Four months ago, Thomas Friedman wrote an op-ed in The NY Times: Start-Up America: Our Best Hope. In comparing business and government, he focuses on the dynamism in the world of start-ups versus the stagnation in Washington DC.  And, like most complaints, it doesn’t suggest a real cause, much less a solution.

Note that his article isn’t about Startup America, nor even about companies in general, it’s about start-ups, mainly new, Silicon Valley companies. He neglects to say that as companies get large, they mostly do so by narrowing their focus and by being authoritarian. Growing from nothing, they have the freedom to try new approaches, and form solutions to new problems.  And though the hand-picked examples are exceptions, most fail and many lose huge sums of money due to mistakes, failures to compete or just working on projects that people don’t really want.

Our government, on the other hand, must solve a host of broad problems, and:

• It can’t fail.
• We insist it be run by 536 executives (435 in Congress, 100 senators, 1 president)
• They’re accountable to 486 different boards, different groups of millions of voters each of whom serves on 3 “boards”, one for the district, state and country.
• There’s no way for board members to communicate with each other, much less meet, so there’s no way to direct the executives.

In business, broad authority for change is given to the CEO who is monitored closely by a board of directors that meets in person four times a year. The accounting department and auditors also report to the board and regulations constrain actions and ensure communication to shareholders. In government, the CEO job is split among the members of Congress, the board (voters) are almost impotent, there’s little accounting or reporting on actual performance, and Congress is largely above regulations.

It’s time to empower the board and build an accountability and communication system for government. If we had this, like in a private firm, Congress could propose changes, the board could give the nod or not, the President could implement the changes, and reports would come back to the board.  It wouldn’t be exactly like a company- the differences are still huge.  But it would give government a lot of the structure that’s currently missing and it would free government to solve more problems instead of fight each other.

It’s time we think outside the box, and consider what’s missing from government- a way for voters to communicate and for executives to be accountable. This is the vision at PeopleCount.org, to build an accountability and communication system for government.