Letters

I read with interest the article in the September issue titled "Anxiety Abroad," and was particularly dismayed by the author's comment that Foreign Service officers reported that "State Department management is equally to blame . . . for allowing non-Foreign Service civil service to hold higher positions." This suggests a view that career civil service employees should not be permitted to hold higher level positions because of the possible impact on Foreign Service careers. As the department's ombudsman for civil service employees, I must take issue with that statement. While I can understand the anxieties of the Foreign Service regarding the impact of budget reductions on their careers-anxieties shared by the civil service-the pertinent challenge is how to ensure that all employees, civil service as well as Foreign Service, are given the opportunity and encouragement to realize their full potential to contribute to the department's mission. If that is what management is being "blamed" for, I believe praise, rather than disdain, is in order.

Ted A. Berek
State Department
Washington

Not in the Job Description

The title of the article "Like Parent, Like Boss" (July) clearly states what the real problem is-too many bosses see their jobs (or are told by senior managers) as "parenting" their subordinates. Instead of participating, they monitor, hover, interfere and then punish when it all goes wrong. Subordinates should act like adults and come up with some new ideas. Maybe there's a reason they don't express new ideas. Considering my experience-laughter, snide comments and public ridicule-I doubt seriously anyone but a masochist would voice new ideas.

Another point is to blame the employee for failing to "anticipate the skill sets," but training is frowned on and under the control of management. Fortunately, one person noted in the article that federal employees "slack off" because "something is wrong with the system," and agencies would rather write them off than admit management is at fault.

Federal managers should quit blaming individuals and examine the systems that created the problem. There are many real-world examples that managers can draw on. Buy a clue, folks. If your subordinates are not the problem, maybe it's the way you manage.

Curtis Rapp
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Atlanta, Ga.

Virtual Conferencing

What an outrage that OMB Director Alice Rivlin and entourage should travel to Paris at taxpayers' expense for an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development gabfest ("Global Governing," September). Jonathan Bruel's report, littered with tired buzzwords and cliches, proves that the assembled functionaries produced nothing worth the cost of transatlantic air travel and Paris hotel accommodations.

After the well-publicized and prolonged travel budget abuses of Energy Department Secretary Hazel O'Leary, I had hoped there might be a curtailment of the unnecessary travel and peripatetic conferencing by Cabinet officials. False hopes. Globe-trotting boondoggles and junkets are still the fashion, despite pious twaddle about "downsizing" in government.

Memo for Alice Rivlin: In the pages of Government Executive and elsewhere, you could learn to confer electronically with your foreign colleagues, from your desktop in Washington. Move e-mail messages and draft white papers to Paris via the Internet, but not your expensive selves.

Robert Fairchild
Colonel, Army National Guard, Retired
Hampton, Va.

A Proud Veteran

Just wanted to drop a line letting you know I enjoyed the August issue, especially "Selling the Services." In the Florida Panhandle, recruiters placed 90 percent of the males graduating from my high school in the 1970s into all branches of the service, partly due to long traditions of military service in the area and mostly because it was the best way to achieve a future.

I routinely encourage teen-agers from the local area to enlist, however problems exist-from image to parents' resistance and a lack of direction from the teen-agers themselves. The services have a serious problem to overcome for all the reasons listed in the article. A lot of the emphasis on military service has disappeared, but I wear the title of "veteran" proudly.

Randall Carpenter
PEO Missile Defense Test Support Division
Huntsville, Ala.

Wanted: NEW LEADERSHIP

I read with great interest Mark Abramson's article "In Search of the New Leadership" (September), regarding the new leadership needed by the government. I fully agree with the Brookings Institution book Civil Service Reform: Building a Government That Works, that says the civil service system recruits and rewards specialists and its stovepipe career development pattern promotes narrow specialization, not general management competence.

Reading the requirements that are part of any SES vacancy announcement, it is clear agencies are not looking for skilled generalist managers, they are looking for specialists. To carry the concept even further, a resume search of many political appointees would probably reveal little management experience considering the positions the appointees hold. I wonder if the Office of Personnel Management reads any of the latest research, such as the Brookings book, and ever takes steps to correct the SES system to recruit skilled leaders with extensive management training and experience.

Dana Lakeman
Federal Aviation Administration

Needs a Head

Savings programs, as Ted Cocca mentioned in his September letter to the editor, have been in use in the federal government for several years now. It seems that it's up to each agency to decide if they want to use such a program. I have tried unsuccessfully for the last two years to get my agency to adopt the GSA Travel Gain Shares Program, where each traveler splits 50-50 with the government the money saved on TDY travel. This program also includes other types of incentives for the traveler to save the government money on travel expenses.

When government agencies choose to go against the new ways of doing business, such as by electing not to adopt a proven approach to saving money, unfortunately, they show the public that while some things change others remain the same.

Merrill D. Billups
Quality Insurance Director
Defense Logistics Agency
Marietta, Ga.

A Profitable Solution

Michael Hammer's description of the modern organization is certainly believable for the private sector, but it cannot be directly applied to the federal bureaucracy simply because of the difference in incentives. Primarily the private sector organization must be profitable (productive) or it will die, but who has ever heard of a federal agency that had to make a profit to succeed? Productivity is simply an abstraction in the federal sector.

Perhaps a key to this problem is provided by John Kamensky when he says that public sector organizations must distance themselves from traditional accountability to the President and Congress. (Mr. Kamensky also cites OMB and GAO but these are simply extensions of the President and Congress respectively).This distancing can only be done through less reliance on the federal budget as a source of operating funds, and more reliance on outside income, such as user fees. But Congress is unhappy with the concept of user fees because it makes the agencies more independent.

I envision a successful government organization that would rely totally on user fees (no appropriated funds). It is only at this point where the true customers' (taxpayers') wishes can be dominant. It is also at this point that the government organization can realize its ultimate goal of independence by becoming a private sector organization. This is true downsizing of government.

James Champy describes several changed organizations which he cites as evidence of progress toward reinvention. In reality these are examples of stagnation. The government bureaucracy is very adept at defeating change strategies. When forced into "change" the bureaucracy makes peripheral changes which appear to be compliance but instead are a measured type of resistance to change. David Osborne called them "islands of innovation in a sea of bureaucracy." Like true islands they are isolated from the main organization to assure that their new cultural norms do not infect the organization as a whole. The bureaucratic strategy is to isolate them so that when this exercise is over the organization can remove the "island" and go back to "business as usual."

These examples do not show evidence of organization-wide cultural changes which would be required for long-term change.

David Osborne does not take into consideration the fact that political appointees may want change, but their career managers do not. Why would a careerist want to change a system in which they already succeed and supplant it with an organization in which they many not succeed? The strategy of the career manager is then to create these "islands of innovation in a sea of bureaucracy" so that when the political appointees leave (and they always do) the organization will be preserved to operate as it always has.

You may think that my analysis of these articles and strategies is cynical, but look at all of the change rhetoric of the past 50 years, and the results. Nothing has changed. Reinvention is seen by the career bureaucrats as just another storm to weather.

Do any of these authors realize that there is no law that requires federal bureaucrats to obey the law, especially the laws dealing with federal management? No one goes to jail for a failure to comply. At the worst a manager may get a slap on the wrist from a career executive, but usually noncompliance is followed by promotion as a reward for loyalty to the organization's "code of honor." It does not matter that the "code" violates the law.

Changing the federal bureaucracy requires more dramatic, forceful strategies for systemic change than those advocated by these authors. The private sector is vastly different from the federal bureaucracy.

Robert E. Rieck
Meteorologist
National Weather Service Forecast Office
Sterling, Va.