it's my pleasure to introduce the president of american university sylvia burwell is u.s 15th president. and first woman to serve as president under her leadership. american became the first carbon neutral university in the united states, the first to launch an anti-racist research and policy center. president burwell also helped to double our externally funded research dollars in just five years. she led creation of our comprehensive strategy change makers for a changing as well as our plan for inclusive excellent both of which have community at their core and are focused on ensuring all eu students can thrive and reach their full potential. president burwell, the university through the challenges of the last two years. we we were lucky to have a president who served at the highest levels in washington as secretary of health and human services and director, the office of management and budget. we could not have predicted how important those skills would be, how essential they are now as we emerge from even better from the pandemic. i'm personally thankful for her partnership and support of both me and as epa. please join me in welcoming president burwell. your special guest for the evening, governor charlie baker. governor is the 72nd governor of the commonwealth a message says he has proudly served this role now in his second term, the governor has moved massachusetts forward so it focused on bipartisanship and result driven leadership. he has public private partnerships to stimulate economic development. he reform the state's environment and deliver tax relief to low income workers by doubling the earned income tax credit. he made historic investments in k through 12 education, fought the opioid and diversified the commonwealth energy portfolio prior to election as governor, he served in several administrations the state and was also a successful business leader in the health care field. we are here tonight to both recognize and applaud his work in result, getting beyond politics to get important work done. the book is an important guide for individuals and of public affairs, looking to find our way out of gridlock toward progress and results. please join me in welcoming the governor. thank you very much. and thank you for your incredible leadership of our top ten school of public affairs and number in dc. i will add and amy will hear from you a little later and thank you. your leadership of the institute of and politics. governor, thank so much for being here. i'm excited. have the opportunity for us to have a conversation. and i'm so excited to see all of our students and some other guests from the community i can see and thrilled to welcome you. i thought that we would start this evening by having you talk little bit about the book in terms a book that talks about four key steps to getting results and also a little bit as you're talking about the how students can hear about this book contributes i believe to helping people understand the importance of the role of public service and what it can mean for them. because we have so many of our students who are engaging in that study, we are hopeful we'll go on to serve in ways that both you and i have had the opportunity and chance to share. so if you can start by talking a little bit about the book would be great. okay. so first of all, thanks very much for having me here. sylvia is actually one of the people who reviewed the book and truth be told, she had given it one of these. it probably would have gotten published. i got to know her when i was governor of massachusetts and she was secretary of health and human services because we had to negotiate a five year medicaid waiver with her and with her team. and i and i just want you all to know that having spent 16 years of my life in government eight as governor and an eight as a cabinet official in two previous administrations, the state level i know a performer when i see and you have a great performer in public service and your president. that's my hope that she'll take it easy on me for the rest of so the book was written with a friend, mine and a colleague by the name of steve kadish. steve is a lifelong democrat. i'm obviously a lifelong republican. i got to know him when i worked in state government in the nineties and he and i together on a ton of different projects and he actually he voted in the democratic primary when i was running in 2014 and the republican primary and, i've never really talked about whether or not he even voted for me in the general election. but honestly, he was the easy choice for me to be the first chief of staff in our administration and. that was an odd pick. usually when somebody gets elected their chief of staff when they enter office is who worked on the campaign and usually it's your campaign manager or, you know, your senior adviser or somebody that when i pulled this guy of academia, he was the i think it was the provost at northeastern at that to come work in our administration. it was an unusual choice because he was democrat beat and going to campaign and see he wasn't kind of a non to a lot of people but steve is one of the best operator i've ever seen in a complicated organizational environment and government is very much that and he and i started talking in 2017 about writing a paper about sort of after 30 years of working together, public and, and in private industry, we thought it would be good to try to put some of that on paper because there's a lot of there's a lot of academic research what and why and and policy procedure and all the rest. there's not much about how and there's a lot of how. that's written in the private sector. there's not much how that's written in the public sector. and how part is when you actually take the grand idea and turn it into real and in our view and we say this in the book, is that one of the things government to understand and the people who work in it need to understand is that if don't deliver on some of the promises, the commitments you make, you create a certain amount of cynicism in public generally and and the tendency in the public sector many times, especially among politicians i've probably been guilty of this is to over overpromise write and if you don't deliver what you say to people is it's sort a negative message about what's possible and and i think one of the things this book is about is trying to say to a lot of folks, both practitioners and others that there's a lot that's possible and if you think about it through a framework, this one, you can get a lot accomplished. and that ability to get things done to accomplish them focus on