Google Goggles

I once borrowed a friend’s goggles to go snorkeling. I got into the water and couldn’t see much of anything. It was all fuzzy. Turns out he forgot to tell me they were prescription goggles. Sometimes, however, you see more, not less, when you look through someone else’s goggles.

There are moments, late at night, when I wonder if I’m spending my time working on the right things. Are measures, goals, quarterly reports, best practices, and regular management meetings important to making EPA a more effective agency?

I was lucky enough to be in a group that met with the President and CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, last week. Eric has a reputation as a superlative manager. The group wanted to know how he saw things at Google and whether his experience could help in how we run federal agencies. Here are a few things that he said he learned are necessary if you want to successfully run a large organization, public or private.

You need to be able to answer a basic question: do you know what people are doing?

You need to have regular operational reviews. Quarterly meetings are good. You must have some measures that are the basis for these reviews.

At Google we set goals so that there is about a 70 percent chance of achieving them. If you are achieving close to 100 percent of your goals or less than 50 percent of your goals, you need to take a closer look at your goals.

In everything we do, we try and capture and promote best practices.

Looking through Eric’s goggles made things clearer for me. Yeah, I’m spending my time on the right stuff.

Comments

[Noha]

ELN is planning a workshop on program planning and performance measurement and management. Our goal is to increase knowledge and understanding of performance management processes and activities and ultimately help promote a performance culture at all staff levels. Who would you recommend that we invite to speak about this topic(from within or outside the Agency)?

[Marcus]

Noha,

Off the top of my head and in no particular order, externally I'd consider: Robert Shea (OMB), Shelley Metzenbaum (Univ. of MD), Harry Hatry (Urban Institute), Bill Eggers (Manahattan Institute), Jonathan Bruel (IBM), Mort Downey (former Dep. Sec. at DOT), Don Kettl (Univ. of PA), and Steve Goldsmith (former Mayor of Indianapolis). In house, Louise Wise and Katherine Dawes would be good. I also expect the IGs office would have some expertise.

Do others have more suggestions?

Also, Noha, most folks don't know what ELN is. You wanna do a guest blog?

[Noha]

Many thanks for the suggestions! We'll keep you posted on the planning for the event. I would be delighted to do a guest blog and introduce ELN. Thanks for the invitation.