Karl Rove describes what the new White House looks like compared to the old in a WSJ article. Nearly three times the number of staff. More power. More infighting. Less space. Senior staff will be required to meet at 07:30. Knock off time is midnight. Obama is confident his organization can keep up the frenetic pace of the campaign. Rove describes the hive-like conditions that have now been created.
It is rumored that as many as 160 people will be in the West Wing under Mr. Obama. Under President George W. Bush there were about 60. My old, modest-seized office has been carved into four cubicles. … There is a chief of staff, of course, but also two deputy chiefs, and three senior advisers. Some senior aides now have chiefs of staff of their own. That is new.
Rove also argues that what is also new is the way power will be wielded from behind the scenes. Cabinet officers will still be the front-men, but some of the real wires will be pulled by operators in the West Wing. Rove describes a kind of reality TV setup where the survivors rise at the expense of those who fall by the wayside.
Aides say Mr. Obama believes the cabinet structure is “outdated.” His appointment of czars to oversee technology, automotive and environmental policies underscores this belief because each new czar weakens cabinet and agency involvement in policy decisions. The White House has always had overlapping lines of authority, which creates a certain amount of conflict while everyone figures out who really has clout. But Mr. Obama has added to the confusion by making declarations that multiple people in his cabinet or on his staff have more authority and responsibility than their predecessors. In addition to creating a protracted power struggle within the West Wing, Mr. Obama’s management decisions may lead to more intrusive, larger government policies gaining traction. Why? Because left-leaning aides will be unimpeded by the White House’s budget director or cabinet secretaries as they push new policies.
Rove ends by observing that “as power that was once diffused to cabinet officers is centralized in the White House, Mr. Emanuel will have to make more decisions and referee more turf wars than his predecessors.” But this perpetual insecurity will ensure a state of permanent dependence on Emmanuel. And the Oval Office.
Sounds like a good description of a political metastasis.
The idea of maintaining the frantic pace of the campaign day in and day out for the coming four years is a little frightening. There is no end of mischief possible when eager and intelligent people feel the need to keep one-upping each other — and themselves. And having czars second-guessing cabinet secretaries sounds to me like a good way to destroy bureaucratic unity, not build it. Yes, indeed — this will be an interesting administration to watch. My only regret is that the traditional media will not be publicizing the chaotic situation that is almost guaranteed by the situation Mr. Rove describes. F
160 or so people is a big enough crowd to hide Blago in, now that he’s looking for a new job.
The “cabinet” structure that Obama pooh pooh’s did have the advantage that the public could eventually find out and understand some of the debates and who owned a position. The current structure Obama has put in place places more secrecy over the way decisions are made and hides the true powers from the public. This structure, I predict, will break down, when cabinet people resign and go public with how they were sabotaged and did not have the access they needed in order to have meaningful input.
This is how Marxists operate. Everywhere and always. They don’t like accountability. This is also Obama’s way of hiding his true ideological predilections from the public. His cabinet appointments were meant to get the public to think he’s a centrist, but the really influential people are from the Left and they are out of the public eye. This is how he wants it to be.
But it would be difficult to actually write about it this way in a public media outlet, because there is still so much denial about who his formative influences and loyalties really were.
Perhaps the stealth is the only way socialism can be put in place in this country, as long as most Americans still are resistant to it. But right now a large minority are very open to it and want it, and I have met some of these people. They DO actually know what’s happening, but they constantly lie about it and try to portray those who are on to it as paranoid McCarthyists.
A classic rookie mistake.
Matrix organizational structures – which combine a “horizontal” and a “vertical” structure – are notoriously difficult to manage. The most common such structure combines functional departments (sales, marketing, manufacturing, administration, etc.) with geographic regions (North, Southeast, West, etc.). But other variations are possible; it looks like Obama has decided to mix cabinet agencies with issue-oriented task groups.
A matrix organization creates multiple reporting relationships. For instance, the head of the Bureau of Land Management will now, effectively, have two bosses: the Secretary of the Interior and the Environmental Czar. Who really makes the call? I guess we’ll see.
The inevitable result of any matrix structure is an increase in conflicts, requiring higher-level involvement to resolve. The game-playing this encourages is legion; knowing that there is always a tendency to balance outcomes between the competing groups, you begin getting lots of contrived fights, with one group making a big deal over an issue they don’t really care about, so as to accumulate irrelevant “losses” so that when an issue arises that really matters, you’ll have the additional argument of “you’ve sided with them on all of these other issues, you need to give us a win or we’ll completely lose credibility.”
