Management Information Systems
Executive Recruiting and Management Information in the White House John W. Macy, Jr., President, Corporation fo r Public Broadcasting
Matthew B. Coffey, Assistant to the President, Corporation fo r Public Broadcasting
The day o f the fancy scroll and quilled pen will always be a part o f the tradition and ceremony o f the White House. In the management o f that vast enterprise known as the Federal Bureaucracy, however, the latest in management technique, information systems, and the best o f management talent must be combined to serve a crying public need fo r better management.
The biggest executive recruiting problem in America belongs to the man with most of the other complex problems— the President of the United States.
In order to get an idea of the scope of the problem, it is useful to look at the activity during President Johnson’s Administration. In his sixty months in office, the President appointed 678 full-time executives. These executives were selected to fill approximately 525 Executive Branch positions which commonly are referred to as “political appointee’’ positions.
In addition to these full-time positions, the President is authorized by law to appoint members of 165 advisory commissions. The membership of these commissions required in excess of 2500 appointments during the Johnson Presidency. On top of all of these selections, the President appointed, on his own motion, an average of 13 task forces each year to work on specific legislative proposals for periods of ap proximately one month.
In this article we will concentrate our observa tions on the full-time executive positions. We will explain the search and evaluation organiza tion which evolved from 1960 through 1969
and the introduction of the first management information system into White House operation. To the best of our knowledge, this system or a reasonable modification thereof is still in use by the current Administration.
The Positions The Executive Branch of the Federal Govern ment has over three million employees. The number of these employees has been constantly rising in the last decade (see Table 1).
This Table illustrates the steady climb in Federal career employment consistent with the Federal Government’s expanding role in the solution of social, economic, and educational problems, as well as the maintenance of a large military force.
This immense organization and the direction it takes are the responsibility of the incumbent in the White House. The management manpower needed to run an organization of this magnitude is much greater than even the largest of private industrial organizations. But still, in order that his policies be carried out, a President must man age it and manage it very well.
The Presidential power of appointment stems from Article II of the Constitution which provides the power to: “appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and counselors, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law ...” 1
Under that very broad authority and in conjunction with specific legislative requests, the President now appoints all of the full-
'U.S. Constitution, Article II. This article is reprinted from the January 1970 issue of the SAM Advanced Management Journal.
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Table 1. Federal Career Civil Service Execu tive Branch Employment 1958-1968*
1958 2,216,921 1959 2,355,054 1960 2,370,827 1961 2,276,657 1962 2,484,654 1963 2,497,709 1964 2,479,641 1965 2,496,090 1966 2,726,145 1967 2,967,964 1968 3,031,954
" Based on figures in the Annual Report o f the United States Civil Service Commission, 1958- 1968.
time executives. Today, these executive jobs include the Cabinet officers, the Subcabinet officers, some 90 bureau chiefs, the Chairman and members of the regulatory agencies and commissions, the heads of independent agencies, and ambassadors to 120 countries.
Politics verses Performance Although it is extremely popular to refer to these executive positions as being the President’s patronage, this is less and less the case. Marver Bernstein of the Bookings Institution in his book, The Job o f the Federal Executive, points out that the demanding nature of most of these jobs requires a high order of managerial skill.2 Many other researchers have confirmed that the days of political patronage except in a minority of these jobs, is near an end.3
Realizing these two conditions, a large number of executives needed, and professional and executive demanded, every President must organize in his own way to solve this problem. As the number of full-time executives increases or as turnover increases, the problem becomes more severe.
Kennedy Organization Laurin L. Henry in an address before the American Political Science Association in 1967 pointed out that the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations developed the first effective professional recruiting efforts for any President.4 Traditionally, a President assuming office has set up task forces to find qualified candidates during the transitional period from one administration to the other. This was the case in the Kennedy Administration as it has been in the Nixon Administration transition.
