About this business of government, Mr. President

Originally posted 5 April 2017.
Reposted here with only minor changes necessary,
mostly deletion of a few dated examples.

Dear Mr. President,

As a neighbor in Canada who has long worked with businesses and governments around the world, I have some important news for you. America is not suffering from too much government so much as from too much business―all over government. Please understand this to avoid pouring more oil on the fires of America, and this planet.

Business in its place is essential, just as is government in its place, which is not all over business. Now, however, thanks to you and your cabinet, business need no longer just lobby government to get its way; it is government. You were elected to challenge the establishment; will the executives who came into your cabinet from Wall Street, etc. do that? They are the establishment, that has displaced the political establishment.

This is an old problem now being carried to a new extreme. In the early days of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength...” Instead, later in that century, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized corporations as “persons” in the law. Not long after that, in the new century, President Teddy Roosevelt was railing about the power of corporate trusts in American society, and in the 1960s President Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” Nevertheless, in 2010 the Supreme Court gave those corporate persons the right to fund political campaigns to their heart’s content. When “free enterprise” in an economy becomes the freedom of enterprises in society, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, government of the real people, by the real people, for the real people perishes from the earth.

Should government even be run like a business, let alone by businesspeople? No more than that should business be run like a government, by civil servants. As you well know, when an entrepreneur says “Jump”, the response is “How high sir?” You are now finding out what happens when a U.S. president says “Jump”. So far, so bad. Governments are relentlessly subjected to a plethora of pressures that many businesses, especially entrepreneurial ones like your own, cannot easily understand.

Business has a convenient bottom line, called profit, which can easily be measured. What’s the bottom line in government, say for terrorism? (Countries listed? Immigrants deported? Walls built?)  

Running government like a business has been tried again and again, only to fail again and again. In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced PPBS (Planning-Programming-Budgeting System) to run government like a business. The obsessive measuring led to the infamous body counts of the Vietnam War. Then, in the 1980s, came the “New Public Management”, a euphemism for old corporate practices: isolate governmental activities, put a manager in charge of each, and hold them responsible for the measurable results. That might work for the state lottery, but how about foreign relations or education, let alone health care? Al Gore, as Vice President, used the misguided metaphor of citizens as “customers.” You know what? I am not a mere customer of my government, thank you, as if I buy services at arm’s length. I am an engaged citizen of my country.

The place of business is to supply us with goods and services; that of government, aside from protecting us from threats, is to help keep our marketplaces competitive and responsible. Do you really believe that recent American governments have been overdoing this job, let alone doing it at all?

I have a little book for you, Mr. President, called Rebalancing Society. It contends that a healthy society balances the power of respected governments in the public sector with responsible businesses in the private sector and robust communities in what I call the plural sector (“civil society”). The most democratic nations in the world today function closest to such balance, including ours in Canada and those in Scandinavia, likewise your own when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the community “associations” that helped to maintain democracy in early America. Indeed, during the decades following World War Two, the U.S. was far better balanced, as it experienced striking prosperity and development—economic as well as social―despite high taxes and generous welfare programs. Now, however, the country has lost that balance. Free enterprise runs free in America. Look around, Mr. President, at the income disparities and the unregulated forces of globalization running rampant around the globe. That is why we have seen votes like Brexit and your own, by distraught people unsure which way to turn, except against the “establishment.”

When enough people realize what has been going on, then a subsequent president, if not you, will have to restore the balance that made America great in the first place.

Sincerely

Henry Mintzberg
Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies, McGill University in Montreal

© Henry Mintzberg, 2017, 2025, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For elaboration of these arguments, please see Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center, also my Harvard Business Review article “Managing Government, Governing Management”. A different version of this blog was published in the Harvard Business Review under the title “The U.S. cannot be run like a business.”