Tag Archives: efficiency

Can I borrow some please?

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Many topics aren’t directly on point, but part of the challenge we face is how to apply lessons from other fields and disciplines and make them relevant in a municipal context. I came across this blog post in the Harvard Business Review, and frankly the headline resonated: When You Can’t Innovate, Copy.

While innovations are vital, it is impractical to think that we can all be innovators. For many practitioners, being a jack of all trades is practically part of the job description. This approach, while often necessary leaves little time to be truly innovate and explore new ways of doing things.

So what are we to do with limited resources, and even less time available to research, test, and implement new ways of doing business? Why not copy from your peers that have figured it out? Unlike when you did it in Algebra class, this form of copying won’t get a note sent home to your mother. This is a way of leveraging proven approaches to maximize your limited resources and improve your community along the way.

There are a variety places to look for what your colleagues are doing well. The League’s Community Excellence Award program was started for just this purpose. It provides members a platform to tell others about their accomplishments, but perhaps more importantly it is a way for the rest of us to learn from their experiences. The National League of Cities and the International City/County Management Association can be excellent resources for innovative ideas as well.

A mentor of mine often said “there aren’t any new ideas, so steal everything.” While I don’t necessarily agree with the literal interpretation, the idea was clear and on point. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you see something that works, make it your own. As Charles Caleb Colton once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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Better, Faster, Cheaper

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Better, Faster, Cheaper.  It is the battle cry of any good government reformist.  How can you argue with the premise?  Shouldn’t we all strive to reach this lofty goal? I certainly think we should.   In reality though, it seems that the focus as of late is really only on cheaper & faster when we talk about government services.  Better never enters into the dialogue.  If something costs less, then that becomes the default answer.  We talk about, but our policies don’t back up the rhetoric.

I’ll be the first to admit that many of the processes that we have engaged in are not cheapest or fastest, but let’s not forget that part of this is by design.  So why would we intentionally have inefficient processes?  Well, another rallying cry of any good government reformist is transparency and accountability.  Everyone needs to know everything at all times.  Is this better, faster, cheaper?  Well it is certainly not faster or cheaper. The need/desire to be open and transparent leads to a slow, costly, cumbersome bureaucracy.  Is it open and transparent?  Yes it is.  Is it efficient?  No, it is not.

Now this does not absolve us of the need to be the best at what we do.  I would also suggest that the best is rarely if ever the cheapest.  The old adage that you get what you pay for is true in the private sector, your home, and in local government.  Ask any successful business person, what is the most important ingredient to a successful enterprise?  The answer will uniformly be talent.  Hire the best people you can and let them do their thing.  I would suggest to those who believe that the best way to save money is to impose further restrictions on locals consider this concept.  By employing a top down, control filled environment as a way of controlling costs: they are in reality making every government less efficient.  We need to attract the best and brightest people possible and let them lead.

We must remember good people always have options.  If we create an environment where the best and brightest choose not to serve locally because we have made it untenable, have we won because it’s cheaper? Are we better off if we have degraded the talent we can attract because of the environment we have created?  Would any business survive with this approach?  Clearly not.  Why then would we use this as our model of success for local government?  In the phrase better, faster, cheaper:  better comes first for a reason.  We should be striving to make Michigan’s communities the best, not the cheapest.

Is it as simple as cutting costs?

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So much is being made about the need for government to be more efficient. Consolidation and collaboration are the buzz words of the day, and are presented as the cure all for the financial challenges that all local governments are facing. So is it really that simple? Is it true that all we need to do is cut costs to some hypothetical number we can afford?

It occurs to me that the simplest challenge that locals face is matching costs to revenues. It’s something anyone with simple math skills can do. What I am bringing in must exceed or equal what goes out, simple stuff. Why then do so many locals have financial issues? The answer lies in the paradoxical nature of local government services. Every time you cut services you reduce the earning capacity of the city.

So why would service cuts diminish a cities earning capacity? While it is easy to understand that police cost money, in fact a lot of money. It’s harder to understand how cutting costs, a.k.a. services, reduce a cities ability to raise revenue. Think about it like this: what is the cities equivalent of a manufacturing company’s factory? Or to say it another way, how does a city generate revenue? It’s the properties located in that city, and taxes assessed against the “value” associated with those properties. So a simple query: would you pay more for a house in a community with “more” services or “less” services? Great parks or no parks? Good roads or poor roads? Adequate public safety or minimal public safety? I think the answers to all these questions are obvious. Better services equate to better property values, and increased revenue to provide critical services.

Turn around companies make a very handsome living by helping companies be more efficient, and shed themselves of losing components of their business. I am quite certain that as part of that quest for efficiency they would not eliminate the fundamental earning capacity of the company. If the books were balanced by eliminating the manufacturing capacity of the company, then there is no company. The same holds true for cities. Any effort to restructure and reduce costs must preserve the earning capacity of the city. In other words, if our cost cutting only approach leaves a place where people don’t want to live, then we have failed. Herein lays the challenge before us. Increase efficiencies to be sure, but retain the character and fiber of our communities. If not, we have only exacerbated the very problem we set out to solve.