Whether going straight from the Columbia campus or after years on corporate campuses, our many alumni who work in the public sector seem to do so for one reason: to promote the greater good, whether they are overseas or in the White House, in Republican or Democratic administrations, defense strategists or diplomats. HERMES spoke with just a few of them: Erskine Bowles ’69, M. Patrick Ellsworth ’99, José Fourquet ’96, Senator Frank Lautenberg, BS ’49, Joel Molinoff ’98 and Brian Roseboro ’83.
Having grown up in a hardworking family, fought in World War II and attended college on the G.I. Bill, Frank Lautenberg, BS ’49, graduated from Columbia Business School with dreams of starting a company.
With two partners, he founded Automatic Data Processing (ADP) and shepherded it from a tiny start-up to a public company with a complete portfolio of HR and employer services. Lautenberg was just getting started.
While still heading ADP, he became commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and witnessed the large-scale improvements brought about by PATH trains, new bus terminals and river-crossing facilities.
“I saw that there were things that could be done by government that could make an enormous difference in people’s lives,” he says. In 1982, Lautenberg left ADP, which by 2004 would become the world’s largest payroll and tax-filing processor, and set his sights on representing New Jersey in the U.S. Senate. He wanted to serve the public good with the skills he had honed as an executive.
Patrick Ellsworth ’99, who became a foreign-service officer with the State Department after working for Booz Allen, believes his work fulfills what he considers “a personal obligation to serve the public.” He recently completed his first posting, a two-year stint in the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. In addition to working with the embassy’s management team, he reported on economic development and promoted the economic interests of the United States.
“Economic policy shapes the world order,” says Ellsworth. “With the United States being the only superpower in today’s world, I believe we have a great responsibility to promote democracy and free markets.”
A sense of being called is nearly ubiquitous among alumni in government. Lautenberg, after 18 years in the Senate, chose not to run for a fourth term in 2000. But when Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey dropped out of the 2002 election, supporters urged Lautenberg to come out of retirement. He was reelected in a landslide. “I tried to leave once, and I heard that siren call that called me back,” Lautenberg says with a laugh. “And I came running.”
Leaving Your Comfort Zone
Brian Roseboro ’83, President George W. Bush’s undersecretary for domestic finance in the U.S. Treasury, didn’t just feel called to public service — he was called.
Roseboro was a director with American International Group’s risk management division when the White House called in 2001 to say the president was considering him for a Treasury post and that someone had “highly recommended” him.
Today Roseboro oversees domestic financial markets, financial institutions and fiscal policy, reporting to the president and Secretary John Snow. The scope of his responsibility is enormous, but Roseboro always has sought opportunities that are “challenging and different — and a bit risky in terms of whether I could do it.” A rule he has followed throughout his career: “Get out of your comfort zone.”
Business, Beltway Style
At its worst, the nation’s capital can be “polarized and paralyzed by politics and partisanship,” says Erskine Bowles ’69. He spent two decades in investment banking before President Bill Clinton asked him to head the Small Business Administration in 1993. “When you run a federal agency,” Bowles says, “it’s like you’ve got 535 directors in the Congress, and they control every little line item in your budget.”
The federal government can present an especially frustrating and challenging climate for MBAs, who come to work trained to make decisions, focus on objectives, lead teams and solve problems. Progress is easily stymied by the sheer size of government and the number of stakeholders. Political infighting can bring the process to a standstill. President John F. Kennedy once called Washington “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”
In the private sector, explains Lautenberg, “the decision making is fundamentally yours. It’s quite different building a consensus and trying to convince others in a peer group that the position you’ve taken on legislation is correct.”
As Roseboro sees it, “It’s so easy anywhere, but particularly here in Washington, to get diverted by process, as opposed to getting things done.” The issues he deals with at the Treasury range from the “epic challenges” of terrorism and economic cycles to the finances of airlines, the Postal Service and such government-sponsored enterprises as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Although Roseboro often feels as though “there’s a bunch of pots on the stove, and you just check to see which ones are boiling,” his skills in overcoming those challenges are what have made his tenure so successful. Having such enormous responsibilities “calls upon you to develop management skills that allow you to effectively get through it.”
Finding Real-World Solutions
If government challenges MBAs in ways that the private sector does not, many find that the challenges peculiar to Washington are what make the work so rewarding. MBAs are often especially eager to effect fundamental change that makes Washington work better.
“The federal government is larger than any private-sector corporation,” says Ellsworth. “But there is no reason [it] can’t operate as smoothly as the best-managed corporations in the private sector. . . . I see it as part of my mission to make this happen.”
Bowles transformed the Small Business Administration by restructuring the agency and making its products more effective for small-business owners: he improved a program that provides owners with a working-capital credit line; slimmed the agency’s loan application from hundreds of pages to a single sheet; and aggressively marketed the agency’s services to women and minorities.
The goal, says Bowles, was to “increase the chance that more people would have a chance at the American dream.” He was so successful that in 1994 President Clinton asked him to join his executive office.
“We face so many very serious problems today, whether they’re domestic or economic or international,” Bowles says. “What I think we need in Washington is people who can bring people together and find common-sense, real-world solutions.”
Fundamental business skills — in negotiation, management, finance, marketing and even entrepreneurship — work in Washington as well as they do on Wall Street. Although conventional wisdom holds that politics is art and business is science, much of politics and policymaking is business. The MBA skill set is highly valuable — indeed, essential — across the spectrum of government agencies and functions.
When the National Security Agency (NSA) was looking for a tech-savvy MBA to start up and lead a new strategy and business management team, it hired Joel Molinoff ’98, previously a vice president with JPMorgan’s e-business group.
