The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems by Mitchell Weiss

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems by Mitchell Weiss Can we solve big public problems anymore? Yes, we can. This provocative and inspiring book points the way. The huge challenges we face are daunting indeed: climate change, crumbling infrastructure, declining public education and social services. At the same time, we've come to accept the sad notion that government can't do new things or solve tough problems—it's too big, too slow, and mired in bureaucracy. Not so, says former public official, now Harvard Business School professor, Mitchell Weiss. The truth is, entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government are growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels. The key, Weiss argues, is a shift from a mindset of Probability Government—overly focused on safe solutions and mimicking so-called best practices—to Possibility Government. This means public leadership and management that's willing to boldly imagine new possibilities and to experiment. Weiss shares the three basic tenets of this new way of governing: Government that can imagine: Seeing problems as opportunities and involving citizens in designing solutions Government that can try new things: Testing and experimentation as a regular part of solving public problems Government that can scale: Harnessing platform techniques for innovation and growth The lessons unfold in the timely episodes Weiss has seen and studied: the US Special Operations Command prototyping of a hoverboard for chasing pirates; a heroin hackathon in opioid-ravaged Cincinnati; a series of experiments in Singapore to rein in Covid-19; among many others. At a crucial moment in the evolution of government's role in our society, We the Possibility provides inspiration and a positive model, along with crucial guardrails, to help shape progress for generations to come. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mitchell Weiss is a Professor of Management Practice in the Entrepreneurial Management unit and the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. He created and teaches the school's course on Public Entrepreneurship. He also teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager course in the first year of the MBA Program. Prior to joining HBS in 2014, Mitch was Chief of Staff and a partner to Boston's Mayor Thomas Menino. During this time, he co-founded the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics.

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You can see online podcasts over there. Go to goodreads.com. Go to facebook.com, The Chris Foss Show, LinkedIn, The Chris Foss Show, and Instagram, The Chris Foss Show. And we are broadcasting live on the newest, hottest thing, the trinket, the hottest thing that's out there, Clubhouse. We've got Mitchell Weiss on the show with us. He is the author of the newest book, just came out January 19th, 2021. We, the possibility, harnessing the public entrepreneurship to solve our most urgent problems. He is new to us on the show. First time, he's the professor of management practice on the entrepreneurial management unit of the Richard L. Menschel Facility Fellow at Harvard

Business School. He created and teaches the school's course on public entrepreneurship. He also teaches the entrepreneurial managerial course at the first year of MBA program there. Prior to joining HBS in 2014, Mitch was chief of staff and a partner to Boston's mayor, Thomas Menino. During his time, he co-founded the mayor's office of new urban mechanics. Welcome to the show, Mitchell. How are you, my friend? I'm good, Chris. Thank you for having me, and thanks for inviting me into this Clubhouse

experience. It's my first time trying that out, so I appreciate it. So this is the first time we've had you on. You've been on a stage in Clubhouse then? It is. Boy, we really put you on the high wire right from the get-go, didn't we? You're welcome. You're welcome. There's lots of great authors that are starting to come on here like yourself and facilitate the app and what's great is you can go into rooms you can host them and and everything else and share your wares and it's just a great platform and then what's really nice

you can interact with the audience and we've been doing this for about two weeks now where we finally got the show where it can pump in to the audience and they can listen in. They can be involved with what's going on and then they can ask questions. How beautiful is that? It's like a live radio show. I love it. So let's get into your book. First, let's start with your plugs. Give us your plugs, your dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs. You can find me and more about the book at wethepossibility.com. Of course, the book is available anywhere you buy books online or offline. I'm also on Instagram at wethepossibility.com. Of course, the book is available anywhere you buy books, online or offline. I'm also on Instagram at wethepossibility. Any of those places would be great. And Mitchell, what motivated you to want to write this book?

