[The following is provided via the courtesy of the Internet Society WhiteHouse Press Release Gopher Service.]       E X E C U T I V E   O F F I C E   O F   T H E   P R E S I D E N T                             THE WHITE HOUSE                      Office of the Press Secretary______________________________________________________________For Immediate Release                          February 22, 1993                         REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT                          AND VICE PRESIDENT TO                        SILICON GRAPHICS EMPLOYEES                             Silicon Graphics                      Mountain View, California10:00 A.M. PST        THE PRESIDENT:  First of all, I want to thank you all for theintroduction to your wonderful company.  I want to thank Ed and Ken --wesaw them last night with a number of other of the executives from SiliconValley -- people, many of them with whom I've worked for a good length oftime; many of whom the Vice President's known for a long time inconnection with his work on supercomputing and other issues.        We came here today for two reasons, and since mostly we just wantto listen to you I'll try to state this briefly.  One reason was to pickthis setting to announce the implementation of the technology policy wetalked about in the campaign, as an expression of what we think thenational government's role is in creating a partnership with the privatesector to generate more of these kinds of companies, more technologicaladvances to keep the United States always on the cutting edge of changeand to try to make sure we'll be able to create a lot of good new jobsfor the future.        The second reason -- can I put that down?  We're not ready yetfor this.  The second reason I wanted to come here is, I think thegovernment ought to work like you do.  (Applause.)  And before that canever happen we have to be able to get the people, the Congress, and thepress who have to interpret all this to the people to imagine what we'retalking about.        I have, for example, the first state government in the countrythat started a total quality management program in all the departments ofgovernment, trying to figure out how we could reinvent the government.And I basically believe my job as President is to try to adjust Americain good ways so that we can win in the 21st century, so that we can makechange our friend and not our enemy.        Ed said that you plan your new products knowing they'll beobsolete within 12 to 18 months, and you want to be able to replace them.We live in an era of constant change.  And America's biggest problem, ifyou look at it through that lens, is that for too many people change isan enemy, not a friend.  I mean, one reason you're all so happy is youfound a way to make change your friend, right?  Diversity is a strength,not a source of division, right?  (Applause.)  Change is a way to makemoney, not throw people out of work, right?        If you decentralize and push decisions made down to the lowestpossible level you enable every employee to live up to the fullest oftheir ability.  And you don't make them -- by giving them a six-weekbreak every four years, you don't force them to make these sharpdivisions between your work life and your private life.  It's sort of a^Lseamless web.  These are things we need to learn in America, and we needto incorporate even into more traditional workplaces.        So I'd like to start -- we'll talk about the technology policylater, and the Vice President, who had done so much work, will talk a lotabout the details at the end of this meeting.  But I just want to startby telling you that one of our missions -- in order to make this wholething work we're going to have to make the government work differently.        Example:  We cut the White House staff by 25 percent to set astandard for cutting inessential spending in the government.  But thework load of the White House is way up.  We're getting all-time recordtelephone calls and letters coming in, and we have to serve ourcustomers, too.  Our customers are the people that put us there, and ifthey have to wait three months for an answer to a letter, that's notservice.        But when we took office, I walked into the Oval Office -- it'ssupposed to be the nerve center of the United States -- and we foundJimmy Carter's telephone system.  (Laughter.)  All right.  No speakerphone, no conference calls, but anybody in the office could punch thelighted button and listen to the President talk.  (Laughter.)  So that Icould have the conference call I didn't want but not the one I did.(Laughter and applause.)        Then we went down into the basement where we found LyndonJohnson's switchboard.  (Laughter.)  True story -- where there were fouroperators working from early morning till late at night -- literally,when a phone would come and they'd say, "I want to talk to the VicePresident's office," they would pick up a little cord and push it into alittle hole.  (Laughter.)  That's today -- right?        We found procedures that were so bureaucratic and cumbersome forprocurement that Einstein couldn't figure them out, and all the officeswere organized in little closed boxes -- just the opposite of what yousee.        In our campaign, however -- we ran an organization in thepresidential campaign that was very much like this.  Most decisions weremade in a great big room in morning meetings that we had our senior staffin, but any 20-year-old volunteer who had a good idea could walk right inand say, "here's my idea."  Some of them were very good and weincorporated them.        And we had a man named Ellis Mottur who helped us to put togetherour technology policy who said -- he was one of our senior citizens; hewas in his 50s.  (Laughter.)  And he said, "I've been writing about high-performance work organizations all my life.  And this is the first oneI've ever worked in and it has no organizational chart.  I can't figureout what it looks like on paper, but it works."        The Vice President was making fun of me when we were gettingready for the speech I gave Wednesday night to the Congress; it was likemaking sausage.  