The natural ebb and flow of political appointees in government is a great example of it. Good civil servants can make things go great.
Where government performs very poorly is typically where both the formal and informal leadership networks are not up to the task. Brilliant appointed leaders exist and can do amazing things. The informal leadership and machinery requires care and feeding, and tends to fail spectacularly when it's ignored or actively undermined.
I didn't mean to imply it was! What it is, however, is resistant to change. Often that's a feature, not a bug.
I've often generalized things as "govt is good at reliable, bad at efficient, while private industry is good at efficient, bad at reliable" . (The entire idea of competition is that companies can and will go out of business, switch markets, etc).
Thus, I personally approve of private industry where I care about efficiency more than reliability (say, garbage/recycling/compost pick up) and govt where I care about reliability over efficiency (say, childhood education). This is also why I personally oppose most "public-private partnerships", as they tend to take the reliability of private industry and add the efficiency of govt.
To agree to your point about leadership - most of the pet projects to arrive from upper leadership failed to last, often failed to ever get past early stages...but those projects that DID survive and became part of the new process were able to do so because enough people pushed for it long enough and hard enough, which serves as a decent barometer for what is important.
Here I've been associating govt and bureaucracy, but that's only a generalization - large corporations (and smaller ones, occasionally) can have plenty of bureaucracy, for the exact same reasons and with the exact same outcomes (both good and bad).
Another benefit of beauraucracy, which I think is understated, is that it might be our best antidote to corruption.
When you have a networked system of approvals and records, and people whose livelihood depends on them maintaining those records in good order, it can become more risky and expensive to buy favours and break the rules than to follow them.
But you need both a good beauraucracy, and a culture of civil servants that value honesty and good order and following-the-rules. A good beauraucracy can reinforce those cultural values, and vice-versa. But just one half is not enough.
The natural ebb and flow of political appointees in government is a great example of it. Good civil servants can make things go great.
Where government performs very poorly is typically where both the formal and informal leadership networks are not up to the task. Brilliant appointed leaders exist and can do amazing things. The informal leadership and machinery requires care and feeding, and tends to fail spectacularly when it's ignored or actively undermined.