Well, much of it came out of this episode that occurred while I was chief of staff to Tom and Eno, as you alluded to. It was then when Boston's best day of the year, Patriots Day, was shattered in 2013. Two bombs blew up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Ended lives, upended lives. And one of the good things to come out of all those horrible things, that horrible tragedy, was this generosity that started to flow in from around the world. Everybody wanted to give, they wanted to help, they wanted to send money. And so the question came up, well, how do we collect and distribute that money? Well, Chris, the answer is that in most instances where that happens and other horrible tragedies

here in the U.S. is that the big local established institution in town, often a big community foundation, collects and gives out those funds. That's what had happened after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after so many other episodes. But we knew that that was actually quite slow. That had been well over 100 days since the horrible shootings at Sandy Hook, after so many other episodes. But we knew that that was actually quite slow. That had been well over 100 days since the horrible shootings at Sandy Hook, since those kids had been killed and not a penny had made it to their families. And that money was never going to bring their kids back, but it was intended for their families. And so we decided we were going to start our own new fund and government and with private partners. And we were told by

the head of our foundation, you can't do that. You'll raise less money. You can't start something new. We did. We started that the next night on a PayPal account and a post office box. And a year later, we collected and distributed, by the way, $60 million in 75 days. It was the fastest relief effort of its kind in the history, I think, of our country. And a year later, two survivors asked me to tell them a long version of that story. And I said, it's not my story to tell. I didn't get hurt. I didn't save anybody's life. They said, you have to show people government can do new things.

And so, Chris, I was left with this riddle, which is really the riddle at the center of the book, which is, well, which is it? Government can do new things or government can't do new things? Is it what the survivors had seen and experienced? Or is it what, honestly, the foundation had said and was often right about, or what most of us have experienced, which is things don't get better, things don't change. And so that really, Chris, motivated me to write the book to try to answer the question, can we solve public problems anymore? And in particular, can government do new things?

That is awesome, Sauce. And quite extraordinary. Were you an entrepreneur before you got into government? I've been entrepreneurial my whole life, I like to think. I remember as a kid starting a little flavored, barely not a real, but a flavored butter company with my brother and a friend of mine. I had helped on a social venture. I had worked before I was chief of staff. I had worked in government and was an entrepreneur inside government. I had been involved as an entrepreneur in many ways. And I try to invite people to think about entrepreneurship broadly. You don't have to have started the latest, greatest tech company to

be an entrepreneur. And so, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. And part of writing this book was to try to invite people who had that interest in entrepreneurship and also in public service to see how they can marry those things up. So would you say the large arc of the book is how government can be better and how it can be more entrepreneurial? It's about, yes, it is, Chris. It's about, and the answer to those questions about how, is to undertake this giant shift, which I write about in the book and then sort of lay out how we might do that and who might do that. But this giant shift is towards what I call possibility government.

And possibility government is the pursuit of new and novel programs and services that might only possibly work, which means they probably won't work. And so you must be thinking, well, like, why would you suggest that right about now? The last thing we need are programs and services that might only work and probably won't. But my argument is that we need to move actually to possibility in more places and more instances and move on from what I call probability government, where we do things that will probably work, but if we're being honest about it, they lead to things that will probably work. But if we're

being honest about it, they lead to sort of mediocre or middling outcomes. They're not really up to the task. And that's what we do. Oftentimes, we sort of go with what feels safe, but it's honestly not because it's not solving problems. We avoid what feels risky, although honestly, it doesn't have to be as risky as we make it out to be. And so that's what I'm describing in the book, why we should move to possibility government, how we would move to possibility government, who among us would need to change so we could move to possibility government. That's the theme of the book. So is one of the challenges of government is that there's, we've had some people on that have run for office and talked about their experience is one of the

problems is you've got so many people from both sides of whatever the issue is, whether it's, it's, it's not necessarily left or right, but you know, some guy wants a fishing boat dock and some guy doesn't something like that. And in your local government is the problem, the, the, the infighting or the outfighting of the community over, over those different issues. And, and maybe that what's the word I'm looking for? Maybe that ISIS or freezes a lot of politicians because they're stuck with committees and all the other BS that goes into government? Look, I think competing ideas are great. It's good to have a marketplace for ideas and a marketplace for competing ideas about how we make our communities better. But it can sometimes lead people to get frozen and not want to try anything new.