Over time, corporate staff plays the crucial role in an increasing number of decisions. This makes them a bottleneck, and increases uncertainty and decreases speed of decision-making. It also decreases “buy-in” by the folks who have to implement any decision, and the organization becomes more and more internally focused.
Matrix structures were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s. I believe the originated in the defense industry, but became very popular in conglomerates. By and large, most large corporations have abandoned them, replacing them with structures in which there is a primary organizational structure with weak, dotted-line reporting relationships in other dimensions. These structures have the advantage of having clear lines of responsibility and authority, which is critical for accountability. “One neck to choke,” if you will.
Let the games begin.
BTW – is anyone else slightly creeped-out about the repeated use of the word “Czar” to describe these positions? Where am I?
Back in the, back in the, back in the U.S.S.R…
L3
L3–
Would you prefer the original Latin form of Caesar?
Ave, imperator, morituri te salutamus might make a fitting greeting for one of the new czars. On their multiplicity– the tetrarchy didn’t work too well for Diocletian, did it?
This should be fun. The senior bureaucrats in the agencies and departments know how to sabotage an agenda. There Will Be Blood.
fred,
I don’t think you could have hit the nail on the nose any clearer. This is exactly how Obama will deceive the public as to who he is and what he is. It will be interesting to see who is the first of the cabinet to jump ship under these kind of weird working relationships.
Or who gets pushed.
I would bet that Gates won’t last until December of 2009. He will quickly tire of having his decisions handed down to him as to management of the Pentagon by some political apparatchnik in the West Wing.
Interesting how this subverts the whole notion of the Senate “advise and consent” to cabinet appointments. The man behind the curtain is not important, pay no attention to him!
This becomes more Orwellian all the time.
PA Cat,
Given their expected work hours, perhaps the better greeting would be Semper ubi sub ubi.
Cheers.
L3
Matrix organizations are extremely dysfunctional. Even when I was in graduate school in the late Eighties (MBA, Finance, Boston College)the discussions about this type of organization tended towards the unanimous opinion that they were energy wasting. I don’t think there is any conscious effort to construct a matrix organization at the White House. I truly do believe that this is all about subterfuge and deception, just like his campaign was. It’s all true to form and the apple does not fall far from the tree.
I predict a lot of turnover in the cabinet positions during the next four years. And some of those people are going to talk. This is a big disaster the voters have served up, and they will have to take their medicine and learn from it. I hope we can recover from it all, because I think this is going to be worse than Jimmy Carter. Way worse.
Prediction: If the first term is a train wreck, Hillary jumps ship halfway through and sets herself up as an alternative to O’s second term.
“…eager and intelligent people …”
Intelligent?
Really?
Working for Obama and you still think they’re intelligent?
Pshaw.
On the other hand, anything that can suck power away from the CIA and the State Department has to be a good thing. So you have a whirling vortex of unleashed young ambition in the White House, leaving behind a vacuum of aged influence at State and with the doddering spooks — and *this* is supposed to produce a government that will take care of America, rebuild New Orleans, civilize the Palestinians, and protect us from Putin / Ahmadinnerjacket / whoever’s the chief dude in China / and Saudi Arabia.
This just gets better and better disaster-wise, combining the best features of manmade disasters like the Titanic with forces of nature like the tsunami, with one little over-educated black man holding his arms up like Moses trying to part the Red Sea. But this time I really don’t think God will have this “leader’s” back and make those waters divide before him.
“Interesting how this subverts the whole notion of the Senate “advise and consent” to cabinet appointments.”
Nixon also had a reputation of being over-powering and over-bearing, and never asking the Senate what to do. They were considered to be a bunch of rubber-stampers after the fact. LBJ was also a bully and terrorized Senators into doing what they were told.
Look what happened to Nixon. ANd LBJ was run out of town equally as much as Nixon was, he just got to leave on his own time schedule.
If and when Obama is uncovered and shown to be what I think he is, I think that impeachment will be the least of his worries. I wonder if the Secret Service would obey if they were told to look the other direction while Obama did a secret 3:30 in the morning flit to exile in Saudi Arabia.
