Spencer: Lessons in disaster from the failing Phoenix pay plan

The most chilling sentence in last week’s report on the Phoenix pay project is this bland, yet blunt, pronouncement: “These are lessons yet to be learned, not lessons that have been learned.” That’s from Goss Gilroy Inc. management consultants, whose examination painstakingly lays out 17 “lessons” – or, to put it simply, ways in which the federal government and senior public servants simply blew it.
They blew it by: not properly defining the scope of the