I do think, Chris, that possibility government affords us a way to actually move past some of that gridlock, which is to say, to use your example, you have your idea about the dock. I have my idea about the dock. Instead of having to just fight about it rhetorically and talk about it, let's actually test out our ideas. Maybe we don't actually put in a full dock. We don't contract for the full dock. We don't pay for the full dock. Maybe we put in a temporary dock, see if anybody uses it, see if it creates the traffic problems you were worried about. One of the big premises of the book is that we could actually try new and novel things in public service in partial ways that allow us to actually test our own convictions. So I do think that it's a way of maybe moving past some of the grid, like I don't want to minimize the deep divisions that face us. But I think in addition to sort of

disagreement, maybe, Chris, which is what holds us back, many of the public officials you've had on the show and other public officials we all know, they're afraid of trying something new because they're afraid they're going to get punished if it fails. And new things are likely to fail. Three quarters of new ventures, from your experience, talking to people and seeing their efforts fail. So trying new things is scary. And one of the reasons why public officials don't want to try new things is because they probably won't work. And so how do we deal with that is one of the questions I take up in the book. And the answer is, well, first of all, we have to point out that the status quo is actually often a risky choice.

Doing nothing is often risky. Not being prepared for a pandemic, risky. Not getting our kids educated, risky. Not making sure people are well fed, risky. The status quo is often the risky choice. And so that's a way to help break some of the stasis, I think, Chris. And in addition, this point again about trying things in ways that maybe aren't complete yet, that don't require the full massive investment yet. So we can test our assumptions and learn from there. There you go. Yeah, I can see where I was an entrepreneur of my own company since I was 18. And the freedom of being able to be the guy, the guy who of what you're doing? Because sometimes you need time to develop a thing. It took me years to build successful companies. Well, sometimes you do need time. And I don't think we necessarily need to change anything structurally, term limits

otherwise, in order to allow this. First of all, I think part of the mandate of possibility government is to get to work quicker, more quickly, deliver new programs and services to the public more quickly. So you don't wait for the four and five year, 10 year RFP, time horizon, consultants, commissions, conference rooms, et cetera. You can deliver some of the stuff quicker. You may not need more time. In addition, if you get some of the solutions out there, the public will start to get buy in. Even your successors will pick up where you left off. And by the way, while we have term limits in some instances, in some places, in some offices, by far the more common experience is that public officials stay in the roles actually for a quite

long time. And so I don't think it's time in the role that's our obstacle. In fact, time in the role may sometimes, it may be that they have too much time in the role and they got too comfortable with the status quo and they get too settled and too risk averse. And one of the arguments I'm trying to make in the book is that we need to create a new kind of accountability. You're still accountable to the public. We're not giving you basically free reign and to be carelessly inventive, but we are encouraging you, us, the public, encouraging you, the people in public office to open up to new ideas, to try new things, ultimately to scale them. And we'll hold you accountable for that. Not for every little failure you make, but for your learning and for the ultimate success if you've invested

across a portfolio of new things. That's really important. You mentioned your books and different things like a government that can imagine. Tell us what that's about. It's the first step. I really believe it's the first step towards possibility. If we're going to have possibility government, if we're going to solve the problems that really face us, we need more ideas. We absolutely need more ideas. That means we need to have government that can imagine. And one of the examples I write about in the book is this gentleman, James Gertz, who was in charge of much of the procurement and the technology for our special forces. He was head of AT&L, the U.S. Special Operations Command. And he was in charge of making sure our Navy SEALs, our Army Rangers, got the equipment they needed to do their warfighting.

And felt like even with all the apparatus of the U.S. DOD, the $700 billion plus budget, all the big private companies, Raytheon, Boeing doing R&D for them, DARPA, right? Some of the most advanced minds on the planet researching for him, that he wanted more ideas to come into his organization, into Special Operations Command, in order to make sure that we weren't surprised by the future, that we were ready for the future, that our warfighters could compete with people around the world who were opening themselves up to new ideas from outsiders, to the internet, et cetera, et cetera. So he creates this little, this thing off base basically called softworks to try to be a bug lamp for new ideas. And I think so many other public servants in so many other contexts need to open up to new ideas. They need to basically look to action to generate some ideas. Sometimes

you need to do stuff to get ideas. They need to look to outsiders to get ideas. It's not just the experts inside governments that have ideas. I write, if you outsiders to get ideas. It's not just the experts inside governments that have ideas. I write, if you'll permit me, Chris, to share a second example. I write in the book about Jimmy Chen, who started a company called Propel to help Americans of low income get better access to food stamps and the things. And he starts to build his company by actually waiting himself in line for food stamps, even though he's not eligible, by sitting in living rooms and talking to mothers of kids on food stamps, even though Jimmy has no kids.

