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Mission v. management culture
Q: In recent years, the agency has come under severe criticism, from Congress and inside the agency, about its mission versus management culture. What is your assessment of this criticism?
MR. ALM: In my opinion, the management challenge for an institution - whether a business or public sector agency - is to achieve its mission. To consider mission separate from management is doublespeak.
I remember once hearing a very, very funny British spoof, and it went along the lines of these guys who had this model hospital, but it did not have any patients. Somebody asked them why their model hospital didn't have any patients. They said, "we can't have perfect systems if we have patients. The patients will screw up the flow." So you can have perfect systems, and still not accomplish a mission.
I think that management is important. I think that, in government, there is never enough time and attention paid to management. There is generally a belief that deputy administrators, who are really chief operating officers of very large entities - EPA is a $6 billion, 17,000-person entity - can be handled by people with no previous management experience. To me, this is like bringing in a brain surgeon to fix your plumbing.
That is a source of the problems. A lot of an agency's management requirements really are at the political, executive level. Many equate management to administration of sub-systems, such as facilities or contracts. To me, management means the focusing of the organization's resources toward achieving a set of goals. These goals are all designed to achieve the organization's mission. The management really comes together, at the Deputy Administrator level, and I think that position should really be filled by somebody who has management ability.