Government Executive - Authors - Bob Stone

Reinventing government: Reflections 30 years later

Bob Stone, Elaine C. Kamarck, and Morley Winograd — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 06:00:00 -0400

On Sept. 7, 1993, Vice President Al Gore presented his final report, “From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less” to President Bill Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House before his Cabinet, members of Congress, and hundreds of civil servants who helped craft the report and its recommendations.

Looking back, three of his top advisors reflect on the accomplishments of the Reinventing Government initiative and what they see as key management challenges looking ahead.

Elaine Kamarck served as a senior advisor to the vice president for Reinventing Government (1993-1997)
Bob Stone served as the initial project director and energizer-in-chief for the National Performance Review (1993-1998)
Morley Winograd served as director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (1997-2001)

What accomplishment are you most proud of from the National Performance Review?

Kamarck: I’m most proud of the fact that the reinventing government efforts of the Clinton years led the federal government’s transition into the information age. Whether it was slimming down layers of management, reforming procurement of information technology or focusing on customer service – most of those efforts remain today as standard operating procedures of the federal government.

Stone: I’m most proud of changing the culture of many of the government’s regulatory and enforcement agencies. They were all a little different, but they changed from being adversaries to being partners with the businesses and individuals they oversaw. Nobody at NPR invented, or conceived this change: renegades in the civil service were doing this out of the sight of their headquarters masters. Renegades like:

Lynn Gordon at Customs and Border Protection, who changed the Miami airport operation to distinguish between smugglers and law-abiding importers and travelers.
Bob Wenzel at the Internal Revenue Service, who changed the Fresno office to help taxpayers pay what they owed instead of treating all as likely cheats.
Joe Thompson at the Veterans Affairs Department who changed the New York office to treat vets as valued customers.
Marie Urban at the Food and Drug Administration, who taught her inspector force to help companies pass inspections.
Joan Hyatt at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who “signed up to protect the American worker,” and showed the agency how to do far better.
Marjorie Buckholtz at the Environmental Protection Agency, who returned former brownfields to productive use by substituting common sense for bureaucratic rigamarole.

NPR’s role in this great transformation was to find the renegades, show them off to the rest of government as true reinventors, get Vice President Gore to sprinkle his fairy dust over them and protect them and their initiatives from often hostile headquarters.

Winograd: Creating the first customer satisfaction measurements of the federal government’s performance in the nation’s history. Creating these measurements allowed us to reinforce the agency leader’s need to pay attention to how their services were being delivered from the customer’s point of view. It led to many changes in fundamental operations, such as the IRS moving to an all-electronic service capability and to Social Security Administration offices around the country making sure their waiting times were shorter.

As the Pew study on trust in government showed, these kinds of performance improvements are what builds trust in government, one day at a time. In today’s highly polarized and cynical world, it is essential that we do more of this type of constant measurements of customer satisfaction in the delivery of federal government services, to provide a foundation on which to build higher levels of trust in our democratic form of government.

Looking ahead, what do you think is the biggest management challenge facing the federal government?

Kamarck: I’m still bothered by the fact that everyone has to file income tax returns. Way back in 1994 we published a paper, written by Greg Woods, outlining how, for the vast majority of Americans, the government could reconcile their taxes with a postcard. Back then the technical challenges were big and the plan more of a pipe dream. But today there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go back to this goal and allow Americans to file taxes easily.

Stone: The biggest management challenge facing the federal government is to harness the talent and enthusiasm of its workforce. Every cabinet and subcabinet member needs to go see workers, in their workplaces, and ask what would make them happier and more effective in their work; then do what they say. Yogi Berra once wisely said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them." Yogi’s advice applies to workers, too: If workers don’t want to give their best, nobody’s gonna stop them. It’s the number one job of management to get them to want to give their best.”

Winograd: The biggest management challenge facing the federal government is bringing a greater sense of accountability at all levels of our government. The 1993 Government Performance and Results Act was implemented during my tenure as director of NPR, which was a good legislative framework to encourage a heightened sense of accountability for results on the part of government agencies, but it received only lip service from the leadership at the Office of Management and Budget, leaving the bureaucratic culture focused on inputs and activities instead of outputs and outcomes pretty much intact.

