The Coast Guard has done a poor job of selling itself and its missions in the competition for federal dollars and support. If it is to survive, the service must focus on the diverse individual "brands" that fall under the single organization.
For each of the past ten years, the U.S. Coast Guard has provided taxpayers a six-to-one return on their investment through innumerable essential services, including saving a yearly average of 5,000 lives and $2 billion in property. Yet, for seven of the past ten years, the Coast Guard has been so underfunded at the beginning of the fiscal year it has had to have its operating budget "rescued" by a supplemental appropriation from Congress.
Never has a governmental agency been such a success and failure at the same time. The Coast Guard is lauded daily in the nation's press for spectacular operational successes, yet is chronically unable to obtain an adequate budget from the nation it serves. This dichotomy was illustrated quite graphically in March 2000 when the Coast Guard won the accolades of Government Executive magazine for being the nation's most efficient and best run federal agency but was ridiculed in the same article for its naiveté and repeated failures in the budget process.
If the Coast Guard were a commercial enterprise, it would be a leading edge, high-visibility "dot-com" sinking in a sea of red ink. Like many dot-coms, the Coast Guard's successes have come at the price of unreasonable work hours and conditions for its people, an infrastructure that is held together with bailing wire and string, operating deficits, and a future that is mortgaged and held hostage by a shortage of funds to pay day-to-day bills.
Many observers have offered explanations for the Coast Guard's budgetary difficulties, blaming its position as a second-tier agency in a second-tier federal department, its broad yet shallow constituency among the public and in Congress, or its "tri-furcation" as a transportation safety agency, law enforcement agency, and national security/defense agency. Each of these express a facet of the problem, but all miss the central issue.
The Coast Guard's travails will never be addressed adequately until it abandons the myth that it is a single, monolithic organization and accepts the reality that it is a "holding company" for a number individual, mutually supporting, maritime service organizations. It also must focus on the individual services, not the holding company, in the competition for federal dollars and support.
Until this is done, the Coast Guard will continue to have difficulty surviving year to year, and will be unable to prosper and succeed. It will continue to suffer the slow death of a thousand cuts at the hands of federal budget bureaucrats in the Department of Transportation, Office of Management and Budget, General Accounting Office, and on congressional staffs, while hoping for annual resurrection from the few members of Congress who occasionally take an interest in it.
Branding
Leadership and management guru Tom Peters loves the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Volkswagen Beetle because "they have a plot." Their very designs tells a story. He observes that almost all new automobiles now provide high mechanical reliability and safe transportation, but they are nearly indistinguishable from one another. These two models are huge successes because they stand out, with a plot easily understood by the public. Potential owners know exactly the combination of nostalgia, whimsy, and attitude the designs convey.
An organization's brands are its plot. They are the way the organization is understood by the public—the story of its products and services. A successful brand is as clearly defined and distinctive as the design of the Chrysler PT Cruiser. Peters points out, "Since the 80s, high quality and performance have become the norm, and no longer distinguish one company from another. To succeed, a business must have an easily understood brand that quickly communicates to the public exactly what the organization is about."
The clearer an organization's brand, the easier it will be understood and the more effectively it will operate in the marketplace. This is true for any organization-business, charitable, or governmental. All compete in a marketplace for support and funds generated by sales, donations, or taxes. If its brand is vague and not easily understood, an organization's quest for support and funding is disadvantaged severely from the start.
There are outstanding federal brands that are clearly understood by both the public and Congress: Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Federal Aviation Administration, Secret Service, and FBI. The names are synonyms for what the organizations do, and what the public gets when they are funded and supported. Money and stamps, safe air travel, protection of officials, federal law enforcement—they could not be any clearer.
But what about "Coast Guard"? To a great many members of the public it means coastal lifesaving. To others it means maritime counternarcotics or counter illegal immigration. To a few it means shipping inspection or lighthouses and buoys, pollution response or icebreaking or fisheries enforcement. To lump all the service's functions together and find a common theme of maritime safety and security does not define the brand. It merely provides an ambiguous definition for a poorly understood name. "Coast Guard" is many things to many people.
How can "Brand Coast Guard" be better defined and communicated? In truth, it can't. The Coast Guard is not now, and never has been, one organization. The Coast Guard is a conglomerate of maritime safety and security organizations, each with its own clearly defined brand, that over the years have been brought together to achieve operational and administrative synergies (see above).
In the past, the Coast Guard had names that were easily understood by the public and Congress, such as Revenue Cutter Service, U. S. Life-Saving Service, Lighthouse Service, and Steamship Inspection Bureau. Support or cut funding for them and you got increases or decreases in the levels of maritime smuggling, lifesaving, aids to navigation, or the safety of commercial ships. But what do you get if you support or cut funding for "Coast Guard"? Ten years of experience with across-the-board cuts, targeted increases, "earmarked" appropriation, and virtually every possible combination of budget actions imposed by administrations and Congresses has shown that the answer is problematic. Coast Guard leaders have chosen to take almost all reductions out of overhead and infrastructure rather than direct services, and apply almost all increases to front line operations. People have worked harder, the service's infrastructure has weakened, and long-term improvements to systems and facilities have been postponed. The point of the spear has become larger and sharper, yet the shaft that supports it and the arm that propels it have increasingly thinned.
