Leonard Martin, Managed Competition

Tennessee City Managers Association, “Turning up the Heat to Create Competitive Government”. (April 18, 2007), Leonard Martin.

This session presented innovative methods of paying for services without the “cut and cut more” mentality.

He proposed that that there are actually three choices in dealing with revenue/expenditures problems. The two traditional methods are (1) cut services or programs or (2) raise taxes. He proposes a third alternative which is to “Transform culture to a competitive service business-reduce costs, adopt best practices and increase employee productivity.

Areas of focus for all communities to reach the goal of “faster, better cheaper and friendlier services” include:

-transforming the Organization (Productivity)

-Essential vs. non-essential services

-Cost Reduction Opportunities

-Revenue Growth opportunities

Goal is faster, better, cheaper and friendlier service

Management initiatives should include Controlling expenses, Preserving City revenues and Providing competitive services.

Management Plan should be to focus on:

-Situation/condition assessment

-Developing a strategy and set priorities (get low hanging fruit first)

-Installing a sense of urgency

-Identifying “public enemy # 1”

-Rallying around the Crisis

-Changing the culture

The standard “Paradigm” needs to be changed from “Traditional Government” to “Service Business”. For example:

Entitlement Attitude to Productivity/results

Professional driven to market driven

Special interest driven to customer focused

Monopoly to competition

Morale-obsessed (make them happy!) to Performance driven

Process oriented to results oriented

“Wanting to be liked” to Managing the bottom line.

Providing Competitive Services by:

-Getting elected official buy-in and on-going support

-Eliminating duplication of services (“silo busting”)

-Organizational restructuring

-Use of technology to streamline processes and automate function

Some steps to competitiveness

-Encourage an external vs. and internal focus

-Be proactive vs. reactive

-Educate employees so they shift from entitlement to ownershipment

-Management commitment to make the tough decisions

-increase direct employee communications, empower good employees

-reorganize work teams, drive accountability down to crew leaders and front-line workers

-Understand and learn from your competition

COMMENTS: Overall I feel the concepts are excellent. Right now, I don’t intend to implement a competitive system, although I do feel many of the concepts are worth evaluating. For example, the “entitlement culture” of some city organizations has always disturbed me and I have been working on changing that since I got here. Certainly learning from the competition, employee empowerment etc. is good.

I think basically our organization has been working on many of these concepts (without going the full way of managed competition.