Even though President Bush’s OMB did better to focus agencies on their GPRA measurements, at the lower levels of the bureaucracy accountability remained pretty much a foreign virus that the culture rejected. It is good to see President Biden’s interest in making sure things get done based on his own experiences as vice president, but there is little public evidence that he is using his current chief of staff’s own track record of delivering results to reinforce the need for further cultural change from the top levels on down to the front lines of our federal government when it comes to accountability for results.

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John M. Kamensky served as a National Performance Review deputy director under all three of these advisors. He is a fellow with the National Academy of Public Administration and an Emeritus Fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government.

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Looking Out for No. 1

Bob Stone — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

For bosses, ethical behavior isn't just about right and wrong.

The news is full of stories of bad behavior by leaders caught treating their institution's assets as their own. The logic is simple: Bosses contribute more than their subordinates. Therefore not only must they be paid more, but also they must be nurtured, some might even call it spoiled. Their valuable time must be protected at all costs.

Consider Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. On a flight from Washington to Saudi Arabia during the buildup to the first Iraq war, there was a line to get into the bathroom. Since the general's time was so valuable, he had a major keep a place in line for him. When the major finally worked his way to the front, he stepped aside for the busy general.

The boss's time must be protected from intrusion so he can remain free to think. When Disney executives attended a corporate retreat at Walt Disney World, they were given a tour of the park by bus. But the private time of the company's president, Michael Ovitz, was so valuable that he rode by himself in a limousine.

Bosses need more privacy and more work space. So they often get large private offices with windows only they can enjoy. When I was setting up the National Performance Review in the early 1990s, of course I chose the corner office with windows that looked onto the White House. The light and the view were an added benefit beyond the space and privacy. They raised my spirits and, no doubt, my productivity. And because I was "enlightened," I allowed subordinates to eat lunch around my conference table when it wasn't in use.

All these examples are logical: They met the needs of the organizations. Schwarzkopf could plan a war, Ovitz could think Mouse-worthy thoughts, and I could envision a reinvented government. But this approach causes problems. Schwarzkopf and Ovitz were damaging their reputations for common sense, and I was satisfying my own needs but not my subordinates'.

Ethics isn't always about choosing between right and wrong. More often, it's between two different rights or two different wrongs. In an enterprise, it's often about choosing between human needs and organizational ones.

Good government leaders are no different from good corporate leaders. When I was an engineer at Garrett-AiResearch Corp. in the 1960s, CEO Harry Wetzel waited in the same cafeteria line as everybody else, ate the same food and sat at the same picnic benches. The workers saw that Harry-as everyone called him-didn't think he was any better than they. Higher ranking, harder working and much better paid, yes, but a better person? Certainly not.

A more subtle conflict between human and organizational needs involves privacy. Bosses need privacy so they can counsel subordinates and hold meetings. My private office also made it easy for me to speak to my doctor or to my wife about family plans. But bosses have no more need or right to privacy than anybody else when it comes to health and family issues.

A simple formula for dealing with these challenges comes from Jim McConnell, former Navy Seabee commander and now head of construction for the huge Los Angeles Unified School District. He taught incoming Seabee commanders-bosses all:

You're there to serve, not to be served.
Command is a privilege in itself.
Don't make a big deal out of other privileges.
It's not your outfit, it's just in your trust.

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Lead or Follow?

Bob Stone — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

In every organization, there are individuals who are both. Even Cabinet members, who are in major leadership roles, are part of the president's team.

These people face an inherent conflict of roles: They are expected to follow the norms of team behavior, while leaders must violate at least some norms as they lead. At the Pentagon, where I was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for installations, my desire to lead change often conflicted with the department's norms.

It was good practice, for example, to ignore the norm about checking everything with the General Counsel's Office, because most of its attorneys were ingenious at finding reasons for not doing what I wanted to do.

The most serious norm--preserving Pentagon prerogatives--was strangling the military. The Pentagon exercised extraordinary control over commanders, severely limiting how they could spend their budgets, and even specifying thermostat settings thousands of miles from Washington. I replaced a 380-page rule book with a four-pager that clearly put base commanders in charge. It was exceedingly unpopular throughout the Pentagon.