There was another president who routinely shut out cabinet officials from key decisions, used an overlapping maze of lines of control in order to centralize decision making in the Oval Office, and relied upon a bunch of young hot shots who were in over their heads to handle the situation. His name was Richard Milhous Nixon.
The more times change, the more they stay the same. Based upon my analysis of BHO’s character, I don’t think it’s a question of whether he will plunge the United States into a major constitutional crisis. It’s rather a question of how soon he will do so and more importantly how soon anybody on the outside will find out what will have happened.
I would be surprised if rival domestic intelligence agencies aren’t eavesdropping on BHO’s every move. I would also be surprised if foreign intelligence agencies weren’t watching him too. He could ask how his conversations with his most trusted aides won’t get bugged, and the real answer is that he probably can’t get away from the watch of rival spies no matter what he does. And even if he were to speak to his aides in Javanese, his words would get translated quickly. He will live under a microscope and in the glare of the limelight.
Wise presidents crave privacy. Foolish presidents crave adulation. And the more fanatically loyal his staffers are, the more dangerous they ironically become. BHO may have more to fear from his worshippers than from his opponents. Remember Selena.
A really bad move. The White House should be cut rather than increased. Other than servants and guards perhaps ten staff would be about right.
I guess the country couldn’t operate properly for almost two centuries without this madhouse. I suspect there are more WH Interns now than total WH employees under Eisenhower.
It isn’t just Obama. The place just keeps growing. Congressional staffs enlarge. More bureaucrats get limos every year. More and more jets are operated by the military for VIP travel. Military bands galore.
Once Michelle becomes the first paid First Lady and runs her staff past 200 the next Michelle will demand 400 and her own office building. And get it.
Great comments from Fred and Leo.
Now if one were really cynical, maybe our Great Leader really wants some things like Defense or the Armed Forces to be seen by the public as failing or incompetent at some critical crisis so he can undermine the military’s power. Or maybe it’s some respected General like Petraeus he sullies. Imagine the convoluted lines of responsibility in a national security crisis. Whose orders do you follow?
Don’t these departments have strict protocol?
Is there a legal issue here? What if some untouchable career bureaucrat decides he will ignore his anointed Czar and follow just his department secretary instead? How does Obama enforce his will? Isn’t that how Bush lost control at State, Justice, the CIA and the FBI?
Fred, great comment on how Obama is hiding his intentions. I hear so many sheeple talk of his bipartisan appointments. Boy, have they been taken in. Our Dear Leader is one piece of work.
About a year ago I remember seeing accounts of how FDR showed genius in his governing style by encouraging enough conflict to ensure that everything got sent to his desk. Thereby breaking the usual administrative tactic of isolating the boss as in Yes Minister. This made a virtue out his hiring people like Ickes and Hopkins who rolled around on the Oval Office rug three generations before Monica did.
@K,
No problem, if Michelle wants her own building I say give her one on Midway Island. It would be a bargain at any price.
The most Green obsessed administration in history may actually choke to death on its own effluvia.
If King Hussein wants to emulate the intricacies of the court of the Sun King at Versailles, will he be installing folding screens with chamberpots behind them? He’ll need them.
test
Bad news guys, glitch fixed. I’m back.
High stress, high turnover, high sense of betrayal. We’ll see at least two tell all books by the endof 2009. One will be sandalous (Rahnm tortured puppies in the west wing, Obama smoked on the sly and one night Michelle caught him.) One will be substantive. Guess which sells the most copies?
It’s going to be a wild ride.
Several of our commenters see deciept in O’s management style. I see naivte, inexperience, and political jobs payoff. Was it A. Jackson who made such a deal of “…to the victor belong the spoils.”?
Regardless, all of us, left, right, middle, who have had to make anything happen in any organization know he is stepping on it big time.
My new prayer…”Please dear God, let him read the BC, before he digs he hole too deep.”
I spell quite well, my fingers don’t.
Alexis @ 14. Interesting. Especially your last point… I remember when football players made touchdowns, handed the ball to the ref and returned to the bench, with out vamping for the camera. Now our prez does it too.
fred,
Great comments. It is possible that this approach is subterfuge; however, if his intent is to impose a hard-left agenda on his (generally) moderate cabinet secretaries, he couldn’t have picked a worse way to do it.
The better way would have been to have a small number of fanatically loyal staff (think Valerie Jarrett, not Carol Browner) serve as uber-secretaries with direct responsibility for getting things done. The secretaries would have soon learned who their real “boss” was, and Obama would still have one person who was responsible to him for success. The public face would be moderate, the actual authority would rest elsewhere, in the shadows of the West Wing.
