Results Are Bush's Bottom Line

Dec. 21, 2004

Federal agenda mixes politics and several private-sector principles.

The new CEO has taken seven months to size up the organization. He's got a pretty good idea of its substantive strengths and weaknesses as well as its strong leaders and its more-or-less reluctant followers. And now he wants to put more of his own management stamp on things. For George W. Bush, the first U.S. president to hold an M.B.A. (Harvard Business School, 1975), the organization is, of course, the U.S. government. And the keyword in his just-released management agenda for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 is results. In a 71-page document that has just been sent to Capitol Hill, Bush states, "Good beginnings are not the measure of success. What matters in the end is completion. Performance. Results." For good measure, he delivered the same message in his Aug. 25 radio address. "We want to spend your hard-earned money as carefully as you do. And when we spend the people's money, we insist on results." Bush noted that in 2002 the federal government expects to spend $45 billion on IT, more than is budgeted for highways and roads. "Yet so far, unlike private-sector companies, this large investment has not cut the government's cost or improved people's lives in any way we can measure," he claimed. Not surprisingly, Bush's management agenda as president is far more political than was his operating plan when he was a Texas oil and gas company executive 25 years ago. For example, the management-agenda document, prepared by the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), takes a swipe at the Clinton Administration for allegedly cutting federal-worker ranks across-the-board rather than by "targeted reductions" aligned with the services individual agencies provide to the public. The White House also is spoiling for a fight with Congress and federal labor unions over proposed "fast-track" legislation that would allow federal department and agency chiefs to identify personnel and other barriers to management flexibility and call on Congress to quickly remove them. Nevertheless, the Bush agenda includes several management principles that private-sector CEOs and COOs have been trying to implement for a decade or more. OMB, for example, is telling each federal agency to flatten its structure, reducing the number of its managers, expanding spans of control, and moving more people closer to its (citizens) customers. Performance-based budgeting is to be instituted to determine whether or not a program as a whole is working. Additionally, agencies are to determine their core competencies and then determine whether they can better serve their customers by adding internal capacity or contracting with private-sector companies. And OMB vows to work with federal agencies to reengineer reporting processes and expand the use of Web-based technologies to improve the timeliness of information that supports operating, budget, and policy decisions. Bush did not wait until nearly the end of August and the formal release of his management agenda to make a couple of notable moves, however. Last month the President told Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa Inc.; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, once G.D. Searle & Co.'s CEO; and other cabinet secretaries and federal agency heads to designate a COO, a person responsible for running day-to-day operations. Bush also reestablished the President's Management Council, a group of federal COOs he's looking to integrate policy implementation within agencies and across the U.S. government. The complete Bush management agenda is available online at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/mgmt.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.