I compounded this norm-breaking approach by establishing the Model Installations Program, which delegated to base commanders vastly more authority.

My team was flourishing, growing in authority, job satisfaction and effectiveness. But, for the most part, members of my team-senior Pentagon executives-were displeased with me for diluting prerogatives.

My dilemma wasn't unusual-all leaders face it. Leadership often requires changing, not following, organizational norms.

In the early days of the reinventing government effort, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros led the Cabinet in transforming his department. He visited field offices to learn what was getting in their way. He sat at workers' desks and personally did front-line work. This earned him much praise from President Clinton and Vice President Gore, but some resentment from the rest of the Cabinet.

Cisneros was resolved to be a change leader, and persisted in that course with considerable success.

But faced with the choice between being a leader or a team player, many will choose loyalty to teammates. One example is when Congress freed several Defense laboratories from staffing limits in 1999. If a lab had money, then it could hire. Congress believed this flexi-bility would increase effectiveness. But lawmakers had not reckoned with the strong pull of team loyalty.

One of the universal norms of Defense teams is "no special treatment." So, the lab directors declined to exploit the opportunity. One said, "If I use my authority to hire more, it could mean that the other directors can hire fewer. It wouldn't be fair." The experiment was a flop.

What's the best way to negotiate a path between the obligations of team leadership and team membership? There's no simple answer. If the norms are disregarded, the organization disintegrates. But when they are followed slavishly, as so often happens at the Pentagon, they ensure the status quo. An old saying from the quality management movement captures it perfectly: "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got."

To lead an organization to change, executives have to break the norms. Since change requires speed, they must do it with some impatience.

If they do it with sensitivity, executives can lead change without destroying team relationships. They must explain just what they're up to and why. They should seek team members' advice on better ways to accomplish the goal with minimal damage to norms. Leaders must appreciate the team's contribution to the mission.

But be prepared to be considered by at least some teammates a maverick, a loose cannon, or worse. For, as Machiavelli wrote: "There is nothing more difficult . . . than the introduction of a new order of things."

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Team Spirit

Bob Stone — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Leaders must decide which norms to follow and which to break.

Can a good leader be a good team player?

In every organization, there are individuals who are both. Even Cabinet members, who are in major leadership roles, are part of the president's team.

The most serious norm-preserving Pentagon prerogatives-was strangling the military. The Pentagon exercised extraordinary control over commanders, severely limiting how they could spend their budgets, and even specifying thermostat settings thousands of miles from Washington. I replaced a 380-page rule book with a four-pager that clearly put base commanders in charge. It was exceedingly unpopular throughout the Pentagon.

I compounded this norm-breaking approach by establishing the Model Installations Program, which delegated to base commanders vastly more authority.

My dilemma wasn't unusual-all leaders face it. Leadership often requires changing, not following, organizational norms.

Cisneros was resolved to be a change leader, and persisted in that course with considerable success.

To lead an organization to change, executives have to break the norms. Since change requires speed, they must do it with some impatience.

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Lessons From a Polite Revolutionary

Bob Stone — Sat, 01 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Be Pleasant

You're going to need a lot of help, so if you're not naturally pleasant, fake it. It'll soon become natural.

At the National Partnership for Reinventing Government I bought an espresso machine and made cappuccino for people. Nobody ever thought I was too busy to listen if the news was bad-or better yet, if it was good. After all, I had plenty of time to make cappuccino, didn't I? Being pleasant can start a virtuous circle-people respond by being pleasant to you and to others.

Be Trusting

People who are trusted are happier and more productive-and more trustworthy.

At the reinventing government summit in 1993, Patrick Mene, vice president of the Ritz Carlton hotel chain, told Vice President Al Gore that Ritz trusts every employee to spend $2,000 on behalf of a customer, no questions asked. Gore asked what Ritz did if they caught somebody abusing the trust. Mene answered, "I don't know. We never have."

At NPR, staffers could travel whenever and wherever they chose, with no approval. If somebody ever took a trip that wasn't necessary, the cost would have paled next to the benefit in spirit that came from people feeling trusted.

Don't waste energy on people who aren't both trusting and trustworthy, and don't keep them in your organization.

