    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [December 19, 1997]
    [Pages 1798-1802]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Presenting the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards
    December 19, 1997

        Thank you very much, Mrs. Baldrige, Robert and Nancy Baldridge,
    Harry Hertz, the examiners and judges and all those associated with the
    Baldrige Award Foundation, especially to the winners. We congratulate
    you all. We're delighted that the Chair of the District of Columbia
    Control Board, Andrew Brimmer, and Councilwoman Charlene Drew Jarvis are
    here.
        And I want to thank Secretary Daley in spite of the fact that he was
    making fun of my penchant for animal stories of all kinds. [Laughter] I
    mean, I don't come from Chicago--[laughter]--I come from the country.
    But my wife comes from Chicago.
        I want to thank Earnie Deavenport, too. Several years ago the
    Eastman Company loaned me an executive when I was Governor of Arkansas,
    and we established the first statewide total quality management program
    in the country. It was what gave me the idea to start what eventually
    became the reinventing Government project headed by the Vice President,
    which among other things has now given us the smallest Federal
    Government since John Kennedy was here. And I'll give $5 to anyone in
    the audience who can honestly say you have missed it. [Laughter] I say
    that because the Federal employees have done a very good job of
    increasing their output and the quality of their service while
    downsizing their numbers so that we can take advantage of technology,
    get the deficit down, get the economy going again. So we have learned
    from you.
        And I've talked with Earnie many times about the importance of
    trying to apply these lessons to other areas of human endeavor. You
    mentioned the two most important, I think, are health care and
    education. I also think there are applications--if you look at the
    success in many law enforcement departments around the country, there
    are law enforcement applications here because the thing that a belief in
    continuous progress through not only doing the right things but doing
    the right things right gives you is the conviction that you can repeat
    whatever you're doing right in one place somewhere else. And that is by
    far the biggest problem Government faces.
        So I really am delighted to see you here. But I think, for me,
    because I have seen this work over and over and over again in the
    private as well as the public sector, that is what cries out for
    application to our public institutions, whether it's in education or
    health care or in law enforcement.
        If the city of Boston could go virtually 2\1/2\ years without a
    single child being killed by a handgun, until--unfortunately, they had
    an incident last week, but they went 2\1/2\ years. No city in the United
    States that big has been able to do that. They did. It must therefore
    follow that if other people did the same thing in the same way and then
    you started the kind of contest you have here in the market system so
    everybody tried to keep continuously improving their process, that we
    would become a safer country.
        In health care, we have all these--you know, managed care, on
    balance, has been a good thing for America, because we've managed some
    inefficiency out of the system. But now people are genuinely worried
    about who's making the

    [[Page 1799]]

