How to Run Government Like a Business | Podcast

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Can government actually be run like a business? It's a phrase thrown around a lot in political circles, usually as a campaign slogan rather than a serious operating philosophy. But what does it actually look like when someone with deep private sector experience walks into a governor's office and tries to apply those principles for real?

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On Episode 6 of In Pursuit, host Mike Bitchick sits down with Rick Snyder, Michigan's 48th Governor, former president of Gateway, and a man who earned three degrees from the University of Michigan by the age of 23. Snyder spent eight years as governor with a clear mission: take Michigan from last place to top ten across nearly every economic and quality of life metric.

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What he shares is one of the most practical, honest, and grounded conversations about leadership in government you will find. Watch the full episode here.

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Michigan Was 50th. The Goal Was Top Ten.

When Snyder took office, Michigan was at the bottom by almost every measure. Highest unemployment in the nation. The only state to lose population in the 2010 census. A business climate that had spent decades relying on large automotive corporations rather than building a broad entrepreneurial ecosystem.

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His goal was not incremental improvement.

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"When I made the decision with my family to run for governor, my goal aspiration was not to get to 47. It was to get to the top 10. And how do you do that? You have to innovate."

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That framing set the tone for everything that followed. If you are trying to go from last to top ten, playing it safe is not a strategy. Failure has to be acceptable, because without the willingness to fail, you cannot push hard enough to actually change things.
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"I said, if everything we worked on worked, it meant we weren't doing our job. Because we weren't pushing the envelope hard enough to innovate."

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This became the foundation of what Snyder calls Relentless Positive Action: no blame, no credit, just a clear focus on what the problem is, what the solution is, and relentless pursuit of that solution.

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The Dashboard Nobody Wanted Him to Build

On his first day as governor, Snyder did something that surprised everyone around him: he built a dashboard of roughly 20 metrics and made it public, committing to be held accountable against those numbers for his entire time in office.

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The reaction from political insiders was immediate and negative.

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"The feedback I got after my speech is other political people and the press came up and said, that was a dumb thing to do. Why did you do that? And their response was, now you can be held accountable. Now you can get in trouble."

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Snyder's response was simple: how do you know you are succeeding if you do not measure it? His view is that accountability is not a threat. It is the only way to know whether you are actually making progress.

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He then drilled that dashboard down to every department in state government, requiring each one to define what success actually looked like for their work. The example he uses to illustrate how badly this was needed: when he became governor, the metric the Michigan State Police reported in their financial documents was how many miles they drove. Not how safe the roads were. Not how many motorists they helped. Miles driven.

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"Who cares? But someone thought it was important to say this is the measure of success of the Michigan State Police. The question is, how safe are the motorists? Miles were irrelevant."

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Getting to the right metrics is not complicated. It just requires asking common sense questions and being willing to challenge the answers you get.

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Champions vs. Captives: The Employee Engagement Story

One of the most striking parts of the conversation is Snyder's description of what he found inside state government and what he did about it.

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His team divided state employees into two categories: champions and captives. Champions were people who still had the drive to make a difference. Captives were people who had once had that drive, had been told to stop rocking the boat enough times that they had given up, and were now working toward retirement.

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When Snyder arrived, there were far more captives than champions.

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Over five years of deliberate effort, including five rounds of employee surveys that Snyder read personally, comment by comment, his administration shifted those numbers by double digits in every state department. By the end of his tenure, Michigan won a national award for employee engagement.

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"They're the people doing the real work with citizens every day that I would never know about. But they were making a difference in their lives, and they were feeling rewarded because they felt they could do that."

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His approach was not complicated. He empowered departments to run pilots. He gave teams discretionary resources to try new ideas. When things failed, he treated failure as a learning experience rather than a career-ending event. And he was explicit with his team that he had their back.

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The message that sent, consistently over years, is what changed the culture.

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Vision, Engage, Adjust, Accelerate

Snyder threw out the traditional government planning model early in his career. The classic approach, hire a consulting firm, spend a year writing a report, implement over the next two years, has one fatal flaw: the world changes faster than the plan.

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His replacement framework is four words: vision, engage, adjust, accelerate.

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Start with a vision based on common sense. Go out and engage with the real world rather than doing an extended study. Try the thing. After three to six months, stop and assess what worked and what did not. Make adjustments. Then hit the gas.

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"Do the engagement and then stop and adjust after three to six months. Take a break and look back to say what worked well compared to your vision. Make adjustments, and now you can see this should work, and then you can hit the gas."

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He applies this specifically to pilots, which he believes are one of the most underused tools in government. Rather than waiting until a program is fully designed and fully funded, get something real into the world, see what actually happens, and build from there.