As it is, this structure is Bob Woodward’s wet dream. Policy disputes will be leaked and counter-leaked to the press; think Rumsfeld and Powell, but at every cabinet department, and on 10X the number of issues. Obama’s decision-making process, rather than being private and deliberative, will be public and reactive.
The big difference he may be overlooking is that campaigns are different than governance. In a campaign, everyone subordinates their own ego and agenda to that of the candidate, with a clear, shared goal. In governance, all of the egos and agendas resurface. Leading with discipline, which was the source of his campaign power, vanishes and he’s left with leading with incentives. Much, much harder, and something he has no experience doing.
It’s the difference between Marshal Murat and the King of Naples.
Anywhooo, I’m still chalking this up to simple incompetence rather than savvy statecraft. But time will tell, I’m sure.
Cheers,
L3
One thing’s for sure. After buddy’s treatment, they’ll never be able to call their program A New Direction.
This looks like a carry-over from his campaign, “just throw money and people at it and some of it will work out”. This approach will work in a campaign(especislly with a complaint, nay, participative media) but in an organization that needs to actually set and achieve objectives it will lead to chaos and mental exhaustion.
Elections cycles are episodic and cyclical, win this state primary, win that one, now on to the Convetion etc. There are goals set by the structure of the event. The world is not so kind, the daily grind of not getting closer to the objective (if one has even been successfully identified!) will create frustration and lead to in-fighting. This will be significantly increased by the bad design of the internal organization.
Re: czars etc, I have always said that the Cabinet appointments are only window dressing, the real power will be weilded by the lower structure, Under Secretaries and Czars operate below the radar and weild whatever power they are allowed to accumulate. They will impact policy because they can be the filter through which the “public” figures get their information.
Anyone who has ever worked in business (few in Obamas list have) know that the CEO’s secretary has a better grasp of what is going on in the office that the gaggle of VPs do (and probably has a better handle on things that the CEO). Cross the gatekeeper and whatever it is that you want to tell the boss is as good as lost, you are just not going to get that appointment.
One of the most frustrating aspects of working for the Fed Govt in DC is the frequently Byzantine coordination requirements. Even trying to find out what the requirements are is a significant task. Attempt to send out simple letter and you discover that you forgot to coordinate with the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Left Handed Widgets on Alternate Wednesdays for Months That Do Not Have an R in Them, or some such.
Some of this is inevitable, but different administrations handle it differently, very differently.
When President Reagan left office, a few stories came out about his management style. In his very first cabinet meeting the SECSTATE explained that the Carter Admin had agreed to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, and that the new view was that it was not a good idea to do so. He then explained there were a number of options for the next step, all designed to delicately maneuver away from the Carter position. At that point President Reagan, looking a bit perplexed, raised his hand and said “Just a moment here. The people of the United States did not elect me to work against our interests. Tell them we won’t sign it.” And that was that.
When, while visiting a bakery in the midwest, Pres Reagan was informed that all was ready to force down the airliner that had the terrorists that hijacked the Achille Lauro and all they needed was a “go” Pres Reagan thought for a moment and then said “Do it.” When his staff said that they needed to rush him to a command center to monitor the operation he replied, “Why? I can’t fly a plane or command a ship. We have people who can do that. Let me know how it comes out.”
The night that Desert Storm began, Pres G.H.W. Bush sat down in the White House, turned on the TV, and waited for the news reports to come in.
The 160 micromanagers that Obama has installed in the White House are a guarantee that nothing much will get done, and that it will get done slowly, if at all.
L3: Yea, it look like matrix style, and that you have been there.
Consider:
Matrix Project Management in my experience only works, if it works all, with a small, like minded staff of professionals with very clear project goals and tasks which are primarily technical in nature and where success can be quantitatively and unambiguously measured. This method implies that teams, including leaders and Project Mangers, only come together for particular, measurable tasks, and that team members will be on more than one project, and more thus than one team, at any given point in time.
In theory, this method is an attempt to take the politics (and personalities) out of PM: Project management is just another parallel skill set on the team at the same level as engineering or quality management; project authority rest with the “sponsor” and not the PM; teams are not permanent so it is more difficult to have political structure form. This is the notion.