    decisions about their health care and whether quality will continue to
    be the most important value in the health care system. I think all of us
    want it to be; even those of you who may have responsibility in your
    organization for holding down health care costs, the last thing in the
    world you want is for your employees not to have access to the health
    care that they need.
        And goodness knows, in education--I've said this so many times, the
    poor people in the press who have to cover me get tired of hearing it,
    but the most frustrating thing about American education today is that
    every problem in education has been solved by somebody somewhere, and
    nobody's figured out how to have everybody else follow suit so that you
    launch the kind of competitive process that you come here to celebrate
    today.
        So, for all these reasons, I love coming here. And I always feel
    that by the time I get up to speak, there's no point in my saying
    anything. [Laughter] I told Mrs. Baldrige I kind of hated to walk out
    here. You all were so enthusiastic, you should have been outside
    listening to all this energy being emanated from this room. It's
    wonderful to be in a place where people don't think it's too corny or
    too embarrassing to be exuberant about what they do. Can you imagine
    what would happen in this country if everybody wanted to wave a flag for
    the place they work every day? [Laughter] Can you imagine that? I'm sure
    somewhere in this room there is some cynic saying, ``This is too hokey.
    I can't believe they're doing this.'' [Laughter]
        Where do you spend more time than at work? Why shouldn't you want to
    wave a flag? Why shouldn't we want to cheer about where we work? We want
    to cheer about our families, cheer about the places we work, cheer about
    the clubs we associate with. This country would work a lot better if
    everybody felt like they could cheer about the place they work. That's
    why I always try to make these awards, and why I think it was a stroke
    of genius to establish them, although I bet even when they were
    established, the founders could never have imagined what the far-
    reaching impact would be, that most States would follow suit, that
    countries would follow suit.
        There is this idea now embodied in our four winners today, in 3M
    Dental Products, in Merrill Lynch Credit, in Solectron, and XBS, that
    you can always get better and that you can organize not only to do the
    right things but to do the right things right in a way that elevates the
    people who work for the enterprise, serves the general public better,
    and obviously supports the bottom line.
        It's nice to think that. Otherwise, you would get bored if you
    didn't go broke. [Laughter] So it's sort of better, bored, or broke.
    [Laughter] If you get a multiple-choice question like that, it's not too
    easy to make an A. [Laughter] And yet we don't. None of us do all the
    time. But we come here to celebrate what we can do at our best.
        I'd also like to thank the Department of Commerce, Secretary Daley,
    the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the support that
    they give to this endeavor. It has been a great partnership. But most of
    all, I just want to say, just think about where this idea was 10 years
    ago and where it is today. Think about how many of the groundbreaking
    reforms that have been recognized in Baldrige Award winners in the past
    that are now just standard industry practice.
        Think about what it would be like if everybody would so shamelessly
    try to learn what their competitors are doing and do it at least that
    well and then figure out how to do it better, if in every area of human
    endeavor you did that. I think that this is something that is really
    worth focusing on. What do we celebrate? The stake the employees have in
    the company, the flexibility, the innovation, the creativity, the spirit
    of enterprise. It has brought America back.
        When I became President, and even when I was running for President,
    I saw that the 1980's, while they had been very tough on American
    business, had also produced a remarkable understanding that was widely
    shared throughout the country about what had to be done to be
    internationally competitive. And I always saw a big part of my duty here
    as just to have Government policies that would reinforce what is right
    and get out of the way of what is right, so that we could create the
    conditions and give people the tools so that everybody could do what
    you're doing. And we've tried to do that.
        I appreciate what Secretary Daley said about the turtle on the
    fencepost; that's one of the things I always say in the Cabinet meeting.
    It took us 3 months, and we didn't have to translate all my aphorisms to
    people who never had the privilege of living in rural areas. [Laughter]

    [[Page 1800]]

