The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?
UPDATE: This week’s Economist (March 17) has a great special report on the future of the state that you can download here, entitled”Taming Leviathan: The state almost everywhere is big, inefficient and broke. It needn’t be,” which has many rich examples, from California to China, and espouses a bunch of these ideas.
I usually try to keep politics away from this blog, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I’m so disgusted with the dysfunction in Washington (and Albany…and Sacramento…and…) these days, that I’ve spent more spare cycles than usual thinking about the symptoms, their root causes, and potential solutions. A typical entrepreneur’s approach, I guess. So here’s my initial cut at a few solutions.
I’m sure it’s incomplete, and it’s possibly overly simplistic. While I think it’s a pretty pragmatic and non-partisan approach, I’m guessing people will have visceral political opinions about it. Here are five things I’d like to see that I think will start us on the road to repair:
- Nonpartisan redistricting: All districts at all levels of government should be drawn by nonpartisan commissions. There is no reason to create “safe” seats and uncompetitive elections that drive candidates to extreme positions in order to win primaries. All of that is undemocratic. I hope California’s proposition that creates this kind of solution works and is copied.
- Public finance of campaigns: This will have to come with a constitutional amendment limiting free speech when it comes to political campaigns, but we should be prepared as a society to limit freedom in that one narrow way in order to remove money from politics. This topic just keeps coming up, from both the left and the right (think about the examples of Wall Street donations impacting financial reform on one side and public sector union political contributions impacting negotiations with states and cities on the other).
- Presidential line-item veto: Its constitutionality may be in question, but this would give the President a more granular form of one check-and-balance he already has and could greatly help reduce wasteful spending as well as simplify legislation (more on that in a minute).
- Auto-expiration of tax/spend bills: I found the debate over the expiration or extension of the “Bush tax cuts” to be enlightening. Maybe some class of tax/spend bills — those over a certain dollar figure, those that create entitlements, though that involve government subsidies to industry — should be forced to be renewed every 5 or 10 years instead of being “evergreen” so that the debate can reoccur in light of changes in circumstance. How many other things are “on the books” in ways that don’t make sense in today’s world?
- Simplicity of legislation: The health care reform bill was 1,990 pages long according to the pdf I just downloaded, and few if any in Congress actually read the whole thing. They even admitted it AT THE TIME. Is this a smart way to govern? Whether voluntarily or via constitutional amendment, Congress should consider only passing single-issue bills and maybe even limiting the size of any given piece of legislation to something that at least THEY THEMSELVES ARE ABLE TO READ.
These things should do a lot to ease legislative gridlock, relieve bitter partisan rancor, and remove some of the silly parliamentary manoeuvrings that plague our government today. Whether or not they can systematically deal with elected officials’ unwillingness to tackle hard problems and penchant for personal deal-making and runaway deficit spending is another question.
My personal belief is that country could stand some form of a new Constitutional Convention to critically review our society and its governance after almost 250 years. I love our Constitution and think it was wisely laid out as the foundation for what has become one of the world’s greatest and most enduring nations…but that doesn’t mean that the Founders, who lived in a very, very different time, had perfect vision for all eternity.
I wrote part I of this post in 2011, and I feel even more strongly about it today. I generally keep this blog away from politics (don’t we have enough of that running around?), but periodically, I find some common sense, centrist piece of information worth sharing. In this case, I just read a great and very short book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, that, if you care about the polarization and fractiousness going on in our country now, you’d appreciate.
If nothing else, the shattered norms and customs of the last several years should point people to the fact that our Constitution needs some revision. Not a massive structural overhaul, but some changes on the margin to keep it fresh, as we approach its 250th anniversary in the next couple decades.
Book Short: Wither the Team
I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link).
I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
- Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
So far the series includes:
I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Book Short: Fixing America
I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished.
There is much that is good about America. And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair. I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much. Tom Friedman, with whom I usually agree a lot, but only in part, nailed it in his latest book. Instead of blaming one party or the other (he points the finger at both!), he blames our overall system, and our will as a people, for the country’s current problems.
