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More than thirty million American television viewers tune in each week to hear Regis Philben exclaim, "Who wants to be a millionaire?" The show features would-be millionaires attempting to answer trivia questions with the help of such lifelines as phoning a friend and asking their community (i.e., studio audience) for counsel.

The show has struck a responsive chord with America’s populace, evidenced by the fact that it airs three times weekly and each of the broadcasts outpace all other prime time listings in the Nielsen ratings. How to account for this response? Perhaps we like to see other do well, or maybe we like to imagine these participants as surrogates for our someday success.

Juxtaposed to this television drama of wealth acquisition comes a new book by one of America’s traditional millionaires, a man who made his fortune while captain of a Fortune 1000 company in Chicago and used it to better the world around him. Contrary to the myriad of best-selling business books which tell readers how they too can strike it rich, Gary MacDougal’s contribution tells the story of how one member of America’s elite used his power and influence to upend the poverty industry in Illinois, and to help transform it into a dynamic, problem-solving operation. In the process, he and Governor Edgar inspired the largest Illinois government reorganization since 1900.

In short, MacDougal’s book is about how one man made a difference. And through its pages the reader can envision how they too can make a difference in their community, whether they are a member of society’s elite or one of those who service the elite. Indeed, the book’s pages are filled with real-life examples of bureaucrats, pastors, small business owners, and politicians who thought a little more about the other guy, and in the process transformed the welfare system in Illinois from the domain of rule-driven processes to the handiwork of living, breathing neighborhood leaders.

Man on a Mission

To understand the story, we must first understand its protagonist. Gary MacDougal is first a businessman, and a highly credentialed one at that. Chairman and CEO of Mark Controls Corporation from 1969 to 1987, he led a company whose investors earned an average growth of 17% per year. His business acumen landed him a spot on numerous corporate boards, including a longstanding directorship at United Parcel Service. Prior to his tenure at Mark Controls, MacDougal served as a partner at the international consulting firm of McKinsey and Company.

Mr. MacDougal also possesses a long history of involvement in philanthropic endeavors. Notably, each of his major foundation directorships dealt primarily with poverty and disadvantaged children’s issues. Such posts included the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, the latter of which he served as board chairman.

The significance of MacDougal’s resume to his book is not how it prepared him for the Illinois welfare reform activity (though it undoubtedly did), but rather in how he leveraged his past professional relationships to assist the government re-engineering project. The personal wealth he created while captaining Mark Controls allowed him to volunteer his services to the government, and to travel at will. His directorship at UPS gave him enough currency to help steer the company’s vast Chicago operation to become one of the leading employers hiring welfare recipients.

Most significantly, his service at Russell Sage and Casey provided him with a knowledgeable grasp of the issues and acronyms that pervade social policy deliberations. His relationship with the Casey Foundation was particularly impactful on his Illinois welfare reform pursuits. The Foundation embraced MacDougal’s vision and was sufficiently comfortable with Governor Edgar’s commitment to reform to pony up $2.5 million to fund pilot project activity that proved invaluable to the systematic reform effort.

But before we go into the Illinois reform story just yet, it is vital to consider that Mr. MacDougal’s transition from corporate titan to bureaucracy-slayer was not a seamless one. Indeed, his American Dream story was interrupted by a trek through Nepal in the mid-1980s where the author contemplated how and where he could be as productive in the next chapter of his life as he was climbing the corporate ladder. Approaching Mount Everest, MacDougal’s view of the top of the world helped him to realize that he was uniquely prepared for, and even called to, work with those who live in life’s valleys--the poor.

Following Nepal, MacDougal attempted to implement his vision through two high-profile posts. Following his successful stint as Assistant Campaign manager of George Bush’s victorious 1998 White House bid, MacDougal lobbied to become the Bush administration welfare secretary. He was widely considered to be the frontrunner for HHS, too, until the junior George Bush was tasked with informing MacDougal that he had "a pigmentation problem" (translated: the cabinet needed diversity). Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot bemoaned this fate in an op-ed called the "Perils of Tokenism," wondering if Bush’s kinder and gentler agenda would be relegated to the sidelines along with MacDougal.

In short order, MacDougal traded his HHS dream with a new one envisaging him becoming the GOP’s social policy champion ala the Dem’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Encouraged by former ’88 Bush pal Lee Atwater and Illinois’ GOP leadership to run for the U.S. senate, MacDougal got off to an impressive start before Lynn Martin secured President Bush’s blessing for the nomination. MacDougal graciously bowed out, still searching for a vehicle to carry out his Nepal dream.

