The friction is the point
I spent thirty years removing friction from organisations. Then I sat on three state commissions and learned what some of that friction had been holding up.
An appointment is not won. Nobody campaigns for a seat on a state commission. You are asked, you serve a term, and the work is mostly meetings, review, and the record. It is the least visible way to be useful that I know of, and it has been among the most instructive.
Over the last six years the Governor of Maryland appointed me to three: the Consumer Protection Commission, advising the Attorney General's office; the Economic Development Commission, one of twenty-five members advising on the state's economic strategy; and most recently the Governor's Commission on Service and Volunteerism, which oversees civic engagement and the state's AmeriCorps programmes. Two of the three required the advice and consent of the Maryland Senate. Alongside them I have served on the board of a national disaster recovery organisation since 2020.
I took them for a reason that had nothing to do with civic virtue. It is very difficult to understand why public programmes stall unless you have sat inside one while it was stalling.
What I expected to find
I arrived with a private-sector diagnosis ready to go. I had spent my career on execution: fragmented ownership, approvals nobody is accountable for, plans everyone agrees with and no one is running. I assumed public institutions were the same machine with worse incentives and older software.
Some of that is true. Plenty of public dysfunction is just dysfunction, and the people inside it can name every bottleneck if you ask them over coffee.
But a fair amount of what I had been reading as inefficiency turned out to be load-bearing.
A private company optimises for execution. A public institution is optimising for something harder: being legitimate to people who did not choose to be involved.
The slow parts are doing work
Consider a review step that adds six weeks to a programme. In a company, that is waste, and I would have removed it without much thought. In a public body, that six weeks may be the only interval in which a person affected by the decision can see it coming and object.
Or consider the requirement that a commission's advice be public, minuted, and attributable. It is slow. It also means that in two years, when someone asks why the state did a thing, there is an answer that does not depend on anyone's memory or goodwill.
Or the advice-and-consent requirement itself. Being confirmed by a Senate is an inconvenience. It is also the mechanism by which a person advising the Attorney General on consumer protection policy has been looked at by somebody other than the person who appointed them.
None of this makes public institutions good at execution. They are frequently bad at it, and the badness has real costs that fall on real people. But the friction and the legitimacy are not separable, and that is the part I did not properly understand from outside.
The uncomfortable version
Here is the thing I find genuinely hard, and I would rather write it down than pretend it resolves.
If you are very good at removing friction, you can remove the friction that was protecting something, and it will look exactly like progress while you are doing it. The metrics improve. The programme moves. Everyone involved is working hard and reporting green. The protection that disappeared was, by design, the thing nobody noticed until it was needed.
That is not a hypothetical worry for me. It is most of what my novel is about, and I did not set out to write about it. I started writing after a few years of sitting in rooms where competent, well-intentioned people made things faster, and I found I could not always tell — in the moment, from the inside — which speed was an improvement and which was a load-bearing wall coming out.
Why it's on this site at all
The other things I do are easier to explain. A company has revenue. A novel has a cover. Travel has photographs. Commission service has minutes.
But it is the part of my working life that most directly corrects the others. The private-sector work is about making organisations execute. Public institutions are not designed only to execute — they are designed to be answerable, which means slow, reviewable, and open to people with no stake except that they live there.
Learning that in your fifties, after building a career on the opposite instinct, is uncomfortable. It is also the most useful thing I have been taught in twenty years.
The full record of appointments and board service is on the public service page.