I'll have to disagree with Mr. Fee. My job was terribly exciting for the entire thirteen months, and there was a tremendous temptation to stay longer. I think some are tempted to stay for good. But I come from the business world, which moves fast. A man should not stay too long in his government post-he should come back after a year, or he may be forgotten. I would like to return to government service again some time later, but for the first time, one year was enough.

Percy Baynes:

The same applies to government men. If they stay way for longer than a year, they are likely to be forgotten.

Francis Fee:

One thing is sure-you need time to get back inside your old organization. I might like to try the switch again, but not for another three or four or five years. And then perhaps in a different industry, or at a different level of authority.

David Sternlight:

For myself, I found that I entered the program at exactly the right stage of my career. Five years earlier, I was still trying to make some major contributions to my company, to establish my position. Five years later, I think, I would have been at a point in my career when it would have been too late to go, and possibly inappropriate.

Question:

Gentlemen, have your attitudes toward the opposite sectors changed drastically because of your program experience?

David Sternlight:

My comment is a little different from the convenional wisdom on that subject. Prior to the program, my contact with government people had been on a technical level. Those I had dealt with had been in charge of very large-scale technical projects-fleets

of ships, cancer research programs, that sort of thing. I had an unrealistically high set of expectations about government people. I thought they were all superb.

Then, when I went into government for a year, I came into contact with a cross section of government people-not just the top scientists and technologists. I now have the view that government people are, well, like everybody else. Some are simply outstanding, while others perform fairly routine functions. On the whole, I guess, they vary just as widely as do the people in any good industrial company.

David Lehman:

My attitude changed also, but in a different way. There are two ideas I would like to offer. First, in business, you tend to view a problem from a single perspective-that of your company or industry. I feel that my government experience has expanded my intellectual resources-and heightened my awareness of the multidimensional aspects of each problem so that I think it out far more keenly than before and try to be more astute about weighing the factors that bear on it. I have seen how necessary it is to look at a spectrum of attitudes before creating government policy.

Second, I discovered that government has something to learn from industry about human resources. There are a lot of people in government whose talents are not being used nearly as effectively as they would be in industry. This is partly because factors such as time, human resources, and personalities are seldom taken into account in organizational changes in government. Government agencies could revitalize themselves if they were able to change their structures more rapidly and flexibly. Then their people would find themselves in stimulating new environments, not entrenched in old situations.

Question:

How do our gentlemen from government feel about that?

Francis Fee:

I did go from government to industry, and my opinion of the government worker did not change as a result of the move. I may be a bit biased, but I had-and still have-a fairly high opinion of government people, with whom I had worked for nine years before I entered the program. I don't think I met any group of people in industry who were markedly superior to government employees.

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value of an audit team made up of men from a great many disciplines.

Another thing: it takes a lot of time to get things done in government because of this circuitous decision-making process. Maybe, also, we spend too much time justifying our work. We feel we have to be extremely certain that what we report is fact and that it is fully supported, and I think we tend to gather a great deal more supporting data than we actually need. One of the things we did at AT&T was to gather just enough facts to support a point and then go ahead and make the point.

Question:

Did any of you encounter any conflicts of interest?

David Sternlight:

I came from a company that is one of the country's major ship builders, among other things, and I went into the Department of Commerce, which includes the Maritime Administration. My background was no secret, but I leaned over backward to avoid conflicts of interest. I disqualified myself from any involvement in maritime policy issues that might ave had any impact on the company I came from. If I had not done so myself, I am sure that others would have insisted on it.

David Lehman:

The same here. When I first planned to spend a year in Washington, all the prospective job offerings were carefully scrutinized by our chief legal counsel at IBM. I was interested in a Department of Transportation job, and he OK'd that because the possibility of a conflict of interest would be practically zero. As a result of careful checking beforehand, neither I nor the company nor the agency had any worries on this score.

David Sternlight:

I think this point can be carried beyond reason. Let's not lose sight of mutual interests and common interests-they're why the program exists. We live in a society where the worst relationship between the government and any other sector would be the kind in which the government slips something under the door and the recipient slips something back over the transom. Open exchange lessens the chance of such nonsense. I would like to see similar programs inolving the academic community and other sectors of society. We need that kind of interchange. We need it badly.

[End of colloquium]

Toward a lasting alliance

In his last comment, Mr. Sternlight stated the essential motive of the program and the reason for its success to date. Ignorance leads to fear, fear breeds mistrust, and mistrust leads to conflict. The aim of our commission is to break this disruptive chain and to enhance harmony among various groups in the nation. It is still trying to improve the program toward that end:

For one thing, the commission has greatly improved the balance between those coming from government and those going to government. Until this year, the participants moved mainly in one direction: a large majority of them came from the private sector. (See the ruled insert.) The commission searched for the reason and concluded that top management in most companies fundamentally mistrusts the capability of government workers. Industry is reluctant to pay $25,000 or more to a man who it thinks may not perform at company standards. It has taken a lot of time and personal persuasion, but a large number of company executives are now convinced that exchange participants from government are men of top quality who are likely to pay their own way. From now on, let's hope the exchanges will be roughly equal; they were nearly so this year.

The basic job selection procedure has also been improved. Instead of trying to match a man to a particular job, as in the beginning, the commission now arranges for about three times as many job offerings as there are candidates. This arrangement enables a man to shop around and find exactly the kind of work that suits him best. Usually he is afforded an opportunity for four to five in-depth interviews before making up his mind. Even at the present time, a candidate can change assignments in midstream if that is desirable.