This is why it sometimes works in technical environments, or at least so it is claimed by the methods adherents. Here the broader political decision have been made before the work begins; that is the theory at least. If you do not know, there is a whole sub-industry in in the software industry around this methodology. The results, to say the least, have been inconclusive. The many of the innovative firms in the software industry are moving away from it for it has delivered what it promised. People, and their pursuit of influence, being what they are, this matrix management tends to either break down or lead to mediocrity (witness the “Big 6″, or whatever that number is now).
But here is the point:
The vicissitudes of governing will put extreme stress on this method. Simultaneously agenda, handling domestic crises, and responding to foreign crises, particular those beyond on the reach of media or political manipulation, work structurally against the method.
The nature of most of their tasks are not technical in nature, and the team is not “like minded”, One could even argue that what they are together for are not “tasks” at all, rather loosely defined goals.
Moreover, rather than taking the (internal) politics out of the management, it will actually make every actor, every act and every word political. Anarchy will ensue, followed by bloody turf battles, followed by entrenched “winners”. Real information will not move either up or down the management structure. Delegation without trust or transparency, poor performance measurement and reporting, and inflexible HR constraints, particularly at the middle management tier, will rule the day.
So this is a true disaster in the making. Too bad it will such an impact on our lives — otherwise it would be a great hoot just to sit and watch them.
Like watching a keystone kops movie.
You can bet that there will be an army of consultants up there trying to work this out. They will only succeed in making themselves wads of cash.
forgive the italics
NahCee @13: I think you are on to something here. I mean, it will not do to have Cambridge nuked.
Lung cancer?
Leo I agree with you once again.
I have worked on defence projects over the years and I have been a meetings in DC but never in the Pentagon (many important meetings are done in other buildings).
After the military cutbacks in HWB admin after the First Gulf War, the DOD politics became really crazy.
The only organizational experience O and his game have had is in law. I hypothesize that this pseudo matrix organization is a strange law firm organization.
Fred, leo, mongoose,
Allow you to gegale you with my brief brush with matrix management. I worked for about 6 months for a large (50 billion revenue) company that had jumped with both feet onto the matrix management bandwagon. I was attempting to leave after 10 days. When I finally managed to tender my resignation, I had never met either my direct or indirect manager. Here is the statement I got from my direct report. I weakled in made the usual pleasantries with someone I had never met before, and then I did the more in sorrow than in anger, better opportunities, etc., etc. thing. The response was:
“Well, I am sure you will be missed, although I don’t really know just what it is that you do.”
I was so dumbfounded that I had nothing to counter that with, and merely turned and walked out the door.
I have dozens of stories about the incredible inefficacy of the organization, but that last pretty much summed up the whole experience. (Despite all that, I actually managed to do some good work there on an individual basis, but whenever the bureaucracy got involved, all forward progress was halted.)
Alexis nailed it. Obama = Nixon.
Both will be remembered as incompetent in governing. Obama more so. Obama now has to DELIVER. He needs above all else a competent staff that can execute, and execute quickly the routine stuff that does not require Presidential involvement. Now he guarantees political infighting and paralysis.
That makes him unable to respond to threats and enemies who do not care about his press adulation: Ayman al-Zawahari, the factions in Tehran, Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Mexican drug lords, and the like.
Consider major terrorist attacks at home and abroad against America, with AQ and/or Tehran’s involvement. Consider Mexican drug lords aided by Chavez and perhaps Putin lobbing rockets and raiding US territory. Ala Pancho Villa. With a White House unable to act because there are 160 people squabbling about what to do, and the crisis errupts in the first place due to inaction by Obama.
Now, the American people demand results. In a deepening crisis, they don’t want more politics. They want RESULTS. It could be that Republicans return to the House Majority by 2010, and Obama is out on his butt in 2012.
There are enough lefties in this new Administration that at least some of them will recognize the Trotsky technique of Permanent Revolution in this jolly new scheme of packing the White House.
Better than packing the Supreme Court, I guess, and the amusement value should be high.
West: A Good man you are. Is any of that management still in place?
BTW, IMO what has destroyed Motorola was been matrix PM stuff and Six Sigma (which is an even worse method). That and the PC CTO.
Whiskey: From you lips to…
LL3-
BTW – is anyone else slightly creeped-out about the repeated use of the word “Czar” to describe these positions? Where am I?
You took the words right out of my mouth. After all “czar” is a corruption of “ceasar”.