After the initial group of executives was selected and came to Washington, the recruitng group was disbanded and recruitment became a part-time function of a special assistant to the President. Following this traditional pattern, President Kennedy appointed Ralph A. Dungan Special Assistant to the President for Latin American Affairs and Recruitment. Mr. Dungan departed from tradition when he chose a staff of three professionals to concentrate all of their time and energy in filling the constant need for executive talent. The first staff assistant to look at the problem of executive selections was Dan H. Fenn. He soon defined the method of selecting executives as BOGSAT, translated that means a contraction of “a Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table,” saying whom do you know?
Quickly realizing that this method was at best adequate for only a short period of time, Fenn contacted the Brookings Institution for assis tance. He asked their aid in setting up a nation wide network of persons considered leaders in their field or in their communities to whom he could go for information and evaluations on candidates for vacant positions. The institution arranged meetings around the country with lead ers in various disciplines to talk with Fenn and staffer David Jelenek. From these meetings a list of potential sources of talent was created and biographies began to arrive from these sources.
The filling o f a vacancy requires two types of information. It requires information on the job and on potential candidates to fill the job. While that is easily stated, it is not necessarily easily fulfilled. The development of the position profile was the responsibility of the White House
’Marver H. Bernstein, The Job o f the Federal Executive (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1958). ’See also: Paul T. David and Ross Pollock, Executives for Government (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1967), Dean E. Mann and Jameson W. Doig, The Assistant Secretaries (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1965), David T. Stanley, et ah. Men Who Govern (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1967). JLaurin L. Henry, “The Presidency, Executive Staffing, and the Federal Bureaucracy,” (Remarks before the 1967 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago: September 5-9, 1967).
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staff with involvement by the President himself or by the head of the department. The profile had to take into account not only the needs of the position at the given moment, but also it had to project tomorrow’s needs. In forming the position profile, a combination of factors complicated the recruitment problem.
Each executive position was looked upon as a unique and complex array of responsibilities that could not be clearly specified. The recruiter, therefore, had to use the best judgement of the President, the secretary of the department, and even experts in the discipline of the job, to come up with not only a description of the present but a projection of the future. This was necessary to assure that future growth or change was not overlooked. Most projections attempted to look five years into the future.
The other problem in writing a job profile was the consideration of the type of candidate necessary to take the job in the direction it was thought the position should go. This is complex because individual personality is composed of a complex interaction of motives, defense mechanisms, aptitudes, conflicts, and traits. Many of these attitudinal factors are recognized as necessary for success in any executive position. But each position had to be defined in terms of the right mix. With the position well defined, and the desired candidate traits spelled out, the search could begin.
While it may have been easy for the recruiter to find all of the right biographical information, he was faced with a difficult task in determin ing the attitudinal characteristics of individuals who met the biographical qualifications. Since it was assumed that these attitudinal characteristics indicated the executive’s ability to succeed, the staff assistant had to make an attempt to get an accurate picture of the applicant’s personality. For this he turned to the contact list for evalua tions. From these unstructured evaluations, the staff assistant would then formulate an under standing of the structure and dynamics of the various applicant’s personalities.
The serious disadvantage that a White House recruiter had was his inability to use any psycho metric methods in attempting to measure attitu dinal characteristics. You just don’t call a man into the White House to take a test to become Assistant Secretary of Commerce. At the same time, because of the honor of being considered and the campaigns of support that might be built up if it were known that a candidate was under consideration, the staff assistant had to operate
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in a situation of confidence with his contacts and no knowledge on the part of the candidate.
Recommendations to the President The Kennedy staff, after completing the above procedure, would put together individual fold ers in which on one side the President could see the statutory authority and the description of the position and on the other side biographies and evaluations of candidates whom the staff con sidered to be qualified to fill the vacancy. The President would react to the recommendations indicating his choice, or choices, for personal interview. The interviews would then be con ducted by the President or by the staff. Relevant background investigations would then be done if the candidate successfully completed the inter view process. If the background investigation was clear, the President would then, depending upon the type of appointment, either make the appointment or nominate a candidate to the Sen ate of the United States for confirmation. Table 2 is a flow diagram of the process.
The Transition 1963-4 Under the leadership of Fenn and his successor, John B. Clinton, the above process slowly developed into a professional clinical approach to executive recruiting. Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, however, an unexpected problem started to develop. Recognizing the fact that the Kennedy team had built a strong resource of talent in their files, a tradition was broken.
