Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexis Herman

Process is the safest word in the public-service lexicon: it signals motion without promising arrival. Alexis Herman, a seasoned operator who came up through labor and Democratic politics and later served as Secretary of Labor, leans hard on that safety here. The sentence is built like a bureaucratic staircase - awareness, partners, commitment - where each step is easier to approve than the one that actually costs political capital.

The intent is managerial and coalition-minded. Herman is framing change as something you manufacture through sequencing, not sheer willpower: first you define the problem publicly (raising awareness), then you distribute ownership (engaging international partners), then you lock in legitimacy (being committed). It is governance as choreography, a way to make action feel inevitable by making it collective.

The subtext is caution. "To me" quietly narrows accountability: this is a leadership philosophy, not a guarantee. "Different course of action" is also tellingly unspecified. It invites listeners to project their preferred remedy while avoiding language that would trigger opposition, budget fights, or diplomatic backlash. The repetition of "process" reinforces that the real deliverable is not an immediate policy win but the establishment of a pathway that can't be easily reversed.

Contextually, this is the rhetoric of late-20th-century institutional problem-solving, especially on cross-border issues like labor standards, trafficking, or human rights - arenas where the U.S. can't dictate outcomes outright. Herman is selling a politics of alignment: get the world in the room, then change becomes not radical, but procedural.