I wonder what this explosion of staff sizes and proliferation of “czars” will do to the escort siren quotient.
I work in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the route of the VIP convoys that shutttle back and forth between the Hill and WH. I can often determine from the volume and cadence of the sirens whether it’s the President or a cabinet member. How many more of these convoys am I going to get to listen to?
Is this a dysfunctional Law firm management model or what BHO has more experience with a dysfunctional academic model with Schools, Department, Committees and ad hoc workshops.
Life, Good point. Most universities are dysfunctional. But the Supreme Leader was only a lecturer at the Chicago Law School.
RE: matrix management
How much of this has to do with the Enterprise Application (EA) software like SAP that went through several generations of development before arriving at their current state of perfection?
/end sarcasm/
More seriously, did the software dump matrix management architecture or vice-versa?
@Jay,
As I am aware. That is in fact the longest period of employment he has ever had. Yes it was part time but he knows that organizational model. What other one would he have experience with? He was briefly a very junior employee at a financial news aggregator, he was an intern in a big law firm and a junior associate in a smaller firm for short periods, he was a community organizer, he sat in an office with Bill Ayers for the Woods Foundation and he was a State Senator and en passant a US Senator. In none of them did he perform more than minimal supervisory or managerial functions. Basically he would show up and do a chalk and talk as an organizer or at the Law School.
Sounds to me like ol’ BO’s applying some of his community organization skills in the West Wing. Whip ‘em up and keep on the frenzy.
Andy
Barak Milhouse Obama…
Pentagon budget to be cut by 10%.
I guess that means the age of peace is upon us…hmmm, I think I’m glad I don’t live in an ‘A-list’ target city.
Slade; SAP more maps to Prince2. This is UK and EU methodology.
SAP is pretty hierarchical. Do you know if a successful SAP full installation? I don’t.
Do you know of a firm that has had an operationally successful SAP full (or even partial) installation? I don’t.
Pirate Kings are we.
Mongoose -
All I know is what I read – and make up out of whole cloth ::))
But I followed the industry for awhile – just out of raw curiosity – and incidental exposure during a brief stint at a government job where the dept decided to “SAPify.” (California!)
At any rate, I neither agree or disagree. I was curious if the applications were confined to public sector, because, as you say, the private sector is less tame, one might even say not fully potty trained.
Not to set you off!!!
I just can’t imagine a SAP decision tree following Buddy (and Cramer’s) insights into the contortionist acrobatic dexterity (un)displayed by Wall Street finance houses in Sep/Oct last year. The short-selling of their own stock takes my breath away. (The persistence of naked short selling just makes me stutter.) And the subject gets zero traction, but instead takes a not unexpected sharp left turn into populism as the compensation/bonus structure is rhetorically aligned next to the wet hanky sacrifice of well let’s go with Common Man (I don’t want to get into Redneck territory again) so instead of fixing the system we will “punish” the Bad Boys with more regulatory constraint the cost of which will be passed to the consumer as a drag on commerce.
I can think of no other explanation for Cramer and Buddy’s insights to be ignored (and Leo who argues for a wait it out approach which is politically incomprehensible). The Common Man is being treated as if he is stupid. Put a populist spin on it and the Bud Boys will simmer down. How effing stale and I will add disrespectful. I am sick of it.
As to SAP, the corp I work for went ‘live’ about a half a year ago…the end result, headaches galore.
My opinion of SAP can be summed up by stealing from Dante. SAP: abandon all hope ye who [hit] enter.
My impression of SAP: it’s a tool for the suit in the corner office; it’s not designed, even slightly, to help the average cube drone get their job done…unless their job involves getting flayed by feral cats while dancing on white-hot coals.
If I was a conservative mole inside the WH, I’d inflict SAP on ‘em in a heartbeat.
As an enterprise solution SAP works great. It solves all those difficulties with anyone so uppity as to even think they can be enterprising.
It is also the Station name for the Amtrak stop in Santa Paula, so apt as an enterprise solution, to label an Amtrak portal with the initials of inefficiency. Just another stop on a Spiritually erm Socially, on no, that won’t do Senatorially Anointed Persons line.
Will the train run on time?
