Mint Condition

"I've always been in a hurry," he says. "It's sort of my personal style. But I didn't rush the changes at the Mint. I started small, with a few initiatives here and there. Then as the envelope was pushed or as roadblocks appeared, problems were tackled as they cropped up and progress continued. Big changes have been made over the past six years, but they've been made incrementally. You do big things by doing lots of small things."

Back in 1994, Diehl and his change-minded Mint colleagues could have taken their first small steps in just about any direction. Costs needed to be cut. Manufacturing plants needed to be streamlined. But Diehl's first critical decision was to focus on changes that got to the heart of the Mint's relationship with its customers. "One of the greatest lessons I've learned," he says, "is that if you identify a problem that customers really care about, and then commit yourself publicly to fixing it -- taking that risk is absolutely crucial to changing an organization. And if you fix the problem, you build an incredible sense of confidence that the organization can tackle the next problem."

The customer-service problems that needed to be fixed were plentiful, especially on the collectibles side. Sure, the Mint manufactures dimes and quarters and guards the gold in Fort Knox. But it also runs a huge mail-order business -- a government version of L.L. Bean or Lands' End -- with distributors in 45 foreign countries, that sells coins to more than 1.1 million collectors. Last year, that business alone generated revenue of more than $1 billion.

But the collectibles and commemoratives operation was big despite the Mint, not because of it. Its customer-service center in Lanham, Maryland was something out of Charles Dickens rather than Tom Peters. The center sat on the second floor of a converted warehouse. Customer-service reps were packed into a dismal space where the heat didn't work in the winter and the air-conditioning failed in the summer. "It was god-awful," says Diehl. To make matters worse, the center was housed in the same building as a U.S. Postal Service regional package-handling facility. Anytime postal workers stumbled on a strange-looking package, they'd issue a bomb scare, and the entire building would be evacuated. As a result, it wasn't all that unusual for an incoming call to be answered not by a U.S. Mint customer-service rep (no matter how frostbitten or heat exhausted) but by an answering machine.

This dysfunctional environment produced depressing results. The Mint was fulfilling only half of its mail orders within eight weeks. The rest, jokes Kevin Cullinane, 48, assistant director for customer care, would take anywhere from eight weeks to infinity. "That type of performance would bankrupt a private company," says Cullinane. But as a government agency, the Mint simply ignored the reality of its performance. "There was no sense of urgency about the problem," says Diehl, "or even a sense that there was a problem."

The situation got worse still. One reason that the Mint didn't feel a sense of urgency about its frayed relationships with customers was that it was basically forbidden from interacting with them. Prior to the Clinton Administration, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) actively discouraged agencies from spending money on focus groups and surveys -- the most rudimentary tools used by private companies to gauge their performance. "OMB never saw the benefit of having an agency talk to its customers," Diehl says half-seriously. "In fact, it suspected that if you were talking with them, you were conspiring with them -- to get Congress to do something that OMB didn't want done."

That paranoid mind-set created a bureaucratic maze in which every customer-survey instrument that the Mint wanted to use had to be approved by OMB -- a review process that took, on average, six months. So Diehl hit on a simple idea: If the Mint couldn't survey its customers officially, Diehl himself would do so unofficially. A few weeks after joining the Mint, he embarked on his own personal fact-finding mission. He went to coin conventions, talked with the hobby press, found situations in which he could interact with collectors. He shunned the ceremonial role that the director of the Mint usually played at these functions (collectors would line up to ask for Diehl's autograph), and did what any smart politician (and change agent) would do: He worked the room.

Diehl asked questions, listened, and learned. He quickly identified the two most widely shared complaints about how the Mint did business. One, it took too long to get coins into its customers' hands. Two, because the Mint required payment up front, it was holding onto its customers' money for an unreasonably long time.