that how, in my view, is part of what builds up the value the approach and the belief in what the public sector can and the book basically has four elements of the framework. the first one is people are policy and there are a lot of people who think people are interchangeable they're not building a team is the most important thing. anybody in any complicated has do and it should be respected and appreciated and taken enormously and and steve and i spent enormous amount of time both during the transition transition before we took office and today he's not in the administration anymore. i still talk to him all all the time about. personnel, people ultimately will in many cases, whether you succeed or not. and you need you need people who are subject matter experts. you need people who've managed in some environment before and demonstrated they can do it. and you need people who can be team players and and i know that sounds common sensical, but i'm telling you time and time again, people pick one out of three or two out of three and discover that they've miscast somebody, that they're not in the right role and. and that creates all kinds of challenges and for everybody else. the second is to follow the facts and there's two sets of facts you have to follow. one is what i call the hard facts, you know, the data, the information, the metrics way you measure it. the second part of following the facts is what we call points of pain and it's what are the things you're hearing either from the people who are working in those entities or the people who are supposed to be served for them? what are they saying? you day in and, day out about how you're doing and how it's going and steve and i work together, a health insurance company, a nonprofit called harvard pilgrim health care, went into receivership. we basically were part of team that turned it around. it was the number one ranked health plan in the country for the last seven years. i was there for member satisfaction and clinical effectiveness but a huge piece of that turnaround was what was coming into the call. both the provider call center and the member call center. and we collected that data and, that information, and a lot of that became the core of the problems to be solved. and i can't tell you how important it is most people, they just focus on, you know, the metrics, the spreadsheets you got to get to the points of pain. the points of pain are usually going to come from your customers, your vendors, your suppliers, people like that. the third part is to focus the how. and that means to really get real about what is it that's actually to make this better and to be willing to recognize, understand that the how may mean having change the way you do things and you can't power through it if you take seriously the stuff you learn around points of pain and you take seriously the information you gather from the the data that's available to you you will have to change the way operate. and in the public sector, particular, that can be complicated and difficult but you have to understand and recognize that that's a big part of getting there and. then the final piece is push for results and and the way to think about push for results is track how you're doing and if it's not working, have don't be afraid actually change what you're doing if it's not getting you where you need to go in the public sector one of the hardest things to do to say i know three months ago i said we should be going this way but we need to be going this way. just continuing. go this way because you're uncomfortable acknowledging that you should be doing differently. all that really does is just, you know, now you're just into hole and you're digging a deeper and and one of the great challenges everybody in any big organized nation faces is are you willing to push for results even if they mean you got to acknowledge that some of what you were doing wasn't necessarily going where you wanted to go and you really need to go over here instead, but that's basically the framework. thank you thank you. and want to let everybody know we're going to do some questions from the audience at the end. so be thinking or i can cold call we need to if we get to that so in your book you argue you say government services are not just what should expect. they are necessary to nurture and protect our democracy as we think about this question of the chicken and the egg. yeah. how much it is we got to have democracy before we can actually get the other things working versus other, you know, getting the policy, what we talk about in the book, how you think about that relationship of without a fundamentally working democracy we can't solve climate issues. we can't work on mental health issues. we can't work on addiction issues. we can't work on health. how do you think about that which we have to have working? at what level? i think they're i think they're related. and i guess what i would say is no one's ever really answered the chicken and the egg question. but the way i think about it. but you get results so i think you going the way i think about this is synthesis is what breeds. i mean that's just i know that's an old saying but a lot of those old sayings get that way because they're true. and i think when when when government actually does something well that does just the opposite. it creates a sense among people that, yeah, that can be done and. and i think the belief in that is incredibly important if you're trying to figure out a way to sustain this idea of purpose, of democracy, i mean, if you look at the places where where autocrats and autocracies rise, they're usually in places where. the argument they make is just give control of everything and everything will work, you know, the old saying about about mussolini in italy was he made the trains run on time. and i think i think the most important government has to do is demonstrate it can perform. and if it demonstrates it can perform, then people will be more likely to be willing to engage. and if you look, for example what's and and governments up against a lot of externalities i mean if you think about the role that the media and social media play i that is there's a lot of outrage in that game and there's a lot more negative anti than positivity. and most of the time you know the airplane that lands at the airport every single day the way it's supposed to is not news. the one that crashes is and that's an old story but it's also still relevant when government does what it's supposed to do, it's pretty hard to get people to pay attention to that. but people do it. they do