Volume 2, Issue 10 November 6, 2000

article-one:
Metrics from Everyday Life

[Metric – from the Latin, metricus – "relating to measurement."]

Source: Harper’s Index – www.harpers.org

• Number of American’s federally registered as candidates for the 2000 US presidential election: 239

• Number of incumbent vice presidents elected to the presidency between 1836 and 1988: 0

• Number of incumbent Republican governors who have won the presidency since 1898: 0

• Minimum number of times senator John McCain winked while endorsing George W. Bush during last summer’s Republican national convention: 5

• Length, in pages, of Al Gore’s 1969 Harvard thesis on the impact of TV "on the conduct of the presidency": 105

• Number of times Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column has likened a male political candidate’s style to "lactation": 3

• Estimated percentage of Ugandan voters who support postponing a multi-party political system: 80%

• Ratio of Motorola’s commercial sales in China last year to the value of its US defense contracts: 3:1

• Ratio of Lockheed Martin’s 1999 sales to the $13 million fine it will pay for giving secret technology to China: 1,962:1

• Number of year’s planning construction devoted to France’s Maginot Line fortifications in World War II: 15

• Number of days it took the German army to maneuver around them and invade France: 3

• Number of troops Italy mistakenly sent to Kristianstad, Sweden, last May instead of Kristiansand, Norway: 116

• Rank of France, Italy and Germany, respectively, among countries with the best overall health-care systems: 1, 2, 25

Link: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/benchmrk/nprbook.html

You may not have realized that it took ten years for TQM to filter into the American government. But that’s exactly what happened when in 1992 the US electoral college set into motion a sequence of events that would eventually come to be known as the "Clinton presidency." Led by vice president Al Gore, initiatives like the National Performance Review were enacted to make our national government function more as a customer-driven high-performance engine and less like a steam-driven paper mill. Did it work? Eight years later, you be the judge.

Actually, I’ve only noticed the effect at the post office, evidence to the power of disruptive technologies (those with the greatest chance for change are those with the least choice). In any case, the link above will take you to a benchmarking study report from the National Performance Review, entitled, "Serving the American Public: Best Practices in Performance Measurement." This paper documents the findings of their 1997 study on "Best Practices in Customer Driven Strategic Planning."

While the advice from the study does not offer any particular aha’s (among their chief recommendations "Leadership is critical;" "Accountability for results must be clearly assigned and well-understood;" and the ever-practical "Performance measurement systems should be positive, not punitive") it does not mislead or misinform either. It’s conclusions are sound, just a bit obvious.

Know a website we should review? Send the url to gregg@roundtable.com

article-three:
Top Ten Presidential Campaign Promises Aimed at Engineers
...from the MRT satellite office in Washington, DC