Mike Dombeck – Keep Them Busy

“In Government, Either You Keep Them Busy Or They Will Keep You Busy.”

When Mike Dombeck joined the Forest Service in 1978 as a GS-6 biological technician, he and his wife settled in the woods near the south shore of Lake Superior expecting to stay there for a regular career. But he became Director of the Bureau of Land Management and later Chief of the USDA Forest Service—responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s land and supervising thousands of employees. 

Timber and mining interests reviled him as, in the words of one western senator, “…delusional.” To Forest Service employees he represented change. 

Mike puts it this way, “Everybody likes trees. Some like ’em vertical. Some like ’em horizontal.” His career has been about how to keep more of them vertical and why that is wise stewardship. 

He talks about how and why a management system and agency culture behaves the way it does—even when that behavior is dysfunctional.