Page 188 - The Drucker Lectures

Reinventing Government: The Next Phase [ 169

how to do this. But it is not what you are doing now. It requires
a different organization. It requires, above all, specific goals of
improvement—3 or 4 or 5 percent each year—for each agency. It
requires measurements. It requires benchmarking.
Benchmarking, of course, is not new. The U.S. Navy, for in-
stance, has benchmarked its gunnery performance for at least a
hundred years, and gunnery competitions go back to the British
at least a hundred years before that. But benchmarking today
does not only mean comparing operations with the best that
happens within a given agency. It means comparing what one
does with the best that is being done anyplace, and especially
with the best of what is being done outside. And by that to-
ken, the things you report as major achievements in government
agencies would be considered more or less clerical adjustments in
a good many outside institutions, and not only in business but in
a great many nonprofit organizations as well.
In other words, you have created receptivity and that is by no
means a small achievement. You have shown examples of suc-
cess, and that, too, is a major achievement and a necessary one.
But how do you now convert these promises into performance?
For without an organized, systematic, continuous, and ongoing
process—and without measurements that hold what an indi-
vidual agency does against the best, the very best that anyone,
inside and outside the federal government, does—these are only
promises. And the seedlings, no matter how lush and green they
look today, are bound to wither and shrivel up.
We need “reinventing government.” If we do not make a
start on it, then pretty soon we face catastrophe within the next
10 years or so. In the presidential election in 1992, Mr. [Ross]
Perot—remember him?—won almost one-fifth of the vote. And
he would have gotten much more had he not turned off a great
many of us with his demagoguery. A different candidate, out to
downsize government, might well have carried the day. And the