experiences. one of the things we talked about in the book when we took the lieutenant governor and i discovered that there were 55 communities in western mass held towns mostly that didn't have access to high speed internet service and and there were a bunch of reasons for it, which i won't into, but giving it to them, figuring how to actually make it work in communities. you were going to have two or three times as many telephone poles as you had people was a logistic challenge and and it was expensive. but we did it because our view was this is like water or electricity. you know, you can't live in and this is before the pandemic. can't live in a 21st century community without it. and most of these places, you know if you wanted to use the internet, you'd have to go to the library or sit out in the parking lot outside the pizza. pizza shop. or maybe you could drafter off the university if you had one. and i used to draft up suffolk university when i was in state government is wi in the statehouse is a very good but the interesting here was we about 45 of those community is hooked up by march of 2020 and the other ten were on their way there. those communities. believe the government works because we solved their biggest and greatest heartburn, which was their inability be part of the 21st century and. i think i think we underestimate the power of doing something well and and i think the. i think that i that does matter when it comes to the issues associated with democracy. the there are a lot of people who are cynical about lot of things. and and you give, you know, you give, you give fire to those who want to promote that. when you don't get something done and get it reasonably well, i will we'll kind of stay on the democracy theme a little bit throughout. and one of the ways i want to stay on it is we had a survey that was conducted by the sign and it was called the sign of things to come, and it found that it's pretty clever by the sign institute sign of things to come. i looked at branding and what it said is that it found that young americans are dissatisfied with the state of our democracy and feel it's hard to make given the way the is set up. and when you about that question, there were that premise that's being expressed by young people across the country what percentage of that problem the articulation that the problem is system what percentage of that problem is substantive and percentage of that problem is a communication that we're just not explaining to our young people how the system or that it does work. so you were putting percentages, how would you put this system? can you tell me again what the what the system they're dissatisfied with the state of democracy and feel. it's hard to make progress given the way the system is set up for them to make progress as people or for the government issues to make issues to make progress. looking at, amy, to has looked at it in depth. but yes that was understanding of the system. i guess i'd say a couple of things. one is government plays at multiple levels. i think one of the biggest challenges we have is that most people pay a lot of attention to what's going on in their local or their state government, which you know as somebody who's been a big piece of my career, both that makes me because a huge of the government that matters to and will matter to you is going on at local and state government and the you know, the price the house you can afford to buy the apartment can afford to rent the parks that your kids and you will play and walk in the your kids will go to and that you go the traffic. you may or may not have to deal with the the downtowns and the vibrancy them. i'm telling you, that's all state and local government and it doesn't get anywhere near the attention or the or the recognition that it deserves. if you look at so. elections at the local level in massachusetts and i love massachusetts i've lived there for most of my life. you know, i believe deeply in the people and the institutions of, the commonwealth. i went to played all this time in public life. if i didn't a typical municipal election, you might get if you have a great one, you get 30% turnout. okay. in a typical off year state election where you're electing members of congress, your state reps, state senators and, your statewide office holders like me, 50% is huge. okay. the only time you really get everybody to come to the table is in the on year election when the president up and then you get maybe 75 or 80% turnout and believe it or not, there's a big difference in who votes and what they think. if you get 20% the turnout or 25 or 50 or 75 and, you know, we've been banging the drum on this one hard and it is really to get people to understand why those local and state elections are important and and yet and yet that is a lot of things that will matter to you as young adults will happen and get done. it's not to say that there aren't huge issues at the federal level that matter. there are. but i think we don't appreciate. i mean, we got a lot work done in every legislative session i've been involved in and take a lot of the stuff we've done on climate. it's 100% bipartisan. we got one of the most comprehensive police. police accountability bills in the country passed bipartisan. we were working on that before the murder of george floyd and all the rest that came with that on a bipartisan i think i, i think sometimes washington is kind of different story for a bunch of reasons. and i'm happy talk about that if you want to. although i think know more about it than i do. but there's a lot of good that does happen. government and just people all pay attention to it and i think that's too bad. i just want to covid i'm you in massachusetts. i had a front row seat for the way local governments, nonprofits, care providers, state government, ems. i mean, it was astonishing to me the way people dealt with that and responded to and massachusetts commonwealth fund did a big study of how states covid all 50 and they use 65 metrics to measure performance. we finished just behind hawaii so i think of us as being one a but they're an island and we're the second or third most densely populated state in the country and we're not exactly a warm weather place where people can hang around outside. so if you grade it on a curve, i think we would have done better. but the point here is that was a ton of that was states and locals and on the you know i completely agree in terms of this this point about states and things getting done. i put in a plug for it'd be great if where we are sitting was a state. i will just mention that in