Fill out mynt into paperwork, i inquired about it. So if you wonder where our Social Security money is going, who wants tobody be on Social Security needs to go down and take a look at the waiting room. They will see where this social purity money goes. Host that does it for todays washington journal. To anl bring you now event happening here in washington on president ial transitions. The secretary of Commerce Penny pritzker and the former housing and urban Development Secretary steve reston is sharing their thoughts on what they take on what they think it takes to succeed as a smooth president ial transition. Think of for watching. We will be back here tomorrow at 7 00 a. M. Eastern. We are showing coverage of the discussion this morning about president ial transitions. It features commerce secretary from theer and partnership of public service, one of the organizations leading the transition into the next president , less than five weeks now and told election day. We understand they are delayed just a little bit but should get underway shortly. We will have that here live on cspan. You want to let you know about the live coverage we have later on. We will hear from mike pence in harrisonburg virginia coming up us morning around 11 30 eastern and tim kaine is in philadelphia at 6 00 eastern. Some reaction now from Longwood University students and cspan viewers from this mornings washington journal. Tell us your name and what you thought about the debate . I am a jr. At longwood and i thought the debate was pretty good. A lot different from the president ial debate, obviously. They actually talked about policies. There wasnt as much back and forth occurring. And when it did happen, it was in good humor. So that was great to see. And just to be inside the debate hall, the atmosphere was nice and quiet and respectful of everything going on. So i got that was a great opportunity for me as a student. Host and Longwood University, this is the first debate. A small school. And one thousand students according to this article are taking classes to look at the campaign. What its like for you and the other students there to be hosting last nights debate . Caller well definitely, i think we have 30 debate related courses. I am a Digital Media major and i am in an advanced media reporting class. And for us, we layer we were firsto go to the president ial debate as an all expense paid trip to Hofstra University we got to go with media passes and that is another onceinalifetime opportunity. It really helped us prepared to cover this debate yesterday. Host what are you learning about the Digital Media and covering campaigns that you saw play out last night . Well, i had access to the media center. So that was a huge aspect. I didnt realize how chaotic it could be. We will leave this now and take you back life to the discussion this morning on the transitions, president ial transitions at the podium is max syre. My name is max dyer i am the president of the ceo for public service. We focus on our work rankings. Ranking agencies against themselves, as well as against. Agencies and the private sector. We do a lot of leadership training and we get good talent into government and we look to improve the systems of government. And the final these we focus on is how to create a constituency government on the outside. So one of the great challenges for the federal government that withe is one that comes in the 4000 political appointees and a lot of them are not committed to the longterm organizations. On a crisisused management but not fundamentally making the organization run more effectively. And that is quite related to the conversation we having here today. But our goal is to promote key stakeholder communities. Philanthropy, inverse cities, nonprofit. To help them understand that whatever their views are, they have something at stake in seeing that the government itself functions more effectively. Would havehat we better government. So one element that is newer for us is that we have launched the center on president ial transition. Things we recognized eight or nine years ago was the difficulty for the government in the transition process. It is an irony. As children, we are taught about the peaceful transfer of power making us a great nation and its true. It is peaceful, but it is ugly. And our goal is to change that. President ialr for transition is focused on creating a learning system such that the transition teams can actually build off the activists of the past rather than going through a groundhog day exercise. So we have collected information from the romney team and the obama team and we made that available to the new teams that are operating today on the clinton and trump side and we are trying to make that process better. From an operational perspective and also legislatively as well. And we are seeing in arms progress in that respect. It is fascinating to me when you think about the transition itself. Because the federal government is the largest and most complex organization on the planet and in history. Trillion 4 million employees. Hundreds of different operating units. Phenomenally complex. And its vital that you start than the inauguration and certainly than the election day if you are able to take over the organization. By way of contrast, if you think about the largest of the private sector organizations, it would be walmart, i believe. And that has over 2 million employees with an annual revenue of 485 billion. Contrast that to 4 trillion. Of directorsboard rather than the 535 that the president of the United States has to deal with. So quite a bit different. So were very excited. Key people here. I no longer have to tap dance. This will be a great conversation. I thought it would be provocative and and my comments by pointing out a quote from Carly Fiorina that she made in 2008 as an advisor to the mccain team. I dont think john mccain could run a major corporation. I dont think proper bomb a or joe biden could run a major organization. She