It has been tradition that all papers in the White House are the personal papers of the incumbent. When he leaves the White House all of these papers are removed overnight so that a new incumbent arrives to empty file cabinets. Since, however, most of the Kennedy staff remained on at the White House in the recruitment area, they retained these files for the use of President Johnson up until early 1965 when they were transferred to the custody of the Kennedy Library.
Immediately following the election, Presi dent Johnson appointed Special Assistant Ralph Dungan to be Ambassador to Chile. In a break from the traditional way of doing things, the President decided that the Chairman of the Civil Service Commission should take over the management of the recruiting function and the remaining staff. This new team leader inherited the resource of talent files and the contact net work, and on the recommendation of the staff,
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Table 2.
January 1970
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he accelerated the effort to design a means of indexing these files in a meaningful fashion.
Problems of Plenty Any group of professional recruiters can remem ber a great many names and qualifications of candidates when they sit around a table. Once, however, they develop a file in excess of several thousand it becomes impossible to remember the qualifications, backgrounds, and even names of all of the candidates in the file. This raises a practical management information problem.
In the period November, 1964, to January, 1969, the writers were involved in the design and implementation of a system which became the White House Executive Biographic Index. This index was a means for searching a file which eventually grew to 16,000 entries.
Other programs also were started during this period to provide a computer file of incumbents and position descriptions which solved the con stant need for providing public information and knowing of upcoming vacancies by term expira tion. The staff received assistance and guidance from all of the major computer manufacturers in the design phase of the system. The computer service and programming assistance was provid ed by the Office of Emergency Preparedness.
At the same time that the computer systems were being developed, the structure of the staff also was changed. Rather than the entire staff working on the vacancy list in total, the vacan cies were divided up between international positions and domestic positions with a desk of ficer and assistant for both areas. This procedure allow the two teams to concentrate their energies and gain in-depth experience in two distinctly different kinds of executive recruiting.
The list of contacts over the years had grown to over 600 and stayed at that level through the Johnson Administration. We must emphasize that this was not a static list. It changed as the recruiters were better able to assess an evalua tor’s ability to perceive attitudinal characteristics in a candidate.
Presidential Anome With this new Executive Biographic Index, the staff did not forget names in the file. The computer provided them with catalogs listing biographies cross reference by skill, providing an effective means of producing a large number
of names for any vacancy which became avail able. This increase in ability to provide names, however, did not initially provide more appoint ments. This did not happen because although the President was receiving several qualified names for each vacancy, he felt no identification with them and would not respond with any indication of approval or disapproval.
It took some time for the staff to realize that it did little good to quote the evaluations of persons unknown to the President to him about another candidate. No matter how good the evaluations, he could not feel certain in his judg ment between candidates.
The staff, therefore, after completing its evaluation process had to seek out persons who were known to the President for evaluations. As soon as their names and evaluations began showing up in the memorandum, productivity increased. We point out this example as a les son to executive recruiters. No matter how good the management system, if it does not serve the personal needs of the ultimate decision maker, it is unlikely to succeed on any kind of consistent basis.
The Johnson Record The President, in making executive appoint ments, has the choice of promoting career or excepted appointees or of selecting appointees from outside the Federal Government. Statistics on the background of the Presidential appointees in the Johnson Administration indicate that 44.8 percent came from the career Federal Service (see Table 3).
Henry in analyzing the performance of the last several administrations in 1967 reported:
“ ...although exceeding FDR, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, in the proportion of appointees with long experience in public office, Johnson still is not relying on insiders to quite the same extent as Truman who made 52 percent of his appointments from public service careerists.”3 * 5 Table 3, and the Henry quotation make clear
that most Presidents choose the majority of their appointees from outside the career Federal Service. With the Johnson average rate of eleven new vacancies every month he was in the Presi dency, the need is clear for organizing a profes sional recruiting effort backed up with the best in management information systems.
3Laurin Henry, “The Presidency, Executive Staffing, and the Federal Bureacracy,” (Remarks before the 1967 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago: September 5-9, 1967).