Following the 1990 Illinois elections, after trotting the globe and circling Washington’s beltway, MacDougal finally met his dream in the unlikeliest of places—the dilapidated housing projects in his hometown of Chicago. Introduced to the poor in his backyard by an inner-city pastor, MacDougal now had a specific burden with which to direct his energy. His first order of business was to relentlessly pursue newly elected governor Jim Edgar to appoint a task force with no less a task than to transform human service delivery in the state.

Not only was the proposed project’s scope seemingly out of proportion to realistic expectation, there was little evidence that MacDougal even picked the right political horse to ride. In stark contrast to his gubernatorial predecessor, Big Jim Thompson, who fancied big projects with big price tags, Jim Edgar fashioned himself in a much more button-down, managerial manner. Edgar’s early years in office adhered to the following mantra: it was time to tighten the belt; make few, if any mistakes; and keep the government’s house in order. The nation’s brief recession during Gov. Edgar’s first two years in office validated his operating philosophy.

Thus, there was not much reason to believe that the Governor would take on such entrenched interests as the poverty industry and labor unions, or that he would risk unchartered waters in the volatile social services domain while he was tacking listlessly and docking boats in all other areas of state government. But to dismiss the possibility out of hand was to sell short Gary MacDougal’s commitment and influence. He had found the vessel to carry his dreams and he was fixed on setting sail.

Sure enough, following numerous exchanges, Governor Edgar conceded that the titanic human services infrastructure in Illinois – 26,000 person, $10 billion annual appropriations – was riskier to ignore than overhaul. Gov. Edgar later remarked that the best way to describe MacDougal would be tenacious. Said Edgar, "[After the election]…he wouldn’t go away. He kept coming around and talking about the need to reform welfare and human services, so finally I decided to let him go ahead and see what he could do."

Naming Problems, Identifying Solutions

MacDougal was appointed chairman of the Governor’s Task Force on Human Services Reform in 1993, a post he would hold until the reform effort was fully consummated in 1997. The task force’s activities, which consume most of the book’s 384 pages, offer a blueprint for policy planning, program innovation, and the politicking essential to any significant governmental reform effort.

Consistent with the common corporate practice of consumer research, Mr. MacDougal’s first order of business was to learn what the welfare system was like through the eyes of those who used it—the recipients themselves. In what is perhaps the most compelling parts of the book, MacDougal tells of his first days as task force head spent with "the ladies in the backyard," an informal group of welfare recipients who lived in Chicago’s poorest neighborhood.

These wonderful ladies agreed to meet with the white, suburban gentleman, albeit quite tentatively and guarded at first. It was only after a trust relationship was built that these consumers of the Illinois human services agencies began to tell of their real struggles with, and perspective of, the system that more often hurt them or impeded their own dreams than it offered any real help or hope. It is not inconsequential to note that MacDougal logged more hours at the Robert Taylor Homes (among the nation’s most dangerous housing projects) and similar neighborhoods than most poverty experts, if not many professional advocates for the poor, who often relegate their activity to conferences and data analyses.

A discovery process that began with "the ladies in the backyard" continued with recipients in other parts of the state, government staff from a half dozen human services agencies, employers, advocates, and national policy experts. The author carefully describes how the task force identified each major barrier to employment, and then he articulates the method of Illinois’s treatment.

Throughout this description, MacDougal notes the first phase of welfare reform (i.e., moving the motivated and able-bodied into productive work) as easily accomplishable, while he makes a checklist of harder-to-solve problems (e.g., re-engaging absent fathers with their families) and calls this the unfinished business that must be completed in the next phase of reform. Says MacDougal, "The remaining group has more barriers, and the complexity of getting them on the first rung of the ladder transcends economics."

Many a well-intentioned welfare reformer has succumbed to the myriad of acronyms, volumes of studies, and mazes. Other reform efforts fail because they get mired in the complexities of low-level operational issues and quickly lose sight of the "why" and "what" of reform. The MacDougal-led commission avoided such traps largely by first articulating a set of principles to both guide their work and to test various strategies against.

This method is consistent with the teaching of management guru John Carver who calls for nonprofit lay leaders, many of whom serve as board members, to govern the work of bureaucrats or program operators rather than redundantly helping the program operators manage the day-to-day affairs of their organization. MacDougal clearly set the task force’s sights on the north star of their effort, effectively avoiding the common traps set by status quo-seeking staff, while also inspiring all stakeholders toward a preferred endgame.

Concurrent to the planning effort, the task force launched several pilot projects to test their ideas in real laboratories. These pilots were administered by federations, which were innovative experiments in devolving authority from the state to community level. The watchword of the 1996 welfare reform bill was devolution, the shifting of authority from the federal government to the states. However, implementation of the law has proven that second-order devolution, from states to cities, is just as vital, and more difficult, than the first variety.

