President-elect Donald Trump won this election in part due to his outsider’s perspective and promise to change Washington by running it like one of his successful, profitable businesses. It’s clear the American people want a change – so why not use a proven framework that has consistently produced results?
By using a three-step framework commonly used in for-profit businesses, Trump could turn the United States of America Corp. into a productive, streamlined corporation.
The first step would be to view government not from a structural perspective; such as we view the House, Senate, Supreme Court, federal departments, policies and programs. Rather, our government would be viewed from a process perspective that most businesses use. The process revolution was made popular with Michael Hammer’s 1993 bestseller, Re-engineering the Corporation. Mr. Hammer urged corporations to blow up their functions and lay over them dynamic processes. But the first attempts to view businesses as a group of processes came from the consulting firm the Thomas Group in the early 1980s. When I was employed as a consultant there from 1996 to 1999, firms like Siemens Lighting, Moore Business Forms and many others transformed themselves from having elements of being slow and cumbersome to being fast and agile.
In businesses, functional areas include sales, marketing, manufacturing, after-sales service, logistics and human resources to name a few key processes. A process is aimed at aiding customer satisfaction. So let’s say in a for-profit business we want to focus on the Customer Order Fulfillment Process. This process touches all of the above functions. The neat thing about a process is that its cycle time can be measured and improved, along with the amount of re-work in a process, which can be measured and improved also.
A key government process could be the Constituent Need Fulfillment process, with measures of cycle time and re-work to fulfill the needs and wants of taxpayers. Other key processes would need to be named and mapped out for their process flows and value-add. A key part of process discipline is to identify the barriers that are getting in the way causing slowness and re-work and to remove them quickly. There is an entire science of barrier identification and removal. Amazon is excellent at this.
We would also need to change the political culture in Washington. Constituents are sick of both major parties playing the blame game. We need the various parties and the Supreme Court for checks and balances and for healthy competition of philosophies. The blame game, created in part by career politicians, creates a culture where delay and animosity seem to thrive. We need to replace this culture with a culture of a “transparent meritocracy.”
The key to this culture is that inefficient and ineffective processes are to blame for lack of constituent satisfaction, not elected and appointed people who can take criticism personally and dig in their heels causing delay. These elected and appointed people would collectively take on the transparent accountability for the great improvements in process cycle time (make them speedy) and re-work (make this much less). Re-work is frustrating for everyone, especially the constituents who need to be served. Look at the issues in the Veterans Administration for example. Long wait times for our veterans still plaque that organization even after a change in leadership. Bad processes will “trump” good leaders almost every time.
The third step involves the formulation of a National Competitive Strategy (NCS). This is not national policy, but a united strategy that would enable the strengthening of “clusters” of free enterprise that are already strong and create a process to enable new clusters to form. A cluster is taken from the groundbreaking work of Harvard University’s Dr. Michael Porter in his 1990 book, “The Competitive Advantage of Nations”. He says that a cluster is a geographical group of enterprises that have gained national and in some cases global competitive and comparative advantage. Examples are the leisure cluster around New Orleans, the venture capital clusters in Silicon Valley and in Boston, the wine cluster in California and many others. Which new clusters could and should be enabled by the NCS? (Please read Porter’s keynote during the 2014 Inner City Symposium entitled, “U.S. Competitiveness and Implications for Our Economic Future”.
I have been sketching a complete framework for all of this by adapting my Business Performance Engine for for-profit business over to government improvement and I call it simply the Government Performance Engine.
As one aspect of the NCS, I would suggest setting up a national investment exchange where any citizen could contribute as an investor. In 2013, the over-18 population was nearly 250 million people. If 100 million of those people would invest just $5 a year, that would yield $500 million in one year and $2 trillion in four years. Mr. Trump plans to repatriate corporate profits lost to overseas and these could also partially fund this exchange, if this all of this money is not needed for infrastructure improvement. So could private investment. A revolving panel of business leaders would chair this exchange and oversee the government’s enablement of resource allocation to current advantaged clusters and develop a process for vetting new clusters. Citizen investors would get a return on their investment. They would also have insight into skills that are needed to beef up the current advantaged clusters and have an early warning of the skills needed for the new clusters. This exchange and its oversight leaders would enable private enterprise to set up training for these skills. Workers left behind by fading industries could be retrained and gain good employment.
Government viewed as processes, not functions, a culture of a “transparent meritocracy” and the formulation of a NCS are three parts of an approach for serious government improvement. This may seem Pollyannaish, but it is doable if we want to do it. America can be made Greater, not just Great Again.
Dr. William Bigler is the founder and CEO of Bill Bigler Associates, He is the former MBA Program Director at Louisiana State University at Shreveport and was the President of the Board of Strategic Planning in 2012 and served on the Board of Advisors for Nitro Security Inc. from 2003-2005. He has worked in the strategy departments of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Hay Group, Ernst & Young and the Thomas Group. He can be reached at bill@billbigler.com or www.billbigler.com.