I worked on Microsoft Bob.
Confession moment...I usually think twice before telling people that. Is there any other tech product that has generated more *unintended* laughter? In the right context, just saying the word "Bob" is a punchline. If you doubt this, take another look at the video Microsoft released on "Bill's Last Day."
I managed communications for Microsoft's consumer division during the era that produced Bob. I lived Bob in a way few people do. A few of my best friends worked on Bob. My husband was a key developer on Bob and the lead developer for the never-released Bob 2.0. Bob was part of our lives.
Some people may remember that Bob was featured on the front page of USA Today and on launch day was the opening segment for the CBS Evening News - back in an era when network news programs attracted a huge audience. I was introduced to Steven Spielberg as the person behind Bob's PR.
I was also the one who sent Bill Gates email at the height of the positive Bob-mania that said we were likely to face a horrible backlash. Tech influentials had started telling me that they were going to bury Bob. They not only didn't like it, they were somehow angry that it had even been developed. It was personal.
And that's exactly what happened. Bob got killed. But first, it was ridiculed and stomped.
For Microsoft, it was a costly mistake. For the people who worked on it, Bob taught many lessons. Lessons that came into play for subsequent products that made a big impact, both at Microsoft and beyond.
How many people know that the lead developer for Bob 2.0 was also the co-founder of Valve and the development lead for Half-Life, which became an industry phenomenon, winning more than 50 Game of the Year awards and selling more than 10 million copies? Or that Darrin Massena - development lead for Bob 1.0, most recently named Technical Innovator of the Year here in Washington State - and Valve co-founder Mike Harrington are the co-founders and partners behind Picnik - which is now the world's leading online photo editor, attracting almost 40 million visits a month and a million unique users a day.
In an innovation context, Bob had many lessons.
Here are a few:
1) Never underdeliver against expectations. Because of the initial hype around Bob, expectations were huge. The first version of Bob was a friendly product that in user tests got good reviews from the intended audience - novice users - but in order to meet expectations, Bob was going to have to be a life-changing experience - and it wasn't.
2) Consumers don't care about strategy. Corporate customers do because if they're investing big dollars over many years in a product, they want to know that it will continue to evolve in ways that are beneficial to the organization. In the corporate market, selling a vision is huge. By contrast, selling a vision to consumers is pointless. The key question they want answered is, "Does it make my life better today?" (BTW, I suspect Bob 3.0 had potential to be great.)
3) A small marketing budget can work wonders. One of the reasons people jumped on Bob was the perceived huge marketing budget. The reality is that the budget for promoting Bob was actually tiny compared to other products I worked on at Microsoft. Because it was so tiny, we felt we had to do out-of-the-box things - like supply napkins on all the flights heading into Vegas during the CES announcement of Bob. The napkins didn't cost much, but boy, people thought if we were buying napkins, it must mean we'd already spent a huge amount of money elsewhere. (We hadn't.)
4) If you start to get feedback from customers that your product is anything but great, don't forget that you only get one chance to make a first impression. The first version of Half-Life never saw the light of day because user testing showed it wasn't fun enough. And this was after that first version had already won the "Action Game of the Year" honors at E3. Making the decision to start over was hugely expensive, and something Valve's publisher completely disagreed with - which meant that all of the funding had to be done privately - which meant the Valve co-founders, including my husband but especially Gabe Newell, got to write huge personal checks.
5) Don't be afraid to take risks. Bob was a risk. People often criticize Bill Gates as someone who didn't take risks. But these people are wrong. Bill was always a risk taker. He supported Bob in part I think because he wanted to support people who were willing to take risks. The Bob team was full of innovators and risk takers, and to Bill's credit, he was very supportive of them as individuals even after Bob hit the wall. (Most famously, Bill married Melinda, who at one time managed the Bob team. At the time, Bill joked that he did so because he liked Bob so well.)
6) Place bets on smart people who push the envelope. Bob was in many ways a bet placed on people. When I worked there - 87-98, Microsoft took many risks on people in ways that were pretty wonderful. One of my favorites along this line is the developer who took charge of the Microsoft Word business without any previous business experience - because Bill Gates thought he was a smart guy who could do it. Chris Peters later led the Office business to huge success and to my mind, was Microsoft's most talented business leader of the era. If you're not willing to risk a Bob, you're probably not willing to hire a Chris Peters either.
(The same people within the consumer division who bought off on Bob - including Melinda - also bought off on Expedia, despite the fact that practically no one on that team had any travel experience. That ended up being a good decision worth more than a billion dollars.)
7) Never forget the crucial role influentials play. In the case of Bob, many of the "end users" for Bob loved it. (I saw the feedback.) But the influentials of that era - in that case, the core tech people - hated it. For whatever product you're releasing, consider the crucial role of influentials even if they're not your target audience.
In the case of Picnik, two important sets of influentials were professional designers and photographers - including the people who are willing to shell out huge amounts of money for Adobe Photoshop. Picnik reached out directly to those people - not to convince them that Picnik was for them, but to encourage them to consider that it might be the best type of product for people who didn't want to take on the learning curve or high cost of Photoshop. Picnik ended up winning many design awards - including ID Magazine's highest honor for an interactive product.
8) If it doesn't work the first time, be open to the idea that it might work down the line. I think Microsoft made the right decision in giving up on Bob during development of the second version. But I also love the fact that Billg was willing to keep trying. Microsoft could easily have funded Bob 2.0, and even a Bob 3.0. It even started down this path, but made a course correction when it became clear the obstacles to Bob's ever being a market success were too big. (Note that Microsoft had backed previous products that were not market successes at the outset- Word 5.0 on the PC was pretty ridiculous from a user interface standpoint and a market penetration standpoint- but all of the learnings that went into that product helped Word become a much bigger success years later.}
9) Don't be afraid to poke fun at yourself. I love that Bill Gates pokes fun at Bob - and that my husband Mike still enjoys wearing his Bob t-shirt. Life is too short to not have fun.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Why My Dying Sister Needed Less Health Care
My older sister had gold plated health care in the last year of her life. She died in March 2006 at age 56, having been diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma the previous May. Because my sister had retired from Reno's city government with full health benefits, any expense was subject to approval by the same people who likely were covered under the same system. No way would they would turn down any potentally beneficial treatment they might someday themselves want.
While the clamor now is to get more health care for more people, my sister's case illustrates what can go wrong when there are no brakes on health care expenses.
From the start, my sister's case was dire. During a self-exam, she noticed a suspicious lesion on the top of her head, which she reported to her skin doctor. A biopsy was done almost immediately, just before my sister came to a celebration of my mother's 89th birthday.
