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Martha Johnson: It's really good to be here. I feel as if I have come home.
I want you to know that ever since I got in last night,
I've been saying hello to people, that it feels
like family, and that is for a number of reasons.
Katie [phonetic sp] mentioned one, but I should fess up
and say that my husband was a cab driver
for 11 years in Denver.
He was the head of the Independent Driver's
Association, and has his degree in automotive and maintenance
from the Denver Automotive and Maintenance Academy,
I think it is.
That was, however, before I met him.
So, he climbed out of the cab, and we both were
at Cummins Engine Company in the '70s and '80s when it was
facing down Komatsu to figure out how America could have
a significant diesel engine manufacturing capacity
that would truly compete globally.
I was just a kid, and one of the first things that they made
me do was to take courses in inventory control.
So, I'm a certified production inventory control specialist.
But I took the exams and I got my APEX certification,
and turned around and realized that everything we had been
taught and tested for was changing,
and changed within about two years at Cummins.
We moved from the old-style, production-management
notions of stock it up to the just-in-time notions.
And that was just a huge revolution
to live through.
As a result, when I started my career, I thought that kind
of massive change was pretty normal,
and carried that sort of sense of naivete throughout
into my other jobs.
But the Cummins experience was formative in so many ways.
I will say that about three years ago, my husband and I,
we were both in the plant in western New York,
in Jamestown, New York, where we were making
the 10-liter diesel engine, which was destined
for the European market and ended up being much
more significant globally.
We were in that plant as we took that whole assembly line apart,
and converted it into a just-in- time process in 24 months,
because Komatsu had told Ford they were going to sell them
an engine at something like half the cost of the Cummins engines.
And we went back to the plant a couple of years ago
with our son, took him around the plant, which has now made
a million engines, and I have to say the pride of the people
there and what we were a part of starting there in the early '80s
is just remarkable.
The real story is that Cummins, as a result of embarking on
that significant change, is now one of the leading Six-Sigma
companies recognized as that, and they have not
off-shored that engine.
It's a big story, and I'm very proud of that.
So, coming here to FedFleet allows me to do a little bit
of a sentimental reminiscing.
I appreciate you listening to that.
And it is a place where I just feel
as if I understand the issues.
I want to talk a little bit about GSA,
and I want to give you a little bit of an idea
where we're going.
I hope this isn't too much inside baseball,
but let me take you through some of the big notions
that we've been within the agency.
GSA's mission is the mission of our customers.
We are there to help them do their missions.
You know, the VA needs to take of the veterans.
GSA needs to take care of VA.
The Education Department needs to take care of educating
our children and our young people, and GSA needs
to take care of the education department.
The fleet support that we give to the agencies is crucial
for them.
It's crucial that they have operations that give them
reliable, efficient, effective, safe,
and competitively priced transportation.
They are working across the country.
They're working globally.
They need to get around and get around efficiently.
And I am delighted that you are partners with us
in supporting those missions of the agencies
across the government.
This is our country's work.
And we are sizable.
The federal government is a sizable fleet consumer,
if you will.
We have over 650,000 motor vehicles in federal fleet,
6,700 marine vessels, 889 planes, 739 helicopters.
If you just step back and think about that,
the size and scope is huge.
So, if we make a small change, it magnifies across all of that.
It duplicates across all of that size.
So, anything we do is of significance
and we take it very seriously.
We appreciate your help in all of that.
I am thrilled to be part of the Obama administration.
I will say that the difference in returning to the government
this time to participate in this administration is that GSA
is truly understood by this president to be an asset
to the government.
In the past, I also felt when I was a GSA in the '90s
that GSA did remarkable work, but the rest of the
government sort of didn't see it, know it, understand it,
and didn't know how to leverage us.
This president genuinely understands
that we can be a partner across the administration.
This is very different.
This is a very different positioning for us.
It makes us stand up and polish ourselves up a little bit,
and it puts us out in front in ways
we never understood before.
