Saudi Conference: Lessons for Us

I’m back from my first visit to Saudi Arabia.  I can’t say I saw any camels, but I did seen plenty of McDonalds and Starbucks!  Conference participants were treated royally and we were treated with great hospitality, including an outdoor banquet with traditional Arabic sword dancing. 

John Kamensky and a Conference Host

While the conference was seen as an international celebration of the Saudi Institute of Public Administration’s 50^th anniversary, it became clear at the final closing session that this was also a serious event for them.

The closing session was chaired by a senior minister from the government and there was a set of recommendations and a discussion of impressions of the conference led by several of the invited guests from around the world (including the IBM Center’s Jonathan Breul). 

Jonathan Breul on Main Podium

Interestingly, these recommendations and impressions have relevance for us, as well, and they probably have a familiar ring to them.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Put customers first.  Use customers as the focal point for performance and service improvements.
• Decentralize implementation and service delivery.  Centralized, top-down reform efforts don’t work over the long run and evidence shows that local implementation leads to greater productivity and innovation.
• Measure what you do and make fact-based decisions.   Performance measurement and fact-based decision-making are hard to do, they are the drivers of excellence and a performance-based organizational culture.
• Use benchmarking and technology as tools to help drive change.
• Create a performance culture.  Create an environment where employees are professional, committed to public service and creative.
• Link reforms to budget.  Any successful reform effort should be linked to budget priorities.  If not, the budget will likely overwhelm the reform efforts.

So, while the U.S. is talking about new cutting-edge management challenges such as greater transparency, citizen engagement, and collaboration, it is useful to see that the basics are still important . . . .and that we can’t say we’ve mastered them yet!

The Saudis use their Institute of Public Administration to provide training and research, but they’ve also created a committee to champion the development and use of performance measurement to help drive their change efforts.  They’ve put a smart man in charge.  He’s been given five years to put in place measures that took the U.S. government nearly 20 to produce.  It’ll be a steep hill to climb before they will be ready to create a Chief Performance Officer, but it looks like they are on the road.  Hopefully, they’ll be able to learn from our experiences!

Dispatch from Saudi Arabia

I’m in Riyadh this week, blogging from afar at a conference on public administration.  The exotic is in the small things – Google comes up in Arabic with the scroll bar on the left and there’s an arrow painted on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca.

The conference is a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Kingdom’s Institute of Public Administration which heads the government’s professionalization and reform efforts (think – the recent U.S. attempt at creating a U.S. Public Service Academy).

Even though there are speakers from 45 countries, there is a heavy dose of Americans, including business author Tom Peters, Reinventing Government author David Osborne, Harvard’s Steve Kelman (who I think is also blogging on this conference), and the IBM Center’s executive director Jonathan Breul.

While the conference’s objective is to inspire public administrators in the Kingdom, I’ll try to snapshot some of the highlights that may be of interest to a U.S. audience. . . .

Tom Peters was the kickoff keynote speaker this morning, and was thoughtfully provocative as usual.  Peters co-authored one of the top business books of the twentieth century, In Search of Excellence in 1982 (and these days he writes a blog worth visiting!).  While he has posted his presentation on his blog, I’ll highlight three things that remind me why he was such an inspiration to me and fellow reinventors in the 1990s:

What is Excellence? Excellence, says Peters, is if you:

• Care more than others think is wise
• Risk more than others think is safe
• Dream more than others think is practical, and
• Expect more than others think is possible.

What is the Role of Senior Leaders? Senior leaders exist to help employees achieve excellence (see above for definition).  Peters reminds us that leaders can grow only when their colleagues are succeeding . . . “we are in the human development process.”  He said one organization promoted leaders based on their answer to the question:  “Name three people whose growth you contributed to in the past year and explain how.”

What is the Most Important Strategic Skill of Leaders? Listening.  He said doctors, on average, interrupt their patients within 18 seconds.  Imagine what it is for senior executives!  He says listening is of strategic importance, is a core value, is trainable, and is a profession.  The four most important words of a leader: “What do you think?”

If you found this inspiring as well, go back and re-read some of his books!