Saving the Coast Guard
In 1993, IBM was on the rocks. Complacent in its historical dominance, the company in 1992 posted the worst net loss in U.S. corporate history—$4.97 billion. Its corporate brand was muddled with mainframes, PCs, consulting, and services all striving for visibility. Just cutting costs had not proved to be the answer to the company's woes. Many were advocating breaking up the giant along product lines into a number of "baby blues." In his dramatic rescue of the company, Louis Gerstner instead chose to eliminate bureaucracy and reorganize the company's traditional geographic-based customer service structure to one focused on business lines and industries served.2 By focusing on IBM's business lines (or brands) he better defined and strengthened each, even resurrecting the IBM personal computer. Not only was he able to hold IBM together, but he also was able to reassert its position in each of its markets while transforming the company into one that delivers systems and solutions to its customers, not just hardware and software.
Negative income, historical dominance, a muddled public image, the failure of both dramatic and incremental cost cutting to solve the organization's problems, a geographic rather than business line based organization—IBM's situation in 1993 and the Coast Guard's in 2001 are eerily similar. But so are the solutions to their dilemmas. The Coast Guard must reduce bureaucracy and focus on developing and marketing its brands.
With five layers of command and four layers of support required to deliver most services to customers, a majority of Coast Guard senior management and leadership talent is engrossed in monitoring day-to-day operations. The involvement of so many players often slows service delivery, while development of smoothly functioning service lines that require little supervision goes wanting. Rightfully the subject of a separate treatise, a reduction in bureaucracy will be orders of magnitude easier once the Coast Guard orients itself around its brands/service lines and their target customer groups.
In the corporate world, an improvement in revenue normally is the direct result of improvements in goods, services, and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, this is not always the case for government agencies and, in this respect, the Coast Guard's position is more difficult than IBM's was. Focusing its operational/service delivery efforts around brands and customer groups undoubtedly will result in some improvements to services. But the Coast Guard's real challenge is to establish a sufficient and reliable revenue stream through the federal budget process. It is in this area that focusing on brands and customer groups will garner the greatest benefit.
Each of the Coast Guard brands is easily recognizable, eminently supportable, and has a well-defined constituency. Consumers don't go to the store to buy Procter and Gamble—they go to purchase Dial soap or Crest toothpaste. Members of Congress don't want to fund "Coast Guard," they want to fund lifesaving and narcotics interdiction. Each of the Coast Guard's brands is an essential service. Funding each adequately is both good government and good politics.
The brands/services format also improves the never-ending search for improvements in government efficiency and effectiveness. It provides greater clarity on what direct services are provided and where, and on the cost of the support functions the brands "purchase" from the support side of the Coast Guard. There is a much more direct link between increases and decreases in funding and what happens on the front lines of service to the public.
For almost a century, Coast Guard leaders have perpetuated the "One Coast Guard" image to foster cohesiveness and teamwork among the disparate functions and organizations that have been added to the agency's roster. Slogans such as "Team Coast Guard" and "The Coast Guard Family" have been seen as good leadership and ensured a continuous search for synergy and efficiency, encouraging the various service lines to support each other, sometimes yielding impressive results.
Yet, portraying the service as a single, monolithic entity to the public and Congress has resulted in mixed and conflicting messages. "Coast Guard" is a blurred, misunderstood brand, and the service is a poorly supported, minimally effective player in the most important aspect of its survival, the federal budget process.
Coast Guard corporate leaders must heed Steven Covey's injunction to seek first to understand and then to be understood. First, they must understand their own organization the way their board of directors (the Congress) and customers (the public) understand it. Congress and the public understand the Coast Guard as the source of numerous essential services. What they don't necessarily understand is what all those services are, and why taxpayers are billed for many different services on one invoice. In most other venues, different essential public services such as law enforcement, fire fighting, and emergency medicine are provided by different organizations and billed separately. This lack of understanding has not been important to Congress and the public, though, because the Coast Guard always has delivered, and delivered cheap. From the bill payer's point of view, the one price tag for many services can be a great deal, especially at the bargaining table.
Coast Guard leaders should then seek to have the service understood. With annual expenses of less than $5 billion in a federal budget that numbers in the trillions, the Coast Guard will never have the public stage long enough to explain its own complicated view of itself to the rest of the world. The Coast Guard therefore must seek to be understood in terms of reference that Congress and the public already understand. This will require that the Coast Guard restructure itself, if only budgetarily, into a form that can be easily communicated and readily understood. The business model of "Coast Guard" as a parent company with several complementary product lines, or brands, not only fits this need but also aligns with the organization's evolution, traditions, and day-to-day operations.
Diversity of people, missions, and brands is the Coast Guard's great strength. To succeed, the service must recognize and capitalize on this strength, not deny it. Identification and use of its powerful brands in the budget process will make the difference between a yearly struggle to survive and reliable, sufficient revenue streams. It could be the difference between subsistence and prosperity, mediocrity and excellence.
Captain Goward is Chief, Office of Boat Forces, U.S. Coast Guard Headquarter, Washington, DC. He previously served as Chief, Office of Shore Acitivities.