I think that GSA has gone through
a lot of transformation.
Back when Harry S. Truman created us,
he was after getting better prices for the government
through centralized purchasing.
It was a great idea.
Centralizing purchasing was one of those things they really
began to understand during World War II,
and it took shape in GSA.
So, for over 50 of our -- well, nearly 50 of our
over 60-year history, we were
the central purchaser.
We were the monopoly.
And you know what happens with a monopoly as well.
We can command low prices; we don't necessarily
consistently, persistently, and over time command
the best value.
And so, in the 1990s, the Clinger-Cohen Act
changed our mandate.
And that was a remarkable moment,
both for the government and for GSA, because no longer were we
simply out there trying to find the best price.
We are now committed to finding the best value
for the government, and I know that you, as taxpayers,
and all of us appreciate that formulation of the problem.
The best value allows us to look across options.
It's more stimulating for industry.
I think it is a better competitive norm.
Price is just one element, and we all know where just
competing on price can take you.
And so, we are now well into a period of adjustment
to the Clinger-Cohen Act.
It isn't something that you can easily do -- turn off one whole
culture and system and turn on another -- but since I have
returned to GSA, I am amazed at how we have internalized
and understood that we need to be giving best value
to the government.
I see it in just huge dimensions within our fleet operations
and our work with you in industry,
because I think we are delivering value
to the government, and it is through our industry partners
that we are doing that.
Now, what I want to talk about a little bit -- as I said,
I hope it's not too much inside baseball -- I want to talk
about how we are shaping GSA so that we are persistently
and consistently producing best value for our customers.
Now, it's a very simple thing.
How do you get an organization to be high performing?
This is the question that people always ask
as they come into an organization:
how can we move it to a higher level of performance?
The answer is actually pretty simple,
and it's on the internet.
There are three things you have to do, and you can Google this.
You can Google these three phrases and you'll come up
with these models.
But the three sort of dimension you can work:
one is operational excellence.
Push for operational excellence.
You can push for innovation, and you can push
for customer intimacy.
If you work those dimensions, your organization's
performance is just simply going to go up.
It's been shown over and over again.
It used to be that we thought you had to just work one
of those -- the operationally excellent Wal-Mart.
Be innovative; be Apple.
Be customer-intimate; be Nordstrom,
and your life will be made.
But since they introduced those concepts in the early '90s,
it's been clear that you can't do one without the other.
Now, I will refer to these three categories as I go
through some of my stories about GSA here, and you'll get the
sort of cadence of it.
I think everybody at GSA can probably reel three things
off to you, but it helps us stay focused.
You will also notice that your tax dollars are at work there.
You could pull your strategy off the internet;
it saves a lot of time inside an organization of going out
for weeks and weeks and hammering out a strategy.
That's our strategy: operational excellence,
innovation, and customer intimacy.
So, let me talk about
operational excellence, GSA, and FedFleet.
The way that manifests itself for us is in a word: safety.
If we are functioning with the notions of safety,
we are doing what we need to be doing in terms of producing
value within the Federal Fleet.
I am thrilled now that I've returned to GSA to become
a good friend and colleague of Bill Webster.
You all know Bill.
One of the things that's remarkable about Bill
is that he is someone with whom you can have a conversation
and I'll bet 90 percent of those conversations will at some point
yield some thoughts about safety.
He is a true champion of the issues of safety.
And weneed to carry that with us.
Safety is not something you can simply create rules about.
It is about behavior.
It's about a whole system around our fleets,
and he understands that, and I think across GSA
we are internalizing that.
I know that many of you are associated with
and emphasizing distracted driving issues
and defensive driving training and support,
and I think those are the kinds of programs
and the kinds of attention we need to pay to this issue.
Safety can change an entire culture.
It is a complete concept.
It can dictate how we come to work, what we do at work,
and how we go home.
It's not just within the four walls of our agencies.
And so as the fleet works on safety,
so will the government be better, and I commend you
for any work that you can do on that front.
