Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Martin O’Malley, former Governor of Maryland, on governing in the Information Age.

“Other cities, like New York in particular, were figuring out how to harness the power of then-modern new technologies, like geographic information systems, and the sort of computational power that would have taken 100 clerks working with sharpened pencils and calculators to do in the past.”

“When I saw what was happening in New York, and when I witnessed – and in fact brought a fact-finding mission to a meeting of Compstat at the NYPD headquarters – watching it unfold, I couldn’t help but ask myself, ‘why don’t we run every department like this? Why isn’t this something we do for the whole of government?’”

“I was surprised at just how much money we saved. Simply by doing a better job of seeing and tracking, basic sort of blocking and tackling stuff . . . like showing up for work.”

“Those little things that really never were terribly sexy and never made a headline in the newspaper. But man did they add up and allowed us to put our city on the path for the biggest reduction in Part One crime of any major city in America over the next 10 years.”

“I also came to understand that in the management and in the leadership of the corporation, known as the mayor and city council of Baltimore, and all its various departments, it’s really about human qualities of leadership, by which I mean things like openness, transparency, clarity of communication, respect for one another, the fostering of a collaborative atmosphere.”

“The key [to changing organizational culture] is to start and don’t stop, to sit to create a default setting to openness and transparency as a leader, and to lift up the leaders along the way.”

“We started and we never stopped. People came to understand that this was not going to be a passing fad that went away. And we looked for ways to lift up quick wins.”

“That higher degree of collaboration [while governor] with independent levels of government, and boards and commissions meant that having a very clear, succinct, and published plan for delivery became critically important.”

“For leaders, for managers, for people that are charged with making big organizations hum, and achieve and work together, there really is no substitution for openness and transparency.”

“If the leader is not sticking her neck out, you know, no one else is going to stick theirs out to follow in their part of the organization.”

“I think we’re only scratching the surface of the art of the possible when it comes to these new information technologies that we have to improve the way we govern ourselves, both its effectiveness and its fairness.”

“What’s required for us to get out of the opening innings of this ballgame and really start driving home runs is for us to be able to have open and honest conversations about privacy concerns, and about the safeguards that we need to put into place to make sure that we control for an algorithm for things like cultural biases, the potential for disparate racial impacts of algorithms.”

“If President Elect Biden ever found something with zip and mission and purpose that he’d like me to do in a new administration, I’d be open to doing that as well. I’m just very grateful at this point in life, to have healthy kids and an awesome wife, and to have been able to learn from smart people and wise people and caring people and to be able to pass it on to others.”