It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration.' It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is… - Marshall E. Dimock

Management is not a matter of pressing a button, pulling a lever, issuing orders, scanning profit and loss statements, promulgating rules and regulations. Rather, management is the power to determine what shall happen to the personalities and to the happiness of entire peoples, the power to shape the destiny of a nation and of all the nations which make up the world. Executive work, therefore, is statesmanship and the techniques which the executive employs are only incidental to the forces which he sets in motion and helps to direct. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the management of the nation's large institutions, both in business and in government, determines the fate of millions of individual lives as well as the lives of generations unborn.

Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre. The object of administrative study should be to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost both of money and of energy.

The opposition of some executives to formalized organizational analysis stems in part from a reaction against the too zealous advocacy of organization as the universal panacea of all management ills. These executives correctly understand that organization is not the whole of management any more than personnel or budgeting or public relation. Organization analysis, therefore, is not properly the periodic pursuit of the expert; rather, it is the continuous responsibility of the executive. His clue is found in mal-functionings; not in the blind following of preconceived stereotypes.