Mint Condition

The answer to all three questions: Engage the public itself in the design process. Congress left the choice of who'd be on the coin to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who formed the Dollar Coin Design Advisory Committee to figure it out. Diehl acted as the chair (but as a nonvoting member) of the committee, whose members included a member of Congress, an architect, a sculptor, a numismatist, a university president, an historian, a businesswoman, and an artist. In June 1998, the committee held two days of televised public hearings and accepted suggestions on who should be on the coin. Out of 19 semifinalists -- women like Betsy Ross, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman -- the panel selected Sacagawea, the 15-year-old Shoshone leader, navigator, diplomat, and translator who played an integral role in Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition from the Ohio River Valley to the Pacific Ocean.

In August, the committee invited 23 artists to submit designs of Sacagawea for the obverse side of the coin. After listening to the feedback of representatives from the Native American community, numismatists, artists, educators, historians, and members of Congress, the committee narrowed 121 designs down to 13. Then it was time to return to the Web. On December 7, 1998 (a day that will live in infamy inside the Mint), Diehl had Bartram and her colleagues post the 13 designs on the agency's Web site. The site generated an astounding 11.7 million hits in one day -- followed by 130,000 email messages over the next two weeks and thousands of letters. "We had more hits on that one day than we'd had the whole year," says Bartram. "Putting those designs on the Web spawned an impassioned grassroots effort. We received comments not only from individuals but also from entire Native American tribes, from local communities, even from the American School in Japan, which didn't want to be left out of the process. It was incredible."

The Sacagawea phenomenon was all anyone needed to sense the power of the Web to shape the Mint's future. Today, the agency is bursting with online initiatives that would sound familiar in Silicon Valley: digital desktop branding, personalization engines, "My Mint" functions, online email targeting. But the initiative about which Bartram is most excited -- the HIP Pocket Change site -- is the one that best reflects the Mint's distinct history and unique products.

HIP, which stands for "history in your pocket," comprises several services. It's an educational tool for teachers. It's also a "digital sandbox" where kids can learn about American history, math, and language arts while they play with coins. Finally, it's a first step to bringing the Mint closer to the much-invoked (and seldom realized) goal of an online community. "A real community is created when you invite people in, provide a framework, give them resources, step back, and then allow them to create a site that they want and need," says Diehl, who believes the evolution of HIP is one of the best reflections of the Mint's future business processes -- and the culmination of the changes that have taken place during his tenure.

For this project, Bartram wrote business plans, won grants, and forged partnerships with a host of organizations, including the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, the Department of Education, and the Numismatic Guaranty Corp., which led the community program. The Learning Space, Washington State's teachers' network, sent a group of teachers to collaborate with the Mint. Bartram knew that these teachers -- who would cocreate the site and develop lesson plans for other teachers -- would need a crash course in coins. So she had them meet with coin specialists from the Smithsonian, talk to numismatists, and go on a field trip to the Philadelphia Mint, where they received a behind-the-scenes tour of coin production. "While looking at one machine, a guide was explaining that it cranks out 700 pennies a minute. One teacher looks at me and says, 'Seven hundred a minute, how many is that in one hour? How many in one day? In a week?' Instant math lesson!"

Bartram recently moved on from the Mint, to throw herself headlong into the Web by building an Internet company for a traditional retailer. But the enthusiasm that she and her team demonstrated is the best indicator of where Philip Diehl thinks the agency is going.

"My vision for the future doesn't have much to do with the Mint's products, markets, performance measures, or efficiency," he says. "It has to do with the relationship that people here have with their work. My goal is to be part of an organization whose members are engaged as whole people. I want them to have a sense of purpose, excitement, and fulfillment. The ultimate performance metric might be to call people on Sunday night and ask them how they feel about going to work the next day. Are they really looking forward to Monday morning? If the answer is yes, then people can do just about anything."