Counter cultures: success in government demands a different set of skills than making it big in business.

AuthorLinsky, Marty
PositionViewpoint essay

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My third tour in government was as chief secretary to then Republican Governor Bill Weld in Massachusetts in the early 1990s. My portfolio was politics and personnel--aka "patronage."

It was the early days of the merger and acquisition craze. As a consequence, there were a slew of men and women with highly successful track records in business whose jobs had ended on someone else's schedule. With impressive resumes, paid-up college tuitions behind them, and enough money squirreled away to get by on a public sector salary, they "wanted to give something back" by serving in an important position in state government. Status was still important. For example, if you had been the president of a successful local bank that had been swallowed up, you might well be addicted to a certain level of authority.

We recruited lots of those folks into the Weld administration. Anecdotally, it seemed as if they either blew out pretty quickly or they made the transition well and made significant contributions to the public good, at least as we defined it. Almost no one was just so-so.

I remember noticing the pattern at the time. It got me to thinking about the difference between exercising leadership successfully in business and doing so in government and politics, and why it was so difficult for many in business to match their private sector success in the public arena.

What are the cultural and value differentiators between these two worlds?

While my academic colleagues might be eager to attack that question with an elaborate research design, I'm too much of a journalist--and politician--to resist taking a stab at naming the most important of these many differentiators.

So based on what I have experienced and observed, here are four key differences I see between succeeding in the world of business and politics.

NO. 1: DATA VERSUS ANECDOTES

For business, systematic data are powerful. In politics, anecdotal evidence is not an oxymoron.

People in government and politics--for our purposes here, let's use "politics" or "political environment" to cover both elected and appointed officials in the public sector--have different ideas about the utility of systematic data versus anecdotes in decision making. At one end of the spectrum, academics and scientists use many, many cases to come up with a general theory, which is then applied to a particular situation. Legislators, on the other hand, are forced by the nature of their work to use...

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