If BHO is smart, some form of Parkinson’s law will assert itself after a while and he will only deal with a small inner group of less than ten. But it’s hard to see how that can happen without either a very strong hand from the emperor himself or ferocious infighting to sort out who the mini-me’s are. During the campaign he kept imagining himself as Abraham Lincoln. No doubt he’s channeling FDR now that a new “Depression” is on us and wants to recreate the Cabinet infighting of those years so that he can save us with his brilliant policies.
I believe that the once great computer company Digital Equipment held onto matrix management long after the rest of the industry had abandoned it, and succumbed because of it. No one could get through to Ken Olsen to point out that the personal computer was on its way and not a toy, this in a company that had brought down the mainframe with the minicomputer.
slade:
SAP is really not a PM approach, it is really more of a workflow/resource management/reporting approach.
Actually SAP is used more in private industry than it is in government. Or at least it was the last time I looked. I doubt SAP is the problem in this crisis.
After it caught on with some government vendors, they made inroads into governments in the developed world. SAP is widely used in the EU and in Asia too,
SAP is generally not used in Investment Banks, Banks and other trading firms like hedge funds. Insurance companies may uses SAP, but rarely use it in their trading desks.
SAP tends to be used in manufacturing or process industries, and in some old line “paper-pushing” firms; some energy firms use it too.
(I have consulted in the financial, manufacturing, energy and process industries. I am not an SAP geek at all, but I am an exec and I kept up on it a bit just to cover my backside.)
I have seen some strange usages: a couple of newspapers use it.
The DoD uses portions of it for asset management, and procurement, sourcing an general supply chain management.
Here is the deal. SAP has traditionally been made up of modules.
They can be financial, manufacturing proper(MRP), supply chain, CRM,Sales, HR, Business Intelligence, etc. One need not put in all of them. (When I said “full installation” I meant all modules would be installed.) The idea is to go across the enterprise and capture electronically all business processes, transactions (of any source, not just financial one) and resources. Some installations of SAP have taken years.
That is why they call it “Enterprise Resource Planing”. (I think now they call it business process management or some other such BS) The idea is to tie it all together so that any particular persons or each skill set would only have to know what they had to do, but the data and the work flow would route things correctly to other internal or external actors in the business process.
So it is sort of a mixture of data entry, archive, routing and traffic cop.
So some Sales jockey would make a sale. Automatically a order would be placed, if it was in inventory then out it would go, if not, a manufacturing ticket would be produced, if there were parts made by subcontracters, requisitions/PO’s would be produced, and so forth and so on.
Well, the problem is that in most cases you have to design you buisness process around the software rather than the other way around. they have tried to fix this but I doubt that they have. It is a profoundly big bummer.
Financial systems and processes are completely different. ERP solutions do not fit them well, though of course ERP vendors try to go after those markets. There is a whole other industry for hard core financial firms (that trade or bank as their core competency). For banks, firms like mysys, for some trading situations, products like Thompson financial, there are lots of solutions. Many firms have homegrown stuff.
Real time program trading in high volumes an is extremely tricky business, and the technical problems are daunting. A lot of the big trading operations and the hedgies have their own custom software and extremely sophisticated technical software and system personnel. Some of the most sophisticated usage of software systems in the world are on wall street and it rivals what the government has.
The problem on the private side in this fiasco is one of judgment and integrity. not technology, it seems to me. There may be some process issue in terms of flagging trades or catching execution tactics or strategies, but that is what these guys do for a living. I cannot speak for the government side. But institutions like the NYSE have extremely sophisticated technology and technologists.
There are all sorts of PM approaches on Wall st. from Waterfall to the latest Agile stuff. In the heat of the battle, it is often “throw the smartest people you can in a room and let them fight it out”. I am sure that there is no particular process/PM methodological culprit on the private side. The Feds? well, who knows?
Hope that helps.
It was taught me, back there on the West Bank of the Charles, that Senators make poor Presidents. Accepting the excellent management analysis above, it appears that the Lord Obama may hold to type with, hopefully, a constipating style.
Rove’s description of the physical disposition of the new staff and modifications of the formal reporting relationships, and his inferences about the likely effects of these changes, indicates a lack of appreciation for the potential for effective organizing in new ways through deft use of now widely available social networking tools. The Obama campaign used these means to great effect last year, much to the surprise and chagrin of both his primary opponents and his opponents in the fall campaign. Initially, his transition staffers and new appointees to Executive Office roles have been discovering numerous institutional and structural obstacles to their continuation of the social networking patterns they established in the campaign, but I suspect they will quickly develop informal workarounds along with more direct means (e.g., a few Executive Orders) to overcome many of these hindrances.
