Running King County, Microsoft-style
County Executive candidate Ross Hunter could bring some of the smart, combative, impatient style that was cultivated in Bill Gates' corporate culture.
As Ron Sims heads east, King County is looking for a new leader. Sims has somewhat redefined the position with his hyperactive drive. No longer is the executive office a place for tweedy pipe smokers, guys with a kind of suburban dad appeal (John Spellman, Tim Hill). Rather, it's become a launch-pad for ambitious pols eager to step up before the place really falls apart (Gary Locke, Sims). It's a management challenge: balkanized, over-shadowed by Seattle, sprawling, highly populated, underfunded, and with much of the public's dirty work to perform: sewage treatment, bus service, jails.
Sims made the best of it by turning his office into a think tank for new ideas, and that served to get him national attention. Sims mastered details, but often seemed removed from them at the same time, more interested in looking at the big picture, excited by the new schemes dreamed up by smart young interns than in the thankless nitty gritty of county government. He was an early adopter of Twitter, a technology tailor-made for his intellectual restlessness.
By dint of his energy and passion (not to mention bear hugs), he maintained years of good will, though more recently he had his political stumbles — infuriating colleagues with his flip-flop on the 2007 Roads & Transit measure, for one. He was for it before he was against it. Local politicos felt betrayed, though Sims told the truth about the measure's flaws.
He also seemed easily distracted by shiny baubles: a run for governor on an pro-income tax platform (another politically expensive case of truth-telling). The bungles in the election office gave rise to increased criticism that Sims seemed more turned on by his own visions than in taking care of basics, like making sure the elections office was competently run or the computers got fixed.
While the unincorporated parts of King County have shrunk (new cities, annexations), the role of county government is now bigger. Sims has made it a player, a key broker in large regional decisions; he's given the executive's office the cachet of visionary thinking, especially on environmental regulation and transportation. Yet left behind are all kinds of systemic issues, like taxing authority, service levels, strained relations with suburban cities, the cost of running the place (even liberal Democratic leader, House Speaker Frank Chopp, has excoriated the county for its costs). In short, the county has a central role to play in shaping central Puget Sound, but it doesn't work.
Against this background, the latest entry into the exec's race is intriguing. Ross Hunter is an Eastside Democrat serving in the state House of Representatives. He's an Eastside D, of course, socially progressive, fiscally moderate, pragmatic, the kind of politician ascending in the suburbs which have swung blue and been cultivated by Chopp's machine-building. Hunter believes the non-partisan county exec race will allow him to attract voters throughout the county, where two-thirds of the electorate lives.
He's also a 17-year Microsoft manager who represents a traditionally Republican district and has become a player in Olympia as chair of the House Finance Committee. He's certainly not the only Microsoftie to run for office (former legislators Toby Nixon and Bill Finkbeiner come to mind as does twice-defeated Congressional candidate Darcy Burner), but he does think the Bill Gates School of Management has taught him some important lessons.
"Bill Gates is the smartest guy I ever met," says Hunter who was schooled in the competitive, combative Microsoft management environment. It wasn't for softies. Managers had to make their case directly to Gates who could run the company, the whole company, out of his head, at least he could well into the 1990s before it got too big even for him. Hunter loved the rough and tumble. The company interview process was notoriously combative. People who worked at Microsoft like Hunter didn't just survive their interviews, they thrived on them, eager to debate and do battle. Hunter is smart, verbal, and not shy, which he attributes to his "whole East Coast background" (Philadelphia).
If working for Gates helped Hunter hone his skills for duking it out, he's had to blunt that a tad to survive in Olympia, where no one likes a guy who thinks he's the smartest one in the room. (Others have made this rookie mistake, former Democratic Sen. Phil Talmadge for one.) It's not a town where shouting "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," like Gates used to do, will win you friends and allies. (It would also make you hoarse, because you'd have to say it so often.) Hunter says he "rubbed people raw" during his rookie season in Olympia but has softened his edge, Northwest-style. His wife has given him stickers that say "Wag More, Bark Less" to remind him to tone it down.
He has not lost his sense of impatience, however. One thing he took from Microsoft was the importance of getting people together to solve specific problems, and doing it fast. He has a get-it-done-now attitude. He's frustrated with the slow-process on resolving the design of the new 520 corridor, for example, and thinks too much time is being spent tip-toeing around the Montlake neighborhood's concerns and demands for mitigation. "Someone needs to say no some time." He says, "I have a level of impatience that is not normal for people who were raised here." He sees that impatience as a virtue.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, May 4, 6:45 a.m. inappropriate
Any friend of Goldstein is an enemy of good government. They probably liked sitting around telling each other to go "F" themselves.
