The Business of Government is a magazine dedicated to improving the management of government.

This issue includes conversations with Clay Johnson III and John A. Koskinen; leadership profiles of Hector V. Baretto, Carolyn Clancy, M.D., Norman Enger, Janet Hale, Eugene W. Hickok, Lindy Ritz, Preston Jay Waite, William Winkenwerder, Jr., M.D., and Holly Wise; a forum on "Getting Results;" a management article on "Bridging the Knowledge and Skills Gap;" and research report abstracts.

CONTENTS
3 From the Editor’s Keyboard
4 Conversations with Leaders
A Conversation with Clay Johnson III
A Conversation with John A. Koskinen

18 Profiles in Leadership
Hector V. Baretto
Carolyn Clancy, M.D.
Norman Enger
Janet Hale
Eugene W. Hickok
Lindy Ritz
Preston Jay Waite
William Winkenwerder, Jr., M.D.
Holly Wise

45 Forum: Getting Results
Introduction: Moving Toward “Getting Results”
Linking Performance and Budgeting
The Arrival of Performance Budgeting
PARTing Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Strategies for Using State Information
E-Reporting: Strengthening Democratic Accountability
Showtime! Creating a Management Framework for Getting Results
Performance Leadership: 11 Better Practices That Can Ratchet Up Performance

92 Management
Bridging the Knowledge and Skills Gap: Tapping Federal Retirees
98 Research Abstracts

Download The Business of Government, Summer 2004

PDF format, 2.8MB, 168Pages

From the Editor’s Keyboard
What Steve Spurrier Taught Me About Management
By Paul Lawrence

My father introduced me to sports. As a Massachusetts native, he taught me the championship history of the Boston Celtics and was pleased when I adopted them as my favorite basketball team.

For much of my early life, I grew accustomed to the Celtics’ annual trip to the finals. My father took me to my first Boston Red Sox baseball game. He warned me that the Red Sox would break my heart, but I became a fan anyway. And he was right about the heartbreak. Like many military families moving in and out of the Washington area, my favorite football team became the Washington Redskins.

As I pursued my career as a management consultant, I found myself increasingly reading management books and magazines. Sports Illustrated gave way to the Harvard Business Review. But my lifelong interest in sports has continued. Occasionally, these two interests come together when I find a sports figure from whom I can learn much about management. And these management insights include learning from bad examples, as well as good ones.

Steve Spurrier, former coach of the Redskins, provided me with ample opportunity to see the relevance of management to sports. As did many Redskin fans, I watched with anticipation the arrival of Spurrier from the University of Florida. During his two years in Washington, I learned much from Coach Spurrier about what not to do when running an organization. It has been fascinating to analyze the contrasts between Spurrier and the new coach, the renowned Joe Gibbs, during the Redskins’ three-day mini-camps.

Watching Spurrier and Gibbs has taught me the following:

Lesson 1: Get to know your team. The Washington Post reported that at the end of his second year of coaching, Spurrier still had not learned the names of many of his players. In contrast, Coach Gibbs was reported to have known all his players’ names by the end of his first mini-camp.

When working with my own team of consultants on a project, I want to emulate the relationshipbuilding Gibbs, not the aloof Spurrier. Clearly, one gets better performance from a team that realizes their leader knows them and understands their hopes and career aspirations.

Lesson 2: Recruit experienced staff. Both the number and importance of assistant coaches have grown dramatically in the National Football League in recent years. The contrast between the coaching staffs of Spurrier and Gibbs could not be greater. Spurrier put together one of the leastexperienced staffs in recent NFL history. Gibbs opted to hire staff with extensive experience at the professional level.

While we will have to wait until the fall to see whether Gibbs’ hiring approach will contribute to a winning Redskins season, we know that the Spurrier approach did not work. In assembling my own team, Gibbs reminds me of the importance of recruiting experienced staff. We frequently forget that there is often no shortcut for experience.

Lesson 3: Hire people who will say “no.” All leaders need people around them who will tell them, “You can’t do this.” Because they appear not to have placed a high enough value on pass protection, Spurrier’s team constantly had quarterbacks injured. To explain this, I imagine a meeting early in Spurrier’s tenure, when he announced that strong and agile offensive linemen were not necessary, because his offensive system was so sophisticated that it would dominate NFL defenses. He must have pointed out that that is, after all, how he did it in college. If he had someone on his staff with enough knowledge and self-confidence to tell him this approach made no sense, it might have prevented two years of ineffectiveness and made Spurrier a more ...

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Through research stipends and events, the IBM Center for The Business of Government stimulates research and facilitates discussion of new approaches to improving the effectiveness of government at the federal, state, local, and international levels.

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