The authors talk about the four challenges facing America today – globalization, the IT revolution, deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change, and about how the interplay of those four challenges are more long term and less obvious than challenges we’ve faced as a country in the past, like World Wars or The Great Depression, or even The Great Recession. The reason, according to the authors, that we have lost our way a bit in the last 20-40 years, is that we have strayed from the five-point formula that has made us successful for the bulk of our history:
- Providing excellent public education for more and more Americans
- Building and continually modernizing our infrastructure
- Keeping America’s doors to immigration open
- Government support for basic research and development
- Implementation of necessary regulations on private economic activity
It’s hard not to be in violent agreement with the book as a normal person with common sense. Even the last point of the five-point formula, which can rankle those on the right, makes sense when you read the specifics. And the authors rail against excessive regulation enough in the book to give them credibility on this point.
The authors’ description of the labor market of the future and how we as a country can be competitive in it is quite well thought through. And they have some other great arguments to make – for example, about how the prior decade of wars was, for the first time in American history, not accompanied by tax increases and non-essential program cuts; or about how we can’t let ourselves be held hostage to AARP and have “funding old age” trump “funding youth” at every turn.
The one thing I disagree with a bit is the authors’ assertion that “we cannot simply cut our way to fiscal sanity.” I saw a table in the Wall Street Journal the same day I was reading this book that noted the federal budget has grown from $2.6T in 2007 to $3.6T today – 40% in four years! Sure sounds to me like mostly a spending program, though I do support closing loopholes, eliminating subsidies, and potentially some kind of energy tax for other reasons.
I’ll save their solution for those who read the book. It’s not as good as the meat of the book itself, but it’s solid, and it actually mirrors something my dad has been talking about for a while now. If you care about where we are as a country and how we can do better, read this book!
Self-Discipline: Broken Windows Applied to You
Just as my last post about New Shoes was touching a bit of a nerve around, as one friend put it, "mental housecleaning," my colleague Angela pointed me to a great post on a blog I've never seen before ("advice at the intersection of work and life" — I just subscribed), called How to Have More Self-Discipline. Man, is that article targeted at me, especially about working out.
I think the author is right — more discipline around the edges does impact happiness. But it also impacts productivity. Not just because working out gives you more energy. Because having your act together in small ways makes you feel like you have your act together in all ways. As the author notes (without this specific analogy), it's a little like the "broken windows" theory of policing. You crack down on graffiti and broken windows, you stop more violent crime, in part because the same people commit small and large crimes, in part because you create a more orderly society in visible, if sometimes a bit small and symbolic, ways.
I agree that the best example in the "non work" world is fitness. But what about the "work world"? What's relevant around self-discipline for professionals? Consider these examples:
– A clean inbox at the end of the day. Yes, it's the David Allen theory of workplace productivity which I espouse, but it does actually work. A clean mind is free to think, dream, solve problems. The quickest path to keeping it clean is not having a pile of little things to deal with in front of it, taking up space
– Showing up on time. It may sound dumb, but people who are chronically late to meetings are constantly behind. The day is spent rushing around, cutting conversations short — in other words, unhappy and not as productive. The discipline of ending meetings on time with enough buffer to travel or even just prepare for the next meeting so you can start it on time (and not waste the time of the other people in the meeting) is important. Have too many meetings that you can't be at all of them on time? Say no to some — or make them shorter to force efficiency. There's nothing wrong with a 10-minute meeting
– Dressing for success. We live in a casual world, especially in our industry. I admit, once in a while I wear jeans or a Hawaiian shirt to work — even shorts if it's a particularly hot and humid day. (And even in New York, not just in Boulder.) But no matter what you wear, you can make sure you look neat and professional, not sloppy. Skip the ripped jeans or faded/frayed/rock concert t-shirt. Tuck in the shirt if it's that kind of shirt, and wear a belt. The discipline of "dressing up" carries productivity a long way. Want to really test this out at the edges? Try wearing a suit or tie one day to work. You feel different, and you sound different
– Doing your expenses. Honestly, I've never seen an area where more smart and conscientious people fall apart than producing a simple expense report. Come up with a system for it — do one every week, every trip on the plane home, every time you have an expense — and just take the 5 minutes and finish it off. Sure, expenses are a pain, but they only really become a pain and a millstone around your brain when you let them sit for months because you "don't have time" to fill them out, then you get accounting all pissed off at you, and the project's size, complexity, and distance from the actual event all mount
– Follow rules of grammar and punctuation. Writing, whether for external or internal consumption, is still writing. I'm not sure when everyone became ee cummings and decided that it's ok to forget the basic rules of English grammar and punctuation. Make sure your emails and even your IMs, at least when they're for business, follow the rules. You look smarter when you do. Maybe — maybe — with Twitter or SMS you can excuse some of this and go with abbreviations. But I wouldn't normally consider a lot of those formal business communications
I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. A little self-discipline goes a long way at work (and in life)!