Be Bold

Leadership is about causing others to go somewhere different. So if you're a leader you've got to move. But moving can get you into trouble, and people will try to protect you by advising you to stay out of trouble. So make sure you have people on your team who will keep you from staying out of trouble.

When President Clinton announced that the government would hire people on welfare as an example to business, the experts said it couldn't be done. They cited veterans preference, the lack of skills and work habits of the potential hires, and so forth. But Susan Valaskovic, deputy director of the NPR, was an expert at not staying out of trouble and volunteered to lead the effort. She created a lot of extra work and controversy for us, but we hired 10,000 people from the welfare rolls within three years-all because Susan wouldn't let us stay out of trouble.

Be Uplifting

A simple word or phrase can inspire people to lie awake at night figuring out how to do their work better. It works at all levels, from entire agencies to teams of just a few people.

At the Office of Student Financial Assistance, Greg Woods now has 6,000 enthusiastic people who don't just do their jobs-they "help put America through school." At the Patent and Trademark Office, Jean Logan convinced her small team of employees that they weren't just registering trademarks; rather they were "promoting the economic vitality of American businessmen and women." People will toil grudgingly to cut stone, but they'll put their hearts and bodies into building castles.

Be Positive

Look for things that go right and build on them. At NPR we discovered the successful collaboration between U.S. Customs and the air cargo industry that was speeding innocent shipments through while reducing drug smuggling. We spent gobs of time and effort building on this success until it became the foundation of NPR's entire effort to reinvent regulatory agencies.

Be positive in your dealings with people, too. When you must criticize, begin by acknowledging some value in what you're criticizing. If it's somebody's honest effort it shouldn't be too hard.

And say "thank you." It'll astonish people. I once wrote a short thank you note to the secretary to the Secretary of Defense. She walked half way around the Pentagon (a long way) to thank me and to tell me it was the first time in 30 years of government service that anyone had thanked her for anything.

Be Unreasonable

Gen. Bill Creech, former commander of the Air Force's Tactical Air Command, was so unreasonable about base appearance that he insisted on fresh paint everywhere. A Defense Department inspector general told me that they had found a crazy general (Creech) wasting the special readiness appropriation painting the backs of stop signs. Visitors to Creech's home post, Langley Air Force Base, were warned, "Keep moving or somebody will slap some paint on you."

Creech's fanaticism made it clear to everyone in his 100,000-person command that he was absolutely, unreasonably committed to excellence. His transformation of the TAC culture is widely credited for the Air Force's spectacular success in the Gulf War.

Be Clear

Defense has thousands of pages of rules and procedures about how to run military bases. Managers were going in all directions-spending more, spending less, increasing quality, scrimping on quality. Then I issued a one-page document called "Principles of Excellent Installations," calling for excellent living and working conditions for service members.

Everywhere I went, I preached the principles. Some people thought I was boring, and my boss thought I was stubborn. But when you're perfectly clear and the message has gotten through, wonderful things start to happen.

Marine Corps civilian Dick McSeveny's refusal to count rundown spaces in an annual inventory of barracks is just one example. McSeveny was holding out for excellence, and when pressed by military auditors, he cited my principles to justify his action. The auditors urged me to tell McSeveny to count the barracks, which met the traditional Marine standard of minimally acceptable. Instead I sent a note to the Marine commandant, applauding McSeveny's commitment to the principles for improving quality of life for Marines.

Think Three

Clarity and repetition aren't enough if the message is too complicated, and most people have difficulty remembering more than three things. West Point's values are "duty, honor, country." The three rules of real estate value are "location, location, location."

When I first met with Vice President Gore, I told him my three rules for changing huge organizations, and he embraced them:

Have a simple, uplifting message that you repeat over and over.
Use colorful stories in plain English, with props, to make your goals clear.
Praise and reward people who are doing what you want, and don't waste one minute looking around for fraud, waste or abuse. In this article I've listed seven things. You'll never remember them, so I'll rearrange them into three:
Be pleasant, trusting, and bold.
Be uplifting and positive with others.
Be unreasonable and clear about your principles.

