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Army Conference: Acquisitions and Logistics Initiatives
Washington, DC

The Power of Partnership

Remarks by Morley Winograd, Director National Partnership for Reinventing Government

November 16, 1998

It is a real pleasure to address this meeting. You are focused on making our national defenses and the Army in particular, more efficient and effective. I want to particularly thank General Wilson, Assistant Secretary Hoeper, Deputy Assistant Secretary Oscar, Major General Gust and Mr. Louis Giuliano.

Thank you for this opportunity to share in your journey to the Army of tomorrow.

I can tell you that Vice President Gore, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War, is deeply appreciative of your enthusiasm and commitment. He regards reinventing the support systems for our front line fighters as an absolute priority. That priority is even more urgent in light of the current crisis in Iraq and the mobilization of our troops. When the United States won its decisive victory in Desert Storm, the Army was quite clear on why we won. We had the best-trained Army in our history equipped with the best stuff on the field of battle. It was the first victory for troops prepared to fight an Information Age war and "our stuff worked". Most of you in this room have the job of making sure that "our stuff" continues to work -- and not just works, but prevails.

As I leafed through the program, I noticed this relevant phrase: "reshape the infrastructure so that evolutionary changes will occur that provide distribution-based systems that substitute velocity for mass, and that provide the right stuff, at the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost." Now as most of you know, the Vice President promotes the use of Plain Language every chance he gets.

The last part about providing the troops "the right stuff, at the right place, at the right time and at the right cost" is great. That’s plain language. But instead of that rather lengthy "velocity for mass" introduction, I suggest that you substitute the words of that controversial and innovative Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

As Forrest put it, the key to victory was "to be the fustest with the mostest." Today we would say "speed wins". Perhaps this could be the plain language goal of this conference: "To create a system that makes sure our front line fighters are always the fustest with the mostest -- the right stuff, at the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost." To accomplish that goal it will require one of the strongest forces discovered in these five years of reinventing government. That force is known as the POWER OF PARTNERSHIP. You are here from business, from the Pentagon, from Army bases and operations across the nation and around the world. You are here sponsored by two outstanding associations – the Society for Logistics Engineers and the Society of American Value Engineers. And your host for this conference is the Fort Monmouth Community. On behalf of the Vice President, let me thank Major General Nabors and his Ft. Monmouth team for helping to bring all of the partners together.

All of you are here to unleash the POWER of PARTNERSHIP in reinventing how we support and supply our troops. Based on my experience in applying the principles of reinvention, I am sure that great things will happen as a result of this meeting.

Let me give you a brief history of reinventing government as a way of demonstrating the power of these reinvention principles. In 1993, President Clinton asked Vice President Gore to reinvent government, to create a government that worked better and cost less. To accomplish that task, Vice President Gore created the National Performance Review – or NPR – as a kind of "Reinvention Corps," a volunteer team of front-line government workers.

The NPR’s first job was to collect and to share know-how and can-do – there is a vast reservoir of such talent in the federal government – and to create a dialogue with the federal workforce. Some of you in this room probably contributed to that effort.

The Vice President also went personally from agency to agency inspiring the troops and launching a campaign to generate recommendations on how to improve government. This reinvention effort, unlike previous government reform efforts, is not the creation of an ivory-tower panel of experts. The Vice President proceeded on the premise that "workers know work," and that the people who knew best how to fix government were the frontline workers themselves.

NPR collected ideas from workers all over the country, and refined them into a series of recommendations. Some of these recommendations could be implemented almost immediately, others are still awaiting a legislative go-ahead five years later. But the changes that have been made resulted in radical improvement.

We celebrated the fifth anniversary of the NPR in March. What has been accomplished in that time? To date reinventing government has resulted in $137 billion in savings and the federal workforce is smaller by 351,000 people, as small as it was in the administration of John F. Kennedy. Our procurement reforms, made possible by the support they received from the Congress, have been rated by the Brookings Institution as rating an A for accomplishment in transforming government. And public trust in government to do the right thing has improved for the first time in nearly 30 years. After a continuous decline from 70% in the sixties it reached a low of 17% before this administration took office. It has risen to the mid-thirties since 1993. That is achieving Vice President Gore’s ultimate goal for reinvention – to restore the trust of the American people in their government.

