Page 186 - The Drucker Lectures

Reinventing Government: The Next Phase [ 167

the reaction also in most of the federal government, even within
Washington. I would hazard the guess that it was the reaction
of a good many of the people who are now converts and who sit
in this room. For them, as heads of major government activi-
ties, they’d felt as though they had heard all this before. In fact,
even when the vice president published last September the first
specific report, most people felt, “We have heard all of this be-
fore, and nothing has ever happened.” One of my friends, who is
pretty high up in the federal government and who for years has
been trying to do what you now call “reinventing government,”
commented to me in private, “Alas, this reads almost like the
Grace Report of 10 years ago, and will have similar non-results.”
And yet, you have had tremendous results.
But one thing has not changed, and it is important to realize it.
The country as a whole—and as far as my own totally unscientific
sample goes, this includes a good many of the people in the lower
rungs of government service—still pay little attention to what you
are doing. Outside of Washington, for instance, I’ve hardly seen the
slightest reference to it in the media. Why is that? The performance
is there, and it is very impressive. But why is it still not seen as an
achievement? I think this is a very important question because it
gives you a clue as to what the next stage of the work has to be.
If you ask me why you have been successful, the answer is
easy. You have been successful because you have focused on per-
formance. To be sure, you are stressing cost reduction, and the
proposals that you are now including in the 1995 budget talk
a great deal about getting rid of the expenditures that are no
longer needed. I can only say that I hope you will have better
luck getting these things through the Congress than any of your
predecessors had. And, as you know, a good many of them pro-
posed getting rid of exactly the same expenditures and programs,
which, if they ever served any purpose, surely no longer do. But
your main focus has been on performance—on enabling this of-