Set goals; develop strategies to meet them; deploy your resources; stay focused; measure your progress.
These are familiar themes to millions of us, including Boy Scouts, coaches, teachers, managers, consultants and self-help gurus. Most would agree that the hardest part of this process is the stuff in the middle, the part about staying focused, staying committed.
Which brings us to the Obama administration's National Travel and Tourism Strategy, whose mere existence marks a historical milestone for the industry. We've never had a National Travel and Tourism Strategy before.
The centerpiece of the strategy statement is the goal of boosting U.S. international arrivals to 100 million a year by 2021, a significant goal that is within reach and that can serve as a motivator, and that allows us to measure our progress. A solid start.
But as we read through the remaining elements of the 30-page document, we note that things start to get fuzzy.
The second stated goal is to "reduce barriers to trade and make it safer and more efficient for visitors to enter and travel within the United States and its territories." This is not something that is as easily measured as welcoming 100 million visitors.
Nor are there any stated metrics for the third goal, which is to "provide a high-quality visitor experience for U.S. and international visitors to achieve high customer satisfaction and inspire repeat visits."
Another is to "prioritize and coordinate support for travel and tourism across the federal government."
This may be the hardest of all. The strategy statement was the work of a task force comprising eight Cabinet departments (Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation and Treasury) plus four other government agencies: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank and the Small Business Administration.
If you were asked what all these entities had in common, would you answer "tourism"?
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The authors of this strategy know what they're up against. In their own words: "Successful implementation of the National Travel and Tourism Strategy will require sustained, high-level commitment throughout federal agencies, which in turn will depend on continued recognition of travel and tourism as a priority for the federal government. Similarly, private-sector participation in and evaluation of these policies, programs and initiatives is critical to their success."
As the document notes, the U.S. "does not have an entity that is recognized by industry and across the federal government as the primary federal policymaker on travel- and tourism-related matters."
Who, then, is going to lead the effort to sustain "high-level commitment throughout federal agencies"?
The strategy calls for the creation of an Office of Travel and Tourism within the Commerce Department to provide this higher profile, but will that be enough?
Early versions of Travel Promotion Act, which created Brand USA, called for the creation of a new federal travel official with the title of undersecretary of commerce.
The proposal didn't survive the legislative process because conservatives objected to the enlargement of the federal bureaucracy. This particular bureaucrat, however, would be charged with one of those difficult tasks in the middle, keeping the bureaucrats in 10 other government agencies focused on a tourism policy.
That would be a bureaucrat worth having.