was trying to make a political point but i think the question, comparing leadership large private sector organizations and large governmental organizations is an important comparison to make. We need to learn what is similar and what is different if we are going to see our government work more effectively. And we have two extreme are people who have done effective leadership in both sectors to hear from today and a wonderful moderator as well. Before turning to them, i didnt want to point out one person on the partnership team. She hopefully is here. This event was a gleam in her eye for five months ago and she has made this happen so thank you, courtney, for your great work. With that, i introduce our panel for the conversation today. It pullsmazing her prizewinning journalist who writes on politics for the Washington Post and he serves with the Public Affairs for the shore school at george mason university. And then we also have a phenomenal Public Servant in penny pritzker. Currently the secretary of commerce. She has been in her position since 2013 following her cochair ship of the obama for america 2012 team. And a very distinguished career in the private sector. She has led several private enterprises including the Pritzker Realty group and joining her is Steve Preston, he served as the 14thcentury of the housing and urban development division. Bush. Ved under president in these roles he work to enact large reforms during the financial collapse. And at housing and urban development he led a 39 million budget. Before entering public service, he spent nearly 25 years in financial and operational leadership positions. He returned to the private sector after his tenure in washington and is the ceo of livingston international, north americas Largest Company provider of logistic services. And i cant help a close on the note that he also serves on the partnership for Public Services board. A challenge in itself that hopefully we dont talk about today. So with that, our panelists will come up. And you so much. [laughter] [applause] good morning. Lets get right to it. A common refrain you hear is part of the speech of the chamber of commerce, government should be run more like private enterprise. It sounds good but is it realistic . I think thatr there are things we can learn from the private sector. But i also think that there are differences that need to be noted. , from my standpoint, pace is different in government. Slower and faster, in a funny way. But trying to get things done and move through the system is more difficult. But you have to acknowledge, there are more stakeholders. So in some respects, maybe we dont want government to move as fast as other types of organizations. Because we have checks and balances. We have more people who members of Congress Interest groups. All thesestration, various players you have to come together to say, this is the path we actually proceed on. I think that is true in the policymaking. Limitation,s to a actually figuring out how to implement more quickly and more effectively, that is something we could learn from the private sector from. That there again, more checks and balances. If you think about procurement as a ceo, iocesses, can go out and make a decision to buy something. And i dont need all the various processes. Or if i want to hire someone, the process of hiring the federal government is so compensated. And i have to confess that even after 3. 5 years i have not mastered that at all. Unnecessarily so, do you think . Penny pritzker i think we make it difficult. I think part of the challenge there is the fear of mistake. Orthe intolerance of mistake the repercussions that come from mistakes. And i dont know any manager who doesnt make mistakes. This balancing act between over scrutinizing something, so that everyone is on board, even wrong if we all make mistakes together, who can be mad at you versus ok, we are going to give managers more authority, that is the bouncing act and that is the difference in government. Do using the balance is right now or have we gone too far in the direction of no mistakes, nofault, no tolerance . Weny pritzker i think that should have more latitude and flexibility. As a manager i certainly see the challenges with that. So take for example Cyber Security. A huge priority of this administration. A huge priority for the country. Tocant get the people in fill the positions and we dont have the flexibility in how to hire, we dont have the flexibility in terms of paying, because we compete with the private sector, and there are ofe 200,000 a shortage Cyber Security specialists in the United States at large and we are competing with every company in america to try to attract talent to defend the Largest Organization in the country, the federal government. Be you know, there needs to provisions, in my opinion for changes that would allow you to address what is, frankly, in my mind, a crisis. Is eight oversimplified and overstated to say that government should run more like a business . Steve preston i dont think it is overstated, but i think what is said i was remembering those high range of procurement, we do have a much more complex Stakeholder Group for reason. Theres a reason you have congressional oversight and now, if i had 20 congressional hearings in my first 15 months on the job, which was a little bit more than i wanted. But there is a reason for that. I would say, from the other side , sometimes things are too difficult to get done because the system is wriggled with system is riddled with old regulations. Or there is not a construct that fastes reasonably decisionmaking. I cant tell you how may times ive tried to get something done and i would talk to my staff and they would explain to me be steps that we have to go through and i would say, that cant possibly be the case. Theres nothing intuitive about that. Right . Answer isently, the oh theres a regulation from 20 years ago that is still in place and it requires us to do this and it just seems