Author Archives: Brad Ferguson

About Brad Ferguson

Private citizen focused on building the economic competitiveness of Canada.

Let It Not Go To Waste

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Whether it was Winston Churchill, Rahm Emanuel, or Mark Twain who actually said it, the concept of “never wanting a serious crisis to go to waste” has been used as a rallying call many times over the past weeks and months.

Companies have used it to digitize processes, reduce meals & travel expenses, develop new partnerships, and eliminate unnecessary meetings. Households have used it to restrict debt accumulation, eliminate frivolous expenses, reconnect with family, and rethink the importance of things like seasons tickets.

The question is, how should government not waste a good crisis?

Currently, much of the collective effort is on health & safety policies, building closures, travel bans, boarder controls, quarantine processes, unemployment support, and now the securing masks and other PPE supply chains. These are all essential provisions in times of crisis as they focus on the safety of citizens, essential services and economic life support – all with immediate, short-term benefits. Like riding a bike and looking down to dodge rocks and cracks and bumps, it takes tremendous effort and oversteering to just keep upright. It feels like you are moving forward, but really you are just trying to keep peddling.

But what if we lifted our eyes, looked to the horizon, and took a 20-year or 50-year nation-building view and asked “How can Canada come out of this as one of the strongest, most united, and most respected nations in the world?”

As the curve starts to bend and the pandemic becomes more predictable, this horizon should become the new narrative of our political leaders. Wouldn’t it be inspiring if we tuned in to a media session and heard the following:

  • Our interprovincial boarders and policies prevent us from becoming an efficient and united country – and these will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • We have greatly depleted our manufacturing capacity of essential goods and services across the country – and this will need to be rebuilt as we recover.
  • Our regulatory environment and lack of competition in critical infrastructure (roads, railways, pipelines, telecom, ports, airlines) has prevented capital investment – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our dual language laws prevent cohesion amongst a multi-lingual nation – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our federal bureaucracy is not representative of Canada’s diverse geography – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our relationship with the United States needs to be coordinated on continental energy, food, fibre, water, and essential manufacturing policies – and these will need to be embraced as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our corporate tax structures need to promote reinvestment in private sector jobs and goods-producing sectors of the economy – and this will need to be supported as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our duplication of services between provinces and among municipalities has increased the cost of government beyond our affordability – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our essential services industries (including health, education, EMS, manufacturing, and public service) need to embrace digital, robotic, and artificial intelligence forms of innovation – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our industries need to align to the Canadian brand of technology, environmental and human rights leadership, but also have full access to tide water to build the long-term strength of our economy – and this will need to be championed as we recover from this crisis.
  • Our Canadian brand is appreciated around the globe but under-developed within our own country – and this will need to change as we recover from this crisis.

If we take a 20-year or 50-year view and use this crisis as an opportunity to break down the barriers that keep us from being efficient and united, and get our people working on long-term solutions and positioning while they are unable to contribute fully to the economy, then maybe we can emerge as that strong nation with a positive mindset, a renewed constitution, and a collective vision.

Churchill was a great orator. His speeches addressed the brutal facts of reality. But they also allowed people to always peak around the corner and see a path forward. A light. A call to action. A national responsibility.

Let’s not waste a serious crisis.

 

 

The Long Road Ahead

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There are two types of people in the world. Those who drain their gas tanks almost to empty before they refill, and those that keep their tanks topped up in case they run into an emergency.

Much discussion has occurred about how long the COVID-19 Coronavirus will last, and how we should prepare as companies or as households.  Although no one knows for certain, it would be wise to expect a long road ahead, with once reliable gas stations often closed along the way.

Fill up your tank, a couple of jerrycans, and fill them up at every opportunity you see. This is going to be a long road trip through the desert of despair, and you don’t want to run out of staying power before the trip is over.

At BGE, we are lucky to be in the air filtration business which is considered an essential product/service to maintain healthy indoor air environments in everything from hospitals to commercial buildings to pharmaceutical labs and oil sands plants. We have watched the erosion of consumer activity and demand across all industries in Q1 and, despite the grit shown by our customers, we expect the onslaught to continue. We have prepared for a Q2 (April, May, June) where the overall economy will be down -24% and we have extended our scenario models through to August 31st and December 31st, as we want to ensure we always have gas in the tank.

These timelines are very different than President Trump’s declaration that this will be over by Easter or April 30th.

What will be interesting is how consumers and industries come out of this. It is hard to imagine a declaration stating that “COVID is now over, please go back outside and resume your lives.” Rather, like restarting a manufacturing plant, the economy will likely return to full production in gradual phases. For that, we may want to draw on an augmented version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and apply it to industry sectors.  Starting at the bottom with the most basic economic needs and working our way up is an interesting view to how to rebuild or reopen the economy. Also of interest are the questions surrounding which industries or human activities simply do not return – a topic of many subsequent posts.

