The Chief Energizer

n reinvention's impact:

When we got together with Internal Revenue a couple years ago to figure out how to reinvent the IRS, we got frontline IRS employees from all over the country, and we asked them what needed to be changed. They came up with dynamite ideas.

IRS now has a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week help line. I'm proud to say that wasn't my idea or anyone's idea from NPR. That came from front-line IRS people.

Thousands of teams of government workers, many of them with private-sector partners, have gotten awards for reinventing government, for doing great things to serve customers or to cut red tape, to save money. These are people whose lives have been enriched and who have enriched other people's lives.

On dealing with the private sector:

At NPR we have been preaching collaboration with the regulated community. Rather than rewarding people for how many tickets they give out, agencies should reward them for how much they foster compliance.

I was meeting with some Food and Drug Administration people in Chicago, and talked to some old, veteran inspectors. This experienced inspector was explaining how they used to grade her on number of violations, and now they don't even keep track of how many citations she gives out. I asked her, "Don't you miss the thrill of catching someone doing something wrong?" And she said, "Oh no. When I catch someone in a violation, I know we failed."

On management reform at the Defense Department:

DoD has made remarkable steps in acquisition reform. It all sounds pretty commonsensical, but they're putting $35 telephones on their aircraft carriers instead of $500 telephones. They're buying T-shirts from Jockey. They're buying ketchup in bottles instead of cans.

I think the place DoD has the furthest to go is developing an empowerment culture. The military side is ahead of the civilian side because there are some fundamental military principles about empowering leaders at all levels. They've made some improvements, but they still have an old-fashioned headquarters. It's bigger than it ought to be, makes more decisions than it ought to.

On reinvention's unfinished business:

The great unfinished task is that we've only begun to tap the ability and creativity and enthusiasm of the workers.

Organizations that really do well at that are just fabulously successful. NASA's doing things that NASA people would have sworn were impossible five years ago, like landing a rover on Mars and deploying it in an exploration mission in one-third the time and at one-tenth the cost that they had estimated it would take.

[NASA Administrator] Dan Goldin told the people running the Mars lander, "This is how much money you have. It's one-tenth what you asked for." And they said "We can't do it for that." And he said, "You have to."

Just the retro-rockets would have used up the entire budget doing things the old way, so they pretty quickly figured they couldn't afford retro-rockets. So they designed a "beach ball." The whole lander was enclosed in a great big inflated ball. It hit the Martian surface, bounced, bounced again, bounced a couple times more and stopped. Those people would have sworn they couldn't accomplish that mission, but NASA was able to tap their creativity.