Why? He's waiting in line and sitting in living rooms looking for insight. He's looking for new ideas. We can go to users for ideas, Chris. More public servants need to actually go to their citizens, their neighbors, people in their community, and ask the people that face the challenges for their ideas.

So yes, I start the book on government I can imagine. If we're gonna solve the problems that face us, we need to start with more ideas. That's really brilliant. One of the things I used to do with my companies is I would call in and pretend to be someone else to the front desk or have somebody else because a lot of times my employees would figure out my voice eventually. But I would call in because I wanted to see how a phone call from a customer would map through my systems. We had those big phone systems that map through the, through the company. And I'd be like, let me talk to the processing department. And, and, and then I'd see how it was handled. And boy, it was really tough to be a, if you're

the gal answering the phone and you butchered my caller or abused me, it didn't last long. I think someone got fired over that or moved one at one time when I called in and just an awful, just an awful response from them. And I was just like, seriously. And, but, but for me, that was testing my stuff. I remember, I think it was Stouffer's or some old, one of the TV dinner companies. And, and they basically, they were having lackluster sales. And I think this is a story from Tom Peters, but they're having lackluster sales and the CEO made the board eat their food they brought in all the tv dinners that they were selling and they were like this is the food for the board meeting today we're gonna test our food and find out why sales suck and they found out really quickly. They're like, this is awful.

Why would anyone want to eat our product? And so I think, yeah, government needs to do that. They need to get out. They need to talk to the people. All government is local when it comes down to it. And I think that's a brilliant idea. Get out behind the desk. Find out what people are struggling.

Go into your communities. Maybe tour the parks where people are living in tents and different things along those lines. And not just for the problems, but also for the solutions, right? Go in and ask them when you're there in the park and seeing how they experience it. Don't just see that, oh, they're experiencing it in ways you didn't envision, but then go ask them what kind of program would be helpful here. Go invite them to help create that programming. There's this very famous scholarship by Erich von Hippel and others that points out that users drive so much innovation. Some 80% of scientific instrument innovation was driven by the users. We can go to our public and invite

their ideas for solutions. I love this mayor of St. Paul, Melvin Cardovic, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, who on his inauguration to become mayor, people are celebrating, clapping. He says, don't clap if you're not going to help. He's exhorting them to be a part of the solution too. So I think we have to go to the public for new ideas, not just understanding what the problems they face are, but trusting, believing deeply. They also hold the key to their solutions. Yeah. One of the other things you talk about is government that can try new things and a government that can serve many. Do you want to break those down? Yeah, trying is perhaps the hardest part. Going back to the earlier part of our conversation, it maybe isn't the first instinct of people in public office to try new things that are probably going to fail.

But it's absolutely necessary. We need government that can try new things. If we're going to source all these new ideas, we're going to get some really good ones. We're also going to get some not good ones. Let's be honest about that. And so you need a way of sorting that out. You need a way of sorting the good ones from the bad ones. And so there are methods that have been used for honestly for centuries as part of the scientific process adapted into entrepreneurship

described by Eric Ries and others as lean startup. There are methods for doing, for trying new things and learning along the way. I tell the story of, in the book of this amazing woman, Gabriela Gomez-Mont, who leads the sort of the R&D lab at the time of the Mexico city government. She's 12 or 13, one of 12 or 13 people among a city government that employs 300,000, believe it or not. But that government, that city had no comprehensive map of the 30,000 buses, street buses, minivans. And I actually tell the story of going down to Mexico City for the first time and asking about how to get from where I was staying to where her office was by bus. And

there's no great way to find out. And she sets about with her team and with partners figuring that out. But they do it in a series of essentially stage experiments, a series of stage pilots, each time learning one new thing. Will people come and contribute their time to building the map? Will the technology we've adopted work? Will the data remain alive and sustainable? Will anybody use this? There's a method to try new things that doesn't inherently demand that government take more risk. It's about how do we try riskier things without taking on more risk. And so I really think we need a government that can do that. And even in places where that might feel perilous, I tell this other story in the

book about Mayor Bill Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, who allows the trying of robot cars. He's an Uber autonomous taxi. He's on his roadways. And that's dangerous, right? Robot cars. You can understand why other mayors didn't quickly follow suit necessarily with free reign for robot cars in our streets. But he believed deeply that it was worth trying. And in part because he felt that humans driving cars were also dangerous. And he wanted to find a way to get us to try our way to the future. As a public, do we need to be more forgiving to these public officials that are really trying? Or how do we somehow we've got to discern who who's really trying? And of course, there's rhetoric and noise and political ads.