 

 

Governments will need to slow the spread of the virus before opening up parts of the economy. By the end of Q2 we should see a movement away from the mandatory lockdown measures to a slow economic reopening based on expanded capacity within the healthcare industry. This may be done by region, or more presumably by a phased approach based on necessity. This may take months, as recurrence of the virus will become the high-risk topic through the summer months.

Regardless, what we know to be true is that many businesses out there have spent the past two months rapidly digitizing every available part of their business model, and are now implementing creative partnerships, processes, technologies, forecasting tools, channels, pricing & terms, and supply chains. These are all overdue improvements to productivity out of necessity, but they also all suggest that when the economy does come back, employment may not return to its original form.

Government support programs, rent & mortgage holidays, utility & tax deferrals, credit & loan facilities are all critical jerrycans to be filled. Debt levels were at all time highs before this all started, and no one is calculating the collective impact of the programs that have been announced.

So, whether you are a business, a non-profit, a household, or an individual, it is important that you keep your tank filled, get your jerrycans before they run out, and prepare yourself for the long, long road ahead.

Absence of Rankings

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In the private sector, it’s pretty easy to know whether your organization is outperforming the others in your industry sector. It is easy to find out if you have better margins, or lower employee turnover, a lower costs structure or a better return on shareholder investment. Many private sector organizations are publicly listed companies that require transparency in financial performance and risk.  Many private sector organizations have articles written about their leaders, their techniques and their performance.  And, many private sector organizations strive hard to be included in published rankings that evaluate them on a multitude of performance metrics, including best performing, fastest growing, best places to work, and best corporate cultures.

As well, there are CEO learning forums like EO Entrepreneurs Organization, YPO Young President’s Organization, the MacKay Forums, TEC, Tiger Forums and many others that are all designed for CEOs of small, medium and large organizations to share their experiences, share performance data, and share tools and techniques with the sole goal of making each other better.

Does such a thing exist for leaders in the public service?

I know many public service leaders who join the organizations listed above, but they do so with a huge sense of guilt and consciousness, as they know that they are using taxpayer dollars to pay for the membership – a membership that includes a peer-to-peer platform for management education, leadership discovery, performance measurement sharing and implementation accountability.

Shame on them.  Shame on the President of the College, the General Manager of the Conference Centre, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Energy and the CEO of the Healthcare system for wanting to learn from the best, compare performance and techniques, and be accountable to one another for getting better. Shame on them for using part of their budgets for improving performance.

Madness. Madness I tell you.

We have dumbed down our public service, and we have done it to ourselves. We have scrutinized budgets, provided harsh opinion on expenditures, demanded lower salaries, and trashed public service leaders all over the front pages of the newspaper for doing anything slightly unusual.

We now live in an environment where elected officials condemn the actions of the administration, independent Boards of Directors are fired en masse. CEOs are held under “investigation” for months based on conjecture. Ombudsmen and whistleblower protection allow everything to be questioned. And senior executives have lost their privilege of an appropriate severance.

And what have we created? Not only a public service culture that is risk adverse, but also a culture in the public service which is scared to spend money on things that could actually improve performance. We have punitively and intentionally dumbed down our public service leaders to a level where all we should expect is mediocrity.

How sad.  How very, very sad.

You get what you pay for, I say. If you are not willing to pay a bit to take risks, to strive for performance improvement, to enable an award-worthy leader, then why would you ever expect to see anything different than what we are getting. Our current fascination with frugality is maybe constricting us to an era of underwhelming performance.

It’s time to bring out the rankings and allow our public service leaders to compete for awards, recognition and rankings. Yes, sometimes people roll their eyes at these accolades and dispute the methodology, the objectivity or accuracy of the assessments. I get it. But that cynicism should not stand in the way of the benefits, as I’m looking at the value of these awards and ranking for what they positively accomplish:

  1. They clearly identify the performance measures that matter, based on years of comparing company performance against one another;
  2. They objectively rank each company’s performance on individual measures, such that the company can learn areas of excellence and weakness, and what it will take to be best-in-class;
  3. They are often accompanied by an education and awards session for the finalists, where leaders can learn from leaders about how they achieved higher levels of performance;
  4. They allow organizations in a wide range of sectors to identify top performers, read about their stories, understand the leadership philosophies used to achieve the results, and compare their own organizations to the winners; and
  5. They allow the winning organizations to use these awards and rankings as badges of honor, to create pride within their own organizations and to create interest in potential employees who want to work for the industry’s best.

To improve performance, to be ranked, to show vulnerability, you have to put yourself out there – and that takes courage. Public sector leaders need rankings and forum groups, and they need them today.  Our public sector leaders need to start putting themselves out there, comparing themselves to their colleagues, making themselves better leaders, and improving performance.

That’s what we should expect of all our leaders, shouldn’t it?

