Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

Long before the Trump administration tapped Elon Musk to cut federal costs and headcount via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), business leaders and politicians have been trying to find ways to make government leaner, less bureaucratic, and more like a well-run corporation.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan asked J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to lead a private sector committee to root our government waste. While campaigning for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to “radically change the way government operates—to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government.” The notion that federal agencies and programs can be run more like businesses has animated the Oval Office aspirations of executives such as Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Doug Burgum.

But are there lessons that executives in the private sector can learn from their public counterparts? Businesses certainly have benefitted from government;........

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