Bob's trying to to take away your your fences and all that kind of crap that goes on between the political infighting. Is there something we need to fix with our politics where we try and I mean, we should all be getting behind Bob when Bob gets elected and we go, let's give Bob a chance instead of sabotaging. And you see a lot of this at the federal level, you see the sabotaging and the, and the things. And a lot of times the American people suffer because these people are just trying to hold the power. Are there other rules or changes we need to make that maybe I would have never survived as an entrepreneur if I would have had to rule by committee or have to worry about getting elected next year? We will have to change as the public.

We will. Chris, we cannot move towards possibility unless we move together. We will need public officials who are braver and more skilled. Although, to be honest, if they're more skilled at possibility, they won't have to be quite as brave. But they will need the public to grant them the permission to do this, the encouragement to do this, their co-participation to our earlier discussion. Whether that means being more forgiving exactly, let me try to be careful about that. I think we need a public that's more forgiving on some fronts, which is if you've tried 50 experiments and 47 of them didn't work, it's not a reason to kick you out of office. If those 47 of them didn't waste too much time, didn't waste too much energy, didn't waste too much money, people didn't get hurt.

And the three that succeeded were transformative, lifted up people's lives, helped them get trained for future jobs, made our city safer. So it's not about shedding our lenses for accountability, but it is about permitting the trying of new things and demanding as a public that you're efficient in all that trying, that you maximize your learning in all that trying, and that ultimately good comes from it. But not holding public officials responsible for every new thing that's tried fails. Most new things fail, and we shouldn't lay that always and entirely at the feet of the public officials themselves. Just look at the race for a vaccine for COVID, for example. We absolutely needed the outcome of all the experimentation that happened by dozens of companies to be a successful vaccine or more than a successful vaccine. We don't go back and look and say that all those companies who tried other compounds or other formulations, that that wasn't worthwhile trying. It was worthwhile trying. And we need to bring some of that attitude towards other aspects of public service. There you go. One of those things, some examples you cite in the book was Airbnb and Amsterdam. Do you want to tell us somehow

how that story worked out? Well, one of the big questions around trying new things is when companies sort of invent new services or new products and put them into our public space, should we allow those new things to show up or not in our public space? Should we have allowed Uber to show up in the first place or to our earlier conversation just here, when it's autonomous vehicles? Should we allow Airbnb when it popped up in our cities to exist when some host listed their apartment for the very first time? Should we have cracked down on that or not? As we look to the future, Chris, as whatever new thing is coming, robot delivery drones and flying taxis and all the rest, should we allow that stuff to show up in our communities or not? It's the question I tried

to tackle in the book. And it's one that was informed by my experience studying and watching the unfolding events as Airbnb grew in Amsterdam. And just the quickest version of that story is that Airbnb, of course, first just starts because that's what happens. A host lists an apartment in Amsterdam and goes unnoticed for a while, but then gets noticed. And then there's a threat of a crackdown. And the people at Airbnb, Molly Turner in my book, who was there at the time, are worried because, oh my gosh, this is supposed to be one of the most permissive cities on the planet.

If we can't succeed in Amsterdam, this is going to have huge ramifications for our success in other European cities and other cities worldwide. And so what transpires, and I won't go through all the detail, is this sort of dance between Airbnb and Amsterdam about what's going to be allowed in Amsterdam, about what Airbnb will do to make sure that Airbnbs stay safe and fair and equitable in Amsterdam, about Amsterdam allowing some of that testing and then pushing back on some of that testing. And the story I think it tells for us is something I picked up while I was uncovering this for myself, which is a story of what the Dutch call gedogen. It's their word for tolerance.

