As I noted in my previous blog post, I am attending a conference in in Saudi Arabia to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Institute for Public Administration. The conference has featured more than 100 papers and presentations by experts, most of them academics, from 35 countries.
What made the biggest impression on me was the conference title --"Towards Excellence in Public-Sector Performance" -- and the two conference keynote speakers, Tom Peters (co-author of “In Search of Excellence”) and David Osborne, inventor of the concept of "reinventing government."
One might think that the focus on excellence and results -- it seems as if half the conference panels had the word "results" in their titles -- would be found mostly in developed countries that had already tackled basic governance issues such as the rule of law or establishment of a merit-based civil service. In this view, talk of "excellence" and "results," and support for such techniques as performance measurement in government, is a rich-country luxury, not something for countries where you need to worry about civil servants coming to work every day and not constantly looking for bribes.
That didn't seem to be the view of conference organizers or of participants from Saudi Arabia and other countries (mostly Arab and Asian) at the conference. The language of the conference -- performance measurement, quality, customer service, empowering employees -- could have been taken from the Clinton-era reinventing government movement, or from academic writing on the "new public management." Somehow, something in this message seems to have hit a chord even in a very different culture.
The message that Tom Peters gave in his first-day keynote should be heard by public managers and leaders in the United States as well: "The first 99 percent of excellence is passion. I do not comprehend the person who would get out of bed in the morning and not aspire to excellence." As I have often written and said, public managers have one great advantage over many of their private-sector counterparts: a mission that easily can inspire passion. This remains our greatest underutilized resource in government management.
P.S. It turns out that allowing women in a separate section of the conference occurred only in the large conference auditorium hall, where it was felt that (because of larger space) women would not be close to men. However, in the two smaller breakout rooms where people were closer together, women were not allowed, and needed to sit in separate rooms into which the proceedings were broadcast. I was told, however, that this conference was actually the first ever held in Saudi Arabia at which, at least partly, women were allowed to be in the same hall as men. Additionally, women presented a number of papers at the conference -- even if in the breakouts, their voices were somewhat eerily broadcast from the "ladies' room" into the breakout room -- which I was told was again a first for Saudi Arabia. I should add that women were encouraged to ask questions during the question periods, and on average the quality of their questions was better than the quality of the men's questions. If you are in a society which raises great barriers to achievement, those who do achieve are likely to be really outstanding.
Posted on Nov 05, 2009 at 11:31 AM0 comments
For the first time in three decades of teaching, I canceled a class. I did so in order to accept an invitation to attend a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Institute for Public Administration, a Saudi government training and research facility. I told my students that the opportunity to visit Saudi Arabia — particularly as an American Jew — was simply too interesting to turn down. (Until a few years ago, it was impossible to get a visa to come to the country simply as a tourist, except for the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Now, tourists may come as part of groups organized by a small number of recognized tour providers.)
This is clearly a nation in transition. One can see it in the physical appearance of Riyadh and in the changes in the ways women appear in public.
The city has expanded dramatically from a tiny old core into a sprawling multimillion-person metropolis. The expansion is relatively new. The build-up of areas even slightly outside the old center has happened just in recent years. Many international brands have arrived for the first time in the last decade. I saw the largest Pizza Hut I've ever seen — probably by a factor of five — on the main drag coming in from the airport. A new "financial city" is going up just north of the center of town, and King Saud University has expanded its campus dramatically, with many new buildings.
One of the new landmarks is the Kingdom Tower, a striking modern office building with a necklace design at the top, reminiscent of some of the modern buildings in Dubai or Shanghai. At the base of the Tower is a shopping mall where I was able to see the evolving relationships between the sexes. The building includes a "Ladies Kingdom," which is a shopping area for women only, with a separate entrance. However, women are also allowed in the main mall.
In the food court, there are separate lines for men and women buying food, separated by a sort of flimsy, maybe five-foot-tall, screen. There are separate seating areas, separated by a high barrier, for men and "families." The Starbucks in the mall, away from the food court, has two separate entrances. However, at other stores, men and women buy from the same counters, without separation, though clerks seemed to be all men. No one I asked was really able to explain why there were different practices for food and other items. About 90 percent of the Saudi women in the mall had fully covered faces (except, often but not always, for eye slots). Many Western and Asian women in the mall wore headscarves, but some had uncovered hair. However, all, including those with uncovered hair, wore long black, loosely fitting abaya dresses.
