The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

agement section’s effort at post does not go to direct support of the mis- sion, but rather to the application of regulations and policy relevant to that work. For example, we do not just purchase a plane ticket; we fil- ter the purchase through a screen of rules. This level of management con- trol comes at a high cost, and current regulations impose a significant overhead on posts’ operations. At large posts where the overhead is spread among many employees and many agencies, the cost is proportionally smaller and the protection it gives proportionally higher. For a small post in a First World city, where both the staff and the potential losses are small, a high level of management con- trols is not cost-effective. Success in shifting to private-sector services is depen- dent upon adopting private-sector modes of operation. Most critically, this means moving away from manage- ment by regulation to management by budget. Small, lightly staffed posts do not have the staff to work both the substantive issues and the intricacies of our housing, travel and allowance systems. Although shifting to management by budget might save money, it would, even more importantly, free up positions that otherwise would have been devoted to navigating basic business decisions through a sea of regulations. Woody Allen famously said that 80 percent of success is just showing up. Becoming readier, more rightsized, expeditionary, transformed and globally repositioned — in short, doing more with less — as we are doing, will help to maximize our current, inadequate supply of human resources. But in more and more arenas, the Foreign Service does not have the staff to even show up. Ultimately, without a net addition of personnel, we are taking ourselves out of the fight. F O C U S D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 Keeping staffing in balance depends on the recognition that time is a resource.