And I think we need a kind of innovation tolerance. In some instances, not every instance, when a new thing comes to town, I do think it's worth tolerating it and laying our hypotheses on the table and not turning a blind eye to it. Watching how it unfolds, layering some regulation as we need, but not immediately cutting these things all off at their very first instance. The other example you say in your book is a opioid ravaged Cincinnati trying to deal with its issues and a hackathon being used to create solutions. Give us some examples of that. So this was obviously a very sad story. Opioids were decimating in many instances, the communities in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, and other communities, of course, in the United States, and a giant epidemic. And a former student of mine who

was from the area decides to go back and want to help. And she organizes a week-long event called Hacking Heroin to try to deal with this. And honestly, Chris, I was like, well, what kind of solution to a giant epidemic is a hackathon? That seems pretty superficial. That seems pretty, that's like the height of entrepreneurial hubris, right? We're going to have pizza and stay up all night with beer. Right, and we'll solve some giant problem. And I begged her also, please don't call us Hacking Heroin. That just sort of accentuates the problem.

But she had a wisdom that I didn't, which was she wasn't pretending to solve the addiction problem in Cincinnati. What she was doing was creating a doorway, a pathway for people in Cincinnati who had not been involved yet in this issue. Designers, software engineers, the sort of weekend warrior types wearing their khakis on the golf course or a PNG and come in and work on this problem, bring your skillset to this problem. So it wasn't about solving the problem over the course of the weekend. It was about destigmatizing it. And it was about this giant invitation to outsiders. And again, a lot of the ideas the outsiders are going to have are going to be not great. If you don't include people who have expertise, like the EMS workers and the doctors and the

public health workers and the people who face addiction themselves and their family members, then definitely you're going to get a bunch of bad ideas. But along with all those bad ideas, if you will, you're going to get one or two good ones. And of course, that's what happened with her hackathon. And one of those ideas, which was really about pairing up in real time resources for treatment to people who need it, to my knowledge, persists to this day. There you go. It's really interesting where government thinks from such a, we sit in committees and then we sit, we have daises where the public comes and speaks. But you bring a lot of different things. How much have you found in your experience with government that they're going to embrace your ideas?

Or since you published the book, how much have you found where people are more responsive in government to go, maybe there are some new ideas, maybe some new ways to go around it? Or do you outline in your book, different ways that people that are in government can do more, be more responsive? Well, in many instances, although not in every instance, and so I want to tell you about that, but the response has been amazing. And public officials tell me, thank you for reminding me why I do this. Thank you for giving me a language to describe what I have been doing. Thank you for giving me a way to sort of tell the rest of our team, the rest of our organization, how we can go chase the future, how we can solve problems anymore. Thank you for reminding us ways of going to our public, of trying new things that aren't inherently more risky. So the response at

all levels of government has been really gratifying. And by the way, all around the world, I guess one of the side effects of living in Zoom land is that we can have this conversation in India and Singapore and the United States all on the same day. And you'll see pockets of public entrepreneurship, Chris, all around the world. And so many mayors and other officials, even local committee heads have been really appreciative of the book. I was thinking just a young leader who I adore, Chris Kwong, who I write about in the book, runs this organization with others called Coding It Forward to attract young technologists just coming out of college, in some cases, software engineers, to go and take their skill set into public life, to go work in our federal government and now in our city

governments to bring that skill set there. And they find this encouraging and inspiring. But I won't tell you that everybody in every instant warms to it immediately, in the sense that I have had, I remember one mayor, specifically, and I write about her, I don't name her in the book, who when I was sort of saying we should, we should try things that might not work. And then honestly, we should be candid about it with the public and tell them it didn't work. We should use the F word, failure on occasion. She said, but Mitch, it's not your name in the newspaper. And I hear that. I hope I'm not so naive. It's not been that long since I was in government that I remember those pressures, but my name was never on a ballot. Generally speaking, wasn't my name in the newspaper. I wasn't generally speaking, getting skewered on

Twitter. So I understand the pushback to it. We have what I call in the book hot stove government. It's a riff on this thing that Jim March and Jerker Denrell described, the hot stove effect, which is a riff on something you may recall that Mark Twain described, which was the cat that jumps on a hot stove will get burned and never jump on again, which is good, except it'll never jump on a cold stove either. It's a problem of overlearning. And so we have hot stove government. Public officials have gotten burned trying new things, right? Social media is turned up on scalding. So I understand some of the resistance. I get it. I hear it. There you go. So anything as we go out, anything more we haven't covered

in the book or touched on? Well, there's this, just one of the last stories I tell in the book is about the race to basically deploy some tools around addressing COVID last spring and into the summer by cities and countries around the world. And what I witnessed and what we all witnessed was some amazing episodes of public entrepreneurship, of possibility government, of government officials trying new things to keep people housed and healthy. But we also witnessed something else.