She got the phone call from her dermatologist while still in my mother's Portland house: "Come home - come by my office, don't stop to unpack."
The initial prognosis was grim - metastasized melanoma. My sister Fran was divorced with young adult children so she asked that our other sister Barbara and I oversee her health care. Fran's Reno-based doctor immediately said she was out of her depth and that we should consult specialists.
We went to San Francisco and met with a group of experts there who poked and prodded, then met for a few hours, and gave us the word that same day. Stage IV melanoma, no primary site found. By this time, small cancerous dots had started to appear all over Fran's body. To the doctors, it was fascinating. They were intrigued and recommended treatment in the Bay area.
We found out more about the treatment, which basically involved bringing my sister to the brink of death under controlled conditions in an ICU ward, with the hope that her immune system would kick in to fight back the cancer. Since my other sister and I are Seattle based, we asked if the treatment could be done in our city, where we could better look after Fran.
The chances of success were estimated at 7-15%. I couldn't find any instance of where someone whose cancer had spread as far and fast as my sister's had had a favorable result. There were world-class melanoma experts in the Seattle area, and they agreed to take on my sister's case.
From the start, I told Fran that I would advocate on her behalf and ultimately do what she wanted me to do. Because our father also had severe melanoma in his 50s (and then lived into his 90s), the type of cancer wasn't a surprise. Among all of my dad's kids (8 total), Fran was the one determined to get as much sun as she liked. She also smoked, hated to exercise, and loved fatty foods. And she wanted a doctor to cure her. She also specifically didn't want to do any research on her condition herself.
At all times, we asked the doctors involved to make decisions and recommendations based on what was appropriate for my sister, not for the purposes of research to better understand melanoma. Fran was hospitalized twice for a week to undergo the procedures that would bring her to the brink of death, each stay in a special intensive care ward. The treatment was grueling, but my sister hung on. Ultimately, the treatment was stopped because my sister's naturally low blood pressure sank too far. For a very brief period of time, the lesions' growth appeared to stall.
Almost immediately, though, the lesions contined to spread, and I got an email while traveling on business that they had spread into her brain.
When we met with the doctor a couple of days later, I asked him in Fran's presence to tell us how long she likely had to live. He turned to her, and asked "Do you want to hear this?" to which she said an emphatic "Yes." He then said that based on what he'd seen in other patients, my sister had no more than four months to live. Then he recommended that Fran see another set of doctors specifically about the lesions in her head. She would wear a metal head brace, with screws into her scalp, in order to stay immobilized while they lasered the lesions down to size.
I questioned the doctor about whether the new recommendation made sense given that the cancer was aggressively spreading everywhere else. From a commonsense perspective, I was trying to figure out if death by brain lesion was worse than death through some other type of lesion. The doctor recommended it, and Fran wanted to do anything the doctor said might help, so we went ahead. All the time, I was wondering why we should pursue this treatment, when nothing suggested it would actually prolong her life in a meaningful way.
When we went in for the laser brain surgery, Fran had an entire team of health care specialists assigned very specifically to her with no other laser patients in sight. Meanwhile, the waiting room at Harborview Hospital was filled to overflowing with patients seeking care for more mundane concerns. I asked what the cost was for the treatment Fran was getting on that particular day, and was told that it was in five figures. They treated her beautifully...imagine the nicest, least crowded dentist's office you've ever seen. The staff invited her back - and said they could continue treating her brain lesions for as long as she wanted. Apparently, as a result of their effort four of the seven lesions were now smaller. This seemed like a huge victory for them - and apparently, was in line with their expectations. My sister's forehead was still bleeding from where they'd anchored the gear onto her head and I was left wondering why anyone thought this was a good idea.
I suggested that my sister go home, enjoy the holidays with her three young adult children - one of whom is severely disabled, and we could reassess. By early January, the cancer was continuing to spread aggressively. We made plans to have everyone in the family visit Fran in late January down in Reno. We had a lovely time toasting Fran at an Irish pub in the midst of her friends and family. (True Irish will drink for any occasion). Her hair was thinner, but otherwise she looked like our Fran. At the party, her dermatologist pulled Barbara and me aside, and said that Fran should immediately be under hospice care.
Barbara visited Fran a couple of weeks later, and told me to get there as soon as I could. I was working full-time in a demanding job, but immediately asked for a week off. Fran went downhill fast - I talked to her briefly, just after she collapsed on the day before I was to fly down. We each said I love you, and I said I'd be down later that day. Her last words to me were "it's happening so fast." By the time I got there later that night, Fran was uncommunicative. For the next six days, I stayed with her 23-7 (my husband flew down with me, stayed in a hotel room, and would take me out to breakfast each day). The hospice people were wonderful and on the seventh day, Frannie died.
What went right and wrong in Fran's care that carries a broader implications for health care reform now being discussed?
1) From the outset, Fran's case was likely too far advanced for anyone to cure. In years since, I've done a lot of research. No one with a case as broadly metastacized as Fran has ever been cured. That seems like an important piece of data, one that none of us in the family could have known, but that the experts should have.
2) The brain lesion surgery was a farce. The doctors there were only concerned about her head. The fact that she might die on the table from where the melanoma was attacking other organs held no interest for them. It was just bizarre to be around doctors who could so clearly treat a "head" with no concern, or even interest in the body that supported it. At tens of thousands a pop.
3) No one in the entire process was looking out for "the system." And by that, I mean, looking out for whether the dollars being spent for my sister's care should be traded off against other health care needs. I get the sense that if we'd asked for it, Fran could have shown up daily to get her brain lesions lasered. I actually got marketing materials in the mail from the hospital asking us to recommend the brain lesion treatment to other "friends."
4) Doctors are ill equipped to tell patients when they should stop seeking treatment. The reason I asked the doctor point-blank how long my sister had to live is because she needed to get her affairs in order for the benefit of her disabled son. Without the grim news, I know she wouldn't have done it. I could feel the doctors' discomfort with such a direct question. Knowing that time was so short also enabled the rest of our family to rally and gather together to say goodbye while Fran could still enjoy it. (And she did!)
5) The hospice people are wonderful. They did a beautiful, even loving job of taking care of Fran, and answering questions about the dying process.