Too Big To Function

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Go back to early Chinese history, the Roman Empire, the writings of Karl Marx or Max Webster and you will find that bureaucracy has always existed. It exists at the family level with parental hierarchy. It exists in military regimes through command and formation. It exists in manufacturing plants with process and controls. And it exists in public service organizations through rules and risk management.

And it exists for good reason.

Traditionally, a bureaucracy establishes the most efficient and rational way to organize human activity through a series of standardized rules and processes deemed necessary to maintain order, control risk, limit irreverence and control messaging. It has been the administrative system that governs pretty much every large institution in our country. And until about 30 years ago, it was a relatively effective organizing mechanism and management structure.

But then our population curve and our technology adoption curve started to turn upwards, and our bureaucracies expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracies instead of meeting the need of their customers.

And the criticisms heightened. Bureaucracies were frequently blamed for longwinded processes, slow decision-making, unnecessary approval steps, inflexible procedures, absence of creativity, lack of organizational personality, lack of individual empathy, convoluted practices, political interference, and the inability to empower front line staff to solve problems.

Bureaucracies are a control-based and rules-based operating system, like Microsoft, when really the whole world just wants to be working with Apple.

Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft will always exist and bureaucracies will always exist. Microsoft had its day in the sun, and bureaucracies have had their day in the sun. Microsoft loosened its control, and bureaucracies must loosen their control. Microsoft underwent an excruciatingly painful and costly re-inventive change process, and it is time for bureaucracies to do so as well.

Yes, it is time.

The fundamental tenants of bureaucracy are rules, process, hierarchy and control – the very essence of centralized conformist management theory – and the antithesis of creativity, innovation, customization and flexibility demanded by today’s informed customers.

Most bureaucracies follow a standard formula: policy gets announced by politicians, strategy gets set at the top, directors control risk, managers supervise a portfolio of projects, tasks are given to front line workers who deal with the customers, and administrative coordinators schedule and record the activities. The whole bureaucratic system is set up to control power and authority, centralize knowledge and decision-making, eradicate all risk and invention, trickle down responsibility without authority, govern through processes and rules, and discount any accountability for results.

No wonder bureaucracies are riddled with ego, drama, politics, blame, turf and a large dose of CYA (cover your arse). Although bureaucracies are the most rational means for carrying out imperious control over human beings, left unfettered, bureaucracies create a work environment where tremendous human emotion is channeled toward internal energy-draining survival activities as opposed to toward external facing services.

Control environments have the ability to completely emasculate public service motivation.

This background needs to be understood by our elected officials that want change to happen, but are stumped as to where to start. Change cannot start from within, from someone who grew up in the bureaucracy, as that is all they know. Perpetuating the status quo is in their best interest, especially if they are nearing retirement, and culture will always suffer.

This is the unfortunate reality for some of our cities, government departments and institutions these days. And that is why I am writing about it. The system needs a leadership and cultural overhaul – and we have a generational window to start making it happen.

More to come …

Time to Expect More

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Not all, but many in the public service have forgotten the larger mission, have become demoralized, and have adopted a behaviour of mediocrity.

How could they not? 

Politicians are stuck in ideological dogma. Leadership is based on polling, not principles. Open discussion and debate has been replaced by social media rants. Organizational strategy is developed among only the chosen few. The average front line employee is six levels removed from the decision-making table. Risk-taking has been abandoned because of the fear of making a mistake. Career advancement comes through internal politics and lateral moves. Unions have considered innovation to be a threat to membership. Professional development is rudimentary, underfunded and ineffective. And no coaching is provided to uplift and challenge the next generation of leaders.

No wonder high-performance isn’t talked about within the public service. No wonder employees are lulled into complacency. And no wonder we don’t talk about leadership in the public service.

Given we have over 5.6 million people employed in the high-purpose calling of the public service, over 30% of the employed population, this culture of complacency and mediocrity needs to be identified as a tragedy of the human spirit across our country.

  • As public service employees, we should demand so much more;
  • As public service leaders, we are capable of so much more; and
  • As citizens and taxpayers, we must expect so much more.

As a nation, we need a fundamental change of perspective and attitude in what we expect from our public service organizations. We need to embrace a new philosophy of leadership for our institutions. We have big topics to tackle, like how to educate our children, care for the elderly, house the homeless, treat our environment, strengthen our economy, narrow the income gap, reduce our debt levels, and so many others.

These topics are not new, but they are not being solved. We continually try to solve these complex issues by approaching them as the same situation with the same mindset and with the same leadership philosophy as before.

And it isn’t working.

We now need a new generation of leaders to step up and change the out-dated ways in which we operate our public service institutions. We need to unleash the talent within that wants to make a difference, wants to solve problems, and wants to change the world. We need to challenge the performance of our bureaucracies, and realize that our current approach is only self-perpetuating a culture of non-performance.

We deserve so much better.  No more excuses.  It is time to expect more.