        We've tried to do three simple things to help you. One, get the
    deficit down and balance the budget so that we could keep interest rates
    down, improve interest rates not only for businesses but for individuals
    and on home mortgages, and two consequences of that are that we have an
    all-time high rate of homeownership--it's above two-thirds for the first
    time in the history of America--and we have record levels of business
    investment, which is becoming very important now because we're able to
    sustain a little higher rate of internal growth as you see a little
    turmoil around the world. I want to say a little more about that in a
    minute. But it's very important.
        When the Congress adopted the balanced budget amendment--I mean
    act--in 1997, back in August, and I signed it, the deficit had already
    dropped by 92 percent below its high in 1992. It went from $292 billion
    a year down to $23 billion a year. And I want to make a point about
    that, because I'm sure you found this in your company. When you get this
    award, you can come here and celebrate, and you don't even have to think
    about how hard and often controversial some of the changes you had to
    make were to get to this point. Right? Well, when we decided we were
    going to bring the deficit down, it was like pulling fingernails out
    around this place. And the bill in 1993 passed by one vote in both
    Houses. Now all of us think we're geniuses. If it had gone wrong, half
    the people that live in town could have said, ``I told you they were
    fools.'' [Laughter] But it worked. And now we're going to balance this
    budget, and we're going to have a healthier economy. And that's very
    important because it frees you to do what you do best.
        The second thing we've tried to do is to change the conditions in
    which you operate by opening more of the global economy to American
    companies. We've had over 200 trade agreements in the last 5 years, by
    far the largest number ever. And the Uruguay round, finished back in
    1993, amounts to the largest tax cut on American goods in history. And
    now we're the number one exporter in the world again. I think it is very
    important that we continue to press ahead in that.
        I believe very strongly that it was a mistake when we were unable to
    get enough votes in the House of Representatives to renew the
    President's fast-track trade authority to negotiate comprehensive bills.
    Why? Not because nobody ever loses in trade in America. There are some--
    in competition, there are by definition some losers and some winners.
    But most of the job loss in America comes from technological change and
    old-fashioned business failure. Some of it does come from change in the
    trading rules.
        What is the answer to that? Well, there are only two answers: You
    can either say, ``Well, we're just not going to change any more rules
    and try to pretend that we won't be subject to these global forces,'' or
    you could say, ``We're going to change the rules, create more jobs,
    raise more incomes, and do a heck of a lot better job than we've been
    doing in the past with the people who are dislocated through no fault of
    their own.'' The second is the right answer, not the first.
        We have 4 percent of the world's people and 20 percent of the
    world's income. And the developing economies are growing at roughly 3
    times the rate of the advanced economies like the United States, Japan,
    and Europe. Now again, you don't have to be a mathematical genius to
    figure out if you have 4 percent of the people and you've got 20 percent
    of the income and you would like to stay roughly as well off as you are
    and maybe, if you're very clever, get a little better off, you have to
    sell something to the other 96 percent of the people in the world,
    especially if their growth rates are faster than yours.
        Now, that does not mean that we should forget about the people who
    are dislocated from trade or from technology or even from old-fashioned
    business failures--people who have to start again.
        That brings me to the third thing that I want to say, which is that
    in addition to balancing the budget and having sensible economic
    policies, having an aggressive trade policy, we must have a policy that
    invests in our people and recognizes that in every company here
    rewarded, you were rewarded in part because you recognized that by far
    the most important resources you had were the people who were working
    for the company. Right? There is no question about that.
        With all respect, nobody was up here waving a flag for the Xerox
    machine back home--[laughter]--you know, or the whatever. Whatever the
    widget is, nobody was doing that. It's a great thing, whatever those
    machines are. You're waving the flags for yourselves and your

    [[Page 1801]]

    colleagues that are here because you know that basically creativity and
    continuous improvement requires people who can think and then who are
    free to act along the lines that they think and work out things
    together.
        The very intellectual processes that you are trying to make
    permanent and embed in the daily work of your companies require a level
    of thinking and reasoning skills that mean that we have to be committed
    in America to universal excellence in education.
        Now, not everybody needs a college degree in physics. But everybody
    needs more than a high school diploma today, and everybody needs the
    ability to keep on learning for a lifetime. That's why we have tried to
    say--implement the national education goals and to oversimplify it by
    saying every 8-year-old should be able to read, every 12-year-old should
    be able to log on to the Internet, every 18-year-old should be able to
    go to college, every adult should be able to keep on learning for a
    lifetime. And we're trying to set up a system where that will be true
    for every American, because it will help more companies to do what you
    have done. And I think that's very important.
        In this last balanced budget, I think 30 years from now when people
    look back on it, they'll say, ``Aside from the fact that we balanced the
    budget for the first time in a generation, the most important thing
    about that bill was it opened the doors of college to every American who
    would work for a college education, with a tax credit called the HOPE
    scholarship that virtually makes the first 2 years of college virtually
    tax-free to every American and other tax incentives and more Pell
    grants.'' That's very important that we are setting the stage for
    promoting a comprehensive reform of America's schools, kindergarten
    through 12th grade, based on national standards and accountability for
    them and real production so that all schools will be organized for
    performance for all the children.
        And I want to compliment Secretary Daley's brother on the remarkable
    work that has been done in Chicago to try to totally change the culture
    of education there to make it more like a continuous quality operation,
    systematically in the way that all of you have achieved. So we're trying
    to do that. And as I said, we also have to do that for people who lose
    their jobs or who are drastically underemployed.
        What else do we have to do? We want to set up--we've doubled funds
    for dislocated workers in the last 5 years to invest in their training.
    The systems don't work very well or at least not nearly as well as they
    can. I'd like to see us consolidate all these Government programs and
    give the workers a skills grant. Most people who are out of work have
    got enough sense to figure out what they could learn to get a better job
    or to get a new job. And I'd like to see anybody that qualifies just get
    a skills grant that they can take to the nearest educational institution
    of their own choosing and get the education they need to become a
    productive member of society and have a great chance to get a good job
    in an organization like the ones we honor today.
        I'd like to see us, when a community is hard hit by a big plant
    closing, go in there like we did when the military bases closed. What's
    the difference? People are out of work, and you have great capacity.
    They deserve a chance to have everybody work together to get them
    started again.
        So we need to do more on that. But that's the right answer, not to
    run away from the global economy, not to say we're not going to trade.
    The right answer is to do more, more quickly for the people that are
    dislocated.
        I guess what I'm saying is, we're still trying to get it right here.
    We're still trying to make our operation one that is continuously
    improving. But at least we know what the objective is. The objective is
    to give every American the chance to live up to their God-given capacity
    and live out their dreams. The objective is to give people the power
    they need to not only have successful careers but to build strong
    families and strong communities. The objective is to help people balance
    the demands of work and family, a problem that I hear in every place I
    go. The objective is to help our country balance our obligation to grow
    the economy and preserve the environment, something we have proved,
    repeatedly, we can do over the last 30 years. The objective is to reach
    out to the rest of the world and get the benefits of the global economy
    while meeting its challenges instead of pretending they don't exist. We
    are, whether we like it or not, all interconnected, one with another, in
    this country and, increasingly, beyond our borders.
        I've spent an enormous amount of time in the last month--enormous--
    trying to help come