Posted Mon, May 4, 11:05 a.m. inappropriate
so how much green was injected for the moss might stretch himself a bit for this endorsement?...
who knows he might be right... but from comfy Sims
to Microsoft manager??
Posted Mon, May 4, 11:40 a.m. inappropriate
Most people just don't understand how ineffective and wasteful and misdirected King County government is. The rewards and incentive system doesn’t advance the interests of the people, but a matrix of salary slots (i.e., MOSS) for thousands of people. So in this respect, Mossback, King Count is the quintessential mossback government!
Why upset this self-serving gravy train? Why not keep growing the matrix and compensation and keep the campaign donations coming from those slots? The problem is that the place now bleeds money from every crevice and has forgotten its purpose. Instead of serving the people, it serves itself. The place is dysfunctional, inefficient, bureaucratic, troglodytic, and rewards careerism and the status quo above all else. Here’s a few things Hunter (or whoever is the next exec) should do if he gets elected:
1. Throw out the current bureaucracy. On this front the next exec doesn’t need to be smart, just impatient. And courageous. Probably the best thing the next exec could do, is create a whole new, smarter, more efficient and effective government. This isn't that hard to do, really. Any citizen could come up with a better set of over-populated uncompetitive silos than what we have now. Government is rife with functions whose technology and organization and whole reason for being is out-of-date or non compos mentis. There’d need to be transition period from the old to the new, say as each union contract expires, but eventually the place needs to be transformed.
2. Demand performance for citizens. There are many employees within King County who'd really like to serve the public first, and kowtow to the matrix later. Retain them and pay them well. Pay them to perform for citizens. Measure that performance. (It might be noted that for all the environmental professionals we now employ, in many areas (fish and wetlands for example) performance is really bad because it’s based on the best politically-motivated science that money can buy. Those who are simply padding union payrolls or just following orders to keep their jobs, should be reassigned to more productive pursuits. Or let them get jobs at private sector firms that compete to perform County services. Or hire them as part-timers or temps. By demanding performance for citizens, true partnerships with other parts of government become possible too, instead of zero-sum battles over turf and taxes.
3. Open all union negotiations to the public. The dozens of Byzantine union contracts that KC negotiates behind closed doors are a source of huge give-aways of taxpayer money. The next exec should also rationalize job descriptions so they are consistent and easy to implement. King County has been wasting tens of millions of dollars trying to implement a payroll system that can accommodate the exceptions and anarchy demanded by current union contracts. Better would be to buy QuickBooks Pro and keep it simple.
4. Preserve the ability to decrease overall government compensation in a down turn. When salary increases are locked in over a multi-year period, the executive and the council have no choice but to dump jobs. Much better is to exercise the option to deal with overall compensation with a judicious mixture of overall compensation cuts and job cuts. If the economy is declining by 10%, government compensation shouldn’t be rising by 5%.
5. Increase the number of lesser paid employees instead of trying to turn everyone into a highly paid union professional. The unionization of KC government isn't a bad thing in itself. It is bad, when it becomes a little George Bush crony-capitalism fiefdom that worries mainly about self-serving well-paid jobs of the in crowd. There are many jobs that could be and should be done by people with lesser skills and talents. Not every job should be a family-wage professional job. There should be many government employees who are students working their way through school, moms or dads supplementing the income of a spouse, or single or retired folks who don't need a full family wage job. In this sense government can become a real jobs program that is also a social safety net. When the average government salary is $50K, with benefits amounting to $35K to $40K, your average job is over compensated for the value actually created for taxpayers.
6. Add an independent compensation board that administers union contracts, so that implicit pay-for-votes schemes don’t undermine the integrity of our unions and our elected. One reason the compensation levels are so high is that electeds end up paying about 33% of that total compensation package for the votes that will keep them in office (just my hunch). Note that unions in their negotiations have no incentive to do a better job or to do a job for less money, i.e., their negotiations with the County are largely divorced from actual value received or performance for the taxpayer.
Posted Mon, May 4, 6:39 p.m. inappropriate
Being an effective executive in government is quite a bit different than helping to run a corporation, so being "impatient" might sound like a wonderful value which will help to effect "smart solutions" and push through the political morass, but I am guessing it might lead to frustration, anger, and more intransigence. Government office is more collaborative, less dictatorial than a management position at Microsoft might be. It's easy to talk about eliminating "waste" and "trimming the fat" of government, until you sit down with your pencil to see exactly how those items function and why they were put there to begin with--not always to easy. At the same time, things do change and it is good to have an executive who is alert to this. Government has quite a few challenges to confront these days, so this job will become increasingly important and difficult.