    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [March 6, 1996]
    [Pages 378-379]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 378]]

    Remarks on Presenting the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards
    March 6, 1996

        Thank you. Let me say how delighted I am to be here today to be a
    part of this again. I want to begin by thanking a few people. First I'd
    like to thank Secretary Brown and all the others who are here from the
    Commerce Department for, I think, giving this country the best Commerce
    Department it has had in many, many decades, and I thank them for that.
    Mr. Houghton and Mr. Bradshaw, I thank you and all your team for coming
    here today. And we want to especially welcome Mr. Houghton's brother,
    Congress' most prominent musician--[laughter]--Congressman Amo Houghton
    from New York. I thank the Baldrige Foundation; its Chair, Bob Allen, is
    here. Thank you, sir, for your work. I want to thank the people in the
    White House who are my eyes and ears in outreach to the American
    business community, Mack McLarty and Alexis Herman.
        Let me say, I have some remarks here I decided not to give because I
    want to just tell you a little bit from the heart what this means to me.
    When I became President I had worked for 12 years as a Governor,
    starting in a State with an unemployment rate that was 3 percent above
    the national average and that never got down to the national average but
    one month until 1992, the last year I served. We decided that we had to
    build a partnership with business. We decided that America would not do
    well unless manufacturing came back. And we decided to put a special
    emphasis on the whole quality management approach, to make people who
    were committed to that feel welcome in our State. In the 1980's when
    there was a dramatic drop in manufacturing employment nationwide, it
    went up in our State. And we were proud of it, and we worked on it.
        So I am very familiar with the Baldrige Award, with the memory of
    Secretary Baldrige and all those in both parties who have supported this
    award since its inception. And I just want to say a few words about what
    the significance of this is.
        There's a lot of discussion today about whether things are good or
    bad in the American economy. The truth is, there's a lot of good, and
    there's some bad, because, as all of you know who are working in this
    arena, we are going through a period of breathtaking change, the most
    dramatic change in a hundred years, since we became an industrial
    society from an agricultural one. And that is forming great changes in
    the nature of work--there's more mind and less muscle in it--great
    changes in the nature of the workplace--there's not a person to waste,
    there has to be very high levels of productivity--great changes in the
    market--all the markets for money products and services are global now,
    either directly or indirectly. And that has put great new challenges on
    our society.
        We should not underestimate, first of all, the importance of a
    commitment to productivity and to quality. It is the revolution which
    has occurred in American manufacturing, I am convinced, that has led the
    way to giving us the kind of economy, with declining deficits and lower
    interest rates, which has permitted the United States to create 7.7
    million new jobs in the last 3 years, when the other 6 big economies in
    the G-7, together, have netted out at zero. It is not easy to create new
    jobs in the beginning of this technological revolution. So I cannot tell
    you how important that is.
        The second thing I want to say is that that has been a model for me
    for what we should do in Government. Our State, when I was a Governor,
    had the first quality management program of any State government. And
    the Vice President's reinventing Government operation here has obviously
    had a significant impact on not only reducing the size of Government to
    its lowest in 30 years, getting rid of 16,000 pages of regulation but,
    more important, raising the performance level in many, many agencies.
        The third thing I want to say is that one of the ways we have to
    manage this transition is to continue to create more good high-wage
    jobs. And we can do that through the passage of specific legislation, as
    we did with the telecommunications bill, which passed with virtually the
    unanimous support of the Congress, Members of both parties, and which I
    believe and Secretary Brown believes will create millions of new jobs.
    That directly affects, obviously, Corning and this specific division,
    but it will indirectly affect all of America if we can create 3 to 3\1/
    2\ million more high-wage jobs. It will

    [[Page 379]]

    help people undergoing transitions in other companies to move to those
    new jobs.
        The third point I want to make is that both of these companies have
    proved that you can have the right sort of partnership with the
    Government. The Secretary mentioned that both of them had done work with
    NIST, which is our technology division within the Commerce Department.
    The Commerce Department has done two things better than any predecessor,
    I believe, thanks to Secretary Brown and the others who work there.
    First of all, they've done a better job in opening the doors around the
    world for American businesses and American products. And secondly, they
    have tried to help, in a very effective way, manage the transition by
    investing in partnership with the private sector in important emerging
    areas of technology. And that is very important. That's the sort of
    thing Government ought to do, not deciding exactly how this economy will
    grow, not picking winners and losers but working with the private sector
    to provide that extra added measure of cooperation in the new
    technologies that will enable us to win.
        The final thing I want to say is this. These two companies--and I
    want to say a special word here about Armstrong. Henry said that, well,
    Armstrong was not--it was a traditional manufacturing company, not a
    high-tech company. All manufacturing operations that are going to
    succeed have to be high performance companies. And they have to get the
    most out of their people. And they are managing this transition in the
    same way I'm convinced we have to manage it here: teamwork. The people
    who aren't here whose names we'll never know are just as important as
    the people who are here in the fact that these two companies won these
    awards today.
        And that's something we need to keep in mind here in Washington. If
    we had more teamwork we would be more successful at giving the American
    people a higher return on their tax dollar and in moving more quickly
    through this transition. That is what works. And in a time of transition
    you simply don't have the luxury of engaging in politics as usual, just
    like you can't engage in business as usual.
        So that's the significance of this day to me. It's the validation of
    years and years of effort by people who believe in quality management.
    It's the validation of the proposition that we can create new
    opportunities for Americans if we work together to move into the future
    instead of running away from it. It proves that there is a proper role
    for the Nation's Government in a limited supportive way to help to
    create new economic opportunities. And most important, it shows that
    when we work together, we never lose.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:10 p.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to James R. Houghton, chairman
    and chief executive officer, Corning, Inc., and Henry A. Bradshaw,
    president, Armstrong World Industries' Building Products Operations.