Oquirrh Institute

TRANSCRIPT OF REMARKS BY FOUNDER MICHAEL O. LEAVITT

Introduction by Bill Shiebler

None of us would be enjoying tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s fascinating program if the Institute hadn’t had a founder. Our founder was the governor of Utah during the 2002 Olympics when he hosted the world from Utah. He initiated the very first meeting of the Oquirrh Institute and helped very very much in developing our mission. The Institute is what it is today, to a great extent, because of Mike Leavitt’s drive and Mike Leavitt’s personality and the close friendship many of us that are active have with him. Governor Leavitt was sworn in as the tenth administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency on November 6th in 2003. Prior to leading the agency he was Utah’s 14th Governor, and was a national leader on homeland security, welfare reform and environment management. Six times during his administration, independent public policy analysts ranked Utah among the best managed states in the nation. Please join me in welcoming our leader, Mike Leavitt.

Mike Leavitt:

Thank you, Bill. I feel and know that I am among friends tonight and so I would like to give you my personal assurance that we will be out of here in 20 minutes. I know the ball game and the debates are of real interest but I thought I’d give you just a little bit of a report on a couple of things that have happened to me in the last year and I’d like to secondly reflect on some thoughts that have come back to me regarding this Institute and why I think it has such purpose and importance. Third, I will leave you with just a little insight on tonight’s debate that might make it somewhat more interesting for you and lastly, if there’s enough time I might share just one insight I’ve been thinking about.

Let me start by reflecting on the last year. It has been a remarkable experience and I am pleased that my friend and colleague Christy Whitman is here. She’s among a handful of people in the world that know the experience that I have had and I have come to have even more fondness and respect for her and what she has accomplished both as Governor and as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. I inherited a remarkable team of people. She will also recognize, as many others will, the fact that occasionally we are dispatched to give speeches at various places and I was invited, in such a setting, to go to Las Vegas, Nevada where I would speak to the International Council of Shopping Centers. I was told that there would be 45,000 people at this convention and I got to Las Vegas and sure enough, there were 45,000 people there. And I was told that I would be speaking at a lunch with 6,000 people present. I thought that seemed impossible, so I got to the Hilton Hotel and there I saw a ballroom about the size of the Washington Mall. It was huge! They had 5 big television screens and a giant stage that was 200 feet long. They had a crystal podium and a model would walk out with every single speaker. It was first-rate and I was so glad I was there.

So I sat down for lunch and about 45 minutes into the program I was summoned by the stage manager who took me out to the green room. So I get wired up with a microphone; I am powdered with make-up and I go out and now I’m standing at the base of the stairs. Well, the program is going on quite a long time, but behind the scenes there must be 15 people running around in black pants and black shirts with flashlights and there’s computers going on running all this electronic equipment. This was a production beyond all productions. Finally it comes my turn to speak, so I stand on the stairs. The stage manager says, “5…4…3…2…1,” and I hear the voice of deity say to me or say to the crowd, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Administrator of the United States Environment Protection Agency, Michael Leavitt.” I took strides onto the stairs, onto the stage and looked out into the audience and saw 5,950 empty chairs. This was the Grand Canyon of empty chairs. They had a video right before my speech and it was a long program and the crowd evaporated. I brought Rich McKeown, who some of you know, with me, who is my Chief of Staff, and I said before I went up, “Now I want to be exacting, when I’ve been speaking for 17 minutes, you do this with your napkin (hand waving) cause I’ll be able to see you.” So Rich is in the front row and he doesn’t know they’re gone. Then I get up there and my speech has disappeared and I think to myself the only thing worse here is that I could miss my plane. So I gave the 20 minute speech and ended it in 6 minutes. McKeown is standing with the napkin waving, and can’t figure it out. I’ve used some of my best jokes and it’s absolute dead silence. Now I’m on these 5 big screen TVs, I can see the people, honestly, you think I am exaggerating; they are like 100 yards away. They’re thinking I’m going to stay here no matter how long it takes for this thing to be over. So I give my speech and I’m out the door. Well, I laughed about it all the way back to Washington, D.C. and the next morning got up and I typed in Google “EPA.” (Christy knows this is the first thing you do when you are the administrator you find out what it’s going to be today) and I am in like 400 newspapers with this stem winder on recycling that I gave at this huge convention in Las Vegas. It is evident to me too that the reporter wasn’t there either. Life has been just full of experiences like that.

I thought that I would just share one other thing with you today. I’ve been at least peripherally involved in the preparation of the President for the debates. I bet you would be interested to know what goes into that process. It started some time ago. They began collecting the 50 most logical questions that could be asked and of course they change everyday. Some current event happens, and then something rises to the likelihood of being asked. Every one of the questions is then staffed out to various people to determine what the most salient points are and to boil it down into 2 or 3 talking points that the President can discipline himself to. It’s put into briefing books. Now the President, we all have our own style of learning, the President learns verbally. He likes to talk and learns things verbally, so we spend a fair amount of time preparing him in terms of his ability to express those three points. Then they go through a substantial amount of role-playing, where they will have different people come in and stand in as John Kerry and they will rehearse them and practice them. As recent as last night, for example, I got a call from a party at the White House saying that we think this question is likely to be asked and here are the three points and here are the phrases. It’s a very demanding format for any two human beings to be put into. Particularly with the stakes as high as they appear to be tonight and I know we are all watching with interest. It’s been a remarkable campaign in lots of ways. I won’t take any more of your time but I thought you would be interested in that.