I loved my sister. But she also got too much of the wrong type of care in her final year of life. Ultimately, it would have made more sense for her to have less intensive physical care, and more help dealing with the anxieties that surround the dying process. A huge aspect of this is cultural - few people are given the message that it's OK not to fight. More recently, when following the journals of friends facing terminal illness, I start to get angry with the people who insist that it's every patient's responsibility to "fight back." Sometimes, the kindler, gentler, more humane option is to acknowledge that death is coming and surround one's self with family and friends to enjoy the time that's left.
The doctors who treated my sister were all nice individuals. But they and doctors like them are going to bankrupt our system by enabling and encouraging people with no reasonable hope for a cure or even for reasonable extension of life under quality circumstances to pursue hugely expensive treaments. When someone is facing a terminal illness, someone has to ask: "Does this treatment make sense given the success rates we've seen in other patients?" We've forced the insurance companies into that role because no one else in the medical community will do it.
When someone doesn't ask the tough questions, the patient doesn't necessarily get better care. Sometimes they just get hugely expensive care with the same dismal end result. (By the way, I have yet to refer any friends for brain lesion surgery.)
While the clamor now is to get more health care for more people, my sister's case illustrates what can go wrong when there are no brakes on health care expenses.
From the start, my sister's case was dire. During a self-exam, she noticed a suspicious lesion on the top of her head, which she reported to her skin doctor. A biopsy was done almost immediately, just before my sister came to a celebration of my mother's 89th birthday.
She got the phone call from her dermatologist while still in my mother's Portland house: "Come home - come by my office, don't stop to unpack."
The initial prognosis was grim - metastasized melanoma. My sister Fran was divorced with young adult children so she asked that our other sister Barbara and I oversee her health care. Fran's Reno-based doctor immediately said she was out of her depth and that we should consult specialists.
We went to San Francisco and met with a group of experts there who poked and prodded, then met for a few hours, and gave us the word that same day. Stage IV melanoma, no primary site found. By this time, small cancerous dots had started to appear all over Fran's body. To the doctors, it was fascinating. They were intrigued and recommended treatment in the Bay area.
We found out more about the treatment, which basically involved bringing my sister to the brink of death under controlled conditions in an ICU ward, with the hope that her immune system would kick in to fight back the cancer. Since my other sister and I are Seattle based, we asked if the treatment could be done in our city, where we could better look after Fran.
The chances of success were estimated at 7-15%. I couldn't find any instance of where someone whose cancer had spread as far and fast as my sister's had had a favorable result. There were world-class melanoma experts in the Seattle area, and they agreed to take on my sister's case.
From the start, I told Fran that I would advocate on her behalf and ultimately do what she wanted me to do. Because our father also had severe melanoma in his 50s (and then lived into his 90s), the type of cancer wasn't a surprise. Among all of my dad's kids (8 total), Fran was the one determined to get as much sun as she liked. She also smoked, hated to exercise, and loved fatty foods. And she wanted a doctor to cure her. She also specifically didn't want to do any research on her condition herself.
At all times, we asked the doctors involved to make decisions and recommendations based on what was appropriate for my sister, not for the purposes of research to better understand melanoma. Fran was hospitalized twice for a week to undergo the procedures that would bring her to the brink of death, each stay in a special intensive care ward. The treatment was grueling, but my sister hung on. Ultimately, the treatment was stopped because my sister's naturally low blood pressure sank too far. For a very brief period of time, the lesions' growth appeared to stall.
Almost immediately, though, the lesions contined to spread, and I got an email while traveling on business that they had spread into her brain.
When we met with the doctor a couple of days later, I asked him in Fran's presence to tell us how long she likely had to live. He turned to her, and asked "Do you want to hear this?" to which she said an emphatic "Yes." He then said that based on what he'd seen in other patients, my sister had no more than four months to live. Then he recommended that Fran see another set of doctors specifically about the lesions in her head. She would wear a metal head brace, with screws into her scalp, in order to stay immobilized while they lasered the lesions down to size.
I questioned the doctor about whether the new recommendation made sense given that the cancer was aggressively spreading everywhere else. From a commonsense perspective, I was trying to figure out if death by brain lesion was worse than death through some other type of lesion. The doctor recommended it, and Fran wanted to do anything the doctor said might help, so we went ahead. All the time, I was wondering why we should pursue this treatment, when nothing suggested it would actually prolong her life in a meaningful way.
When we went in for the laser brain surgery, Fran had an entire team of health care specialists assigned very specifically to her with no other laser patients in sight. Meanwhile, the waiting room at Harborview Hospital was filled to overflowing with patients seeking care for more mundane concerns. I asked what the cost was for the treatment Fran was getting on that particular day, and was told that it was in five figures. They treated her beautifully...imagine the nicest, least crowded dentist's office you've ever seen. The staff invited her back - and said they could continue treating her brain lesions for as long as she wanted. Apparently, as a result of their effort four of the seven lesions were now smaller. This seemed like a huge victory for them - and apparently, was in line with their expectations. My sister's forehead was still bleeding from where they'd anchored the gear onto her head and I was left wondering why anyone thought this was a good idea.
I suggested that my sister go home, enjoy the holidays with her three young adult children - one of whom is severely disabled, and we could reassess. By early January, the cancer was continuing to spread aggressively. We made plans to have everyone in the family visit Fran in late January down in Reno. We had a lovely time toasting Fran at an Irish pub in the midst of her friends and family. (True Irish will drink for any occasion). Her hair was thinner, but otherwise she looked like our Fran. At the party, her dermatologist pulled Barbara and me aside, and said that Fran should immediately be under hospice care.
Barbara visited Fran a couple of weeks later, and told me to get there as soon as I could. I was working full-time in a demanding job, but immediately asked for a week off. Fran went downhill fast - I talked to her briefly, just after she collapsed on the day before I was to fly down. We each said I love you, and I said I'd be down later that day. Her last words to me were "it's happening so fast." By the time I got there later that night, Fran was uncommunicative. For the next six days, I stayed with her 23-7 (my husband flew down with me, stayed in a hotel room, and would take me out to breakfast each day). The hospice people were wonderful and on the seventh day, Frannie died.
What went right and wrong in Fran's care that carries a broader implications for health care reform now being discussed?
1) From the outset, Fran's case was likely too far advanced for anyone to cure. In years since, I've done a lot of research. No one with a case as broadly metastacized as Fran has ever been cured. That seems like an important piece of data, one that none of us in the family could have known, but that the experts should have.
2) The brain lesion surgery was a farce. The doctors there were only concerned about her head. The fact that she might die on the table from where the melanoma was attacking other organs held no interest for them. It was just bizarre to be around doctors who could so clearly treat a "head" with no concern, or even interest in the body that supported it. At tens of thousands a pop.