Book Short: Bringing it on Home
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories.
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.
Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics. This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun “novel” format as is the case with his other books.
The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations. It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team. The framework may or may not be perfect — we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things — but for those companies who don’t have one, it’s as good as any.
The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall. And the point Lencioni makes here is — “why wait for a crisis?”
At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones. I’m definitely sorry to be done with the series. We may try the “field guide” companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.
The full series roundup is:
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes
The press conference this past spring where President Bush embarrassingly refused to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes, other than to reiterate his gaffe at trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers, brings up another issue in this series: is it good for leaders, both political and corporate, to admit mistakes?
On the corporate side, I think the ability to admit a mistake is a must. Again, I’ll refer back to Jim Collins’ books Good to Great and Built to Last, both of which talk about humility and the ability to admit mistakes as a critical component of emotional intelligence, the cornerstone of solid leadership. And in another great work on corporate leadership, The Fifth Discipline, writer Peter Senge talks about “learning systems” and the “learning organization” as far superior companies. My experience echoes this. Publicly admitting a mistake, along with a careful distillation of lessons learned, can go a long way inside a company to strengthening the bond between leader and team, regardless of the size of the company.
But in politics, the stakes are higher and weirder — and the organization is a nation, not a company. Publicly admitting a single mistake can be a leader’s downfall. It’s too easy these days for political opponents to seize on a mistake as a “flip flop” and turn a candidate’s own admission into a highly-charge negative ad.
There was a fantastic op-ed in The Wall Street Journal back on April 15 on this topic, which unfortunately doesn’t have an available link at the moment, entitled “Bush Enters a Political Quandary As He Faces Calls for an Apology.” I’ll try to both quote from and summarize the article here since it’s central to this topic:
“For a politician, is an apology a sign of weakness or strength? That is the debate now swirling around President Bush after a prime-time news conference in which he refused reporters’ invitations to acknowledge any specific mistakes in handling the issue of terrorism or offer an apology to Sept. 11 victims’ families. Mr. Bush deflected the invitation, saying, ‘Here’s what I feel about that: The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden.’ Mr. Bush’s quandary is a time-honored struggle for politicians. While some have found a public apology helps them out of a tough spot, others discovered it can fuel more criticism. So far, there isn’t a definitive answer.”
The article goes on to say that while Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” mentality was de rigeur in the Beltway for a while (through Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco and Reagan’s poor handling of Beirut), nowadays, apologies are a dreaded last resort. The reason? The rise of partisanship and the use of ethics and congressional or special counsel investigations used to humiliate or defeat political opponents by raising the spectre of corruption. The examples? Gingrich’s struggles in 1996 over his book; Clinton’s ridiculous linguistics machinations (“it depends what the definition of ‘is’ is”) around the Lewinsky scandal; and Lott’s downfall over segregationist comments.
The piece wraps up by saying that “Mr. Bush was backed into the apology quandary by one of his administration’s toughest critics, former White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke…Since then, White House officials have been pressured to do likewise [apologize to victims’ families about the government’s failings on 9/11] — or explain why they won’t…[but] aides are convinced that admitting error would only embolden Mr. Bush’s critics in the Democratic Party and the news media.”
So the question is: would Bush be better off by saying “Sorry, folks, we thought there were WMD in Iraq, but it turns out we were wrong. And we miscalculated how difficult it would be to win the war, how many troops it would take, and how many lives would be lost. I still feel like it was right for us to go to war there for the following four reasons…”?
