The world-changing power of being good at your job

Whatever your job entails, it’s probably more effective against societal ills than tweeting

Generic law-related photo by Sebastian Pichler on Unsplash

When the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld a lower court’s pro-environmental ruling in a constitutional climate lawsuit, I had two reactions. One was typical: I rejoiced that authorities agreed with my interpretations of law and science. The other was weird and perhaps unwarranted: I wondered about the talent of the state of Montana attorneys.

Could it be that more talented lawyers—pursuing different strategies or making arguments more effectively—would have persuaded the judges to overturn the ruling? (Maybe not: the case struck me as cut-and-dried, and not very consequential, because an extreme law clearly violated an unusual constitutional clause. But I’m not a lawyer, and many actual lawyers think otherwise.)

But isn’t the question worth asking? Montana’s attorney general, Austin Knudsen, has spent four years trying to remake his office, often in partisan ways. The results have included staff turnover, the hiring of politically connected outside counsel, and demands for larger budgets. Given that Knudsen easily won re-election, it appears that voters approve of his strategy. But surely, as with any strategy, one potential failure would be if Knudsen failed to find enough great staffers to pull it off. Are there lots of ambitious, politically conservative attorneys who are also objectively-talented enough to consistently win in court?

Or maybe talent is the wrong way to think about it. Consider that groups like the Federalist Society will have a huge impact on conservative attorneys’ future job prospects. So don’t these young attorneys have incentives to construct arguments that appeal to the Federalist Society, rather than to actual real-life Montana judges? In this way of thinking, these attorneys may have plenty of talent, but they’ll apply that talent to goals other than winning lawsuits.

In today’s hyper-partisan environment, nobody wants to ask about how well the lawyers are doing their jobs. Everybody wants to talk about strategy or results. For example, Republicans can cheer Knudsen’s partisan remaking of his office as a tweet-worthy way to accomplish ideological goals. Meanwhile, Democrats can cheer the results of winning environmental lawsuits as a tweet-worthy way to accomplish ideological goals. Nobody wants to talk about operations: whether you have the skill to turn a strategy into results.

I tell this story as a symptom of a larger issue: I think operations in general are important and overlooked. Doing things well matters. Many of America’s past successes were fueled not by ideology but operational excellence. And so whatever we want to succeed at going forward, we could try to get better at its operations.

For example, I believe we need to get better at building things so that we can build more solar and wind power plants. We need to get better at mass-producing electric vehicles so we can compete with China. We need to get better at governing big cities so that people’s lives are improved. We need to get better at improving people’s lives because—in addition to improving people’s lives—it makes politics a lot easier.

But celebrations in a hyper-partisan world are too rarely about operations. We pass a law, secure a budget, win an election, or uphold a lower court’s decision. But can we implement the law, spend the money wisely, hire good staffers, or translate the legal victory into operational results?

Indeed, we too often implement ideologies with too little regard for operations. Whether it’s back-to-the-office policies, child care subsidies, or pension investment restrictions, people of all ideologies seem more interested in the partisan win than the operational success.

Hyper-partisanship can make it appear that the only game to play is the one of ideological influencers. Which means the “work” to be done is making arguments on social media. But what if the work that will shape the future is mastering non-ideological legal arguments? Or improving the operations of a social-service agency? Or emptying the trash for a wind turbine manufacturer? Shouldn’t doing those things well be worth celebrating?

The night of that Montana Supreme Court decision, I wasn’t following the news. Instead I was at a cocktail bar connecting two friends: one with a new job, the other with expertise in that field. I didn’t know anything about the field, I just hoped they’d get along. And they did: I felt delightfully extraneous to the conversation. At one point, the woman with the new job said, “I’ve searched the literature, and I’m not finding viable options for service delivery models. Do you know anything about that?”

My inner writer, my inner advocate, and my inner influencer all cringed. Service delivery model—what horrible operational jargon. How useless that would be on social media!

Yet hearing the phrase in the flow of the conversation, I was able to find it beautiful. She loved her new job because she was fascinated by making organizations run well. If she could find a better model for delivering services to her clients, the operations of her agency would improve dramatically. Lives would be improved. Society would be better off. At which point, voters might prove more likely to trust liberals like her to run programs to save us from the negative effects of income inequality and climate change.

The expert nodded and smiled. He didn’t have an answer off the top of his head, but he’d think about it. Meanwhile, I rejoiced that these two authorities agreed with my interpretations of world-changing power of being good at your job.

Discussion:

• On these issues, I’m really impressed with Jennifer Pahlka’s Eating Policy newsletter, including this explanation of its title.

• I wrote last year on a similar theme: “Can Capitalism Save the Climate?”