3) No one in the entire process was looking out for "the system." And by that, I mean, looking out for whether the dollars being spent for my sister's care should be traded off against other health care needs. I get the sense that if we'd asked for it, Fran could have shown up daily to get her brain lesions lasered. I actually got marketing materials in the mail from the hospital asking us to recommend the brain lesion treatment to other "friends."
4) Doctors are ill equipped to tell patients when they should stop seeking treatment. The reason I asked the doctor point-blank how long my sister had to live is because she needed to get her affairs in order for the benefit of her disabled son. Without the grim news, I know she wouldn't have done it. I could feel the doctors' discomfort with such a direct question. Knowing that time was so short also enabled the rest of our family to rally and gather together to say goodbye while Fran could still enjoy it. (And she did!)
5) The hospice people are wonderful. They did a beautiful, even loving job of taking care of Fran, and answering questions about the dying process.
I loved my sister. But she also got too much of the wrong type of care in her final year of life. Ultimately, it would have made more sense for her to have less intensive physical care, and more help dealing with the anxieties that surround the dying process. A huge aspect of this is cultural - few people are given the message that it's OK not to fight. More recently, when following the journals of friends facing terminal illness, I start to get angry with the people who insist that it's every patient's responsibility to "fight back." Sometimes, the kindler, gentler, more humane option is to acknowledge that death is coming and surround one's self with family and friends to enjoy the time that's left.
The doctors who treated my sister were all nice individuals. But they and doctors like them are going to bankrupt our system by enabling and encouraging people with no reasonable hope for a cure or even for reasonable extension of life under quality circumstances to pursue hugely expensive treaments. When someone is facing a terminal illness, someone has to ask: "Does this treatment make sense given the success rates we've seen in other patients?" We've forced the insurance companies into that role because no one else in the medical community will do it.
When someone doesn't ask the tough questions, the patient doesn't necessarily get better care. Sometimes they just get hugely expensive care with the same dismal end result. (By the way, I have yet to refer any friends for brain lesion surgery.)
Friday, March 20, 2009
Why Confiscating the Bonuses is Fair
The 90% tax on bonuses paid out by companies that are on life support due to government intervention is imminently fair.
But once again, special interest groups are trying to convince legislators that the tax is unfair, and sets a bad precedent, and everyone would understand why this is bad policy if only Congress really understood "the way business works."
Well, the way business should work is that businesspeople should figure out how to build sustainable businesses and should get rid of any incentive schemes that encourage people to work against the long-term best interests of the company.
Early in my career, I benefitted from stock options that were paid out over a multi-year period. The value of the stock was directly tied to how well the company was doing overall. It really dawned on me how effective this compensation system was when an employee sent email to his work friends boasting about how much he'd spent on a business dinner the previous evening. People were aghast, and the mail got forwarded around. A common theme was "How dare you boast about spending OUR money?" Everyone in the company who had stock options felt like they were owners of the company. That affected everything, including hiring decisions. After all, it's a lot different if you're hiring people with someone else's money; when it's your money, and you're going to be sharing it (the net effect of hiring people who also get stock options), you tend to be more thoughtful.
Since I frequently managed multi-million dollar budgets and hired agencies at that company, I was often "courted" with gifts - things like courtside seats to pro sports games. Only once did I take tickets - for a set of great seats to a Rolling Stones concert. That experience made me uncomfortable because, although I convinced myself I would never make a business decision based on such gifts, I could see how easy it would be to become seduced by such experiences. (The irony was that everyone around me with great seats to that concert looked like a corporate type - and though the Rolling Stones did a great job, the crowd experience felt completely sanitized and somehow unfulfilling.)
After that, I accepted only the occasional Christmas basket, which I always shared with everyone on the floor. Later, the company adopted an official policy, essentially banning gifts of any value.
The ban on gifts was put into place to keep employees from making decisions that worked against the best interests of the company. If you're hiring an ad agency or PR firm, you should be hiring them because they can do the best job for the company, not because you control the type of purse strings that tend to attact lavish gifts.
Later, when I joined my husband to build a startup, we decided upfront that we needed for everyone to feel like owners. So while the founding partners put up the upfront cash and took the earliest risks, employees who joined later earned a piece of the company. And when my husband and I later sold our interest, we sold a good chunk of it back to the company over a multi-year period, knowing that we were only going to get paid if the company continued to do well.
So when I hear about employees at AIG and Merrill Lynch getting huge bonuses just before or even after their companies are getting huge bailouts from the government, my blood boils. As a taxpayer, that's MY money. And I don't care what type of business you're in or whether your part of the business made money and did all the right things but your colleagues down the hall or in a completely separate part of the world made all the bad decisions, YOU WORKED FOR THE SAME COMPANY AND THE COMPANY FAILED. And the fact that you and your bosses can't seem to fathom that because the company failed, you shouldn't be paid ANY bonus is just beyond comprehension. When a company fails, no bonuses should be paid. And since you people can't seem to figure that out, Congress must step in.
I know how business works. I'm comfortable that I'm not missing key facts on how compensation should be structured. Members of Congress shouldn't be distracted or deluded by so-called experts who say that taxing these bonuses is somehow bad policy. It's atrocious policy, but because the underlying acts are even more atrocious, it needs to be done.
But once again, special interest groups are trying to convince legislators that the tax is unfair, and sets a bad precedent, and everyone would understand why this is bad policy if only Congress really understood "the way business works."
Well, the way business should work is that businesspeople should figure out how to build sustainable businesses and should get rid of any incentive schemes that encourage people to work against the long-term best interests of the company.
Early in my career, I benefitted from stock options that were paid out over a multi-year period. The value of the stock was directly tied to how well the company was doing overall. It really dawned on me how effective this compensation system was when an employee sent email to his work friends boasting about how much he'd spent on a business dinner the previous evening. People were aghast, and the mail got forwarded around. A common theme was "How dare you boast about spending OUR money?" Everyone in the company who had stock options felt like they were owners of the company. That affected everything, including hiring decisions. After all, it's a lot different if you're hiring people with someone else's money; when it's your money, and you're going to be sharing it (the net effect of hiring people who also get stock options), you tend to be more thoughtful.
Since I frequently managed multi-million dollar budgets and hired agencies at that company, I was often "courted" with gifts - things like courtside seats to pro sports games. Only once did I take tickets - for a set of great seats to a Rolling Stones concert. That experience made me uncomfortable because, although I convinced myself I would never make a business decision based on such gifts, I could see how easy it would be to become seduced by such experiences. (The irony was that everyone around me with great seats to that concert looked like a corporate type - and though the Rolling Stones did a great job, the crowd experience felt completely sanitized and somehow unfulfilling.)
