Photo by Mong Mong.
There are times when you need the business to run. Not run as in operate. But run as in sprint. Like the fast, efficient hum of an organization where the top-line goals are clear, the executives are aligned, and the management corps has the tools and talents to bring the rest of the organization along. Where the incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic, all point to the same thing. Sure, the CEO makes more money and has a different options package. But we all stand to do well if this thing succeeds. And somewhere in the distance, a starter pistol goes off.
If you’ve ever worked in a company with this intoxicating hum, you know what we’re talking about. The all-for-one, one-for-all, in-this-together. Where the pull of the market has us putting out better work in a month than many people will do in a lifetime. This version of work feels fucking fantastic. You aren’t mad about meetings that could be emails. You aren’t squabbling with other departments. You wake up and you paddle as hard and as fast as you can. And then you do it again the next day.
You are efficient because you have the searing clarity that comes with strong market forces. What is good for your CEO is good for your customer base is good for your shareholders is good for you. In the 80s, you could put that efficient business feeling up your nose at work. Due to government overreach and regulation, you will have to settle for the buzz from your third cup of coffee. But honestly even that still feels pretty damn good.
That buzzy feeling is so good that it makes you want to apply it to a bunch of other non-business-y things. Run your non-profit arts org like a business. Take the ugly barracks of the Presidio and run the park like a business. Anywhere you sense that a little efficiency and a strong north star will go a long way, boom, pow, now we’re cooking with gas. Bring in a high-profile CEO with a long leash and run the entire US government like a business. LFG.
Good on paper
We get the appeal. We really do. We have been paddlers in this story several times over. Not at every job. Not in every organization. But enough to know to spot the familiar rush. And to spot its absence.
You may work an entire career and never feel the profound capitalistic high we’re pointing to. You can force people back to offices. You can ask for daily summaries of what they are working on. You can threaten them. Yell at them. And still have them standing around. Not paddling. Not even in boats. Trying to figure out who ordered the Costco pack of oars to the office and why.
This is very frustrating. If run-it-like-a-business means all of the amazing things we just laid out. If it’s pixie dust for efficiency and an aligned workforce that gives a shit. How come every business doesn’t get those things by default?
You already know. Not every business is a good business. Not even every well-run business is a good business. The terrible stat that haunts every founder and entrepreneur and individual human with a dream is this: most businesses fail. With every year that you manage to stay in business, more of the businesses around you tumble. When we tell people to “run it like a business,” we are saying go do a thing that ends in failure more often than it succeeds.
Even when businesses succeed, there are still problems. The Sacklers ran an extremely successful business. With the stacks of body bags and millions of dollars of McKinsey fees to go along with it. Enron was incredibly successful until it wasn’t. Ditto the subprime mortgage lenders. Union Carbide was killing the game in 1984, when the Bhopal disaster injured more than half a million people and killed tens of thousands. And if you’re like, yeah, sure. Those are orgs that broke the law, though. They put such a high premium on achieving business objectives that they pursued them at the expense of everything else. Including compliance with regulations and corporate governance.
Yes. They ran it like a business. A very effective. Very efficient. Very profitable business. And that worked well until the success of those businesses bumped right up against the needs of the communities in which they were operating.
Telling on themselves
One of the main ways government interacts with business is that it regulates the worst of those excesses. Not particularly brilliantly, not particularly efficiently, but consistently enough and effectively enough that it’s a popular thing for business leaders to complain about. Businesses don’t want to report their greenhouse gas emissions, or security breaches, or injury claims. Business do want their mergers, or drugs, or crypto exchanges to be approved faster and with less oversight.
If you don’t run a business you might not spend a lot of time thinking about government in those terms. But we promise you that every CEO, every senior leader of a large company, every investor, every billionaire, thinks about regulation a fair bit. It’s an ever-present part of how they make business decisions. Some of them accept it as the cost of doing business or even a welcome levelling of the playing field, others try to buy the changes they think will give them an advantage. But every single one of them thinks about it, studies it, navigates it. So when a powerful CEO tells you that the government should be run like a business, they’re telling you they want the government out of theirs.
If they get their hands on the keyboard, they’ll send any email they need to, to get that done. Because in business they would. Shut down departments that aren’t profitable. Lay off the teams that are too uppity. Call it efficiency. That’s par for the course in business. But government departments aren’t supposed to be profitable, by and large. Regulatory agencies are, by design, sort of uppity to the people trying to break the law. Businesses fail all the time but if a government fails that’s an actual crisis.
Like, if you sit with it for a minute this is all obvious, right? Good government is about service, and support, and care, and protection, and organizing collective action for collective good — firefighters and roads and school lunches and vaccination programs and whistleblower protections — without the expectation that each of those programs generates cash profit. Government doesn’t have a profit-based business model because government isn’t a profit-based business. Government shouldn’t move fast and break things because government is civic infrastructure and breaking democracy doesn’t end well. The payoff isn’t quarterly earnings, the payoff is a just and thriving society.
Pretending that these things aren’t obviously true would be a small silly distraction of small silly men if it weren’t endangering, threatening, and killing people. But here we are.
This ain’t it
Look we’re not government policy wonks, and we’re not trying to give civics lessons to anyone. But when you tell us you’re doing a set of things in the name of treating it like a business, you’ve stepped into our lane. When you tell us that what government needs is more of the ruthlessly efficient management of the private sector, that intoxicating hum of a well-run team, you’re talking about a thing we are actually world experts in. Let us break it down for you.
Intentionally putting teams into chronic stress is not good management, it’s ideology. Sending conflicting orders within the same management chain is not good management, it’s incompetence. Understaffing critical roles is not good management, it’s poor impulse control. Midnight layoffs of gold-standard teams finding hundreds of millions in savings is not good management. Eliminating policies that drive transparency and accountability is not good management. Double-counting and faking your metrics is not good management. Forcing dedicated and decorated staff to resign based on their gender identity is not good fucking management. Eliminating a program literally focused on elevating great management is…well it’s not great.
In business, the notional backstop to all this is supposed to be those stock options. The shareholders want their stock to be worth more and the board acts on their behalf. The CEO gets a pile of stock options to ensure that their decisions align with what shareholders want. This is an arrangement that has caused all kinds of inequity and awfulness in the world, but the idea we’re all pitched is that at least it aligns incentives. That a CEO making decisions in their own best interests will end up doing right by the organization as well. That’s the foundational trickle-down story of business.
But the government doesn’t have stock options. When a CEO tells you they want to come in and “run the government like a business,” which business do they mean? Whose interests are being served? We can’t read their minds but we can look at their actions, and we can ask ourselves which model explains them best.
If this is what you meant when you said “run it like a business,” you should have just said “run it badly.”
— Melissa & Johnathan