I was told that wearing an abaya was considered to be more important than covering one's head. One couple was holding hands! I asked about this as well and was told this is seen more and more. However, if a member of the so-called religious police stopped a couple and they could not show they were related (by blood or marriage), they would be in serious trouble. (However, one person I asked added that the religious police seldom came to the Kingdom mall because it was owned by a high-ranking member of the royal family.)
At the conference I'm attending, women had a choice between sitting in a separate section in the main hall or in a separate room into which the proceedings were transmitted. My room has been cleaned by men, and I haven't seen any women employees at the hotel, at least in customer-facing jobs.
More to follow!
Posted on Nov 02, 2009 at 1:58 PM3 comments
I am in the business class lounge at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, on a seven-hour layover flying from Boston to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where I will be attending a public administration conference. (Among others, John Kamensky and Jonathan Breul from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, along with David Osborne, author of "Reinventing Government," will also be there.) Particularly attentive readers of this blog may remember that this lounge is filled with newspapers from all over Europe, so this is my chance to look at French, German, British and Swedish papers during these copious layovers -- they have good snacks too, including a Thai curry soup I am about to try after finishing this post.
At any rate, there was a small story on the business pages of the U.S. media on Thursday that was, unsurprisingly, a huge story in the Swedish press (four full pages plus an editorial in Dagens Industri, Sweden's counterpart to The Wall Street Journal), about the likelihood that Volvo, the Swedish carmaker that Ford now owns, will be sold to Chinese automaker Geely.
This is a huge story for Sweden because Volvo is a Swedish national icon and one of the largest companies, and employers, in Sweden. And it is an interesting story for me personally, given my interest in both Sweden and China.
But it is an important story for the rest of the world as well. This represents the first significant purchase by a Chinese company of an important Western consumer brand. Volvo is a well-known, if niche, brand even in the U.S. and certainly in Europe. This is another sign of China coming of age in the world economy.
Geely is the largest privately- and Chinese-owned auto producer in China. (There are a number of foreign producers and foreign joint ventures with Chinese government-owned firms.) Geely was founded by a private entrepreneur, who is quoted in Dagens Industri as saying he sees Volvo as "a beautiful, mystical woman" -- an interesting metaphor that says something about what this sale means for China. The company has promised to keep Volvo headquarters in Sweden, and Swedish commentary notes that this has to be good for Volvo sales in China, now becoming the largest car market in the world. "Time To Get Used To Volvo Becoming Chinese" is the headline of the editorial on the topic in Dagens Industri.
Posted on Oct 30, 2009 at 8:45 AM4 comments
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- Sunday evening was the beginning of ACT/IAC's annual Executive Leadership Conference of the Industry Advisory Council/American Council on Technology. With 850 attendess (about 250 government, the rest industry), this is the premier government IT conference of the year.
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Three people buttonholded me at dinner tonight to tell me what was on their minds -- a small business manager, an executive from a large business, and a middle-upper middle federal career manager. What struck me was that all of them were in a complaining mood.
The small business griped that government program managers only wanted to work with large businesses, who ripped them off, seldom bothered with seeking competition, and were oblivious to the cost savings his products offered. The big business executive complained that Congress was creating an environment where government and industry were no longer able to talk with each other, where attention to quibbles was replacing attention to results, and where agencies were unwilling to make any of the tough decisions necessary to achieve successful business transformations. The government manager groused that more and more requirements, reports, and oversight were being laid on understaffed organizations, and that the the talent pool was growing really thin as experienced hands retire, increasing the risk of mistakes and in turn generating more oversight, reviews, and second-guessing. The new people coming in would eventually be very good, he argued, but now people were being promoted to grade levels well beyond the skills they had developed.
Interestingly, both the large business executive and the government manager felt that the push for more transparency was creating lots of additional work for little additional benefit. Government is already incredibly transparent compared with other institutions in society, both were saying. (The manager of the small business didn't mention transparency.)
People like to complain, of course, but I must say -- as an almost 20-year veteran of ELC conferences -- this level of complaint and sourness struck me as really high. I don't have an explanation -- I'm only reporting. I think the mixture of the oversight environnment and people problems/shortages is fraying the fabric of government and the government-industry interface. We have some significant repair work to do.
Posted on Oct 26, 2009 at 10:40 AM0 comments