After that, I accepted only the occasional Christmas basket, which I always shared with everyone on the floor. Later, the company adopted an official policy, essentially banning gifts of any value.
The ban on gifts was put into place to keep employees from making decisions that worked against the best interests of the company. If you're hiring an ad agency or PR firm, you should be hiring them because they can do the best job for the company, not because you control the type of purse strings that tend to attact lavish gifts.
Later, when I joined my husband to build a startup, we decided upfront that we needed for everyone to feel like owners. So while the founding partners put up the upfront cash and took the earliest risks, employees who joined later earned a piece of the company. And when my husband and I later sold our interest, we sold a good chunk of it back to the company over a multi-year period, knowing that we were only going to get paid if the company continued to do well.
So when I hear about employees at AIG and Merrill Lynch getting huge bonuses just before or even after their companies are getting huge bailouts from the government, my blood boils. As a taxpayer, that's MY money. And I don't care what type of business you're in or whether your part of the business made money and did all the right things but your colleagues down the hall or in a completely separate part of the world made all the bad decisions, YOU WORKED FOR THE SAME COMPANY AND THE COMPANY FAILED. And the fact that you and your bosses can't seem to fathom that because the company failed, you shouldn't be paid ANY bonus is just beyond comprehension. When a company fails, no bonuses should be paid. And since you people can't seem to figure that out, Congress must step in.
I know how business works. I'm comfortable that I'm not missing key facts on how compensation should be structured. Members of Congress shouldn't be distracted or deluded by so-called experts who say that taxing these bonuses is somehow bad policy. It's atrocious policy, but because the underlying acts are even more atrocious, it needs to be done.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Pensions - Past Their Prime
One thing that should be a clear to everyone tracking the current financial crisis is the new pension reality: Pensions as currently structured are completely unworkable in a global economy that is powered by the private sector.
This applies both to government pensions and benefits and to private sector pensions.
The current debate about what to do with the UAW contracts with Ford and GM is one part of a much bigger problem that has to do with human nature and the way our economic system works.
Whenever possible, people will tend to make decisions that are beneficial over the short-term rather than face up to unpleasant long-term realities. Auto executives, their management teams, and investors (which fittingly enough includes lots of pension funds) basically gave an IOU on pensions and retiree health care benefits in order to get labor to sign contracts in the near-term that would be beneficial to the bottom line. No one was really thinking about the consequences years out. The UAW and the companies were equally complicit and the federal government turned a blind eye when it should have stepped in more aggressively with appropriate rules and regulations.
The truth is that there isn't a person smart enough on this planet to accurately forecast retirement obligations given the uncertainty that exists around future health care costs, future competition, long-term investment returns, and future regulatory requirements. People who pretend that they can are simply passing the IOU to future generations to figure out.
No one in a global economic system can be guaranteed a specific return. What companies, governments, employees and labor unions can do is work toward agreement on retirement benefits that will be funded while the obligation is being created and then work together cooperatively to see that those funds are managed well. For most workers, barring on-the-job death or disability, the obligation should be funded completely while the employee is actively employed and then managed conservatively with the goal of matching inflation. This applies both to all funds that will be disbursed during retirement - including social security, Medicare, and any other retirement funds.
In the case of the UAW and the car companies, contracts they signed years ago should have required full funding of all future obligations. If the funding was to be invested in the stock market, it should have been explicitly stated that it was subject to the vagaries of the stock market. If it were to be invested solely in "safe" securities, like US Treasuries, it should have been explicitly stated that it was subject to the vagaries of inflation. Instead, it was invested in the future success of the companies themselves - and the companies have failed. Now that they have, the UAW and the companies are looking to the government to bail them out, which goes beyond what we have expected of government to this point and which simply shifts the burden from one group (the autoworkers and retirees) to all of us (taxpayers).
To do other than fund obligations fully at the time they're incurred is to tax future generations in a way that is immoral and should be illegal. When someone is dead, we don't allow that person's creditors to go after the deceased's children. Yet we seem perfectly willing to let mass obligations pass on to future generations of workers, investors, and taxpayers.
We need a new system for funding and managing retirement obligations - one that recognizes that we all have a responsibility to plan for and fund retirement during our working years and that we should all be working together toward a financial system where investors who want low risk/low valatility returns over the long term have options that make sense.
What this means is that whether you work for a private company or for a government agency, your pay stub should reflect the full cost of whatever obligations are being incurred on your behalf. Understanding those full costs is the only hope companies, investors and governments - and the people who rely on them - have for making smart decisions that will bring long term benefit.
This applies both to government pensions and benefits and to private sector pensions.
The current debate about what to do with the UAW contracts with Ford and GM is one part of a much bigger problem that has to do with human nature and the way our economic system works.
Whenever possible, people will tend to make decisions that are beneficial over the short-term rather than face up to unpleasant long-term realities. Auto executives, their management teams, and investors (which fittingly enough includes lots of pension funds) basically gave an IOU on pensions and retiree health care benefits in order to get labor to sign contracts in the near-term that would be beneficial to the bottom line. No one was really thinking about the consequences years out. The UAW and the companies were equally complicit and the federal government turned a blind eye when it should have stepped in more aggressively with appropriate rules and regulations.
The truth is that there isn't a person smart enough on this planet to accurately forecast retirement obligations given the uncertainty that exists around future health care costs, future competition, long-term investment returns, and future regulatory requirements. People who pretend that they can are simply passing the IOU to future generations to figure out.
No one in a global economic system can be guaranteed a specific return. What companies, governments, employees and labor unions can do is work toward agreement on retirement benefits that will be funded while the obligation is being created and then work together cooperatively to see that those funds are managed well. For most workers, barring on-the-job death or disability, the obligation should be funded completely while the employee is actively employed and then managed conservatively with the goal of matching inflation. This applies both to all funds that will be disbursed during retirement - including social security, Medicare, and any other retirement funds.
In the case of the UAW and the car companies, contracts they signed years ago should have required full funding of all future obligations. If the funding was to be invested in the stock market, it should have been explicitly stated that it was subject to the vagaries of the stock market. If it were to be invested solely in "safe" securities, like US Treasuries, it should have been explicitly stated that it was subject to the vagaries of inflation. Instead, it was invested in the future success of the companies themselves - and the companies have failed. Now that they have, the UAW and the companies are looking to the government to bail them out, which goes beyond what we have expected of government to this point and which simply shifts the burden from one group (the autoworkers and retirees) to all of us (taxpayers).
