Lindbergh's transatlantic strategy was simple: less weight (one engine, one pilot) would increase fuel efficiency and allow for a longer flying range. Accordingly he left behind any item considered too heavy or unnecessary. These included a radio, parachute, gas gauges and navigation lights. Lindbergh went as far as to cut his maps down to include only the reference points he would need.
Even at that, Lucky Lindy ran dangerously low on fuel. In the film, Stewart was shown jettisoning objects to keep the plan aloft as he approached the European coast. After 33 hours and 30 minutes, and 3,600 grueling miles, challenged by fog and ice, uncertain navigation, and bone weary fatigue, he managed to land outside Paris.
You may be thinking, "Nice story, but so what?"
I see it as a loose but instructive parable for the daunting challenges that lie ahead for governments across the U.S. After years of "thinning the soup" budget practices, many of our public enterprises' fuel tanks are low, the journey ahead is long, and unlike Lindbergh's lean and durable Spirit of St. Louis, the vehicles of government are ponderous and plague-riddled.
The Coming Era
I have been paying increasing attention lately to the financial affairs of this great country. The news is not good. The long-term fiscal condition of the nation is barely above water and sinking. A growing number of voices and interests -- from U.S. Government Accountabililty Office Comptroller General David Walker to the Concord Coalition -- are sounding the alarm. The indicators of fiscal disease include record federal deficits, our seemingly bottomless trade imbalance, Americans' zero savings rate, deferred maintenance on infrastructure, rising interest rates, shaky pension plans, Medicare and its daunting demographics, and a host of ill-considered unfunded mandates.
Together and separately, these conditions threaten to narrow our future policy choices, stress our public organizations, and challenge governments' capacity to do the public's important work. Irresponsible fiscal commitments today will impose a cruel opportunity cost on our children (fiscal child abuse) and hamstring next generation public managers and leaders.
Government ... More or Less
Some sunny prognosticators blow off this argument, claiming we can grow our way out of this fiscal predicament. Perhaps. Lacking a crystal ball, I suspect that the role of government is bound to grow in the years ahead. This will not be as a result of partisan politics, but due to the worsening lot for many Americans. I hope I am wrong. But if I am right, it raises a key question: How will we pay for government in the future if the relative well-being of many Americans is diminished? Another way of saying it is this: If we can't afford our government today, how will we ever be able to pay for it in the future when the demands may be even keener but the treasury has been plundered?
All of which takes me back to Lindbergh and his strategy for traveling light.
If we are unable to fuel our public enterprises in the future because an inordinate share of the needed dollars have been cannibalized by today's excesses, we will be left with three choices: (1) continue to thin the budget soup -- a death by starvation option; (2) engage in political triage by actually reducing the portfolio of public programs and activities in which we are willing and able to invest -- a nasty winners vs. losers proposition; or (3) pursue a lean business model that takes money
out of the bureaucracy and puts it in play for public purposes. This latter alternative, the lean business model option, is one where public CIOs are best positioned to lead.
Business Models Matter
In her article, Why Business Models Matter (Harvard Business Review, May 2002) author Joan Magretta explains that a business model describes how enterprises work. They show, as a system, how the pieces of a business fit together, who the customers are, and the underlying economic logic of how value is delivered at an appropriate cost. Consider leading companies like Dell, Google or Microsoft, and you get the point.
This notion got me wondering about the public sector's business model. Government's "business model" is accidental and evolutionary rather than economically purposeful and precise. It is a labor-intensive, facilities-based, paper-oriented, and process-intensive ... a model that evolved from the 19th century and was refined in the decades since World War II.
Given the coming fiscal challenges, the government's conventional business model looks to be unsustainable. Evidence has been building since the late 1970s with the passage of property tax limitation Proposition 13 and the anti-tax movement it launched nationally. More recent research by Hutchinson and Osborne (The Price of Government, 2005) holds that the citizenry has a pretty discrete tolerance for what it will pay, which is consistently less than what government wants to collect. The solution? Get mean about getting lean.
Calculating the Burden Rate of Government
Readers may recall some years ago that one of our national charity organizations, the United Way, got in trouble for appropriating an inordinate percent of its in-bound contributions to pay for excessive overhead and benefits for executives. To the best of my recollection, it was about a 35 percent burden rate, meaning that only 65 cents of every dollar was actually going into United Way services for beneficiaries.
Here is an interesting question: What's the burden rate for a particular governmental service (e.g., the Department of Motor Vehicles licensing) or for a particular governmental program (e.g., educating primary students or environmental protection)? Should it be 15 percent? Twenty-five percent? Forty percent? More? Remember, every dollar that feeds the bureaucracy is a dollar that does not directly serve a beneficiary or public purpose. Virtually no executives or leaders with whom I have spoken during past the several years knows the answer nor seems to care much about it. Absent the will to know and the instruments and indices to locate the fat, we have little basis for attacking the problem accept by investing in IT projects episodically.
Have you ever heard of the Body Mass Index, commonly referred to as BMI? It calculates for human beings the ratio between fat and muscle, and then compares the calculation to an idealized healthy model. Once calculated, a table is used to determine one's "leanness."
What if public CIOs partnered with their chief financial officers to create a Government Mass Index (GMI) Calculator to better understand the overhead factors for public-service delivery systems, and to drive the quest for organizational leanness? Where there is a high GMI factor, there probably is an opportunity to put the activity or program on a low-fat diet to get the GMI factor to an acceptable level. This might involve forms reduction, data consolidation, business process redesign and off-loading services through the e-government channel.
Our colleagues in the business sector have done a lot of work on lean manufacturing, lean supply chains and logistics, and lean administration. Where is the body of work on lean government? It barely exists ... yet. You can be a pioneer!
Public CIOs as Transformational Leaders
The ultimate role of any leader is to ensure their organization's survival and well being. That is why
it's time for public CIOs and their c-level counterparts to step up to the lean government opportunity. Public CIOs are governments' systems, information and technology experts. They must evangelize the case and help craft the strategy with the program management and political side of the house to make lean government a serious initiative for the long haul.
We need not be stuck in a "Sophie's Choice" between amputating services and raising taxes. There is another way out. We have to think and act like Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis. Fly light. Be determined. Fight weariness. Be willing to jettison organizational ballast that needlessly consumes precious resources or fails to propel the enterprise. Lean government matters. Think lean. Act lean. Be lean. (Get the) Work out! The future promises nothing more and requires nothing less.
George K. Beard is a senior fellow with the Center for Digital Government. He also teaches at the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, and heads his own consultancy, GovernmentWise Inc.