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Highlights from the speech of Al Gore at 3QC
Bartel Stompedissel bartel.stompedissel@minbzk.nl
15 September 2004, more than a thousand civil servants from all EU Member States welcomed Al Gore. The former Vice President was invited to give a keynote address to the 3rd Quality Conference for Public Administrations in the EU. His experience with the Reinventing Government program combined with the advantage of hindsight, would offer a fruitful combination that resulted in inspiring examples with lessons for the future. But what most struck the conference participants was the energy and passion Al Gore displayed.
Politics of reinventing government
•�The challenge we all face in trying to implement government reform or reinvention of government is: You have to deal with the politics of reinventing government because there are a lot of people who don’t want to reinvent government. There are a lot of mid-level bureaucrats who don’t want anything changed in the way government operates today.�
•�One of the secrets that I learned, enabled me to have some success in this. President Clinton directly delegated to me the authority to make changes. If I gave an order, the bureaucracy had to obey it as if it came from the president.�
•�Any organization that undertakes this kind of task has to have strong leadership. The person who is in charge has to back up the reformers. If you try to reinvent any government agency and the people who are resisting change have the slightest hind that your boss is not going to back you up, you can forget it. You have to have committed leadership supporting the reinvention process.�
The reason why
•�Most people have had the experience that some businesses have provided them with something that is different from what they had in the past. Very efficient, with lower prices, and higher quality.�
•�Because they had these experiences in the market place, they know that it is possible for organizations to reform themselves and to do better. And often the people feel they don’t get that kind of service from their government. But if there are government agencies that do provide that quality of services then it inspires confidence in democracy and in self-government.�
•�You recognize it when you get it!�
Illustrating the need for change
•�Try to illustrate to the public the need for change. But some subjects appear to be complicated. People just don’t want to bother with it, they certainly don’t want to invest their time in worrying about it. So you have to entertain them to some extent if you want to buy their attention and in the process built support for the kind of cultural change that is involved.�
•�We came up with a slogan: works better, costs less. Sounds like a toothpaste commercial, but that was in fact what we were trying to do, to create a government that works better and costs less.�
Good and bad news
•�Slowly over time we did built a considerable amount of support for it. Now ideologically it doesn’t matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. The principles involved in transforming the operations in a public bureaucracy to make it more efficient and to provide better service, are really beyond ideology. That is the good news.�
•�The bad news is that I cannot tell you that there is a huge amount of political benefit that comes directly from the voters for doing this. But it is very satisfying work and as I said earlier it is extremely important to accomplish this work.�
Important principles
•�Listen to your customers. Ask them what it is they want, don’t assume that you know what they want.�
•�After asking your customers what they want, measure your performance. But there is a key to this principle. You have to be really careful when you decide what it is you are going to measure. When you put a measuring system into place, everybody in the organization, once they realize what’s being measured, then that’s what they are going to give you.�
•�Be creative. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.�
Being creative
•�We actually had a difficult time in encouraging people in charge of government programs to do something new and to depart from the standard routine. People are scared to death to do anything new and thus these routines become established that never change.�
•�If you are not making mistake, you are not trying hard enough.�
E-Government
•�E-government is a variety of reinventing government that is very powerful and I am all for it. But don’t let anyone ever convince you that any technology is the magic answer to reinventing government. It is not. You have to change the culture, you have to change the management practices, you have to change the way of thinking.�
•�But the introduction of new information technology can speed up the change in thinking and culture.�
•�E-government encourages the breaking down of those walls between the different organizations, the different silos, and that is one of the best things about it.�
Leadership in the information age
•�There is a new kind of leadership that is required in the information age. It is not just issuing instructions and getting results. You have to concentrate on establishing a vision for your department and that vision has to be compelling enough so that everybody in the organization feels that they are part of something that is worthwhile.�
•�You have to communicate clear goals.�
•�You have to communicate and maintain a set of values that will be used by everybody in the organization as the basis for decision making.�
•�And if the people who are part of that organization feel like that they are part of that mission and it is important to them, then everything else to goes into reinventing government is going to be much easier to accomplish.�
•�In this day and time we all have a purpose to redeem the promise of self-government and make this a better world.�
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