Thread by @SeanCasten

Because there seem to be some indignant folks suggesting that it is standard practice for a CEO to demand daily performance updates or else fire you, a few observations from a guy who spent 20 years in the private sector 16 as CEO and the last 6 in government…

1. First, if you think that government employees aren’t already setting goals, doing performance reviews and being held accountable.. they are. And if you’ve ever lamented that the gov’t has too much bureaucracy - HR is a part of that bureaucracy!

2. In my past job I sold stuff to the government and big corporates. They’re both a pain in the butt as customers. Interminable sign offs, reviews and checks to confirm the purchase tracks with larger goals. Bureaucratic decision making is innate to large organizations.

3. And while it’s annoying as a vendor, it’s also necessary; any organization large enough to be interesting is too big for one person to understand. You want the engineers to have independence from the accountants and them from the lawyers and them from the operations team, etc.

4. Which brings to the first problem with Trump/Musks missive. The arrogance. If you’re working in a national lab, you set your goals with a research director whose goals are set by the lab director who reports up through undersecretaries, ultimately to Wright and then to POTUS.

5. That’s no different from a shop floor worker who reports up through a plant manager to a regional VP to the COO and to the CEO in an industrial. At each level, a good manager sets goals for their reports and empowers them to implement by doing the same for theirs.

6. Managerially, the WH communication last week is like Tim Cook sending the same emails to every Apple Store employee. It would destroy all of their entrepreneurial culture and paralyze the company as everyone waited for the word from on high.

7. The hubris that Musk & Trump have to do this is one thing. Their fundamental insecurity, failing to trust anyone junior to them who is more than an order-taker is something else. But it is how you create more bureaucracy, not more efficiency.

8. Now let’s turn to the government-specific side. A lot of federal employees, in every branch are doing work that is classified. Sending information about what they’re doing to a single, unsecured email address is really freaking stupid.

9. Sending that information to someone who just hacked into the $5+T/year treasury payment system with unsecured hardware and software and has failed to disclose what they are doing there is foolish, and unpatriotic.

10. And even for employees who aren’t doing classified work, providing a single database where every employee discloses what they’re doing presents a single breach point where bad guys could unearth all sorts of information we wouldn’t want them to have.

11. So let’s take this all back to a private sector analogy. You love your company. You’ve been there your whole career and take pride in what it’s done. Then you wake up one day and have a new boss who was convicted of financial fraud in his last job.

12. His first act is to fire your ombudsman who had helped you address an ethics problem you observed with your manager last year when you didn’t feel safe going to HR. Then he encouraged your biggest competitor to buy a long-term partner of yours.

13. Then he fires people on your audit team and starts sending 19 - 22 year olds into the payables system but doesn’t explain why.

14. You stay on because you love the company, with the hope that the board or other senior managers will keep this guy in check. But you’re nervous.

15. And then you get that email asking you to go around your managers who trust - who played a role in building all that he seems bent on destroying. What do you do? That is the question facing every federal employee right now. My advice is to put the organization first. /fin

Postscript: in the private sector analogy you should also assume that your new CEO is a easily-manipulable, sundowning narcissist who spends all his time with a Ketamine junkie who has billions of dollars of contracts with your org.