There are only five companies in today’s Fortune 50 that were also in the Fortune 50 in 1975.
That means 90% of the businesses that once dominated the largest market in the world either failed to adapt, lost the faith of their customers, or could not manage their costs and efficiency.
I am not a tech founder, nor am I part of the startup growth scene. I grind results out of legacy assets—steel, paper, aluminum. In these industries, most players lose. Only the fastest, most capable, and most adaptable survive. After 30 years in manufacturing and operations, I know a turnaround plan when I see one.
Why? Because when a company has failed to adapt, lost its customers' trust, and mismanaged costs or efficiency, the turnaround team inevitably arrives. And strangely, I have never seen anyone surprised when drastic change was needed. In fact, the more common response is agreement: Change is long overdue.
This is why turnarounds succeed—because employees recognize the need for improvement and, crucially, they know where the opportunities are. However, when employees resist change, hide inefficiencies, and hope the crisis will simply “pass,” there is a well-known outcome. It’s called an asset sale.
Does this sound familiar? It should—because it mirrors the current state of our government. Decades of presidential and congressional largesse have turned it into a massive, underperforming legacy asset. And fixing it will be a grind. This is manufacturing complexity on steroids.
The challenge is even greater because government is not a business—it is like a business where the employees are also the customers. I personally participated in the early 2000’s Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma improvement efforts. The task of improving a process without a clear success metric, unlike profit in business, makes this turnaround significantly more challenging.
Like Elon Musk, I understand the pain of trying to get a production line to run at 3 a.m. and know that the only way forward is through two things: better systems and engaged people. Unfortunately, this is not a factory floor. We need engaged leadership—leaders who can inspire and align the silent majority of government employees who care about results and want to make things better.
Right now, we are caught in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Fixing our government requires modernizing systems, eliminating waste and fraud, and engaging federal employees in the mission of national success. But our current political landscape forces people to align with factions rather than solutions.
This is a pattern I’ve seen before. When management neglects to train or invest, and labor resists commitment to improvement, both sides become entrenched. We think in absolutes. We pick sides over one or two issues—even when we agree on the vast majority of what matters: a safe workplace, satisfied customers, mutual respect, and security for the future. The individual worker is left to decide: Are you with management or labor?
But government is not a monolith. It is not a “thing.” It is a collection of people given the authority to act on behalf of all of us. I have seen too many manufacturing plants close, destroying families and communities—not because the equipment failed, but because the people who operated it were disengaged or trapped in broken systems.
Like any turnaround, solving this requires breaking out of entrenched mindsets. Leaders must shift from factionalism to collaboration. The enemy of collaboration is speaking without listening.
Most Americans have not yet realized that the conversation fundamentally changed on election day. The voters decided the United States is an underperforming legacy asset that needs a turnaround. And the turnaround plan has only just begun.
The real question is not whether change will come, but how it will happen.
We must recognize waste and inefficiency as our shared enemies. Factories that survived did so because labor and management collaborated to eliminate obstacles to success. The ones that failed? They had workforces who sat back, waiting for the current leadership team to leave while cuts kept coming.
The five legacy companies that have remained in the Fortune 50 for half a century did not survive by accident. They made painful cuts when necessary, modernized the value they provided, and—most importantly—built engaged, aligned workforces that believed in the mutual success of management and labor.
We need that same mindset in government. Leaders on both sides must find common ground, be open minded to modernize where possible, and cultivate an engaged federal workforce. We cannot afford to ignore waste or to make indiscriminate cuts that weaken the entire system.
We are at the very beginning of this new paradigm. Assume every federal employee adds value until proven otherwise—but every program and system must continually prove its worth. Government must not only survive; it must improve.