We witnessed suggestions of, oh, why not Lysol? Or how about hydroxychloroquine? And those are sort of now obviously delusional. But one of the questions I ask in the book is, well, how do we really know? What's the difference between possibility and delusion? And can we really know at the first instance? Because most new ideas look unlikely. How can we sort out the ones that are unlikely but worth trying, and the ones that are clearly a waste of time and a distraction and a lie? And I ended up kind of going back over all the episodes I'd seen, going back to all the people I'd met along the way, and asking them this question, which is, can we sort out the difference between possibility and delusion? And the good news is, I think that we can. I think I sort of ended up writing about two dozen guidelines in the book. I won't go through them all here, but that will

help you if you're thinking about jumping in as an entrepreneur to help on COVID or anything else. Or if you're a public official who's thinking about welcoming that jumping in, how can you, yes, chase possibility, but not succumb to delusion? I think that's an important, those are important guardrails that we need if we're going to do this work. Yeah. And it looks like our new administration're going to do this work. Yeah. And it looks like our new administration is going to be doing some experimenting there. The $1.9 billion thing seems quite large,

but I think I'm hoping from what I've seen in my experience with finance and the Federal Reserve, I'm hoping that they're on the right track with everything. They seem to be skipping a lot of mistakes they made in the 70s recession, in the 2008 recession, and they're they're on the right track with everything they seem to be skipping a lot of mistakes they made in the 70s recession in the 2008 recession and they're kind of realizing the money's going to hit the ground at the local level more than just propping up the stock market or propping up bigger to fail things they've really got to get the money to the people at the at the at the bottom of the money period i guess pyramid i. I know that on the day he declares victory, November 7th,

then the president-elect says, we can always define America with one word. That word is possibilities. I know that inauguration day, after the festivities we watched at noon, he goes and swears in his team that night. And he says, I've always believed America could be defined by one word, possibilities.

He looks at his staff after he swears them in. He says, you're my possibility. one word, possibilities. He looks at his staff after he squares them in. He says, you're my possibility. You're the possibilities. And I hope that that's part of what he means is that, yes, you're the future. Yes, you're the change. Yes, we're relying on you. But we understand the future is uncertain.

And so we are relying on you to open yourself up to new ideas, to open our administration to new ideas, to be able to try things that are new and novel prudently, but try them. And I very much hope that's true. What we need to do is, yes, have a return to science, competence, expertise, but at the same time, not rule out outside creativity, novelty, and experimentation. Well, in confidence, the government seems to work so well. Why change the model? It has. People tell me the book is hopeful and they need hope. And I do agree we all need hope

right now and more than hope, of course, and some skill and stuff. But government has solved amazing problems in our lifetimes and before. Government has been an experimenter in our lifetimes and before. This country was founded as an experiment. George Washington, you know, says so, calls an experiment finally staked in the hands of American people for the first five presidents do. So I know we've seen episodes where government's fallen down, right? We're living in the midst of a giant crisis made worse by our own failures. But I do believe deeply that there are amazing public servants out there still now, that there are amazing ones coming, rising up a new generation. And I hope the book will be encouragement and maybe to some extent,

a manual for them. Definitely get them on a better foot. And of course, we need to change some of our stuff. So thank you very much, Mitchell, for spending some time with us and giving us some details of your book and stuff. It's my pleasure, Chris. It's been fun to get your questions. It's been wonderful to have you on the show, Mitchell. To my audience, be sure to check out Mitchell's book. It's We, the Possibility, Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems. You can get it from Harvard Business Review Press. It's available right now.

It just came out January 19th, so it's hot off the presses. And you can get a chance to pick that up at your local bookseller or amazon.com or wherever you get books sold be sure to go to youtube.com fortress chris foss to see the video version of this be sure to go to goodreads.com fortress chris foss to see what we're reviewing and what we're reading you can go to facebook.com linkedin.com instagram.com you can find us all over there and clubhouse as well thanks for tuning in thanks to mitchell for being here and we'll see you guys next time