So that's the operational excellence improvement
angle that we are keen to continue and support.
So, moving from operational excellence, I'm now going
to talk about innovation, and this is the bulk of what
people have been setting me up to be talking about.
The way we're thinking about innovation is in large part
surrounding the notion of sustainability.
The president issued an executive order
last fall around sustainability, and it's a demanding one.
We filed a plan with the White House about a month ago.
We expect to get it back shortly,
and then we can discuss it more publicly.
They're tweaking it and absorbing it.
I think we've been quite -- I think we've been quite
energetic in our plan, and this is going to be the framework
under which we're going to be functioning.
But in the spring -- I've only been at GSA five-plus months.
One of the first things we did was say, "What are we doing
and where are we going?"
So, we took all the leadership on a field trip,
and the leadership of GSA, about 200 of us,
went to Georgia and toured a carpet company there that
declared in the middle 1990s, 1994, that they had a goal
of being a zero-environmental- footprint organization.
This was quite visionary of this organization,
this carpet company, but what's interesting about it is
that by declaring the goal of zero environmental footprint,
a major sustainability goal, they began to look at their
entire enterprise differently.
And the way they unpacked this is, I think, a wonderful story.
First of all, they championed -- they began to grab on to
the technology of carpet tiles, because they said,
"If we're going to really get into this
"zero-environmental-footprint business, we need to be
"recycling much better; we need to be capturing it.
"Why take out a whole carpet when you could just take out
the square that's a little bit worn?"
So, they started working on carpet tiles
pretty intensely.
They also came up with the notion --
and they didn't have the language for this,
but subsequently this is the language we are now using
-- of thinking about products not from cradle to grave,
not from creating the product all the way through
to disposing of the product.
They were thinking about the cycle of cradle to cradle,
meaning you have a product and you design and create
that product with the notion that it will come back
to you, and it will come back and you will reuse it
or you will return it to the elements of nature.
And this cradle-to-cradle philosophy they
were working with, and they decided to emphasize
a different financial model as well,
and they are in the business of leasing carpets
so they can control their inventory in that cycle.
So, they lease carpets and then they will claim them back,
and that was another way in which their enterprise
was changed by this notion of zero environmental footprint.
We went to see them.
We visited their factories, their recycling center.
We listened to how they have changed their language.
They talk about waste as food.
They have all kinds of ways in which they are just shifting
their headset about sustainability.
So we learned a lot, and we returned to GSA,
and we decided that we, too, want to embark on this very
ambitious goal of aiming for zero-environmental footprint.
Now, this is important to be clear about.
A goal like this is a little bit like President Kennedy
in the '60s saying, "We're going to put a man on the moon
and return him safely to earth."
It is a huge goal that no one knows how to do.
It electrifies everyone because it is the right thing to do.
It is a cool thing to do.
It engages the next generation.
It powers up the best of our thinking,
and it puts us onto a path together.
Zero environmental footprint is a huge goal.
We don't know how to do it.
We don't know how long it's going to take,
what it's going to require of us,
but I will tell you a couple of things.
One is that all the young people want to
come and work for GSA now.
We are inviting and gathering and gaining talent,
just in the last couple of months, that we never
could have done before.
So we are going to be able to command
the best and the brightest.
We are also finding that internally
it brings us together.
We're all, you know, rowing in the same boat rather than
doing whatever else we are doing.
It unites us, how we do buildings,
how we do fleet, how we do purchasing.
All of our own activity comes together under this notion,
so it's a wonderful way in which we become
an enterprise going forward together.
So, the notion of a zero- environmental-footprint goal
is huge, it's staggering, and it leaves us all sort of saying,
"I don't even know where to start,"
but that's a good confusion.
It's a good set of questions, and it's the right one.
I want, however, to be very explicit
about the transportation world.
If you look across industry, and we look across a lot
of industry, IT, housing, construction, engineering,
consumables, the place that probably has the biggest
challenge in terms of zero environmental footprint
is the transportation industry.