I’m not sure about that. He’d certainly be more intellectually honest, and a number of people in intellectual circles would feel better about him as a leader, but my guess is that he thinks it would cost him the election in today’s environment. My conclusion is that today’s system is discouraging politicians from admitting mistakes, and that it will take an exceptionally courageous leader (neither Bush nor Kerry as far as I can tell) to do so.
In the end, while humility appeals to many people in a leader, it’s not for everyone. Fortunately for us, CEOs don’t have to run for office and most CEOs don’t have to face some the same level of public, personally competitive, and media scrutiny that politicians do. Now that’s an interesting conclusion that I didn’t intend at the beginning of the post — being a good political leader and being a good politician are sometimes deeply at odds with each other.
Next up in the series: Not sure! Any ideas? Please comment on the blog site or by emailing me.
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible.
I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.
But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader. I tell our team at Return Path all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.
A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.” And there you have it. More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.
Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):
– Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
– Create Clarity
– Overcommunicate Clarity
– Reinforce Clarity
And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):
1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?
While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions. We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
Book Short: Choose Voice!
I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.
I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years. I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968. But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me). Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words. But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.
The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization: exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within). The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”
You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all). That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.
With your customers: make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.
With your employees: make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.
With your company (you as employee): make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.
Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book. But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written. Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!
Startup CEO “Bibliography”
A couple people who read Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book. Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books.
And here’s the list of books in Brad Feld’s Startup Revolution series other than Startup CEO:
Book Short: Vulnerability Applied to Leadership
Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (book, Kindle), is Patrick Lencion’s latest fable-on-the-go book, and it’s as good a read as all of his books (see list of the ones I’ve read and reviewed at the end of the post).
The book talks about the power of vulnerability as a character trait for those who provide service to clients in that they are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy. Besides cringing as I remembered my own personal experience as an overpaid and underqualified 21 year old analyst at how ridiculous some aspects of the management consulting industry are…the book really made me think. The challenge to the conventional wisdom of “never letting ‘em see you sweat” (we *think* vulnerability will hurt success, we *confuse* competence with ego, etc.) is powerful. And although vulnerability is often uncomfortable, I believe Lencioni is 100% right – and more than he thinks.
First, the basic premise of the book is that consultants have three fears they need to overcome to achieve nirvana – those fears and the mitigation tactics are:
- Fear of losing the business: mitigate by always consulting instead of selling, giving away the business, telling the kind truth, and directly addressing elephants in the room
- Fear of being embarrassed: mitigate by asking dumb questions, making dumb suggestions, and celebrating your mistakes
- Fear of feeling inferior: mitigate by taking a bullet for the client, making everything about the client, honoring the client’s work, and doing your share of the dirty work
But to my point about Lencioni being more right than he thinks…I’d like to extend the premise around vulnerability as a key to success beyond the world of consulting and client service into the world of leadership. Think about some of the language above applied to leading an organization or a team:
- Telling the kind truth and directly addressing elephants in the room: If you’re not going to do this, who is? There is no place at the top of an organization or team for conflict avoidance
- Asking dumb questions: How else do you learn what’s going on in your organization? How else can you get people talking instead of listening?
- Making dumb suggestions: I’d refer to this more as “bringing an outside/higher level perspective to the dialog.” You never know when one of your seemingly dumb suggestions will connect the dots for your team in a way that they haven’t done yet on their own (e.g., the suggestions might not be so dumb after all)
- Celebrating your mistakes: We’re all human. And as a leader, some of your people may build you up in their mind beyond what’s real and reasonable. Set a good example by noting when you’re wrong, noting your learnings, and not making the same mistake twice
- Taking a bullet for your team, making everything about your team and honoring your team’s work: Management 101. Give credit out liberally. Take the blame for team failings.
- Doing your share of the dirty work: An underreported quality of good leaders. Change the big heavy bottle on the water cooler. Wipe down the coffee machine. Order the pizza or push the beer cart around yourself. Again, we’re all human, leaders aren’t above doing their share to keep the community of the organization safe, fun, clean, well fed, etc.
There’s a really powerful message here. I hope this review at least scratches the surface of it.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