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Table 3. Percentage Background Distribution* of Johnson Administration Appointees
Career Federal Service 44.8% Business 18.0 Law 17.0 Universities 12.4 State and Local governments 6.5 Labor 1.3
100%
*Based on total number of years in field; i.e. ten years in business, nine years in university. The candidate would be listed as from business.
Conclusions The day of the fancy scroll and quill pen will always be a part of the tradition and ceremony of the White House. In the management of that vast enterprise known as the Federal Bureaucracy, however, the latest in management technique, information systems, and the best of manage ment talent must be combined to serve a crying public need for a better management.
The writers believe that the size of the White House staff for this function should always remain small. They believe that administration policy should be shaped as well as carried out by the externally responsible Presidential appointees in the departments and agencies and not by a large, internally responsible White House staff. The more effective the men in publicly responsible positions, the better able the President should be to work directly with them, and not establish his own cadre of personal advisors.
The one function that can only be performed within the White House is executive recruiting. Each President should be able to exercise his choice as to how this function can best serve him. But no future President can afford the luxury of the old style methods of one-time recruitment. He will need professional assistance on a continuing basis. His staff must be able to use the latest techniques of management science. If they do their job correctly, they bring the best brains to the service of the American public and their President. In addition to the use of the most
modem organizational scheme, the recruitment staff must have human relation skills and highly developed communication skills.
Previously, writers6 have expressed the desire for an Office of Presidential Data Management. Under this plan, the President would have his own computer staff which would collect vast quantities of information and presumably cause the bureaucracy to be more responsive to Presi dential needs for information.
We prefer an alternative approach similar to the one we used during the Johnson Presidency. The Office of Emergency Preparedness is within the Executive Office of the President and is set up to coordinate all resources in time of national emergency. That organization not only has excel lent computer hardware and software capability, it has it in bomb-proof sites. It, therefore, seems more reasonable to assign to the OEP the function of knowing were all computer-stored information in the Government is and how to tap all of the information needed from these sources. By sim ply providing that direction to OEP, the President would have knowledge of the data banks within the bureaucracy and the means of access to them.
The OEP staff under this plan should serve as technical advisors to whatever White House staff the President feels is necessary. OEP would advise the staff of the whereabouts of all the critical information as it relates to their particu lar field of endeavor. The White House must rely on the publicly-responsible official to manage their departments effectively and gain for the President all the information he needs to know on any subject in making a decision. OEP should be the coordinator.
We have pointed out the way in which the White House has begun to turn to modem man agement techniques in the solution of major national problems. We look upon this as a first step and hope that the current Administra tion and succeeding administrations give more thought during candidacies and campaigns to the serious management problems they face on entering the White House. The period of transi tion is not long enough to allow for organizing a new Government.
Members of the management profession have to think in terms of not only solving their own problems in private enterprises, but contribute of their time and effort in helping the President solve his serious management problems. We
6Chester L. Guthrie and Thomas R. Kennedy, “Informing the Nation’s President.” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (New York, January, 1969).
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have written about one management problem and the effort that went into its solution. Multi ply that by a number o f items and appearing in the Congressional Record each day, and you can make a pretty good ball park guess of the man agement problems facing the President each and every day.
John W. Macy, Jr., is the first President o f the Corporation fo r Public Broadcasting, which is Federally-chartered under the Public Broadcasting Act o f 1967 to coordinate and fund public broadcasting in the United States. Prior to this affiliation, he had served as Chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. A career civil servant, Mr. Macy has served in responsible
posts with the Social Security Board, the War Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department o f the Army, and the Civil Service Commission. He is the recipient o f the Presidential Medal o f Freedom, the highest decoration the President can bestow upon a civilian, from President Johnson. He also is the recipient o f the Human Relations award of the Society fo r Advancement o f Management. Prior to his present position as Assistant to the President o f the Corporation fo r Pubic Broadcasting, Matthew B. Coffey served as a Staff Assistant to the President o f the United States at The White House. Holder o f a M.S. Degree in Business Administration from the University o f West Virginia, Mr. Coffey also has served as an investigator fo r the U.S. Civil Service Commission.
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