 One of the first rules of performance management is that performance is measured by results not by what you do. Commercial results only come about when you commit the necessary resources to do the productive work. Billy has enough money to take Betty to the movies. When she notes that she has famished, he spends some of it on a few slices of pizza. He won't be able to take her to the movies after all as he no longer has enough money to buy their entrance. This is financial reality. Once resources are expended on one purpose, they're no longer available for direction elsewhere. If the resources are expended on administration, not running the organization, they will not be expended on performance. And likewise, the resources that are expended on performance will not be available for running the organization. The commercial business needs resources to generate and deliver products to customers, and needs these resources to maintain and operate the organization while it accomplishes this. How do we address the division between these two valid purposes? Is there some way to sort this out? For the business of government, the technique to make sense of this is to return to the commercial purpose, to what our government and laws are to accomplish through management of commerce. This has already been addressed, and it is to promote the economic welfare of the people. We also have three segments of the people who are identified with commerce. We have business owners and investors. We have business employees. And we have business customers. You, by your valuation of what is available and by your purchase decisions, are the customer. You are the one who will select business products by your own decisions. You will also be the employee or person who commits time and effort to gain income. Even those who inherit their wealth still inherit what their parents and grandparents accomplished by committing their commercial efforts. You will also take part in part of what you have and you will save it or put it into retirement efforts or commit it to stock and bond ownership. You will be the owner and investor of businesses. The answer is that you are the one who is to benefit from operation of our commercial efforts. Ownership is in you and everyone who is like you in purchasing, in employment, and in eventual ownership. It is we the people who give purpose to our businesses and we the people who are owners of our government which is supposed to be managing our commerce for our benefit. As noted, there is only one real party in interest and it is we the people. It is most definitely not some American aristocracy that is supposed to survive and prosper on the labor and investments of others. Our personal prosperity is not different than the prosperity of us as we the people. Neither is our personal prosperity different than if we are employees or customers. Both personal and public prosperity are the same human purpose. The question of who is neatly answered by what we value and it is generally termed to be prosperity. Prosperity defines performance and it is further defined by what people receive from our commitment efforts and by what people must commit in time and effort in order to gain what they value. Prosperity is that personal sense of value in our time and effort and in what comes to us. It is we the people who receive and value what our economy is able to provide us. It is we the people who commit our personal time and effort to productive use as business employees. It is we the people whose investments or ownership in commercial businesses is our means of storing wealth and maintaining prosperity. We are both as individuals and as a body the only party in interest. Our universal question is how we maximize the value we receive from the time and efforts we commit to economic pursuits. We have two management answers to this universal question. The administrative management answer is that we improve what we are doing. If we do things more efficiently and more effectively then we can reap benefits from having improvement in our commercial performance efforts. The performance management answer is that we eliminate waste, that we cut costs where we stop doing things that do not contribute to desired performance. As a general rule, 80% of all real improvements come from ceasing to spend our time and energy doing non-productive efforts. Switching management from administrative to performance reduces costs to less than half. Focus on authority promotes authority, focus on results yields results. When a performance manager directs coordinated efforts, the focus is on people working together. It is elimination of the wasteful efforts that arise when people cannot rely on each other doing some other part of a larger performance. There is a performance cycle to any commercial effort. The business receives income from sale to customers and it uses that income to generate goods and services and it delivers to its customers. The customers in order to gain what they value, buy the output from the business giving it what it needs to continue in operation. This defines the performance purpose for any commercial effort and it is delivery of goods and services to customers in order to gain income that it needs to continue in operation. Customer decisions are based on how much they value the commercial outputs and what it will cost them to gain these. If you raise the price of goods and services, say by requiring your customers to wait in idleness for 20 minutes before you are willing to sell it, then fewer customers will decide to buy your products. Type one waste is requiring additional resources from customers and it weakens the performance cycle. Then there is a potential for donating corporate output to charity or other non-customers. These donations produce no income for the commercial effort. The only way to pay for these outputs is to gain additional income from the customers. It is in terms of higher prices, which again discourages customers. Type two waste is delivery of output to non-customers. So where is management in this? Is a cost of gaining performance through those who are doing performance. The internal purpose of management is supporting the