Changing Structure

It is relatively easy to make incremental changes in an organization, a company, or a society.  Increasing staffing by a couple of people, shifting a few people in a reorg, tweaking tax rates by a bit — these are all relatively easy to accomplish.  Maybe a few belts get tightened here or there, but the fundamental positions of all the players involved don’t really change, so the friction is relatively low.  

Making large structural changes is relatively hard.   Cancelling old product efforts and reconstituting teams into entirely new efforts — this is disruptive and high friction; many people find their mandates changed and try to fight the change.  I lived through a couple of wholesale organizational changes at Microsoft, and they could be painful.  In the early 90s, the break with IBM and the shift of focus from OS/2 to Windows led to major changes within Microsoft's Systems division, and many people ended up in new organizations with new missions.  It was chaotic and stressful, but ultimately was very positive, in part because company leadership was clear and open about why the changes were happening, what the new goals for the organization were, why those new goals were important, and how the goals tied back to the “PC on every desk and in every home” company mission.  

The Internet shift in the 95/96 timeframe was another significant change.  Large movements of people onto new browser, server, tool, and app efforts, shifting away from legacy efforts.  Perhaps because I was higher up in the organization at this time, this change seemed a little rockier, and leadership never fully embraced the transition to an Internet-first focus, instead trying hard to maintain Windows' primacy in the industry.  Ultimately, many people left the company, and it took another 10-15 years for the company to fully complete the change as a new generation of leadership stepped in.

If you want to create significant, structural change, strong leadership with a clear mission is an absolute requirement.  People can tolerate short-term pain and chaos if they see the promise of a better tomorrow.

Structural changes in national policy

We have problems in this country, and the government and its policies cause some of them.  The Trump administration’s poster child for fixing the government was DOGE, and now DOGE has been disbanded.  All DOGE did was disrupt the government while generating no meaningful savings — and whatever savings it generated were spent 10x over in the Trump tax cut.  The Trump administration has disrupted foreign aid, the education department, healthcare, food assistance, renewables, foreign trade, and critical foreign alliances, with no impact on inflation, economic growth, or national safety.  

It is all change without leadership.  There has been no vision for what the administration wants to achieve — just a lot of change and destruction for the sake of change and destruction.  During the shutdown, the Republicans claimed they had a long list of ideas about how to fix healthcare, binders full of ideas.  And yet here we are, post-shutdown, and no proposal in front of us about how to fix healthcare.

I am a fan of constant re-evaluation of government spending and changing it when it isn’t working.  Our healthcare system isn’t working — we spend more and have worse life expectancy than almost every other developed nation.  Our education system isn’t working — test scores aren’t improving, and our large student loan programs aren’t making us more competitive.  Our energy policy isn’t working — we are far behind China in the shift to electrification.  Our trade policies aren’t working — we are far behind in manufacturing.  Every dime the government spends in these areas should be re-evaluated and reconsidered.  

But just blowing up the programs without a hint of an alternative is not helpful.  We need significant structural changes—and we need clear leadership to get us through them.

It is hard to view the Trump administration's destruction as positive, but it has given us the opportunity to look anew at policy and start over with fresh eyes.  Let’s take the lemons and make some lemonade.   Here are a few lemonade ideas:

• Education.  Here is one guy’s proposal for student loans — “The solution is surprisingly simple: make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and require universities to underwrite loans making them eat 80% of defaults.”  This is a significant structural change, and I love the basis of it — putting colleges and lenders on the hook for loan quality.  And allowing students to recover from bad decisions, or bad education foisted on them by institutions.  Giving students more agency and educational institutions more responsibility seems right.  
• Representation. The government seems unresponsive to many voters, causing them to quit voting or to vote for untethered populists.  Here is an idea from Belgium that makes a fundamental change in how citizens are involved in government — by pulling randomly selected citizens into the process.  I love this, and it probably doesn’t go far enough — at the extreme, one wonders if we wouldn’t be better served picking congresspeople at random from the voting pool, rather than the current money-laden, ad-smothered campaign process we go through.
• Healthcare.  Nearly every developed nation does better than the US on life expectancy and on healthcare costs.  As we consider structural changes, the most obvious approach is to look at other systems around the world and learn from their successes and failures.  I’ve been using ChatGPT and Gemini to explain the systems around the world.  The first system I’ve looked at in depth is Singapore. (I’ll look at Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and the Nordics next).  We spend 3-4x per capita more on healthcare than Singapore, yet have life expectancies 5-6 years shorter.  Some things I observe looking at the Singaporean system:
  • Everyone is covered.   This creates far less administrative complexity.
  • Everyone has to pay a fee for each visit.  There is something appealing about everyone having skin in the game.
  • Hospitals and insurance are not for-profit entities
  • Hospital care is less deluxe than US, but no less effective.  Individuals can still pay more for private care or private hospitals if they wish

Let’s not waste the disruption caused by Trump.  Let’s get informed about issues and better ways to do things, and let’s demand that the next generation of elected leaders make significant changes.