What Money Can't Buy
#
Excerpt #
Solving the crisis of implementation
What Money Can’t Buy #
Solving the crisis of implementation #
[
By now we’re all familiar with stories of government overpromising and underdelivering. The promises get bill signings, ribbon cuttings, and ceremonial ground breakings. The failures get GAO reports and dunks on X.
Consider a few recent examples.
In 2021, Congress spent $7.5 billion for a half-million electric-vehicle charging stations. Three years later, only eight had been built.
Not 8,000. Not 800. Eight.
This is EV chargers we’re talking about, not putting men on the Moon. Private companies have built 140,000 charging stations in the U.S. alone; roughly 40,000 of those are fast chargers like the Tesla Supercharger Network. China had 1.8 million public charging stations in 2022. Forty percent were fast chargers. Is it really a surprise they’re eating our lunch on EVs?
If this were a one-off, we could treat it as an unfortunate case study of waste and inefficiency. But it’s not. It’s systemic. We’ve seen it over and over in efforts to build critical infrastructure.
Congress spent roughly $50 billion to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing. Billion-dollar grants were announced, to great fanfare. And then? Endless delays, as marquee projects like TSMC’s in Arizona got pushed back to 2027, 2028, and beyond.
Congress spent $42.5 billion to bring high-speed internet to rural America. Three years later, not a single home has been connected.
And of course, no list would be complete without mentioning California’s high-speed rail. The state has spent decades and billions of dollars on a 500-mile stretch of track whose projected cost has swelled to $128 billion. It has little to show for this investment today besides a few lonely stretches of concrete.
These examples are evidence of a nearly terminal cost disease. Worse, they’re evidence of catastrophic failures to produce the things we say we’ll produce. This is a crisis of implementation. It will have dire consequences for our security and quality of life if it’s not addressed, bluntly and quickly.
Projects can fail for many reasons. They can fail for lack of vision. They can fail for lack of resources. And they can fail in the process of being implemented.
The failures we see in the United States are not primarily failures of vision. A nation-wide EV charging network is a visionary project. So is reindustrialization, high-speed rail, and high-speed internet for rural America. Our leaders have grand (sometimes grandiose) projects in spades. The American people respect and reward this kind of vision… when there’s follow-through. We’ve always been a people whose sights are fixed on the horizon. Hopefully we always will be.
Our failures are due in part to resources—though not in the way you probably expect. The United States is an almost unbelievably wealthy country. If you need evidence, compare the average income of the “poorest” U.S. states to countries in the EU.
We are afflicted instead with the pathologies of a rich country. The worst of these is a change in mindset. Complacency and self-satisfaction seep in. The killer instinct and grind-it-out mentality that created the good times go away. Perhaps worst of all, people start to fetishize money as the solution to problems in itself, while ignoring the hard work that money is meant to support and reward. Moving money around becomes the primary focus, while the ability to use money in productive ways—the ability to implement—atrophies like a muscle that’s never used.
This pathology is on full display today. We see it in the career choices of our best and brightest. A couple generations ago, six percent of Harvard Business School graduates went into finance. That made sense. HBS grads were being trained to lead General Electric and IBM. To empire-build, not to wear a green eyeshade. That has changed. Today, about a third of HBS grads go into finance. No doubt they are exceptional at moving money. Do they know how to make things?
Unsurprisingly, we also see this in Washington. Politicians act like their commitment to solving a problem scales in tandem with the funding they can throw at that problem. They think they have a magic money cannon, and that shooting this cannon in the general direction of a problem is enough to batter down the obstacles preventing us from solving it. Not working? Stuff the cannon with a higher-velocity round and fire.
Any successful leader can tell you this is the wrong way to solve a problem. In a properly designed incentive structure, money is an enabler on the front end and a reward for completion on the back end. Money bookends the hard work that actually goes into executing a project and getting results.
Leadership, organization, and accountability are far more important than money in driving outcomes. All are conspicuous in successful organizations—and conspicuous by their absence in high-profile failures.
Bureaucracy is the enemy of accountability. Too many agencies seem structured precisely to insulate key decision-makers from accountability for delivering results. Their sheer size and complexity bewilder leaders, tricking them into thinking the bureaucracy runs on auto-pilot.
The opposite is the case. Effective action requires small teams with complete authority and intense devotion to wrangling the beast of bureaucracy. Kelly Johnson, of Skunkworks fame, said this succinctly in his Fourteen Rules of Management. His first commandment was that a project manager “must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects.” The third was that “The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.” These rules create a bias for action, and leave no doubt where the buck stops if the train goes off the tracks.
I could spend all day talking about failures of implementation. There are plenty of examples to go around. But it’s worth remembering it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries and companies have built the critical infrastructure we are currently failing to build with far less money and time. Japan mobilized to build a TSMC fab one year after we did. The plant is already open. Starlink is beaming high-speed internet to the most remote parts of the world right now from a network of 6,000 satellites. Uzbekistan operates a larger high-speed rail network than we do.
We also know big projects can still happen here, with the right urgency, leadership, and technology. Americans aren’t lazy, indifferent, or ill-equipped for a challenge. Understanding this fact is the first step on the road to reform. [2]
General Gustave Perna led Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s crash effort to develop vaccines for Covid-19. When he came into the job in May of 2020, one news article reports, “his arsenal consisted of three colonels, no money, and no plan.” By the end of the year, millions of doses of vaccines were rolling off assembly lines and being distributed to more than 70,000 locations across the country.
Operation Warp Speed was the perfect storm of urgency, leadership, and technology. In keeping with Kelly’s Rules, it was a ruthlessly small team with complete responsibility for the task. Warp Speed got top priority and political cover at every level. It also got a geyser of cash. But cutting the check was the start of the hard work, not the end.
Warp Speed was only possible because it had an experienced logistician in General Perna who postponed retirement to serve his country–and who bulled through obstacles standing in his way. It benefited from America’s biotech industry, which is still world-class despite the decline of other areas of our industrial base 1.
Operation Warp Speed was implementation on steroids. The challenge is how to replicate this success in peace time, absent a state of emergency. This challenge is more acute when we consider the disparity between us and our greatest adversary, China. We will have to move faster and with greater urgency to make up for disadvantages in population size and industrial capacity. Ukraine’s challenges in dealing with Russia should serve as a warning about how difficult it is to confront a much larger foe.
Breaking out of our national malaise will require a concerted effort to clear away the bureaucracy standing in the way of progress—starting now, before the moment of crisis. If our goal is to build, then non-essential obstacles standing in the way of building need to go.
It will also require leaders who don’t rely on the magic money cannon and who aren’t bewitched by the bureaucracy. Retired SOCOM Commander Raymond Thomas liked to remind his lawyers that they were there to advise him; he was there to make the final decision. We need that kind of command at the very top. Leaders who are neck deep in the implementation process and wrestle the Hydra of bureaucracy until it’s under their control.
If we don’t put in the reps and rebuild the muscle of implementation, we shouldn’t expect different results from the ones we’ve seen in the recent past.
You can forget about flying cars in that world. We’ll still be building EV chargers.
Subscribe to Shyam Sankar #
Launched 8 months ago
Views from the Shire. Thoughts on business, strategy, defense, technology.