Duke alum, Healthcare.gov repairman talks Duke education, business world

Jeffrey Zients, Trinity '88, was recently chosen to oversee the repairs of Healthcare.gov, the website through which health insurance exchanges are set up under the Affordable Care Act. Upon its advent the website experienced multiple crashes and technological issues that the administration is now working to fix. Zients, who is the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and will become the director of the National Economic Council in January, will serve as the manager of the repair project within the Department of Health and Human Services. Zients sat down with The Chronicle's Elizabeth Djinis and Georgia Parke to discuss his work and the path that brought him into the public sector today.

The Chronicle: What exactly is your role going to be in fixing the problems on the website?

Jeffrey Zients: Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius—who is the head of Health and Human Services—and administrator [Marilyn] Tavenner is the head of the Center for Medicare Services—have asked me to come in and provide management expertise to improving the website Healthcare.gov. Tabner is the administrator who supports Sebelieus running the center for medical services, which is in charge of the Affordable Care Act.

JZ: I went to a rigorous high school. At the same time, when you come to college, it definitely stretches you in terms of pushing you to explore new terrains and the standard of work and the workload is very, very rigorous. At Duke I sharpened my work skills and study habits. I was exposed to political science. I also spent a fair amount of time at Fuqua. At the time you could take up to five classes at Fuqua as an undergrad. You couldn’t major in business like you can at some schools. When I graduated Duke, my first job was at Bain & Company. Certainly both the rigor of the work at Duke and the exposure of those undergraduate business courses taught at Fuqua helped prepare me at Bain, and then Bain helped set up the rest of my business career.

Little did I know that my political science major would some day come in handy. people have asked me, ‘Well what did you major in at Duke?’ and I say, well, political science, when really what I learned at duke was how to study and how to work hard. When I went into the government four and a half years ago, it ends up that my major actually has some relevance. I think it’s the liberal arts’ high intellectual stimulation and working standards expectations of Duke that really helped set me up for my career. But it just so happens that both my courses at Fuqua and my political science major were very relevant to what I ended up doing.

TC: How did you make the transition from the business world to the policy world and where did that jump come from?

JZ: I grew up in Washington. My friends’ parents worked in government, neighbors would work in government. I went from Duke to Bain & Company in Boston, was there for a couple of years, and then moved back to Washington to pursue some entrepreneurial ventures. So effectively, I’ve been in Washington my whole life except for the four years at Duke and two and a half years in Boston with Bain. And as I was in business in Washington, I had friends who were in government and I always thought some day I’d like to try to do that. I was a big believer in President Obama when he was running for president, but I didn’t think that I would serve at that point in time.

The CPO is also the deputy at the Office of Management and Budget. It’s a combined position and when they asked Warner for who might be a candidate for that—Warner I had known from the Washington business community. Mark Warner was a business person before he was a governor and now senator. Warner introduced me into the process, and few weeks later I was announced by the president on a Saturday morning radio address as the first chief performance officer and deputy director for management of the office of the budget. So it was something that I always hoped I would have at some point in my career, but the opportunity to do this specific opportunity and the specific timing was unanticipated. And I look back and think how fortunate I have been to have had the opportunity to serve the president.

TC: Was this position in fixing the website something you hoped to have a hand in?

JZ: About three weeks ago the president announced that I would be be coming back into the White House to be his chief economic advisor, which is the director of the National Economic Council. So I’m very excited to be rejoining the president’s team and helping to coordinate economic policy. I am game to help out in any way that I can and Healthcare.gov and the ACA and the website are very important for providing people who don't have health care today. So if I can contribute in any way to making sure that the Affordable Care Act is successful and people who don’t have insurance today can be insured, I’m happy to do so.

TC: There’s a trend in your career of serving managerial duties. Do you think this is a skill that you honed at Duke and, looking to current Duke students hoping to achieve success in their careers, is this something that they need to be successful in their own careers?

I think that my time at Duke as I said—disciplines and my work experience over the summers when I was at college then that first job at Bain & Company really did provide me with an early foundation of management exposure and learning. I do think that management and leadership is important in any organization, but at the same time, some individuals were better at becoming world-class experts at certain disciplines and therefore its important to have a mix of really strong experts and managers. There should be multiple tracks to the senior-most positions in organizations. Sometimes I think organizations make a mistake in that they create one path towards the top of an organization that says you have to manage. Some people just aren’t interested in or aren’t wired to be great managers that doesn’t mean they’re not unbelievably important to the organization.

My track happens to be general management but there are brilliant people at this university who are world-class, Nobel Prize winners who may or may not be good managers. But the world needs them to do what they do great. Think of management as one track towards trying to be really good.

TC: Do you think you're really good at getting those people to be really great at what they do?

JZ: I think that’s what management is all about—it’s creating a team of great people who share a vision come up with a handful of priorities and then execute against those priorities. As a manager or leader your one job is to put together a great team and make sure that that team shares a vision and has a clear set of priorities and then gets stuff done.

TC: What do you think is the difference in working in the business world versus the policy world?

JZ: In business depending on the industry or the company, you have different goals and different methods. But at the end of the day there is one bottom line which is how is the company doing financially in terms of its revenue growth and its profit building.

In government, it’s much more complex in that there is no single bottom line. There's programs in health care, programs in nutrition, there’s programs in national defense where its very important when you’re leading these organizations to have clear metrics and clear goals and to share visions, I talked about, but it’s more complex. There isn’t that single bottom line financial metric. So business is hard and business is complex but managing in the public sector I would argue is even more difficult. It requires even more focus and even more time.

TC: Would you ever go back to the business world after serving in the public sector?