To do other than fund obligations fully at the time they're incurred is to tax future generations in a way that is immoral and should be illegal. When someone is dead, we don't allow that person's creditors to go after the deceased's children. Yet we seem perfectly willing to let mass obligations pass on to future generations of workers, investors, and taxpayers.
We need a new system for funding and managing retirement obligations - one that recognizes that we all have a responsibility to plan for and fund retirement during our working years and that we should all be working together toward a financial system where investors who want low risk/low valatility returns over the long term have options that make sense.
What this means is that whether you work for a private company or for a government agency, your pay stub should reflect the full cost of whatever obligations are being incurred on your behalf. Understanding those full costs is the only hope companies, investors and governments - and the people who rely on them - have for making smart decisions that will bring long term benefit.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Avoiding an Even Broader (Madoff) Ponzi Scheme
America's current domestic public policy shares a lot in common with Bernie Madoff's business plan: Keep growing the pyramid at the bottom to pay for the people at the top. What Madoff did was illegal. What's happening with the government's Ponzi scheme is something we've all agreed to.
In the US Government case, the top of the pyramid are older people and retirees; the bottom of the pyramid are young workers.
Any type of plan that depends on an ever growing base is completely unsustainable over the longer term. At some point, especially because of diminishing natural resources and other population-related issues, you can't grow the bottom of the pyramid enough to pay for the people at the top. With the current financial crisis, the US is building on to a huge pile of debt that will need to be paid by future generations. From an operating perspective, we've also got a hugely disproportionate share of the budget going to the elderly as compared to children and young people.
The reason everybody seems comfortable with this situation (at least, comfortable enough not to do anything about it) is that we haven't faced up to the idea that the underlying premise of continued population growth is fundamentally flawed.
What should be happening is that every generation pay for itself, through taxes that are designed to accommodate the choices a generation makes. If people want a system where you get to retire at 55, then the taxes that are collected during the 30 years between 25 and 55 should be onerous enough to care for the publicly financed programs for the 30+ years that are likely to come after. Same with health care - if people from my generation believe we should be getting knee and hip replacements into our 80s through Medicare, then our taxes now (I'm 48) better be high enough to pay for them later.
No one wants to face up to this reality so what happens is that Medicare expenses are climbing at more than 6% of a year, and are gradually squeezing out a lot of other very worthy programs that benefit people of all ages.
We also need to take a look at the estate tax in this context. Why not tax the estates of elderly people to pay for elderly-related expenses, including Medicare? This would tie the estate tax in a meaningful way to an expense that was incurred by the generation that should have built up an endowment to pay for it. Instead what happens now is that even wealthy people get their medical expenses paid at public expense (which increases the deficit - to be paid by younger generations of taxpayers), with their estates then passing down to their own very fortunate adult children and grandchildren.
In the last several decades, because our population was growing quickly, we were able to mask the problems associated with exploding elder-related expenses. Now, however, it's becoming impossible to dodge the fact that the boomer generation, as we become elderly, are going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than the generations that came before us. And we've done nothing to really prepare for that except hope that the generations coming after us will agree to pay the bills.
This blind faith in future generations might have made sense back in the days when people were routinely having five, six, or more children. (I come from a family of eight.) Now, however, for a variety of reasons the birth rate has slowed, with more and more two-children or fewer families. At the same time, the number of older people with long-lasting chronic health conditions continues to rise. This means that fewer people in their earning years are going to be supporting a much bigger number of elderly people, many of them with hugely expensive medical conditions.
The solution can't lie in encouraging people to have more children, because that just keeps the Ponzi scheme going a bit longer, and creates an even bigger problem for future generations to solve.
Creating a tax system that requires each generation to forecast its public expenses and to fund them fully while still in their earning years would change a lot of things in our society. Younger people would have more of a stake in the decisions that affect their lives, middle aged people would have to confront tough questions about whether they're saving enough, and elderly people would know that the quality of support they're getting from government is directly tied to decisions they made earlier in their lives.
In the US Government case, the top of the pyramid are older people and retirees; the bottom of the pyramid are young workers.
Any type of plan that depends on an ever growing base is completely unsustainable over the longer term. At some point, especially because of diminishing natural resources and other population-related issues, you can't grow the bottom of the pyramid enough to pay for the people at the top. With the current financial crisis, the US is building on to a huge pile of debt that will need to be paid by future generations. From an operating perspective, we've also got a hugely disproportionate share of the budget going to the elderly as compared to children and young people.
The reason everybody seems comfortable with this situation (at least, comfortable enough not to do anything about it) is that we haven't faced up to the idea that the underlying premise of continued population growth is fundamentally flawed.
What should be happening is that every generation pay for itself, through taxes that are designed to accommodate the choices a generation makes. If people want a system where you get to retire at 55, then the taxes that are collected during the 30 years between 25 and 55 should be onerous enough to care for the publicly financed programs for the 30+ years that are likely to come after. Same with health care - if people from my generation believe we should be getting knee and hip replacements into our 80s through Medicare, then our taxes now (I'm 48) better be high enough to pay for them later.
No one wants to face up to this reality so what happens is that Medicare expenses are climbing at more than 6% of a year, and are gradually squeezing out a lot of other very worthy programs that benefit people of all ages.
We also need to take a look at the estate tax in this context. Why not tax the estates of elderly people to pay for elderly-related expenses, including Medicare? This would tie the estate tax in a meaningful way to an expense that was incurred by the generation that should have built up an endowment to pay for it. Instead what happens now is that even wealthy people get their medical expenses paid at public expense (which increases the deficit - to be paid by younger generations of taxpayers), with their estates then passing down to their own very fortunate adult children and grandchildren.
In the last several decades, because our population was growing quickly, we were able to mask the problems associated with exploding elder-related expenses. Now, however, it's becoming impossible to dodge the fact that the boomer generation, as we become elderly, are going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than the generations that came before us. And we've done nothing to really prepare for that except hope that the generations coming after us will agree to pay the bills.
This blind faith in future generations might have made sense back in the days when people were routinely having five, six, or more children. (I come from a family of eight.) Now, however, for a variety of reasons the birth rate has slowed, with more and more two-children or fewer families. At the same time, the number of older people with long-lasting chronic health conditions continues to rise. This means that fewer people in their earning years are going to be supporting a much bigger number of elderly people, many of them with hugely expensive medical conditions.
The solution can't lie in encouraging people to have more children, because that just keeps the Ponzi scheme going a bit longer, and creates an even bigger problem for future generations to solve.
