Open Letter to President Obama

17 October 2011 Dear President Obama, You're probably a little stressed out right now. U.S. citizens are revolting in the streets, and to make it even more frustrating, they have no cohesive, discernible vision or united demand, so choosing a course of action is daunting to say the least. I believe I can provide a little insight into what I believe the ultimate problem is. As you may know, some of those protesting are calling for the dissolution of the economic system, a socialist-based robin-hood-esque return of wealth 'back to the people', the proverbial 99%. They believe they have been victims of a system that has sought to exploit them and keep them down. They believe that their congress has been bought, and that the interests of corporations have been put ahead of their constitutional rights. However, in short, I believe the problem has more to do with an outdated governing system, than any of the above. The processes that a government adopts to coordinate people's actions across organizational levels and functions is central to an effective governing system. Recently, you will notice, there has been an increased interest in examining government's relationships with its citizens. One only need to look towards the revolutions occurring in the Middle East to draw examples. Understanding what citizens want is obviously highly desirable given their focus on basic needs, civil rights, and the ability to earn a living. I believe the U.S. government has lost touch with what its citizens want, and need. Regularity in contact and engaging in meaningful conversations with citizens and small businesses will add depth and perspective to the principles that drive the creation of policies, bills and laws. When a government ignores these primary sources of information, and looks only to filtered, static, public and secondary sources, something is lost along the way. America has changed drastically in recent years, yet your governing policies have remained the same. Now is the time to re-evaluate both your long-term and short-term goals. Your long-term goals should include forecasting, setting quotas, implementing strategic control, understanding new and emerging markets, planning and resource allocation. Your short-term goals should be focused on implementing strategic objectives, ensuring your top executives understand the new needs of your citizens, and managing your governors. Your mayors should be concentrating on developing proposals, interacting with citizens, and managing their assigned territories. You, Mr. Obama, should be the one determining the scope of services, developing budgets and implementation plans, and engaging in service development and positioning. Ideally, you will have a department assigned to more short-term goals focused on service management, 'pricing', and distribution, in addition to a separate department that will engage in field-level research about the needs and wants of your ever evolving citizen base. Ideally, your governing system provides key insights into all levels of your government. The necessity of tailoring government services to meet a strategic or tactical decisionmaker's specific needs is of utmost importance. The creation of tailored government services however, also creates a pressure within a government to ensure that the services being offered and used in decision-making is consistent and coordinated across society's indisputable hierarchy. Just as strategies will need to be coordinated across all levels of government to ensure success, the driving principles, your values, will also need to be coordinated. There must be coordination amongst long-term goals

and short-term needs. This is difficult of course, as many of your citizens have different goals, jobs, priorities and standards. "You can please some of the people all the time, but you can't please all of the people all the time". However, by designing a system of governance that produces and coordinates long-term goals with short-term needs, your government will not only be able to meet your specific decision-making needs, but also allow you to achieve internal consistency in long-term and short-term actions. Companies that execute 'best practices' will routinely establish coordination of long-term and short-term goals as a priority, and are also able to effectively articulate the processes used to achieve this coordination. They are also able to articulate how their governing principles were designed to facilitate this coordination, in turn, affecting the design and effectiveness of their governing principles. Simply making coordination a priority, however, is not sufficient. You must also be able to communicate this to all levels of your government, simply so that everyone is on the same page. Inevitably, problems will arise in creating synergy between those responsible for America's longterm goals, and those responsible for citizens' short-term needs. Coordination must be facilitated by individuals who can float between the two. Once a formal distinction between the two has been eroded, I believe you will be able to create a synergy based on a system of information sharing. Close communication and other operational linkages between long-term and short-term, I believe, will increase the country's ability to coordinate strategic (long-term) and more tactical-based short-term goals. This is necessary in order for the United States to effectively compete in the global market. As a simple example, think of Walmart's use of satellites as the basis of their distribution system to ensure that stores are never out-of-stock of the products that its customers visit their stores for. It allows Walmart to quickly respond to conditions in the external environment and better coordinate the long-term goals of the company and the shortterm needs of their customers. Borrowing from business practices, the tools you will need to do this include the creation of various teams, allocation of responsibilities amongst those teams, a plan, interaction amongst those teams, and the creation of a network to facilitate them in doing a successful job. The use of these five tools together provides businesses (and in application here: your government), with a sophisticated means of coordinating longterm goals and short-term needs throughout all levels of business, or in this case, government. Note, however, that omission of any of these tools in practice, will subtract from its effectiveness and negatively impact the coordination process. Teams are the first component of coordination. Most of these permanent and semipermanent teams should be task-oriented and involve focused activities with specific strategic or tactical agendas. Single-function teams can be used to address functional issues and initiatives. Multi-functional teams can be used to address broader issues and initiatives. Many companies and organizations use both types of teams. Information technology is also important due to the role it plays in supporting the operations of these teams, allowing for high levels of consistency and continuity in the teams' activities. This you already know, evidenced by your disappointment in your outdated blackberry upon your first arrival in office. It is important that high-level management, your senior executives, have direct representation on these teams to ensure proper management of organizational processes and coordination of long-term goals and short-term needs. They should help to plan the meetings amongst these teams, attend the meetings, while also having

follow-up responsibilities. Your senior executives should be responsible for ensuring that long-term strategy is implemented in their functional areas. Those responsible for communicating these functions to the public should be directly represented in long-term strategy meetings. These individuals also represent citizens' interests by synthesizing and reporting on the short-term related needs that exist amongst your citizens. Before resources are allocated, input from all levels (strategic, long-term and tactical, shortterm) should be weighed, evaluated and incorporated into your decision-making process. The results of this assessment should then be used to further coordinate the collection of input across all government levels. Your strategic planning and budgeting process should require that those responsible for communicating government services to the public, and those responsible for determining how they are distributed, complete structured reports on the economic, sociological, etc. environment in which your citizens live. This will require communication between your governors and senior executives who are responsible for dealing with short-term issues between the worldwide and country levels. When states request funds from your government, they should be required to submit information regarding short-term issues and how they 'fit-in' with the larger, long-term goals of the country in order to be funded. This has the benefit of forcing senior executives to be aware of the short-term needs of your states on a daily basis. If they value what they see in those reports, funding should be provided. Regular, face-to-face or telephone, relationship-oriented interaction should be the primary and preferred method of communication amongst these levels. This should increase credibility and trust between your levels of government, and your people. Senior executives should interact with those responsible for implementing government services on a monthly basis. These lower-level government employees should be viewed as sources of information that can provide primary source feedback to senior executives via email or via their respective advisory teams. This close working relationship will encourage informal and frequent feedback. You should also make efforts to define and redefine key governance topics and other governance needs so that your governing system is one undergoing constant evolution and adaptation something I believe the current system lacks. As a final note, one must also be aware of the external environment surrounding you. The global marketplace. Broadly, the external environment contains various conditions that will act either as barriers or facilitators to the coordination of your long-term goals and your citizens' short-term needs. This includes the availability of information, information efficacy, competition and rivalry amongst other countries, and the presence and intensity of industry regulation (of which you might want to take a second-look at given the focus that protesters, your citizens, have been devoting to it). You must recognize and take into account, all of these factors in order to successfully compete. Good Luck. Very truly yours, Selina Chan