The task force selected five pilot sites, capturing all the geographic and population diversity possessed by the Land of Lincoln. The sites ranged from inner-city Grand Boulevard, home to some the worst social indicators in the nation, to suburban DuPage County, to a consortium of the seven southernmost counties in the state, virtually Delta-like in its rural poverty.

Believing that the key of community engagement is not more money, but rather decision-making authority, the federations were empowered to design their own service delivery structure. This allowed Grand Boulevard to design a self-sufficiency coach to help the welfare-to-work participant after placement in a job, including navigation through the maze of disconnected state workers only interested in parts of the family’s life. The federation process not only allowed communities to react to problems, but to also pursue innovative solutions such as Springfield’s co-location of formerly dispersed local human services staff.

The federations’ success bore many commonalities, such as the irreplaceable role of employers. To be sure, the nature of employment opportunities varied among the test sites, but the author persuasively made the point that all employers can be approached through two doors: (1) enlightened self-interest and (2) reasonable business risk. If employers understand the bottom line value to hiring former welfare recipients, and if their risk is minimized by meaningful government support, employer demand would soon exceed provider supply.

MacDougal’s thesis is supported by the Illinois federation’s experience, not to mention many other states that used similar interventions. In Springfield, 101 of the 116 participants in the new, integrated case management system found jobs. Of the 47 Grand Boulevard participants sent to work at UPS, 34 were still on the job more than two years after placement—a turnover rate four times better than the average UPS entry level worker.

Yet for all its advances in the human capital arena, Illinois still suffers from the strict wall of separation between its welfare and workforce development bureaucracy. DHS’ new, consolidated human services centers are an impressive vehicle to administer safety net services, though the surest safety net provision – a job – is primarily accessed through separate job centers.

Illinois will need to bridge these two sectors if it is to ultimately serve as the nation’s beacon of human capital development. It will also need to include a managed competition scheme to allow private agencies to compete with government to heighten service delivery performance. Until then, it will remain a sterling example of how government can be turned around, and why states can be trusted to take over welfare programs from the federal government.

Conclusion

The author’s personal account offers genuineness absent in most issue-oriented tomes, though it will undoubtedly cause various reader groups to react quite differently. For the welfare policy novice, it is a welcome method to learn the meaning of such issues as paternity establishment, and complex welfare-to-work strategies like reverse-commute transportation systems. Too often, welfare policy discussions migrate into cul de sacs of high intellectual content, accessible only to select class of academics and policy wonks. MacDougal succeeds in taking on heady issues and translating them into language common on the streets where most people live.

For those who bear the title policy wonk, the pace and repetition of main themes will become wearisome. A word to this group: if you choose to put down the book for this reason alone, you will miss some truly remarkable insight and a privileged opportunity to learn an insider’s account of a major state’s social services overhaul. Indeed, the place where this book proves most useful to the welfare reform academy is in its elucidation of the management side of the equation.

Too often, the economists and social scientists that write about poverty issues do so through a personal income lens; i.e., how can we provide more resources or greater opportunities for the poor. Noted welfare scholar Larry Mead has long been a lonely voice calling the question of whether government can even deliver on such promises, and this book goes far in explaining one state’s successes and failures in the midst of reform.

Related, the book offers an insightful glance into the political machinations that impede most bold reform efforts, and almost did this one as well. The state of Illinois practices transactional politics at its unvarnished best, and the author does a nice job of describing the personalities and processes involved in turning the task force’s ideas into legislation, and then transforming the legislation into law. The chapter regarding Illinois’ legislature offers a compelling read for political scientists as well as those interested in public policy writ large.

Ultimately, the book serves as a helpful antidote to the plague that inflicts far too many communities in America – that is, carelessness. The cry of liberal critics is that all who care about the poor should fear welfare reform because it forces those in poverty out of their homes and into the chains of the low-wage marketplace. Blind to the success stories that abound about how these families are being healthily integrated back into society, and many into well-paying positions, the would-be advocates have chosen the wrong bogeyman.

The real danger to American society is not when the underclass re-joins society, but rather when the overclass secedes from society. An increasing number of new rich in America seclude themselves in gated communities, impersonally relegating their contribution to society to the form of a financial contribution. Gary MacDougal offers a different model, one that is not only engaged in the cause of poverty fighting, but engaged in the lives of those who are in poverty, as well.

Gary MacDougal’s fine book, and his work, proves that one man can indeed make a difference.