Bob Stone, a Public Strategies Group partner, was project director and energizer in chief of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government from 1993 to 1999. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Polite Revolutionary: Lessons from an Uncivil Servant. ]]>

Keep on Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Bob Stone and Babak Armajani — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400

letters@govexec.com

n his column, "The Last Word," Paul Light argued that the federal government's recent customer satisfaction survey was unnecessary ("Which Customer Is Right?" February). We think some of his criticisms of the survey are valid but that his conclusion is wrong. In this distinction lies a lesson for the National Partnership for Reinventing Government on how to improve the next round of surveys.

Several years ago, a state government executive was diligently promoting customer service in his organization, which included the centralized motor pool of state vehicles. The executive visited fleet headquarters to review customer service initiatives. The fleet director told the story of a state car that was returned to the motor pool strewn with refuse from a visit to McDonald's. "What did you do?" inquired the executive, expecting-or at least hoping-to hear that the car was thoroughly cleaned and readied for another customer. "We gathered up all the junk from McDonald's," proudly replied the director, "boxed it, and sent it to the guy who made the mess, informing him that the vehicle is state property and should be treated with more care."

Who is the motor pool there to serve? Before one can pursue a strategy of customer service, one must decide who is the customer.

In choosing a customer to be surveyed, some federal agencies missed the chance to measure their largest group of constituents or the ones most central to their mission. Our friend Paul Light complains that some agencies picked easy-to-please customers, noting for instance, that the Education Department picked primary users of department publications, not teachers or parents, and the Environmental Protection Agency picked reference librarians. On the other hand, as he points out, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration picked harder-to-please customers-the principal targets of their regulatory activities. Others chose to survey the principal beneficiaries of their service. The Veterans Benefits Administration, for example, surveyed a random sample of veterans, knowing that in many cases the VBA has to say no to veterans' requests. It's no surprise that Education and EPA received much higher customer ratings than FAA, OSHA and VBA.

Yet scrapping the customer survey is not the answer. On the contrary, we think it should be enhanced and vigorously pursued. Three lessons can improve the survey process. All three involve making a more careful choice about what customers to survey.

LESSON NO. 1:
Distinguish between an agency's stakeholders, on the one hand, and its customers, on the other. Stakeholders are people or groups that hold a vital interest in how the agency does its job. These include constituent interest groups, congressional oversight committees, and the general public, as well as customers and employees. But customers are the people who actually engage in transactions with the agency. To evaluate agency performance, survey its customers.

LESSON NO. 2:
Survey your main customers. Paul Light says a flaw in using customer satisfaction to measure performance is that there's no such thing as a single government customer. Heck no, that's not the flaw; the flaw is picking just a single government customer to survey.

Most agencies have many groups of customers, often with conflicting interests. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, simultaneously serves recreational, forestry and mining interests. Veterans Benefits surveys customers for all its services, from home loans to vocational rehabilitation services. It even surveys customers who were turned down for benefits. And Student Financial Assistance is expanding its use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (the survey instrument the National Partnership for Reinventing Government used). Last year they surveyed students who applied for loans-their principal intended beneficiaries. Next year they'll also survey college-aid officers, high school guidance counselors and financial institutions that make student loans.

LESSON NO. 3:
Distinguish between customers to whom an agency is primarily delivering a service-like students getting aid-and customers to whom an agency delivers an obligation-like taxpayers obliged by the Internal Revenue Service to pay their taxes. Many agencies deliver both an obligation and a service. Treating the individual citizen respectfully and responsively (i.e., with great service) is critical. Doing so is the most effective, least expensive way to deliver the obligation. So for sure, survey those who are obliged, whether by the IRS, OSHA, EPA, FAA or the other agencies. But we might expect satisfaction ratings lower than those from customers who are using a service of the federal government.

Identifying customers and regularly measuring their satisfaction serves three important purposes:

It gives agencies a clear focus.
It provides a strong vehicle for holding agencies accountable.
It provides agencies with feedback crucial to improving their services.
Focus, accountability and feedback are strong levers for reinventing government. The federal government should continue this worthwhile initiative. And agencies should take seriously the choice of customers to survey.

Babak Armajani is CEO of the Public Strategies Group Inc. Bob Stone, now a partner in PSG, was project director and energizer in chief of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government from 1993 to 1999.

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