We Should Wait for a Fortune 500 Executive
The lack of Fortune 500 C-level executives in US government is striking. If you exclude finance and oil and gas (FOG), it’s even more bizarre given how high status legislative posts and executive branch positions are, and worrisome given their proven effectiveness in private sector roles. I’m not sure if their talents and perspectives would lead to better outcomes, except for the gut instinct that smart outsiders often contribute a lot. At the very least, we should experiment more than we do. Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his band of private sector sycophants have probably soured people on this idea for a generation.
The presence of businesspeople in government most often takes the shape of people who have run a closely held family business. This does not represent the experience in navigating complex markets, operations and supply chains–to say nothing of acting ethically in the eyes of shareholders–that VPs or above in F500s have.
The exceptions to this strange scarcity of businesspeople in government are transplants from FOG industries that are especially prone to regulatory capture, extractive businesses, who see global commerce in a pretty warped fashion AND don’t experience the same competitive pressures for talent, so their good old boys clubs are still functioning quite well. Additionally, both industries (O&G moreso) see the world as more zero-sum than most and thus executives leaving those firms are less likely to look for Pareto improvements–we can see how this thinking plays out. Note, I’d much rather have someone from Goldman or Exxon than someone that ran a family business semi-successfully, but the FOG examples we have don’t represent either the level of talent or quality of perspective you would get from a VP from–say–a multinational CPG firm.
The worldview of a CPG executive would be dramatically more data-driven and meritocratic than FOG. In both dealing with nations, firms and people, the CPG executive would recognize that short term prejudicial treatment of industry or people would long term hurt the our firms competitiveness, our economy, and by definition, the global economy.
They would understand that diverse workforces perform better because you are in fact more discriminatory, you discriminate explicitly based on talent rather than implicitly on irrelevant factors. As knowledge workers become ever more central, it’s bizarre not to do this. Compared to a privately held firm leader, public firms require internal and often external coalition building to get anything done, experience that could plausibly translate to legislative and diplomatic prowess. Experience negotiating up and down the value chain would necessarily provide insight into both firm-level decision making and how trade really functions rather than abstract macro-level understandings (or misunderstandings).
I’m not making a claim that the outcomes of drawing corporate talent into governing roles would be definitively positive, just that it’s strange it doesn’t happen more often and the examples of financiers and oil and gas execs aren’t reflective of non-FOG leaders’ performance. Like most theories, I think we should test this one.
Unfortunately, the test date has probably been pushed back years, if not decades.