There are a lot of ways in which we can redesign
products that we make.
There are a lot of ways we can run
our technologies differently.
We can build -- we can construct and build
our infrastructure differently.
But transportation is the tough one, and this is why it is so
special for you because as you are pushing towards green,
you are learning a huge amount, and you are setting a pace
for everyone else.
Because if you can do it, if you can push down this road,
everybody else has no excuse.
I say that because we understand solar panels, we understand ways
of capturing solar energy, but we haven't really found
economically capable and sophisticated ways
to really pack that kind of energy into vehicles,
ocean-going vehicles, planes, and so on.
We don't really know how we're going to do that.
Carrying that much energy in another form other than
what we're doing now sort of sinks the ships.
So, we have a huge technological
challenge, but it is the attitude
of the transportation industry that you're going
to jump in and you're going to see what you can do,
and you're going to try and you're going
to have some failures, and you're going
to take some risks, and we're going to learn together.
And that is what we as a country can only ask,
that an industry be aggressive in this important goal.
So, GSA is in this really special place of acting
as a membrane between government
and industry, and on this subject I think we want
to be as good a filter, a connector,
a sharer of information to enable industry and government
to move down this path of a greener set
of transportation options.
And let me just return to that comment about risk.
I think the notion that we can move forward in sustainability
without risk is a little demented.
There are going to be a lot of risks we're going
to be taking, and we're going to have a lot of failures.
You can only expect that.
I believe in failing fast, failing fruitfully,
and failing forward.
I do believe in failure.
I think we learn, but we need to take bite-sized risks
so those failures are not, you know, phenomenal big ones.
So, we will be playing with these ideas,
talking about them a lot, urging you to share your thoughts.
Sustainability is close to our heart.
Our goal of zero environmental footprint, I think,
is going to be a radical one to galvanize GSA
and all our partners.
One thing I will add, though, is that we are not just
thinking about zero environmental
footprint in the fleet in terms of how to power the fleet.
I think that there is also a human factor in this,
and as an agency, we are also aggressively pursuing
the best of the technologies that allow us
to work virtually.
We are beginning to get away from the notion
that everything is in a time and a place.
If we are in the same time together, we don't always
have to be in the same place.
Work is what you do not necessarily where you are.
And so, you will be hearing from GSA more policy,
more technology notions, and more investments in ways
in which the federal government can be working together
without traveling.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea.
The original reason, which is a very important one
and is important to the first lady and the first family,
is the notion of work and family demands and stress.
If people have more virtual options, you know,
we have more flexibility in terms of being
with our families and getting our work done.
As a working mother, I know how valuable that would have been
in the days of tearing around and being away
from my children.
But we are moving into an arena where now virtual workplaces
are arguably very sensible for three other reasons.
One is financial.
If we can cut back on our actual geographic
footprint in terms of buildings by having people working more
at home or at Starbucks, let them pay the bill.
So, financially, there is really becoming a new ROI
for why should be pursuing virtual work.
The second one is, of course, environmental as
I've been speaking.
Getting us off the roads is a good idea.
But the third is security.
There is a huge argument now for figuring out how
the government can be dispersed and highly functional.
And so, as we pursue virtual work, we are supporting
our environmental goals, our financial goals,
our social-family goals, and our security goals.
So, there is a lot of power behind
the virtual work notion, and as the transportation industry,
I'm sure that you all are interested in tracking
that and seeing how aggressive we're going to be.
All right, so, I've been talking a lot about sustainability.
I'm not going to talk all morning.
Let me remind you, I'm talking first about
operational excellence, then innovation in the form
of sustainability, and the third piece to the change work at GSA
is around customer intimacy.
Customer intimacy might be a phrase that makes
some people a little uncomfortable,
but it's the phrase and it is about how well
we know our customers.
The fleets are in a particularly good position to help GSA
understand its customers, and that is because it is from
fleet activity that we can harvest an enormous amount
of data about our customers.