Besides the personal experience of working with our Team sites and other internal tools (Rove would no doubt be appalled by our “crowded” work environment extending across the enterprise!) the discussion in Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” provides an illuminating framework for considering the possibilities for amplifying effective communication and activity to accomplish the new regime’s policy goals.
At the same time, it points to the great solvent power these approaches have when applied in a world which is still much more familiar with “getting things done through organizations”, so the end result could well be an intentional cultivation of social networks that feed into the work of the regime in a way which is far more effective in “getting things done” than the Rovian mind can conceive, while at the same time tending to erode the institutional structures which have been the engine of excessive centralization that he warns against. The latter may well be an unintended side effect of what Team Obama does, but when did politicos (or the rest of us, for that matter) ever realize the full implications of their activity?
On the other hand, perhaps that “community organizer” experience that was so much derided during the campaign will count for more than any of Obama’s naysayers could have imagined. A study of just how he managed to get all of his opponents (including the veteran incumbent) kicked off the ballot in his first successful run for Illinois state senator back in 1996 might be illuminating in this respect.
Mongoose -
I must be a worse writer than I thought. I have a medium level of knowledge of ERM software having tracked their implementation over five generations – last I looked – the time required to match the software functionality to the business model/structure in a way that is marginally more meaningful than fighting off “feral cats while dancing on white hot coals.” The ERM apps were little more than a blip over the radar screen of 2008 and out. My primary query was whether tackled matrix structures were modeled.
But I need little incentive to segue into rant over performance of financial services. There should be a special level in hell reserved for the senior management that shorted their own portfolios to provide a cushion for the incipient collapse – a collapse that destroyed 40% of the “Redneck” portfolio wealth. They can bud up with the politicians who pressured for deterioration of lending standards in the name of feel-good social policy and the regulators who were too busy shipping their personal wealth off-shore. The performance legacy will be destruction of the capitalist model.
Political Capitalism [h/t Elephant Bar]
The authors argue that during the last century political institutions were used by business to create a stable and predictable economic environment (very different from that of the Robber Barons). I predict that the Common Man will begin to demand that government provide a stable and predictable environment for the growth of private portfolios. The performance legacy of the cumulative failures leading up to 2008 may well be the destruction of the capitalist model.
Stable environments I do not care for as they do not encourage entrepreneurship. Predictable environments are a wonderful thing. Kind of like playing the game with the rules not changing mid game. Now of course we do not get a homogeneous environments. We get blends. Right now are ability to grow economically is impeded by government intrusion and monkey wrenching.
Now that I have stated the obvious to everyone. My question of many to come is. How does the common man re institute predictability into the economy? I think I know the answer but want to see if anyone has the spine to actually write it out.
The destruction of the Capitalist model is not possible. Even during Russia’s darkest days there was a large percentage of the economy done “off the books”. This was well known to the Politburo and the Council. It was allowed so as to have those things available to the well connected.
Jim
Small (or maybe not) semantic quibble: “Stable” keeps the risk profile within a predefined confidence interval. This is accomplished through regulatory “circuit breakers”. (And I am obviously – I hope – not arguing SOX but the common sense stuff, like mark-to-market, the uptick rule, realistic mortgage underwriting standards, enforcement regs with teeth, naked short selling and transparency in derivatives trading.)
In my view predictability correlates with absence of government influence – putting an end to rent-seeking that distorts market mechanisms. The Common Man has limited options except voting out all incumbents for the next ten years. See how that works out.
The more minions the more centralized the power will be in president 666.
Lots of smurfs running about with no decisions to make nor work to do other than to attend to the needs of the one.
Leftists ALWAYS have problems with effective, results-oriented management and governance. They aren’t even concerned with results as much as with power so why should they care about the effectiveness of organizations like government?
Carter had a similar predilection but he became a micromanager. BHO seems unconcerned with the effects outside the Beltway other than on his ability to impose his political will on the nation. I’d doubt he cares who plays tennis on the WH courts unless he sees that as an effective route to greater power.
BHO is also seeking power over Congress. By working around the Cabinet structure, he bypasses the legislative controls on the Executive branch, including the advise and consent on appointees.
As to matrixed organizations, I’ve worked on mega construction projects for private companies where they have some success. As others have noted, the common technical focus minimizes opportunities for political mischief.