Sold On Government Work
Private industry often scoffs that government institutions are too bureaucratic and move too slowly – but Howard Pitkin argues that the current credit crisis is evidence that a slower, more thoughtful pace isn’t such a bad thing.
Pitkin, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Banking, has been with the department since around the age of 30 but spent much of his previous experience in other government organizations.
“It always seemed to me that [government] was the easiest place to make a contribution to the world,” he said. As for the frequent complaints about slow-acting government institutions, Pitkin points to notable business blow-ups in the past decade — the dot-com bust, Enron and now the credit crisis — and reflects that lightning-quick private businesses can throw themselves headlong into disaster. While Pitkin says speed is something to strive for, it does have its downsides.
Selling Vegetables
Pitkin’s own experience working for private enterprise came early: in high school, he worked at a vegetable stand in Manchester. He mostly remembers that as a lighthearted gig.
“I worked with people I knew, people my own age,” he said, and the area was small enough to bring in familiar faces from around the neighborhood.
But in college, Pitkin had gravitated to the public sector. He took a government screening test at a downtown Hartford post office, was given a few organizations to try out and applied to the Department of Defense as a part of the Defense Contract Agency.
This was Vietnam-war era defense department, and Hartford’s Colt was pumping out M-16s for the troops overseas. Pitkin interviewed for a low-level job and was hired on the spot. “Maybe [the interviewer] liked my necktie,” he said.
He spent two summers working there, arranging accommodations for traveling department employees, typing up reports. But it was his next summer, at the Small Business Administration, that made him decide to stick with government work.
Fair Role Model
The SBA is dedicated to helping people start and grow their own businesses, and Pitkin’s summer there exposed him to the kind of work that has an impact on people. In particular, he was impressed by the SBA’s regional director, a leader who also made sure to treat everyone fairly. Pitkin remembers that during his speeches, the director would spend as much time and attention talking to a group of college kids as to bankers.
“He would make congressmen wait on the phone just like he’d make members of the public wait on the phone,” Pitkin said. That dedication to being fair-minded stuck with Pitkin, who says he’s tried to apply the same principle to his work in bank inspections.
Pitkin’s leanings toward economic studies originally guided him back to the private sector, where he worked at the Hartford Federal Savings Bank on State Street. But when Hartford Federal started cutting jobs, Pitkin decided that there wasn’t much of a future there. So he reverted back to his original plan: He went to the State Office Building and looked into how to be a state government employee.
Pitkin became an inspection aide in the banking department, where he took care of the detail work on banking inspections. Other than the mailroom, he said, it was probably the lowest-paid position in the department.
But Pitkin said he just threw himself into the work and eventually climbed the ranks. Banking is so heavily regulated, with so many requirements for every transaction, that the industry almost becomes like a sub-section of government itself. The same principles of fairness are necessary to make good banking inspections, and Pitkin said he always tried to apply them to his work.
Pitkin rose up to become the chief of administration at the department and was appointed to his current role in September 2006.
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