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His example is the Healthy Kids Dental program. He could not fund it statewide in the first year. So he launched it in a handful of counties, added more counties each year as the budget allowed, and eventually covered the entire state. The key was getting on the path early rather than waiting until all the pieces were in place.

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Gardening Before Hunting

One of Snyder's most useful frameworks for economic development is the distinction between gardening and hunting.

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Hunting is going after big deals, recruiting major companies, competing with other states for headline-generating investments. Gardening is taking care of what you already have: supporting existing businesses, connecting Michigan companies with Michigan buyers, building workforce pipelines, fixing infrastructure.

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His view is that most economic development programs get the order wrong.
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"Focus on gardening before hunting. Ask any business person: is it more important to keep a happy client or to go after a new client? Keep a happy client. We need to get refocused on Michigan and gardening again."

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He points to a program called Pure Michigan Business Connect as an example of what gardening looks like in practice. The program required almost no budget. It simply asked Michigan's major utilities to commit to increasing their sourcing from Michigan companies. They agreed. They ended up doing five to ten times their original commitment, found better suppliers in the process, and generated what Snyder estimates as several billion dollars in additional revenue for Michigan businesses.

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No incentive checks. No subsidies. Just a commitment to connect buyers and sellers who were already in the same state.

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The Rule Problem: When Good Intentions Become Barriers

Snyder is direct about what he sees as one of the biggest structural problems in government today: the accumulation of rules that were each individually well-intentioned but collectively create a system that collapses under its own weight.

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His view is that the default assumption behind most regulation is that people are bad actors who need to be controlled. He starts from the opposite assumption.

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"Should we assume the average person is a good, honest person, or should we assume they're a bad person? My model is I assume the average person is a good person and we have to deal with the outliers. So why create more rules to constrict the people trying to do good?"

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He uses the Michigan Agricultural Environmental Assurance Program as a case study. Rather than passing regulations requiring farmers to meet environmental standards, his administration created a voluntary certification program that recognized farmers for best practices. Thousands of farms signed up and got audited voluntarily to earn the certification. The white signs you see on farms across Michigan today are the result.

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The lesson he draws is broader than agriculture. When you trust people and offer recognition rather than imposing compliance, you often get far better outcomes than you would with a mandate.

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What Government Can Learn from Business, and Where the Analogy Breaks Down

Snyder is thoughtful about where the business analogy for government holds and where it does not.

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Customer service translates directly. If you make the people you serve your top priority, government works better, full stop. His administration moved social services workers out of government offices and into local schools so they could be closer to the families they were serving. The state employees loved it. Service quality went up. The only thing that changed was asking a different question: where should we be to actually help these people?

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Where the analogy breaks down is profit. Government does not have a bottom line that signals success or failure the way a business does. That makes measuring outcomes harder and makes it easier for people to hide behind inputs and activity rather than actual results.

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The answer, in Snyder's view, is not to pretend profit exists. It is to be more deliberate about defining what success looks like for each program, measuring it honestly, and being willing to be held accountable for the answer.

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The One Thing He Would Fix First

When Mike asks Snyder what he would do with a magic wand, the answer is not a policy or a program. It is civility.

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"Our greatest threat in this country is us, because we don't treat people with respect the way we should. That's the biggest issue we face. We've got to get back to the golden rule."

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His argument is that without civility, none of the other problems are solvable. The ability to pass bipartisan legislation, to run pilots that might fail, to hold leaders accountable through dashboards, to move from captives to champions, all of it depends on people being able to engage with each other in good faith. When that breaks down, everything else breaks down with it.

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During his eight years as governor, roughly 90% of the bills he signed had majority support from both Republicans and Democrats in both chambers. He credits that not to political strategy but to a simple practice: not asking what party someone belonged to when building his team, and genuinely listening to ideas regardless of where they came from.

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The Bottom Line

Rick Snyder's career, from three Michigan degrees at 23 to gateway executive to venture capital to governor, is built on a consistent thread: clear vision, honest measurement, willingness to try things, and the discipline to keep going when things do not work the first time.

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His prescription for government is not complicated. Define what success looks like. Measure it. Trust the people doing the work. Run pilots. Garden before you hunt. Get rid of rules that are no longer serving their purpose. And treat the people you disagree with the way you would want to be treated.

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None of it requires a business background. It just requires leadership.

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This post is based on Episode 6 of In Pursuit, featuring Rick Snyder, Michigan's 48th Governor. Watch the full episode for more on economic development, cybersecurity, AI in government, and what it really takes to move a state from last place to the top ten.

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