For all of its success in the first five years, it was clear that to make the next set of changes in our government, to complete the process of completely transforming government before the 21^st Century, we needed to change our strategies as well. So to mark our fifth anniversary, the NPR changed its name to emphasize our new focus on partnerships. As most of you know, "NPR" no longer stands for the "National Performance Review," but has been renamed the "National Partnership for Reinventing Government". It was time, we are no longer in the business of reviewing government performance. We are in the business of building partnerships, and you in the defense community are key partners in that effort.

Our Vision

We developed a new vision statement: "America @ Our Best." It is a vision that successfully aligns all of the forces that impact the successful accomplishment of our mission. Taxpayers, those who are the recipients of government services, federal government employees, policy-makers and influencers all have a voice in what kind of government we should create. By stating clearly that our overarching purpose is to create a government that represents America at our best we eliminated a lot of potential controversy over what NPR is about. People may disagree with our tactics, but we have found few who are in favor of America at our worst.

The vision reads like a website address, and that is on purpose. America @ Our Best implies a key role for information technology as we reinvent government. IT will enable us to accomplish much more, much sooner, and much cheaper. A large part of this meeting is focused on that premise.

Our Values

Next the NPR established our values as an organization:

The most important unspoken question anyone has when asked to partner with someone is, "Do I share this person’s values?" If not, it is very difficult to trust them enough to be in a partnership with them. So we decided to make our values explicit and even define what they mean as you can see in this overhead. I think these values are shared with all of you here today. But if we don’t have a shared set of values, partnership won’t, in the long run, work.

Our Mission

We didn’t change the mission much. "Works better and costs less" is still the key to NPR’s mission. But we did add the important phrase "get results Americans care about." Bureaucracy has a tendency to tinker around the edges, to make changes that only a few would understand or notice. We have to focus on issues and programs that can make a real, palpable difference in the quality of our citizens’ lives. And so we are now focused on five key strategies that we think are so powerful or catalytic in their nature, that they will allow us to transform government forever.

Our Strategies

The first strategy is to change the way we incent and measure our success. It isn’t just achieving our performance goals, although they are certainly important and need to be more tightly linked to each leader’s performance evaluation. We also need to make sure those goals are being accomplished in ways that involve the front line workers and satisfy our customers. Those are two of NPR’s original ideas and we now want to weave all three of these elements of reinvention—results from GPRA, customers and employee satisfaction—into the woof and warp of every agencies processes.

The second is to create an electronic government—on line and always accessible by its citizens. The outline of this idea is contained in a major publication of NPR last year entitled Access America, and we will be rolling out the first set of applications for students in this on line world yet this year. Eventually we hope to transform how people think of government, using this E.Gov concept just as much as Amazon.com has transformed how American’s think about buying books. Third, we want all parts of government to rethink their mission. It is not to conduct a specific set of activities or increase their budgets from year to year. Instead it is to focus on the outcomes or results Americans care about and to do it without regard to current organizational boundaries. The best example of this strategy is the Food Safety Council established by Executive Order of President Clinton this fall. Five different government agencies, including the Defense Department, are now working to achieve a common vision of how to provide Americans with the safest possible food.

Fourth, we have identified 32 High Impact Agencies whose activities are so central to how American’s think about government that they need to be at the forefront of our reinvention activities. One of these is the Defense Acquisitions activity that Jacques Gansler leads in the Department of Defense that is so critical to your own work. We want, and I know Jacques, wants, each of these organizations to transform their business processes, information technology and culture to deliver the "fustest with the mostest" to their customers.

Finally, we want to enroll every government employee and as many in the private sector that we can recruit to join us in convincing the rest of the country that it is possible to reinvent our government and once again make it the very best that America has to offer. It is only by doing that that we can accomplish the ultimate goal of reinvention.

Our Goal

Thank you