What does it really cost to build a “customer-centric” public sector?

 

Governments around the world have embraced customer-centric culture as the solution to bureaucratic failure. Values like empathy, empowerment, and authenticity promise more humane institutions and better public trust.

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But what happens inside organisations that live these values every day?

Drawing on rare ethnographic insight from inside a flagship public institution, Living the DNA reveals how organisational culture works not just as a set of ideals, but as a powerful system that shapes emotion, identity, and behaviour at work.

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Dr Anna Kiaos shows how culture governs quietly — through belonging, recognition, performance, and care — and how the human costs of reform are often absorbed invisibly by workers themselves.

 

This book is not an attack on public servants or leaders. It is a careful, humane examination of what culture does when it is asked to carry reform.

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Written for smart general readers, policymakers, leaders, and anyone interested in work, power, and care, Living the DNA offers a new way to think about organisational culture — and why governing through meaning demands responsibility, not just values.