The NSA was in many ways a logical next step in Molinoff’s career because it offered “operations and management experience in a cutting-edge technology organization.” But Molinoff, who was living in New York City on September 11, also “thought that someone with my background could be helpful in supporting the war on terror.”
Specialized divisions in the NSA — “America’s code makers and code breakers” — protect U.S. information systems and gather different kinds of intelligence. Molinoff’s strategy and business management team manages strategic planning, financial operations and resource management activities for Data Acquisition, a unit of the NSA’s Signal Intelligence Directorate that gathers and processes foreign electronic intelligence and has a multibillion-dollar budget. Molinoff’s responsibilities include “making investment decisions, being able to evaluate business units for efficiency gains, tying budgetary decisions to performance and establishing repeatable processes for managing programs.”
“There is tremendous opportunity for MBAs” in the NSA, Molinoff says. “Only a small percentage have MBAs or corporate management experience. Part of my mandate is to apply corporate best practices to the work we do in Data Acquisition to improve the group’s overall effectiveness and efficiency.”
He adds, “Although there are many business challenges analogous to those experienced by private-sector companies, measuring profit and loss, performance and success all require different methods of evaluation. This is particularly interesting given that the product is something as unstructured and variable as intelligence.”
Getting to Yea
Bowles became White House chief of staff in 1997. Admired on both sides of the aisle, he was most noted for negotiating a balanced budget — something that hadn’t been seen in Washington in 30 years. He did it by relying on the skills he had perfected as an MBA and an investment banker.
“Nobody believed it could be done,” Bowles recalls. “I believed it had to be done.” He spent “months and months locked in conference rooms” with Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt. “It wasn’t easy,” Bowles says. “The two sides were really far apart.”
“In the investment-banking business you’re always working to get to yes,” Bowles explains. “I had to earn trust, just like you have to earn the trust of a buyer and seller in order to get something done.” Running for senator in North Carolina in 2004, Bowles has pointed to his negotiation and consensus-building skills as among his major political strengths.
José Fourquet ’96, whom President George W. Bush appointed as U.S. executive director for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2001, says that as an MBA, “I had the ingredients for how to make good decisions.”
“When analyzing a complex financial issue, I felt confident that I was one of the more knowledgeable people at the table,” he says. “I had a very solid academic background in finance. Even if there was something that I had never seen before, I could work through it. It was intellectual firepower.”
Ellsworth names Turnaround Management as a Columbia course that directly prepared him for his work at the embassy in Kiev. Encompassing every critical aspect of running a business, the course taught him “how to walk into a situation that is failing and assess and fix the situation with confidence and speed.”
Ellsworth was responsible for managing embassy operations that affected 600 staff members and projects that required navigating a “labyrinth of legal and financial issues.” In addition to meeting financial, budgetary and regulatory objectives, he led the search for a new embassy site. Additionally, Ukraine is considered a hardship post because of its lack of strong infrastructure and worries about Chernobyl, among other reasons.
Ellsworth restructured practices and implemented changes that saved the U.S. government hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He says he enjoyed having a job that allowed him to do the type of restructuring he did at Booz Allen while giving him exposure to the geopolitical issues that fascinate him.
Initially attracted to the State Department by Colin Powell ’s emphasis on strong management and strategic organization, Ellsworth says his first post provided excellent opportunities to use his MBA. He is now preparing, with intensive Chinese lessons, for his next post in Hong Kong.
Getting What You Came For
The most satisfying compensation for leaving the private sector, according to many alumni, is the very reward they had sought: the sheer opportunity to serve the public.
If working for the public good is what makes his job so demanding, says Roseboro, it is also what makes his work fulfilling. “I’m working for the taxpayer,” he says. “And that makes it worthwhile and gives you the confidence to stand for principle on things. I started in public service, went to the private sector and now I’m back in public service.” The cross-pollination that results, says Roseboro, “brings an updated, fresh perspective on how to do things — methodologies, approaches. As I envision it, this is the way it should be.”
“When you work in the White House you have a chance to do more good than you could ever imagine,” says Bowles. “I knew that I had really done something that mattered, on a scale that you can’t imagine anywhere else. It gives enormous satisfaction.”
Lautenberg’s accomplishments during his 20-and-counting years in the Senate — during which he led the ban on smoking on commercial airlines and the raising of the age of majority to 21, as well as other landmark legislation — have undoubtedly saved many lives.
When working with the IDB, Fourquet wanted firsthand knowledge of the impact he was making in poverty-stricken areas of Latin America. He regularly visited the people whose lives were transformed by his work. After all, he says, “the decisions we made affected half a billion people in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Fourquet took his first such trip to Chiapas, Mexico, a remote region devastated by the international coffee crisis. Responding to a burgeoning market for organic coffee, the bank provided loans to build a factory for processing and packaging coffee according to organic standards. Because of the IDB’s commitment, many families were saved from hunger and poverty.
“Some of these people drove eight or nine hours to be able to see me and thank me,” Fourquet says. “Without the loan they wouldn’t be able to feed their families. ”
Fourquet resigned from the IDB in May to pursue an opportunity with Lehman Brothers. As the new managing director in charge of Lehman ’s Miami office, he advises Latin American families, which he sees as a continuation of his work on behalf of the region.
Fourquet is sure that he would not have been offered the position without his experience at the IDB. That said, he cautions, “You really have to want [to work in the government] for the right reasons, because when it’s all said and done, it has to be because you want to serve your country and, in my case, your president.”
His work in Washington, says Fourquet, was “superintense” but “as intensely fun as it was sacrificing. So far it was one of the highlights of my life.” And the best reward for leaving the private sector to work for the federal government, he says, is this: “There is no better way to leave the world better than you found it.”
From the Editor: HERMES invites graduates of the School who have left the private sector for government service to send us your story. Your responses may enable us to run a follow-up to this article in a future issue.