crazy. Law, if ieed a little need legislation to get done, it is a crapshoot. You dont know if you get it or not. Need change, it will be a long and complex process. Ironically, if i had the budget to make an operational change, i had almost no oversight. Find, it is an important thing to understand this. Because many Government Agencies have large business. D, wei was leading hu had direct programs for disaster victims and guarantee programs. First of all, businesses with in them. That in manyund is cases, we didnt have the skills to drive change or improvements, there wasnt the expectation that we would achieve a particular outcome on the other end. Into the smalle Business Administration a year after katrina and the direct loan process to homeowners had gotten shut down, they actually make home loans to people who have had their own home damaged in a disaster. Had gottenw people loans. And the whole system had kind of collapse. So we can men and teams were brought in with process design experts. We engaged in teams. We look at the issues. And within six weeks, we had double production and in five months we had every thing cleared out. Ok . People thought we were magic. But we didnt do anything that people with Good Business skills or process skills could do. So what i found, on the business side is that a lot of the people , a lot of the leadership, it didnt have the tools to think that way. They were terrific leaders in other ways but they didnt have the tool to say, i want to try that out. I want to get this document it. And a lot of people in the agency didnt have the skills to work through the issues. They didnt have processes in place that looks at effectiveness or how did you do it . Steve preston we brought in people with the skills. You were able to do that quickly . Steve preston well [laughter] Steve Preston i had a lot of people on my staff who were terrific. I think one is in the audience back there. We were able to bring in small teams to help. That really, what we were able to do was take the career workforce that saw all the issues at the frontline and understood what was going on in the mix and pair them with people who had skills to basically redesign processes. We worked with them to help them be more effective. To replace organizational structures that help them a more effective. The said he gets a lot of agencies,but at both we had such incredible success working with people in the career workforce and care deeply about what they did and wanted nothing more than to win every day and serve the american people. Like lot of times i felt the road to do that was blocked because we didnt have a lot of their competencies. With traditional business competencies that help you get this thing done. Penny pritzker so one of those things, taking your question about learning from the private sector, one of the things were doing at the department of commerce is to put in shared services on a cure meant, hr, i. T. Processr ability to procurements or process new people that we are bringing on board. To to do that, you have reprogram money. You have to get approval from congress. You had to say look, we want to run ourselves better. We are 47 thousand people. We have Many Services that we provide to the private sector and to others. Us, in order to be more effective and flexible in terms of adjusting with the we ares we are providing trying to take a page from the private sector. And really bring in the Capacity Services andshared specific functions within our organization. And we are quite excited about that. It is quite a way to facilitate moreer ability to address quickly the challenges that we are facing. So if the new president were to call each of you up and say, my instincts is to say, i want someone with significant public and private experience to be cabinet officers. Maybe state department and maybe is, but wherever management it will go. Would you recommend that . Say, lifelong Public Servants can be just as good cabinet members as someone who has no experience from myitzker standpoint, it is all about the team. It is the team you put together. And i think you need folks who are wired on the hill. Who understand the politics of what you are dealing with. You didnt give us a particular department to her talk about but we folks who can manage well. You need folks who can problem solve. And you need and ability to communicate innovations. That is a significant part so building a team and the people who make up the team, some good have a lifelong career in the federal government and be absolute assets to the team, and some could be mixed and some could be from the private sector. What ive learned is that this is someone, i would be a disaster if all i had were people from the private sector. So you think it is the team. It doesnt matter whatever the weakness is of the people at the argue, letuld also me push back on this. People who are not happy with all the way the government is working, if the person at the top is a lifelong washington never, they will understand the urgency or the attitude that the public has, which is, we dont want you to do the same thing. We want you to do something differently and you are too much part of the system . Id i would say look, maybe have experience outside this bubble here called washington . Steve preston i agree 100 . People not you need only with different skill sets but also people who look at problems differently. Its the same thing if you put together a board, a Leadership Team or a business or anything else. On what theepends agencys mandate is. Right . If you are in the department of congress and you are looking at how to fix trade and deal with the issues of trade, you need people who can look at the policy issues because they are highly complex. Im probably going to get out of my depth pretty soon. Who can people negotiate effectively and who can do a number of different things. And also those who can track progress in the department. I was very involved with the transitioning of my ag