corporate performance effort that completes the performance cycle. Expending on management is an internal investment and good management can remarkably increase what performance efforts can produce and deliver to customers. Administrative management addresses running the business as a purpose. This requires the time and effort of employees, but does not produce any output that goes to customers. It involves type one waste. Administrative management addresses the effective use of authority to structure the organization. This often requires internal services that do not yield any increase in productive output. Administrative management brought order out of chaos in the development of corporate commercial efforts, but it is of questionable value now that we have potential for focus on performance. By law, the incorporation of business efforts now supports administrative management shielding a corporate aristocracy from responsibility for wasteful practices. By law, government efforts have raised the price of labor through regulation, increasing the cost of performance without contributing to any corporate output. By law, the government taxes what corporations earn, which is output capacity that does not go to customers type two waste. By law, the administrative interference of sovereign government has limited the choices of citizen customers by insisting on product requirements that are not universally valued by citizen customers. Many of these interferences, as in the product safety requirements, have recognized value, but there seems to be few who address what such interferences cost the public and whether the regulatory requirement is a support for or detriment to either people. Taking the choices away from citizen customers is misconduct in office. It is failure to represent the public or sovereign citizen. The government service that would have value is empowerment of citizens so that they either have recognized the value and it is empowerment of citizens so that they can hold their corporate effort and corporate leaders personally responsible for any damages that they cause by their decisions. The difference is between taking economic freedom from we the people and providing support services to we the people so that the economy serves them. We also have a corporate government and it generally operates on the principles of administration. It is a corporate effort that consumes more than 30% of everything the U.S. citizens earn, even as it requires the efforts of many to be non-productive. True to administrative thinking, the concept of management is one of improving what the various elements of government are doing. It yields little benefit. Performance approach would identify and eliminate waste. Having 125 million taxpayers spend eight hours a year doing their taxes equates to a billion man hours per year in citizen expense that produces nothing. It is about half a percent of the total productivity of the American people. It is not the cost of operating the IRS nor the cost of the taxes collected and dumped into the Treasury. It is type one waste that this process puts on. We the people so that the government can take what it will use up in its operation. This is wasteful government process that can be eliminated by more sensible approaches. The general rule for bureaucracy is that the purpose of government is serving we the people. And where there is no service, the entire bureaucratic structure can be eliminated without reducing what people receive. And this is why empowering people is so scary to leaders. Having to serve the public instead of functioning as an aristocracy adds responsibility for what leaders do. It is not that these organizations can just be terminated. Many have functions that contribute reasonable support for we the people. And some do deliver value. It is just that the value is not being delivered to the people. The focus of modern administration is on running the government, not on delivery of goods and services to the sovereign citizens. Our investment in change should address what people value and how government is going to provide it. The empowered citizen focus will be on goods and services that people receive, not on authority structures and internal government operations. This course of study in law and government is an application of this empowerment effort. My function in preparation of this course is not to provide guidance and change, but to empower you as tomorrow's citizen owners of this nation to see what needs to be done and to come together with others who see the need to make it happen. There is nobody who can tell we the people what will have value beyond the general categories of freedom, prosperity and support for family. The changes that will increase the value of government and legal management of commerce are otherwise for you to determine. Is there more value in resetting the EPA to serve public instead of the environment? Or more value in redirecting the Department of Justice to serve the public instead of government leaders? Nobody can tell you where you will come to focus with others on improving the corporate business of government. Finding when and where you can achieve agreement is what you will learn as you work through the classroom discussions. You will learn it as you seek to find agreement with other U.S. citizens with whom you share ownership of this nation and its government. The burden of commercial law and government is on we the people, even if it is applied to the business entities that we own, or that employ us, or that generate goods and services for us to buy. We are the only party in interest and we are also the ones who are entitled to receive the benefits of both our commerce and our government. We are the ones who can, whenever we are agreed, step into management over both our economy and our government to direct benefits for ourselves. As a special case, we have the business of government. What the government costs comes out of our productivity, but we as owners can step into management whenever we are agreed. We as owners can initiate such changes as will increase the value we receive from government and can decrease what it costs us to gain that value.