The Business of Government

As an MBA intern in the White House Office of Management & Budget, I was charged with helping to "make government cool again"

By Jonathon Scott Feit

Fascinating. Insightful. Investigative. Tumultuous. Microcosmic. Realistic. These are just a few of the adjectives that describe the once-in-a-lifetime summer opportunity I enjoyed from May through August of this year, as an MBA intern in the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) in the White House.

My stories can (and do) go on for lengths that far exceed this space, but let me share a secret that I wish I'd known beforehand: the business school courses that I thought would be utterly useless proved critical and for the most part, vice versa. Although statistics and probability informed my thinking and shaped my problem-solving approaches, I consciously used the skills learned in those classes maybe once, if that often. On the other hand, organizational behavior courses—say, managing organizations, and the art of analyzing power and influencing networks —as well as presentation skills, strategic planning, and "Marketing 101" were the bread and butter of my daily activities.

I was hired with a mandate to help "make government cool again." The phrase came from President Barack Obama in a September 2008 speech at Columbia University. In case you're wondering, "making government cool again" isn't actually a job description. And yet it is.

A Matter of Passion

Perhaps, the single most exciting truth that I can report from inside the Executive Office of the President is that a sea change is happening when it comes to the business of governance. At the heart of that change is an approach to government as business—that's revolutionary. What it means for MBAs is, quite simply, that we represent the most expert cadre of future talent that our country's leaders will need to tap. I was tasked to revamp USAJobs.gov—the so-called "Face of Federal Hiring"—to attract top talent into the federal government at a time when it is both expanding and watching its functions become more specialized.

Where do business-minded folks fit in? Here's just one prime example: The Performance and Personnel Management Division of OMB, where I was assigned for the summer, sits at the heart of a strategy to make the government not only efficient, but also accountable, for the execution of plans as detailed and within their cost estimates.

Among the new office heads, Jeff Zients, a wildly successful entrepreneur, management consultant, and corporate executive, certainly hasn't gone into government seeking job security. For him, it's a matter of passion—and a place he can make a difference. After all, MBAs are taught to seek trends—and Zients fits into one, profoundly. His title: Federal Chief Performance Officer. Top agencies around the government are also installing COOs, CFOs, and chief human capital officers (the uncomfortably named "CHiCOs").

No Chugging the Kool-Aid

C-Suite titles aren't government-standard. They're corporate language, and they flow off the MBA's tongue like wine. Indeed, the integration of a corporate mentality into government suggests that expanding operations under a Democratic President may well be joined by more efficient decision-making, and greater accountability, in the long run.

But I didn't chug the Kool-Aid. There is a downside (political and organizational reality for starters). MBAs are well-trained to handle the fundamentals of due diligence and organizational transformation; we certainly focus heavily on them at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (Tepper Full-Time MBA School Profile).

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