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Florida's New Governor
Think Big, Guv'nr
His new role could bring out the best in Charlie Crist.
3. Teach the people and make them better than they were.
"I think the best thing about Gov. Collins was his ability to bring out the best in you," former Attorney General Jim Smith says in Martin Dyckman's recent biography of Collins. The leaders each of us remembers as most compelling are those who got us to focus on something bigger and more meaningful than our own immediate interests.
Peter Drucker said the job of leadership is "the generation and direction of human energies." It's easy to lead people where they want to go. It's harder to help people decide where they should be going.
4. To be the "people's governor," create the "people's government."
Your creation of the Office of Open Government was a great first step toward restoring "government in the sunshine" as a characteristic of Florida that has helped make our government better, less prone to corruption, more efficient and effective and more credible to its citizens.
Go further. Use technology and transform the collection, storage, retrieval and public presentation of government data and documents so that they are available virtually as soon as they are received and organized so that citizens can retrieve them easily. Then let people follow the performance of agencies on a multitude of performance standards, with a presentation of the information in clear and unvarnished ways.
5. Take a risk on something important that you believe in.
Nothing in his life before he became governor indicated that LeRoy Collins would become one of the great political leaders on civil rights. But he staked his political career on doing something meaningful and important at a time when the country and his political party were being torn apart by the issue.
The same year that segregationist George Wallace was winning the presidential primary in Florida, Gov. Reubin Askew stumped the state urging voters not to oppose busing as a remedy for segregation. He could've kept quiet, but he didn't.
6. Something will go wrong. When it does, your whole government should learn from it.
The traditional political cycle of screw-up or scandal consists of denial, detachment and then, if the headlines don't stop, fault-finding through the sacrifice of some rook or bishop and hoping everyone forgets quickly.
Every failure and every scandal is an opportunity, not for a superficial patch or a celebrity firing, but for creatively rethinking the causes and solutions.
And, by the way, if nothing is going wrong, you're playing it too safe.
7. Pursue a complex challenge as if it were a crisis.
Early in his administration, Bush was admiring the rapid, effective decision making and execution at the emergency operations center. Why, he is said to have asked, can't we run the whole state government this way?
Emergency management works because key people from all over state government -- and local governments and affected private organizations too -- drop everything when the hurricane is on its way. What if we took some complex state problem and treated it as a crisis? What if relevant agency heads could be told to drop everything for a few days and come to the ops center to attack this problem? What if each time an effort fell short, you learned to do it better. What if it worked?
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As you look in the mirror on Inauguration Day and every morning thereafter, Guv'nr, imagine the unimaginable.
