Maura Healey and Christina Romer reflect on how business can be more like government—yes, government

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

Long before the The President administration tapped Elon Musk to cut federal costs and headcount via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), business leaders and politicians have been trying to find ways to make government leaner, less bureaucratic, and more like a well-run corporation.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan asked J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to lead a private sector committee to root our government waste. While campaigning for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to “radically change the way government operates—to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government.” The notion that federal agencies and programs can be run more like businesses has animated the Oval Office aspirations of executives such as Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Doug Burgum.

Public-sector playbooks for CEOs

But are there lessons that executives in the private sector can learn from their public counterparts? Businesses certainly have benefitted from government; tech companies owe a debt to DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for funding the predecessor to the internet, for example. Local governments can be particularly good at empowering employees at all levels to innovate, something that can confound large corporations. Rick Wartzman and Lawrence Greenspun, when they were with the Drucker Institute, shared the story of how a single front-line employee and two-middle managers in South Bend, Indiana, streamlined the city’s application for tax-abatement to four pages from 22 and moved the process online. The mayor who challenged them to innovate? Pete Buttigieg, who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Transportation during the Biden administration.

Government has produced and shaped other notable leaders, including Christina Romer, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration; and Maura Healey, the current governor of Massachusetts, whom I happened to interview last week at Think 2025, IBM’s annual event for senior business and technology leaders (Fast Company was a strategic media partner at Think). At a time when many forces are pushing government entities to be more like businesses, I asked both of them to reflect on what business can learn from government. Here’s what they had to say:

Maura Healey, governor, Massachusetts:

“Nobody has ever asked me that question. In many ways, government can do better by operating like a business, but in other cases that just doesn’t hold. Government is the place where things have to get done that the market isn’t going to do. As governor, I have to be attentive to the needs of seven million residents, some of whom voted for me and some of whom didn’t, many of whom have competing interests. In government you have to find a way to account for all of that. It gets messy; it gets noisy; but at the end, it helps in terms of productive policy formulation when you have that kind of stakeholder incorporation.

“For purposes of creating a better world—I think in big terms—a world where there is an abundance of energy, of housing, of healthcare, of transportation, of economic opportunity and prosperity for every child, it has to come from a broader lens than sometimes might be incentivized by the bottom line.”

Christina Romer, professor emerita, Graduate Division, University of California at Berkeley, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:

“Government policymaking is often chided for being slow, and it can indeed be frustratingly bureaucratic and incremental. But ‘moving fast and breaking things’ is not what Social Security recipients want when they are waiting for their checks or what the public expects when the FAA is reconfiguring flight patterns and deciding control-tower staffing. At their best, government actions are carefully researched, broadly vetted, and deliberately implemented. This approach wouldn’t work in every business setting, but it could certainly help prevent many bad decisions and unintended consequences.

“Something else that impressed me during my time in government was the high quality of government workers. Far from being the lazy, overpaid bureaucrats they are often caricatured to be, I found government workers to be knowledgeable, hard-working, and committed to serving the public. Businesses would certainly benefit if they could generate that kind of loyalty and passion in their workers.”

Good enough for government work

Are you a business leader who has worked in government? What did you learn from your experiences in the public sector? Send your stories to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I may include insights in a future newsletter.

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