Remarks by Secretary Michael Chertoff at the Homeland Security Advisory Council Meeting

Release Date: 06/23/05 00:00:00

Washington, D.C.
Homeland Security Advisory Council Meeting
June 23, 2005

Secretary Chertoff:  Thank you, Joe. Thank you. Good to see everybody. I apologize for being late. Unfortunately, as sometimes happen, things arise that delay you. But I understand you had a good opportunity to visit with the deputy. We actually crossed paths as I was heading out here, and he said he enjoyed the opportunity to talk to you today.

And of course, we, once again, want to say how much we both value the very, very fine work that you all are doing because what’s important about this advisory council is it brings a perspective to the Department that comes from private and public sector experiences that are not within our normal compass. And I think we probably have, more than perhaps any other department in government, our success resting upon our ability to network with the public and private sector partners. And so it’s very important for us to be tuned into the kinds of solutions you bring.

Also, we tend very much to operate in the area which is uncharted waters, and that, I think, puts a premium on the kind of creativity you can get when you get a lot of different people together with a lot of different experiences to brainstorm about things that we might do.

So I want to indicate how interested I am in both the product of this session, but also some ongoing dialogues I want to have with you, which I think I’ll briefly mention.

Before I get into actually the -- a couple other things I wanted to say, since I did get to hear at least a portion of Ruth’s presentation. I want to -- I also thought it was a very terrific presentation, and I think it’s a good example of the challenge that we face in the Department and the way we have to look at the challenge, because it recognizes that we have to figure out a way to deal with problems where -- in situations where we do not own the assets or have the employees who are going to deal with the problem. And moreover, as you point out, we can’t possibly have an understanding of the kind of specificity we would need to have of the way every business operates and the networks and connections they depend upon from in Washington. It would be a thankless and impossible task.

The question is, how do we incentivize, pay, assist and guide all our partners in doing the job themselves. I think the first step is we need to identify the problem, as you’ve done, Ruth. I mean, we all -- through Y2K, there was a lot of publicity and it did educate most companies about issues like continuity of business and the kinds of interdependencies they had with their networks. And I think that that is an important process that we can perform. We then do need to give them some guidance about what the threat is and what the consequences are, and we could do some very sophisticated modeling on a national level about where key nodes and where interdependencies are that affect us nationally.

But as we flow it down locally and to individual businesses, we can’t do that in the same way that the individual local official or owner/operator can do. What we can do is say, here’s a model and here’s something you ought to do.

I do think we need to make the business case, which is, frankly, if you’ve invested in your business and your assets, you should want to protect them, which I think is, certainly at a general level, easily understood.

And finally, I guess I would say, I mean, I read in your presentation a strong sense that what we ought to be doing is not giving out specifications but defining outcomes. We ought to be saying, you need to be able to do the following -- how you do it, only you’re going to be able to tell. We should have some way -- you should develop a way to test and verify. That’s what we do. We go through exercises. But we recognize, as you say, one size will not fit all. And even if it did, I don’t think we’re the tailors here that could figure out what that size was.

So this is very much a different kind of model of the way government works with government partners and private sectors. It’s collaborative, it tries to give guidance and practices and create incentives, it doesn’t dictate or try to micromanage. And I think that’s very -- part of the value of the committee is, in fact, the kind of insight you’ve given us.

Let me just give you an update on a couple of things that are going on, just so you can have it in your head, and indicate one of the things I would like to see the Council and the various advisory committees continue to work on as we go forward. As you know, we have been going forward with the second stage review, and my initial phase of this was, I asked various teams to go out and be prepared to come back and sit with me and report on their observations about where we have achieved what we need to achieve, where we have fallen short, what our gaps are, and how we might think of solutions, outcomes that would address those gaps.

I’m pleased to say that they all completed their work a day ahead of schedule, which was May 30th; I had given them till May 31. And I’ve now begun the process of meeting with the groups and talking through some of the solutions and starting to task out things we might do to report on this. I anticipate that I will have completed this process basically by the end of this month. And then as we move forward, I think we’ll begin to see the fruits of this process.

Some of the solutions that have been identified, I think do obviously deal with issues that, again, we don’t have total control over, either the private sector or other parts of government have a major role to play. And I think as we start to think through the details of some of these solutions, whether it be how to better manage our supply chain so that we have greater transparency about cargo goods coming into the country, not at the point of embarkation, but pushed earlier in the process. I think there’s going to be a lot of expertise here, and I’m going to be asking that we start to develop some working groups here to look at the way we might implement those and get those things done. So I think that that is, again, an additional value, maybe an additional burden, I’m going to place on the Council.

I think we are -- what I can tell you is, I think we are at an exciting moment in the Department’s growth. We’ve had two years of the basic building. We are now looking to do some fine tuning and adjustment, and to really step back and look at what we do from an outcome-oriented basis. And I think that really is our mantra. What we care about is, what is the result and making sure we as a Department and everybody in the Department owns the result, that we’re not focused on our tasks or specifications, we’re focused on our outcomes and what we produce, which I think is the way any good business operates and I think it’s the way government would operate.

So that has been -- has driven the entirety of our work. I’m pleased to say that I’ve seen some really, really interesting results as we’re starting to talk through this process, and I look forward to continuing to finish it up and then working now to actually turn these solution sets into real policies and programs that we can start to address in the Department and through the government as well.

So I’m here to listen, not to talk. So with that, again, thank you for being here, and I turn the microphone over.

Chairman Grano:  Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I just have one question for you. What’s your assessment, relative to your ability to coalesce the common culture within the Department since you’ve been there?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think it’s obviously a tremendous challenge, and those of you (inaudible) mergers know this to be true, to bring a lot of disparate organizations together with strong cultures and make them serve as one culture. I think there are a number of things we can do to move that forward. I think there are some things we can do organizationally to integrate the Department and to give people an understanding and show in practice how all of the pieces fit together, that these are not -- again, the results will require a span of activity that has been linked. I mean, you could organizationally make sure we drive it.

We also need, in terms of the way we deal with our people who work, our colleagues, to start to have some cross-fertilization, to build jointness, to build cooperation into the process of our activity. That means training. We have training abilities, and we ought to do joint training. It means building in incentives for components to exchange to have people move back and forth and to have joint activities. I know in the military, part of the process of moving up the career ladder requires you to spend some time in Joint Operations. That needs to be a part of what we do so that we incentivize. And frankly, when we -- as we go forward and we roll out our personnel process and our evaluation process, under MAXHR, which I know you know about, we’ve got to build into that. Part of that has to be a requirement that we have teamwork and jointness as part of the metrics on which the leadership of the Department is going to be measured, so that when time comes to judge how you’ve done in your performance, it’s got to be not only how you’ve done with your component, but how you are measured in terms of working with other components, working with joint effort, and promoting those kinds of things among the people who work in the components.

So I think those are some of the things that have emerged, actually. We’ve talked through what we need to do in the Department.

Chairman Grano:  Thank you very much, sir.

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Related Information

• Homeland Security Advisory Council

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