Innovations: Musical Chairs in Maryland

Even before she had a chance to take over the Maryland Governor's chair last month, Shaila Aery confronted her first crisis: two guards held hostage in a state prison uprising. Aery remembers thinking, "Where can I hide?" Fortunately the real Governor, William Donald Schaefer, alerted to the emergency, was already at his desk. But for Aery, normally secretary of higher education, it was a dramatic introduction to a unique job-swapping scheme in which the Governor ordered state Cabinet officials to exchange portfolios every morning for a month, then write reports and suggestions based on their experiences.

Schaefer, who moved temporarily to the department of human resources, is proud of his shake-up. Taking over a Cabinet colleague's desk, he believes, brings in fresh eyes and can inject new ideas into stale bureaucracy. He devised the plan while he was mayor of Baltimore from 1971 to 1987 because the city's departments "did not know they were interdependent." When he first proposed the idea to city officials, he recalls, "they thought it was silly. But the second time we got good results."

State officials were no less skeptical the first time Schaefer scrambled the chairs of 31 Cabinet members three years ago. Even this year, there was some foot dragging. "I bitched my head off, but it was an eye opener for everybody," says director of public relations Lainy LeBow, who also went to the human resources department. "I'll be the first to sign up next time." Some of the officials grumbled over the added hours, but most of their anxiety was about outsiders' big-footing on their territory. Everybody in Annapolis remembers the last swap, in 1988, when housing secretary Jacqueline Rogers was sent over to the planning department and promptly recommended that it be dissolved. Within a year it was gone, folded into the budget office. This year, when Rogers showed up for a stint as the head of the budget office, officials there rolled out the red carpet and solicited her advice on devising a new format for budget documents.

Marylanders have learned to expect the unexpected from Schaefer, a Democrat who is serving his second four-year term. A 69-year-old bachelor with a hot temper and a flair for the flamboyant, he made headlines in February by granting clemency to eight women convicted of murdering men who had abused them. In the notoriously corrupt politics of Maryland, he remains squeaky clean, an unpolished zircon who spends as many nights in the working-class row house he has lived in all his life as he does in the 53-room official mansion that was redecorated by his close friend of 35 years, Hilda Mae Snoops.