VISIT SUE WOOLSEY AT HER HOME OUTSIDE
Annapolis, Maryland and you might think you’ve
stepped onto a proving ground for renewable energy
and energy-efficient technologies. A 3.75-kilowatt
photovoltaic array covers the farmhouse’s southwest-
facing roof. Out on the dock, Woolsey and her husband
Jim have installed two small wind turbines. A
geothermal heating system keeps the house reliably
warm in the cold Maryland winters and cool in the hot
and humid summers. To maintain a comfortable
temperature, they’ve filmed their windows, installed
attic tents, and re-insulated electrical sockets and other
openings. Look in the garage and you’ll find a plug-in
Prius, modified by battery manufacturer A123.
“The first month the geothermal was operative, our
electricity bill went down by nearly 70 percent from the
same month the year before, although we added the
charging of the Prius to the load,” Woolsey says proudly.
Her fascination with renewable energy and energy
efficiency dates back to the late-70s when she was
Associate Director for Human Resources at the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) in the Carter
Administration.
RMI cofounder and Chief Scientist Amory Lovins
had recently published his landmark Foreign Affairs essay
“Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” in which he
argued for an “end-use/least-cost” approach to the
energy problem.
“There was a big buzz about him in the whiz-kid
policy community,” Woolsey remembers. “So I was
really excited to meet him.”
One day, she and her colleague Elliot Cutler, then
Associate Director for Natural Resources at OMB,
decided to seek him out. Woolsey still remembers the
hallway on the second floor of the old Executive Office
Building where the three first met.
Even though her work at the time was very focused on the
“human, domestic side of the budget,” Lovins’ analysis and
reasoning appealed to her. He really exemplified how, “if you
question the assumptions effectively, you can turn the issue on
its head and see a whole new range of answers,” she says.
Prior to joining OMB, Woolsey had worked for five years at
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, evaluating
HeadStart and many other programs.
The experience taught her that federal policies often contain
some startling internal contradictions. For many years, the food
stamp program, for instance, required an eligible family to pay
money to receive the government benefit. Five dollars of food
stamps might cost $1.50. But “if you didn’t have $1.50 to buy
$5.00 worth of food stamps, you couldn’t get anything,” says
Woolsey. That posed serious problems for people who were
most in need—the people who didn’t have any money to begin
with. The purchase requirement had been imposed to limit the
cost of the program, but the disincentives to participation had
operated in exactly the wrong fashion.
At OMB, Woolsey worked with Congress to eliminate the
purchase requirement. This increased the cost of the food stamp
program because it encouraged more people to enroll, and
Congress decided not to apply the incentives to those higher on
the income scale. But it also helped the government achieve its
stated objective: feeding the country’s poor.
These early experiences in Washington not only revealed
Woolsey’s knack for taking on big responsibilities—at OMB,
she was running 51 percent of the federal budget—but also her
keen eye for process and organizational dynamics.
A Stanford- and Harvard-educated psychologist, Woolsey
says her understanding of the way people think and act in
groups was invaluable. For her, academic concepts like group
theory and role theory found practical application in the halls
of government. The key was parlaying that understanding into
“I found in my government career that you
could get a lot done in bureaucracies if you kept
your eye on” what you wanted to accomplish, she
says.
In 1980, Woolsey left government and
landed a job writing editorials for the
Washington Post. Nonetheless, she retained an
abiding interest in government programs and
their inconsistencies.
On Memorial Day, 1980, she published an
unsigned editorial describing the compensation
for naval petty officers returning from the Persian
Gulf versus the federally set wage other workers
were paid under the Comprehensive
Employment and Training Act (CETA), the
government’s program to reduce unemployment
rates. The results were shocking. According to Woolsey’s analysis,
sailors returning home to Norfolk, Virginia made as little as
$2.54 per hour—even after housing allowances, tax advantages,
and food were factored in to their wages. In contrast, people
employed under CETA were making $3.75 per hour.
According to officials who accompanied him that Memorial
Day, President Carter read the editorial on his way to greet
returning sailors in Norfolk. He immediately scrapped his
speech and rewrote it to include his support for a military pay
increase that was working its way through Congress.
If Woolsey had not been convinced of the importance of
communications and media before, she was now. “I probably
had more effect on Jimmy Carter as a member of the press than
I did in his administration,” she jokes.
Her career as a pundit was short lived, however. By the end of
1980, she joined the consulting and accounting firm Coopers &
Lybrand (later to become part of PricewaterhouseCoopers) as a
consulting partner. It was there, she says, that she deepened her
understanding of organizational management and operations, a skill
set she would later use in her posts at the National Academies.
The position at Coopers & Lybrand “gave me a lot of
background about how things are done by a wide range of
companies, universities, and nonprofits,” she says. “So when I
went to the Academies, and people said, ‘ This is just the way
things are done,’ I could say ‘Well, the people at X organization
tried it this other way and had a lot of success.’”
Of all the places she worked in her distinguished career,
Woolsey says the National Academies were the most obsessive
about process. For over a decade and a half, she would serve as
the Academies’ Executive Director of Behavioral and Social
Sciences and Education, Chief Operating Officer and, finally,
Chief Communications Officer.
Listening to her discuss committee selection, public
comment periods, and technical reviews at the independent research organization reveals a world of deeply entrenched
behavior. But it was a world she was well suited to help.
During her tenure, the Academies streamlined their
operations and became far more effective at communicating
its research to the public. In this latter endeavor it was, again,
her willingness to rethink processes that paid off.
Most studies at the Academies are initiated when a
government agency asks a question, explains Woolsey. For
example, the EPA wants to know whether it is using the right
kind of metrics to measure mercury levels in groundwater.
“Generally, you put together a committee with all the areas
of specialization, and they look at all the available data and
draw conclusions and make recommendations,” she says.
But the problem with this approach was that these reports
ended up being written primarily for the client (e.g., the
EPA) or for colleagues of the scientists and engineers on the
committee. Though technically of the highest quality, they
generally went unread by most of the public.
“What we decided to do was ask, from the audience point
of view, ‘Who cares about the mercury in the groundwater?’
People who work on developmental psychology,
pediatricians, parents care,” says Woolsey. The EPA might be
asking the question that prompts the research, but the
research can have a larger impact if you think about the
audience in broader terms. In the case of the groundwater
study, the Academies published a popular summary of the
health research on mercury for the general public.
In 2004, Woolsey made yet another career change. She now
serves on the boards of a number of companies, non-profits, and
universities, including Colorado College, Caltech, the Institute
for Defense Analysis, the German Marshall Fund, Fluor
Corporation, and Van Kampen Mutual Funds—and of course,
Rocky Mountain Institute. “To some extent, this is a dilettante’s
paradise. I love new challenges, steep learning curves,” she says.
But this humbleness belies her deep understanding about how
to make these organizations run better.
And not everything she’s doing is entirely new, either. Her
interest in efficient and productive ways to be
environmentally responsible—“doing well by doing good”—
that Lovins sparked more than three decades ago, remains at
the core of her involvement with RMI.
“Of all the work that I’ve done on figuring out how
organizations work best—working with highly scientific
types, working with development—this comes together for
me in a lot of interesting ways.”