Creating a tax system that requires each generation to forecast its public expenses and to fund them fully while still in their earning years would change a lot of things in our society. Younger people would have more of a stake in the decisions that affect their lives, middle aged people would have to confront tough questions about whether they're saving enough, and elderly people would know that the quality of support they're getting from government is directly tied to decisions they made earlier in their lives.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Who Sets the Post-Meltdown Rules?
Hopefully, the current financial crisis will silence forever the people who say that over the long run and without intervention, the markets work and business will always do the right thing for the most people. It's flat out not true.
Business needs "rules of the road." The trust-based systems that the foes of deregulation like to cling to evolved in much smaller communities, where owners, management, workers, and customers were all vested in making sure the system worked over time. If you own and run a grocery store in a small town, your workforce and customers are going to be your neighbors and their kids are going to be attending school with and playing with your kids. Unless you want to live in isolation, you're going to work to earn their respect.
Now, the workforce is global, customers are global, and natural resources are global (though they can be exploited in ways that offer no benefit to local people who will end up paying the consequences), and ownership is so murky that -- as the Madoff case and the broader Wall St. meltdown shows -- even investors have no idea what they own or think they own.
The current financial system operates much like the childhood game of "hot potato," where investment managers are incented to move money around in ways that generate huge financial returns for themselves -- with no one ever asking hard questions unless someone gets hurt because they're holding the potato when the music stops.
Moving forward, it's critical that we figure out how to balance between rules that encourage people to act in ways that ultimately deliver the most good for society and rules that might stifle and ultimately crush innovation.
The "most good for society" is likely to come from:
- rewarding innovators for their contributions - which encourages them to keep applying their creativity to solve interesting problems
- ensuring that workers are fairly treated - which becomes ever more difficult as the standard of "what's fair" needs to encompass the fact that when jobs can be moved offshore at lower cost, they will be
- ensuring that the environment is protected
- ensuring that consumers' health, safety, and rights are protected
- ensuring that competition will be fair
- ensuring that investors have access to the information they need to make good decisions and that they suffer the consequences when they ignore or encourage behavior that violates "the rules," much as a small business owner in a small community pays the price when he or she violates the community's trust.
A difficult problem now is determining who should establish and enforce the rules of the road. With free trade, the system has gone global and there's no going back. When one country crashes, the fallout is often felt around the world. Clearly, Barack Obama is going to play an activist role. However, even his very powerful voice is just one part of a much broader system that even the "experts" don't fully understand.
We need to develop new systems and new "rules of the road" that reflect the reality of our interconnected, interdependent world, where financial resources, natural resources, and human resources are all intertwined. Greater transparency is an absolute necessity.
Governments will need to figure out new ways to step up - and work together in ways that perhaps could not have been imagined before the greed on Wall Street triggered a financial collapse in Iceland, and before melting icecaps in the Arctic became a key indicator for drought and flooding across the Southern Hemisphere.
Nongovernmental organizations and watchdog groups that can operate across borders also need to play a bigger role. Increasingly, warning bells are going to be sounded by organizations and people that operate from a global perspective, who can see local symptoms, but who understand that those symptoms and their potential solutions must work in a global context.
Business needs "rules of the road." The trust-based systems that the foes of deregulation like to cling to evolved in much smaller communities, where owners, management, workers, and customers were all vested in making sure the system worked over time. If you own and run a grocery store in a small town, your workforce and customers are going to be your neighbors and their kids are going to be attending school with and playing with your kids. Unless you want to live in isolation, you're going to work to earn their respect.
Now, the workforce is global, customers are global, and natural resources are global (though they can be exploited in ways that offer no benefit to local people who will end up paying the consequences), and ownership is so murky that -- as the Madoff case and the broader Wall St. meltdown shows -- even investors have no idea what they own or think they own.
The current financial system operates much like the childhood game of "hot potato," where investment managers are incented to move money around in ways that generate huge financial returns for themselves -- with no one ever asking hard questions unless someone gets hurt because they're holding the potato when the music stops.
Moving forward, it's critical that we figure out how to balance between rules that encourage people to act in ways that ultimately deliver the most good for society and rules that might stifle and ultimately crush innovation.
The "most good for society" is likely to come from:
- rewarding innovators for their contributions - which encourages them to keep applying their creativity to solve interesting problems
- ensuring that workers are fairly treated - which becomes ever more difficult as the standard of "what's fair" needs to encompass the fact that when jobs can be moved offshore at lower cost, they will be
- ensuring that the environment is protected
- ensuring that consumers' health, safety, and rights are protected
- ensuring that competition will be fair
- ensuring that investors have access to the information they need to make good decisions and that they suffer the consequences when they ignore or encourage behavior that violates "the rules," much as a small business owner in a small community pays the price when he or she violates the community's trust.
A difficult problem now is determining who should establish and enforce the rules of the road. With free trade, the system has gone global and there's no going back. When one country crashes, the fallout is often felt around the world. Clearly, Barack Obama is going to play an activist role. However, even his very powerful voice is just one part of a much broader system that even the "experts" don't fully understand.
We need to develop new systems and new "rules of the road" that reflect the reality of our interconnected, interdependent world, where financial resources, natural resources, and human resources are all intertwined. Greater transparency is an absolute necessity.
Governments will need to figure out new ways to step up - and work together in ways that perhaps could not have been imagined before the greed on Wall Street triggered a financial collapse in Iceland, and before melting icecaps in the Arctic became a key indicator for drought and flooding across the Southern Hemisphere.
Nongovernmental organizations and watchdog groups that can operate across borders also need to play a bigger role. Increasingly, warning bells are going to be sounded by organizations and people that operate from a global perspective, who can see local symptoms, but who understand that those symptoms and their potential solutions must work in a global context.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
When Government Needs to Cut
As governors look to trim state spending, there are always going to be critics who say there's no fat that can be found ANYWHERE. Yesterday I listened to a radio program where one of the guests said there was no reason to eliminate schools anywhere, despite shifting demographics that left some existing schools underattended and some areas without the facilities to accommodate growing school-age populations. In times of tight budgets, I don't know how you can expect to open new schools in areas where they're needed without also looking to close schools in areas where they're not.
It reminded my of my first full-time job after graduation. There was a deep recession going on, and I was fortunate to be one of the few members of my graduating class to get a job in my field - journalism. I had a great title - Publications Editor within the Agricultural Communications Department at a publicly funded university. What I realized shortly after joining the department is that my job didn't really need to be done - not by me, not by anyone. At the time, we were producing short stand-alone publications (the equivalent of a magazine article) on home economics topics. All of the writing was done by University professors.