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    to grips with the financial difficulties you're reading about every day
    in the Asian markets. Why? Because a huge percentage of our exports go
    to Asia. They are our neighbors now for all practical purposes. And it
    is in our interest that those countries be able to be stable, growing,
    increasingly healthy countries from which we not only buy but to which
    we sell, countries that together we can build a stable future. Instead
    of have a part of the world in the 20th century that called Americans
    there to fight and die in three wars, better to be a part of the world
    that participates in--[inaudible]--three new stages of the global
    economic revolution in the 21st century. We still have a lot of
    challenges out there.
        Technology is not an unmixed blessing. It bothers me some of the
    things little kids can see on the Internet at night. It bothers me that
    people who know how to do it can figure out how to build bombs and have
    access to dangerous weapons just by having the technological
    availability of it. There are a lot of things that bother us about it.
    There are troubling questions of our competitive laws and how they
    should apply to new technologies that have to be worked out. That's why
    we all have to be committed to the idea that we can continuously
    improve. Or in the language that was quoted from David Kearns, that our
    endeavor is a journey without an end. That's frustrating to some people;
    they always want to get there. But, you know, the older I get, the more
    I like the journey. [Laughter]
        So I thank you. I thank you for making America a better place. I
    thank you for your enthusiasm and for being a model for other American
    workplaces. And I ask you when you go home to share with your friends
    and neighbors, who may not work with you, the idea that this country is
    like where you work. America is still around after 220 years because we
    have a Constitution which said, if you want the country to always get
    better, you have to make it possible for people to always get better.
    And you have to give them the freedom to fail and mess up. I mean,
    that's what the Bill of Rights is all about. That's what the
    Constitution is all about, limiting the powers of Government and
    mandating, in effect, partnerships. That's what the flexibility of the
    Constitution is all about, so we could change over time to adapt to new
    circumstances without giving up our values. That's the kind of country
    you live in.
        And if it's going to be everything it ought to be in the 21st
    century, it has to do, as a nation, what you're trying to do every day
    at work. And you have to ask yourself, do you think America is on a
    journey without an end; do you think we can always get better? I think
    the answer, because of your example and that of millions of others, is
    an unequivocal yes.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:54 a.m. at the Sheraton Washington
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to former Secretary of Commerce
    Malcolm Baldrige's sister, Letitia Baldrige, brother, Robert Baldridge,
    and sister-in-law, Nancy; Harry Hertz, national quality program
    director, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Earnest
    Deavenport, president, Malcolm Baldrige Award Foundation; Mayor Richard
    M. Daley of Chicago, IL; and David T. Kearns, retired chairman and chief
    executive officer, Xerox Corp.