People were running in and out saying, put this in andtake this out.  (Laughter.)  But it worked.  You know, it worked.(Applause.)        So I want to hear from you, but I want you to know that we havehired a person at the Office of Management and Budget who has done a lotof work in creating new businesses and turning businesses around -- torun the management part of that.  We're trying to review all theseindictments that have been issued over the last several years about theway the federal government is run.  But I want you to know that I think amajor part of my missions is to literally change the way the nationalgovernment works, spends your tax dollars, so that we can invest more andconsume less and look toward the future.  And that literally will^Lrequire rethinking everything about the way the government operates.        The government operates so much to keep bad things from happeningthat there's very little energy left in some places to make good thingshappen.  If you spend all your time trying to make sure nothing badhappens there's very little time and money and human energy left to makegood things happen.  We're going to try to pare away a lot of thatbureaucracy and speed up the decision-making process and modernize it.And I know a lot of you can help.  Technology is a part of that, but sois organization and empowerment, which is something you've taught usagain today.  And I thank you very much.  (Applause.)        We want to do a question and answer now, and then the VicePresident is going to talk in more detail about our technology policylater.  But that's what we and Ed agreed to do.  He's my boss today; I'mdoing what he -- (laughter.)  So I wonder if any of you have a questionyou want to ask us, or a comment you want to make.        Yes, go ahead.        Q       Now that Silicon Graphics has entered the supercomputerarena, supercomputers are subject to very stringent and costly exportcontrols.  Is part of your agenda to review the export control system,and can industry count on export regulations that will keep pace withtechnology advances in our changing world?        THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Let me start off on that.  As you may know,the President appointed as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce JohnRollwagon who was the CEO at Cray.  And he and Ron Brown, the Secretaryof Commerce, have been reviewing a lot of procedures for stimulating U.S.exports around the world.  And we're going to be a very export-orientedadministration.        However, we are also going to keep a close eye on the legitimateconcerns that have in the past limited the free export of sometechnologies that can make a dramatic difference in the ability of aGaddafi or a Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons or ICBMs.        Now, in some cases in the past, these legitimate concerns havebeen interpreted and implemented in a way that has frustrated Americanbusiness unnecessarily.  There are, for example, some software packagesthat are available off the shelves in stores here that are, nevertheless,prohibited from being exported.  And sometimes that's a little bitunrealistic.  On the other hand, there are some in business who areunderstandably so anxious to find new customers that they will notnecessarily pay as much attention as they should to what the customermight use this new capacity for.  And that's a legitimate role forgovernment, to say, hold on, the world will be a much more dangerousplace if we have 15 or 20 nuclear powers instead of five or six; and ifthey have ICBMs and so forth.        So it's a balance that has to be struck very carefully.  Andwe're going to have a tough nonproliferation strategy while we promotemore exports.        THE PRESIDENT:  If I might just add to that -- the short answerto your question, of course, is yes, we're going to review this.  And letme give you one example.  Ken told me last night at dinner that --hesaid, if we export substantially the same product to the same person, ifwe have to get one permit to do it we'll have to get a permit every timewe want to do the same thing over and over again.  They always give it tous, but we have to wait six months and it puts us behind the competitivearc.  Now, that's something that ought to be changed, and we'll try tochange that.        We also know that some of our export controls, rules andregulations, are a function of the realities of the Cold War which aren'tthere anymore.  But what the Vice President was trying to say,^Land he said so well -- I just want to reemphasize -- our biggest securityproblem in the future may well be the proliferation of nuclear andnonnuclear, like biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction tosmall, by our standards, countries with militant governments who may notcare what the damage to their own people could be.  So that's somethingwe have to watch very closely.        But apart from that, we want to move this much more quickly andwe'll try to slash a lot of the time delays where we ought to be doingthese things.        Q       Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, you've seen scientificvisualization in practice here.  As a company we're also very interestedin ongoing research in high-performance computing and scientificvisualization.  Can we expect to see a change in the national scientificagenda that includes scientific visualization?  Right now I don't see thescientific visualization as being represented, for example, on the FCCSETcommittee.        THE VICE PRESIDENT:  It is a good question.  One of the peoplewho flew out here with us for this event and for the release of thetechnology policy in just a few minutes is Dr. Jack Gibbons, who is inthe back of the room -- the President's science advisor and head of theOffice of Science and Technology Policy.  And he will be in charge of theFCCSET process.  That's an acronym that -- what does it stand for, Jack -- the Federal Coordinating Council on Science and Engineering Technology.And visualization will play a key role in the deliberations of theFCCSET.        We were actually, believe it or not, talking about this a little