy, there is less hands-on job and more management of resources. It vests in a bureaucrat a successively larger responsibility for enforcing the general point of view of the government.

♤ Top management job requires a general understanding. It requires a view of the whole.

♤ Most specialists usually employ an esoteric language to convey their ideas. In administration it leads to difficulty in communication between the non-expert minister and the highly specialized expert secretaries.

Civil services thus require a mix of both generalists and specialists. However, the current stranglehold of career bureaucracy has prevented willing and able experts from outside the system to join the government. Even in ministries as complex as finance, academic economists have been confined to that of advisory roles rather than executive roles in most cases. Creating a specialist system of bureaucracy would mean ending of monopoly at the top with the introduction of lateral entries, ending of ageism as younger people will get to hold higher positions. These changes will improve performance management and bring rationalist bureaucracy, as demanded by the 21st century.