Tom Ridge Quotes

It is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.

I have never been a believer that serious government problems are solved by reorganization or shifting around bureaucracy.

It is time to acknowledge that the reorganization that took place in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was a mess.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty.

There is, of course, always the possibility, that two such powerful and well--financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors.

The open-ended nature of the struggle against it means that the war on terrorism, unlike conventional wars, cannot be viewed as a passing emergency. That fact has important implications for the debate about how much liberty we should give up so the government can fight terrorism more effectively. Since there’s now way of knowing when the war is over – no territory to occupy, no surrender to accept – any sacrifices we make are likely to be permanent.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

I was instructed let’s put out press releases touting advances and let’s minimize problems because we want the Department of Home Security to be a good news story…. But you have to tell the truth when you are in a job like this.

Any time you have a change of leadership in an organization, everything kind of shifts.

It's normal in a top club that people change.

Most organizations fail in driving change.

It follows that acceleration in the rate of change will result in an increasing need for reorganization. Reorganization is usually feared, because it means disturbance of the status quo, a potential threat to peoples vested interests in their jobs, and an upset to established ways of doing things. For these reasons, needed reorganization is often deferred. With a resulting loss in effectiveness and increase in costs.

Synergies are something that the CEO basically has to force to happen, because organizations are, generally, like bodies in motion that tend to stay in motion. It's very hard to get big organizations to change. And it takes really a very powerful mandate to force things to happen.

People have accused me of only working with good companies. No I don't. I work with some very dysfunctional companies or unbelievably dysfunctional organizations. The people that bring me in know what they're doing won't work for the future. They know they want to change and they want to change for the right reasons. They believe what I believe and that's why they called me.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

I've been around the government system and believe me it's built to spend. You've got to change the system, otherwise it's like asking a cultivator to do what a combine does, it just doesn't fit, it won't get it done. You've got to change the system.

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. [...] Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. [...]

We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.

Change the leader, change the organization.

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.