When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Even when you know what you don’t know, it can still be hard to get it right. I opened a bookstore a few years ago, realized I knew nothing about publishing or retail, was extremely deferential to the judgment of the team we hired and it turned out that basic business practices and logic still applied. Things that don’t make sense in one type of business are probably things you shouldn’t do in another. We lost a lot of money unnecessarily. I should have been more aggressive in our oversight.

On the other hand, buoyed by our success as tech investors, a few years ago, I personally funded the creation of a tele-religion app, then promptly made every wrong decision possible and lost a bunch of money in the process. I should have listened when others tried to warn me off the project. In that case, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and should have listened to the experts.

I’m someone who at least tries to realize that just because I know about some things doesn’t mean I know about everything. So what happens when you honestly believe that because you’re good at some things, you must be good at everything?

That’s what we’re seeing right now with Elon Musk and DOGE. Musk is an incredible entrepreneur. He’s a visionary. He is a fantastic businessman, albeit highly unconventional. And he’s absolutely right that the federal government is bloated, wasteful and could perform the same services — if not better — with far fewer people and far better technology.

But I also know from having spent the first fifteen years of my career working directly in city, state and federal government that running a government is not only very different from running a business, it’s also much harder. I spent four years as the Deputy Governor of Illinois where I oversaw the state’s budget, operations, legislation, policy and communications. I learned this lesson every single day.

In a normal business, you decide how to spend the money, who to employ, what risks to take and you have the unilateral power to enforce those choices. In government, being in charge is vastly different. Yes, you have a lot of power because your work impacts the lives of everyone in your jurisdiction. But you also have to share decisionmaking with the legislature (especially how the money is spent). Public sector unions are incredibly powerful because they are able to take money every two weeks out of the paychecks of almost every public sector employee and then turn around and dangle some of that money in the form of campaign donations and get out the vote operations to politicians to force them to agree to labor rules that are patently terrible deals for the taxpayers. You have a media mainly interested in generating clicks and controversy who are hounding you at all times (rather than a CEO’s occasional updates to the board or quarterly calls with analysts). And you have to get re-elected, which typically means either placating small groups of highly ideological voters and special interests or being at war with them 24/7 in a (usually futile) attempt to go over their heads to the broader public (who rarely actually vote because it’s too inconvenient). That alone makes the basic work of just delivering good services to the public insanely difficult.

In business, you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders and legal obligations to your employees and customers. But that’s about as far as it goes. Otherwise, P just has to be greater than L.

The remit of government is exponentially broader. You are charged with massive societal responsibilities — educating children, keeping people healthy, keeping people safe. You are dealing with every type of person, every type of problem. The obligations dwarf anything in the private sector no matter how overburdened or underappreciated some CEOs may feel.

When I got to Illinois, we were facing a $4.3 billion budget deficit and my boss was resolute in not wanting to raise income or sales taxes or cut funding for education, health care or public safety. That meant finding the same kinds of efficiencies that DOGE is looking for, except rather than just slashing agencies randomly and wildly with zero thought into what those cuts might actually mean for our constituents, we cut the state workforce by 20% over time by not filling open positions and offering early retirement packages. It worked. We still had to raise some niche taxes and we still had to cut spending in a lot of places and we still left plenty of problems mainly unsolved, but overall, the public’s wallet was protected, their core priorities were protected, a lot of special interests were very unhappy, and we reduced the size of the bureaucracy but surgically and intelligently in a way that didn’t cause widespread chaos (I also worked for the ultimate businessman turned elected official in Mike Bloomberg both at City Hall and as his campaign manager, and while he applied all of his business acumen to being mayor, he didn’t just slash and cut jobs and programs without even understanding what they were).

DOGE can do that here too. I don’t even recall Trump saying that Musk had to achieve trillions in savings (or even a mere hundreds of billions) in year one. And as we’re seeing, DOGE is still struggling to find and prove actual savings and yet is also taking the same move fast and break things approach that turned out to be a complete disaster in social media (look at all of the harm caused in Meta’s wake, the teenage suicide rate, the eating disorders, the cutting, the bullying, the toxicity of the internet and, as a result, our culture at large) and is even more dangerous in a place as complicated and multi-faceted as government. Cutting nuclear scientists and infectious disease specialists and air traffic controllers is not the same thing as cutting middle management at the post office.

Why not take the time to learn the difference? Why not have enough humility and self awareness to know that just because you’re great at making electric cars or satellites doesn’t mean you implicitly understand the intricacies of government? I know that’s not Musk’s personality and maybe he’s not capable of being anything different than what we see. But ironically, when Tesla and Solar City were clients of our consulting firm a long time ago, I actually found him to be quite reasonable. He did recognize the need for the expertise of others. He was actually a pleasure to deal with.

So maybe it’s still in him somewhere. Maybe he can recognize that he has the overall concept right in DOGE but the initial application needs a re-think. Every early stage tech startup undergoes a major pivot. It’s rare that the initial business model ends up being the way you make money long term. He knows this.

There’s a lot of good DOGE can do. It can find a lot of waste in the federal government, cut spending (and unnecessary personnel) and return those savings to the people. It can embrace the use of AI for functions like procurement, rulemaking, licensing, permitting, analysis and make government decisions more efficient, more intelligent and a lot cheaper. It can find programs that are bloated and ineffective and fix them or end them.

But do it right. Take the time to learn. You have four years (and the more out of control you seem, the more likely Trump is to eventually cut you loose when he needs a fall guy, especially when he sees your favorability so far underwater in the latest polling). Don’t give your opponents so many easy lines of attack. Don’t give your opponents an easy narrative to boycott Tesla and cause your shares to tank. Taking on these problems doesn’t enhance your ability to succeed nor is it a necessary cost of success.

Your underlying intuition is right. Take a step back, realize what you don’t know – and get the execution right too.

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Save the date: On April 2nd, I'll be hosting a live podcast taping of Firewall at 6:30PM at P&T Knitwear. I'll be joined by Spencer Greenberg — mathematician, social entrepreneur, and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast — where we will dive into how we fix the broken political moment we are in as well as our personal hacks for being productive at work and fulfilled in life. We'll of course have Q+A, so come with some questions and a chance to be featured on the show. Space is limited RSVP today.