The first rule of thumb for starting the overhaul process that is so needed at Turtle Bay is simple: Exclude the word “reform” from its vocabulary.

U.N. leaders and their cheerleaders have been on a reform course for decades, as the institution became less efficient, more corrupt, and ever friendlier to the world’s bad guys.

Ten years ago, a new reformer was hailed as a man who grew up in the institution and knew its ills so well that only he could cure them. Secretary-General Annan ended up preserving Turtle Bay’s worst aspects and blocking any hope of bringing out its best.

Rather than hiring capable and independent managers, Mr. Annan appointed top executives that either climbed the bureaucratic ladder along with him or who were imposed by outside interests, such as the likes of Richard Holbrooke, George Soros, and Maurice Strong.

During his tenure at the top, which will end this month, Mr. Annan’s plans for reform followed a familiar pattern: establish a committee to produce an ambitious plan; make a keynote speech laying out an ambitious plan; blame “member states” or America once that ambitious plan falls apart.

While very little outside attention was paid to Mr. Annan’s earlier reform attempts, they were all the rage once the oil-for-food scandals hit the world press. The more scandalous oil for food, the more ambitious the promises of reform became.

As the Volcker report concluded its devastating verdict on the way the U.N. secretariat conducted its business, Mr. Annan published the ultimate reform blueprint, a booklet titled “In Larger Freedom.” During a September 2005 world summit, Mr. Annan was eager to turn the corner and talk of reform. When I posited an oil-for-food question at that time, he advised me, to loud cheers from his aides, to “move on, my dear chap.”

The verdict on the three most important ideas in Mr. Annan’s latest, and final, reform plan is now in: Neither achieved its goals.

The first — making the Security Council more representative of the 21st-century than of 1950 — was pronounced dead on arrival. Regional rivalries killed any attempt to add members to the council, which would be much better off at a smaller size than a larger one.

The second, abolishing the U.N.’s discredited Human Rights Commission and replacing it with a smaller, less political, and more accountable council, is a disaster. Since its establishment last summer, the council was very active in exposing real and imagined Israeli sins, and even more active in ignoring them everywhere else. Even Mr. Annan has noticed the absurdity, and last week, he expressed his disappointment.

Much less scrutinized was a third reform pillar: an attempt to create a new bureaucracy for an organization that has too many. The Peace-Building Commission was created to assist “reconstruction, institution-building, and sustainable development in countries emerging from conflict.”

A U.N. alphabet soup that includes ECOSOC, DESA, and UNDP already deals with similar issues. How effectively? A series of articles by Inner City Press blogger Matthew Russell Lee — which may be found at innercitypress.com/undp120206.html — will hopefully increase scrutiny of inadequacies at the U.N. Development Program. The others do not fare much better.

Meanwhile, Mr. Annan’s new Peace-Building Commission was somehow hailed as a huge reform success. Was it? So far, the countries represented on the commission have inconclusively argued about everything from which of them would lead the new effort, to how to get the General Assembly to approve its budget. A year after its establishment, to borrow a recent election phrase, the commission is yet to agree on how to measure the new office curtains.

The secretariat hoped for a $250 million budget for its shiny new commission. Washington, which is highly skeptical of the project, declined funding. The commission had to make do with mere $60 million, which it decided to invest in Burundi and Sierra Leone.

There are no sufficient controls in place, however, to prevent money invested in Burundi from disappearing in the country’s institutional chaos, or to assure that Sierra Leone’s ruling party would not use the funds to assure victory in next June’s election.

Why would anyone familiar with Turtle Bay think that just because a certain goal is noble, a new bureaucracy would help it?

A new secretary-general, Ban Kimoon, will be sworn in next week. By the end of December he will hopefully have a team of capable operators in place. You will know that he is doomed the minute that he presents his first U.N. reform plan.