It was decidedly low-tech and the typesetting and production was done manually in a huge building on campus. This was in the early 1980s - just after the introduction of the IBM PC.
What made my job essentially pointless was that there really wasn't an audience for most of the publications I worked on. I saw first-hand how the publications remained stacked up, unread, in that huge printing building. At the time, I was a magazine junkie, and the women's magazines at the time were full of lively articles that did a better job of communicating about most of the topics our department was supposed to be focused on.
I could believe that years, perhaps decades earlier, a department focused on home economics for farm families absolutely made sense. Extension services and communications around topics such as canning, sewing, and cooking would have been hugely valuable to farm wives, many of whom lived in isolated situations without easy access to important information. Especially in food safety areas like canning and cooking, having authoritative guides on how to do things right would have been enormously helpful and healthful.
But that was then. By the time I came along, there was not enough work to sustain my job and the work I was doing was not very useful. On too many days when I would come in, eager to work, there was literally nothing in my in-basket. Since I was part of a workflow (the publications had to be written before I could edit them), if there was nothing there, I really had no work. Furthermore, my boss was extremely uncomfortable whenever I tried to take on additional assignments because she'd had my job before getting promoted and so the fact that I didn't have enough to do likely meant she hadn't had enough to do either.
What kept it going was tradition, the desire to not give up anything in the budget process, and the need of the university professors to have an outlet for publishing. (At one point that year, I was assigned to edit a new publication on earth-sheltered housing, something that struck me as a bit odd. When I dove in a bit deeper, I found that the publication I was working had already been published by a different author in another state. It was a clear case of plagiarism which I reported at the time. There was fallout and some very quiet disciplinary action, but what really dawned on me was that the professor who did the plagiarizing didn't expect anyone to read the publication either and that's why she thought she could safely turn the piece in as her work.) When things get dysfunctional, they often get wildly dysfunctional.
I left that post after about eight months and moved on to a writing job in the high tech sector.
Wow. The worlds could not have been more different. Where my previous job was all about reaching markets that no longer existed, the new job was all about reaching markets that were growing and changing everyday. I stayed at that next job for three years, enthusiastically working long days, and learning as much I could before taking the next step to work at a growing software company in Redmond, Washington.
There are things that government absolutely can and should do. Government plays a critical role in many ways - ensuring access to quality education, setting and enforcing safety standards, protecting natural resources, protecting our national interests, and providing a safety net, to mention a few. Government can and does attract some great people - but it is also vulnerable to a bureaucratic mindset that can strangle innovation and demoralize people who want to find a better, more efficient way of doing things.
Now, with the huge budget cuts being implemented across the country, there are new opportunities for government to reexamine the ways things have been done and try to find new ways of achieving the same or even broader impact by doing them smarter or better. It's not going to be easy. But one of the things that would help is for people who believe that their pet programs should never, ever be cut is to recognize that times and situations change, and that for a lot of reasons, government needs to be more transparent, responsive and proactive about making sure each and every department and job makes sense in the broader context.
It reminded my of my first full-time job after graduation. There was a deep recession going on, and I was fortunate to be one of the few members of my graduating class to get a job in my field - journalism. I had a great title - Publications Editor within the Agricultural Communications Department at a publicly funded university. What I realized shortly after joining the department is that my job didn't really need to be done - not by me, not by anyone. At the time, we were producing short stand-alone publications (the equivalent of a magazine article) on home economics topics. All of the writing was done by University professors.
It was decidedly low-tech and the typesetting and production was done manually in a huge building on campus. This was in the early 1980s - just after the introduction of the IBM PC.
What made my job essentially pointless was that there really wasn't an audience for most of the publications I worked on. I saw first-hand how the publications remained stacked up, unread, in that huge printing building. At the time, I was a magazine junkie, and the women's magazines at the time were full of lively articles that did a better job of communicating about most of the topics our department was supposed to be focused on.
I could believe that years, perhaps decades earlier, a department focused on home economics for farm families absolutely made sense. Extension services and communications around topics such as canning, sewing, and cooking would have been hugely valuable to farm wives, many of whom lived in isolated situations without easy access to important information. Especially in food safety areas like canning and cooking, having authoritative guides on how to do things right would have been enormously helpful and healthful.
But that was then. By the time I came along, there was not enough work to sustain my job and the work I was doing was not very useful. On too many days when I would come in, eager to work, there was literally nothing in my in-basket. Since I was part of a workflow (the publications had to be written before I could edit them), if there was nothing there, I really had no work. Furthermore, my boss was extremely uncomfortable whenever I tried to take on additional assignments because she'd had my job before getting promoted and so the fact that I didn't have enough to do likely meant she hadn't had enough to do either.
What kept it going was tradition, the desire to not give up anything in the budget process, and the need of the university professors to have an outlet for publishing. (At one point that year, I was assigned to edit a new publication on earth-sheltered housing, something that struck me as a bit odd. When I dove in a bit deeper, I found that the publication I was working had already been published by a different author in another state. It was a clear case of plagiarism which I reported at the time. There was fallout and some very quiet disciplinary action, but what really dawned on me was that the professor who did the plagiarizing didn't expect anyone to read the publication either and that's why she thought she could safely turn the piece in as her work.) When things get dysfunctional, they often get wildly dysfunctional.
I left that post after about eight months and moved on to a writing job in the high tech sector.
Wow. The worlds could not have been more different. Where my previous job was all about reaching markets that no longer existed, the new job was all about reaching markets that were growing and changing everyday. I stayed at that next job for three years, enthusiastically working long days, and learning as much I could before taking the next step to work at a growing software company in Redmond, Washington.
There are things that government absolutely can and should do. Government plays a critical role in many ways - ensuring access to quality education, setting and enforcing safety standards, protecting natural resources, protecting our national interests, and providing a safety net, to mention a few. Government can and does attract some great people - but it is also vulnerable to a bureaucratic mindset that can strangle innovation and demoralize people who want to find a better, more efficient way of doing things.
Now, with the huge budget cuts being implemented across the country, there are new opportunities for government to reexamine the ways things have been done and try to find new ways of achieving the same or even broader impact by doing them smarter or better. It's not going to be easy. But one of the things that would help is for people who believe that their pet programs should never, ever be cut is to recognize that times and situations change, and that for a lot of reasons, government needs to be more transparent, responsive and proactive about making sure each and every department and job makes sense in the broader context.
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