One of the first things that I ran across this morning was a headline across the top of FoxNews.com that read “Emails Reveal White House ‘Pressure’ To Fast-Track Questionable Loan.” Without even opening the article, I knew exactly what it was talking about: the half-a-billion dollar funneling of taxpayer money to a solar project that is now out of business. I’ve held a pretty firm stance all along that the current administration doesn’t have a real grasp on what institutes an impactful sustainability project, and this was just another example why.
It got me thinking about how businesses, and even NGOs, handle oversight of themselves. In many cases, it is with a board of directors made up of individuals from outside the organization. If you were to look at a pile of resumes from top executives of publicly held corporations, without a doubt you would see a host of board seats outside of their own organizations. With yet another administration mistake, and with mainstream media repeatedly calling the US a country of regulation, why not take a good hard look at letting the real experts, not uninformed politicians, make the type of decisions that just cost our country over half-a-billion dollars?
I don’t think the idea is that far-fetched. Instead of hiring a host of friends who are owed political favors, put together a diverse board of directors for various projects that is responsible for making allocation decisions, such as the now-defaulted $500 million loan by the White House. Instead of paying full-time salaries to “czars,” and dealing with bureaucracy and red tape at every step, let the board of directors make the decisions. Let people work autonomously to review projects, and then hold meetings every quarter, or bi-annually, to handle the extremely large or lingering decisions.
Think of it like this. In the world of academics, professors and graduate students submit manuscripts to be reviewed for publication in journals. Think of environmental projects as these manuscripts. Each journal publishes a clear set of rules that each manuscript must adhere to. There is anonymous review process by three reviewers, who can either rate the manuscript as accept, revise and re-submit, or reject. In terms of an environmental project, it could go to anonymous reviewers, and if it were accepted, it could be accepted and receive funding. Or, it could go to the entire board that could then vote on it at a scheduled meeting … or it could be emailed to each board member to review and voted on at that point.
The point it is that reviewers – the board members and subject-matter experts – currently hold board seats that are very prestigious, but don’t make them rich. If a top executive would spend their time to help other businesses, why wouldn’t they spend the same amount of time to help their country? The simple answer in most instances is they would.
At that point, instead of having wasteful environmental loans (or bank bailouts) being pushed through in the middle of the night, the best processes and people are in place to make the most informed decisions possible. And remember, there is a set of rules in place – that’s where our lawmakers and our officials come in. It would be the board of directors doing the diligence in their area of expertise to ensure that the projects and programs are administered in the most ethical and efficient manner possible.
Just image, a world where the subject-matter experts – the citizens – are the ones making the decisions on how to spend tax dollars within a simple and well-defined set of rules. I don’t know about you, but that’s a world I would love to be a part of.
Christopher A. Craig, MBA, MA in Organizational Communication
