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• Tuesday, December 2, 2008 09:48 AM

  Like you, I'll wait and see

  But I'm not hopeful. What I want is a culture change in DC (I won't presume to speak for the rest of the country). Culture change in any large organization is difficult, time consuming, and problematic due to the innate inertia of a large organization. If you go to MBA school, you'll encounter a number of authors who discuss techniques for corporate culture change and the problems associated therewith. Attempts at corporate culture change frequently fail.

  Typically that failure is a result of a failure of top management to follow through with a change agenda that has to include the alteration and/or elimination of numerous rules, policies, and practices that embed the existing culture in the organization. It also has to include the removal via transfer, firing, or demotion of those middle and lower level managers who have to actually implement the change being dictated at the top and who don't. If you're at the bottom of the corporate food chain, it's actually quite easy to ignore sweeping direction from the top. In fairness to top management, it is difficult to discern exactly how various policies, procedures, and rules embed the existing culture and it is difficult or impossible to remove and/or sideline experienced, capable people who actually make the organization work. After all, a group's function is to produce something, not implement change. Change has to be done in tandem with the group's primary function.

  Which brings us to the Federal Government. The USG's policies, procedures, and rules are far more numerous, detailed and binding than those of a corporation, thus making them far more difficult to alter. Civil service rules make it far more difficult to remove managers to are not performing their primary tasks well than in the corporate world. and doing it because they are not implementing changes from the top is harder. Populating top management with a bunch of tired political hacks who got where they are by virtue of their ability to understand and manipulate "The System" is not a good start. Unfortunately, the depredations of the last 8 years are so serious that this new administration will find its hands full trying to deal with the disasters, time bombs, and trojan horses left by the previous regime.

  Change is going to have a hard time even making it into the back seat.

  I hope I'm wrong.

  —Jeffrey P. Harrison Read Jeffrey P. Harrison's other letters
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