Marc Guggenheim Quotes

You shouldn't have one opinion when you're running and another when you're president.

I will not do work that isn't done well or right. Stuff happens - things break, contractors don't come through - but I don't want to be responsible for not doing something correctly.

My background is putting in large systems that change lives... The right kind of systems can bring honesty and efficiency.

Never promise more than you can perform.

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.

There are words that work, that are meant to explain and educate on policies that work, on products that work, on services that work. I'm not going to ever try to sell a lemon. I don't do that.

One mentor I had taught me that people do what you inspect, not necessarily what you expect. In other words, if nobody is watching, there will be some slack off.

We are constantly working towards the highest level of compliance possible.

There are checks and balances in science. There's somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there's somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker's checkers.

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

My top priority will be to secure maximum value for money in aid through greater transparency, rigorous independent evaluation and an unremitting focus on results.

How can any company know if its processes, products, people are safe? Only if everyone is watching and telling the truth. The first part can be assumed; the second cannot.

People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.

No organization, whether it's police or physicians or whatever, wants to have its errors held up to the light of day, but it's wrong, as is coming out so well.

I'm a big proponent of accountability.

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong.

There will be no politics, no ifs and buts; if we see something and feel that work needs to be done, we will get people here we can rely on and ensure it is done in the same thorough way as our other projects.

I just figure if it has my name on it, and I want to make people feel good about wearing it, I can't pass it off.

When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals' Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare.

People would say, 'You can't say negative things about the company.' But you have no credibility if you can't tell people that they need to do better.

Standards violated are better than no standards at all.

You can't fire anybody in Government; everyone blames the system. Look what is happening in NASA. Now we have to truck out these 200-plus audits out of the closet because we had a disaster [the Challenger], and we still can't find someone to fire.

I'm a person who believes in close monitoring and knowing what everyone on the staff is doing.

Our government should not make promises we cannot keep. And we must keep the promises we have already made.

If we play our cards right with the media, the Press will be our Inspector General’s Office. Encourage them to find any dirt on our programs and tell us. Then we can fix them or at least start to and everyone will be better off. We will learn of and fix out weaknesses, the press will have good stories, and the public will get better service. I can see some of you wondering what our own Office of Inspection is supposed to do. It is to find out about our problems before the press does, not to wait for complaints and then start looking. When a reporter comes to us with a scandal story of one of our programs, I would love to say, “Good reporting. That’s a serious problem and this is what we have been doing about it. Give us a hand and keep monitoring it, and let us know about our progress.” No one expects us to not have problems, but they do expect us to find them and fix them quickly, and that is what we must all expect of each other.