Customer intimacy is about having that data,
working on that, and through all sorts of data constructs off
the fleet work, traffic information, consumption,
information usage, mileage, GSA actually will have
a data profile on its customers that is even better
than the customers have on themselves.
That puts us in a hugely powerful position
of being able to help customers at a new level.
Just think of it this way: you can watch your own
fleet if you're an agency and kind of understand
what you're doing, but you don't have the context
of what the rest of the government is doing.
We do.
And that is a powerful and enormously helpful bit
of information to share with our customers.
So, the world of fleet management;
the more it can produce, harvest, analyze,
and understand the data that comes from our transportation,
the better we can be at helping the government be efficient,
effective, and safe.
And I commend you as you work on the tracking
and the analytics of all of that data because it allows us
to make data work for us.
Many people say that Washington is an evidence-free zone,
and I believe that that is perhaps a fair call
on some days, but it is the kind of data and information
that we can command in this kind of a setting
that truly can help the government move forward
and work off good information.
So, operational excellence in the world of safety,
innovation in the world of sustainability,
and customer intimacy in the world of good data.
Your work with us and our work supporting our customers will
help this government move forward.
I think the fleet is at a moment;
you are at a moment in which many things are changing
and your work, your data, your safety, your innovation
can help us power the government forward and help us answer
some of the toughest problems that we have.
You touch almost all other industries.
You touch the economy; the transportation
sector intersects with all of our other industries.
You are concerned about our security and our labor force.
How -- and as you are thriving and healthy
is how goes the country.
It is your moment, and we want to be your partner in it.
You are critical in supporting the mission --
the missions of our customer agencies.
They can't interdict drugs without boats and cars.
We can't fight fires without airplanes and fire trucks.
We can't move people and cargo without the right tools
to the war fighter.
So, thank you so much for your help on that.
It is great to be here with you today, and before I close,
I would just like to make one announcement:
we have just sent an e-mail to all of GSA and all of you
who are Twittering away -- probably, you know,
know all of this -- but I would like to personally
announce that we have chosen a new commissioner
for the Federal Acquisition Service.
The new commissioner is Steven Kempf.
He has been the acting commissioner
for the last couple of months.
He is an 18-year veteran
of the Federal Acquisition Service.
He is a lawyer, contract officer,
an astute business partner, and I have been working
with him closely as he has been acting and we have forged
a very good relationship.
I'm thrilled he is going to be taking the helm
of the Federal Acquisition Service.
He will be one of the most critical leaders at GSA.
He has, I believe, the trust
of the Federal Acquisition Service.
I have heard many people in this process
of selection come to me and say, "Please choose Steve."
And I have heard them.
I believe he can be reconciling, he can help FAS move forward.
But it isn't just that he emerges from FAS
and therefore is quite knowledgeable about
the organization.
One thing I've learned about Steve is that he is hungry
to change FAS.
He is eager to ask the tough questions
and to move us forward, because we are also in a moment
as an acquisitions service where the markets are changing,
technology is changing, and we need to be ready.
So, he is both a trusted and respected leader,
and one with a real appetite for transformation.
He is therefore going to be, I think, a very powerful
and important commissioner, and I'm going to look forward
to working with him and hope that you, if you don't
know him, are able to meet him and enjoy his leadership
in this -- in this whole arena.
He is going to join Bob Peck, who is the other commissioner,
commissioner of the Public Buildings Service.
And I think it does tell me that I have too many lawyers
on my staff, which makes me a little nervous,
but at the same time, very astute and willing to push
hard when there is an issue in front of them that they
need to fix.
At any rate, I want to thank you for your time.
I'm not hearing too many forks clicking, so I think you need
to go back to either eating or getting cream in that coffee.
It's been good to be here.
I hope you don't melt in this heat, but I am going
to enjoy seeing the displays and the convention hall,
and I wish you a good, powerful week in which you're
learning a lot and you're carrying back to industry
and to the government the best of the Fed Fleet.
Thank you.