Now if I could just reflect on one other thing. Just before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, I had been giving a lot of what it is that gave me satisfaction and I concluded that I had been the beneficiary of a remarkable gift and I count this among the greatest blessings of my life and that’s been the opportunity to do public service in the role that I served as Governor. The context in which I was thinking was, this is such a unique education to be able to stand in a place where you begin to see all the different forces of society and how they reach a confluence and society sponsors and chooses very few people through a unique and kind of rigorous process to have this remarkable four-year scholarship and then they are renewable under the right conditions for another four and sometimes even longer. I began to ask myself what is it that I can do when my service is complete that will repay or make use of what I have learned through this unique opportunity? (Which there are only 50 at any one time who have that opportunity.)

As I say, I don’t think it makes me the smartest person in the world, by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been a unique privilege and I know my former colleagues who are here feel the same way. That was really the point at which I began to thinking about Oquirrh as an institution. It’s regrettable in my mind that people like Mike Sullivan, Jim Geringer, Christy Whitman and Don Sundquist, (and don’t let me forget any of the former governors in this room who served in this great way and then reach the end), they go on to other public service but they enjoy working together. They’ve had common experiences and there’s a huge reservoir of experience and investment that the public has made in people like these. It occurred to me that there had to be a way that we could harness that great investment and begin to allow them to work together in public policy. That’s the first point.

The second point, as I begin to ask myself, what is it that I like to do? What is it that brings me satisfaction, and I concluded that I wanted to always be in a setting where I was learning. Where I was learning new things or my mind was being challenged and I was pushing new frontiers for myself. Second, that I was engaged and contributing in important things, that I was actually changing something and making the world better, that I was dealing with relationships that I value, friendships that meant something to me. That I was finding it fulfilling and it was creating good opportunities for myself. I realized there was a connection potentially between these two. That’s really when a lot of us began to get together to say perhaps there’s a way to bring these two ideas together.

If we were to bring a group of people who feel similarly, who want to continue learning, who want to find a way to contribute to important things as being important to their own sense of self-worth, who like relationships and friendships and feel not just validated but enriched by them, and who wanted to continue to find new opportunities. The idea of Oquirrh came together in this way; let’s go out and find 40 or 50 former governors who have had a unique experience working together and want to continue working together in public policy. Then let’s find a group of people from the private sector who enjoy relationships with each other and who would be willing to support financially the kind of public policy work that could be brought together by this reservoir of former governors. Add to it people with particular expertise, and we can create something quite remarkable.

For the last couple of years we’ve been pursuing this, you are probably aware that there are, I don’t know, Jim, how many? 20 some-odd former governors now who have indicated a desire to work together in public policy settings and we now have the Oquirrh Club, of which all of you are a part. Together we have been able to travel to Russia and meet with some of the leaders of Russia including the Mayor of Moscow. We went to Mexico and met with President Fox and leaders of his government and found that remarkably interesting, I think. We had a great session. All of us went to the Oracle of Omaha—Warren Buffet. That was one, I think, of our favorite meetings. We had a remarkable meeting in Washington a couple of months ago with George Tenet. For those of you who weren’t there, this was an amazing experience. We walked in at 4 o’clock and he was supposed to take an hour with us and he left at 5:30. When we finished, we went home, turned on the news the next morning and George Tenet had resigned. We were the last meeting he had. And now tomorrow we will have sessions with Nobel Prize winners. I would like to say this is the kind of interaction that I believe we as a group concluded that there’s some good things happening.

Out of our trip to Mexico, for example, came our project to take Mexican immigrants and to track their education on a competency-based learning scale. It would contain the work of the Mexican National Government and a number of states. Governors can get that kind of thing done. Former governors can get that kind of thing done from a public policy standpoint. Out of our visit came the project. The whole concept of Enlibra has been fostered by this group and it’s begun and continues to take on quite a prominence. But again, I just want to say how pleased I am that my former colleagues have found this appealing—five or six tonight that are here. But there’s a lot of enthusiasm among the governors and former governors to work together and we were very fortunate when Jim Souby, who had been so successful at the Western Governors Association, agreed to come over to continue this work.

Now lastly, let me just make one observation that hopefully will challenge your thinking a little bit. Tom Stockham and I just began to talk about this over dinner—my work in environmental management has again stimulated a belief that the world is beginning to intuitively organize itself into networks. I think this is a substantial change and maybe the next frontier of human productivity. The President has assigned me to do a project on the Great Lakes. We have two nations, eight states, probably 1000 municipalities working to solve some very clear and complex environmental problems. One of the principles of Enlibra that we have all espoused is that political environmental solutions transcend political boundaries. I’ve come to understand that political boundaries are not just the boundaries between Canada and the U.S. It’s not just the boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota, and it’s not just the boundary between a county and a city. But it’s also the boundary between the department of agriculture and the department of interior. It’s also the boundary between the office of water and the office of air and that part of learning 21st Century problem-solving is learning to create and to manage networks.

I’ve begun to travel around the country a lot and in the last 10 months I’ve been in 43 states and I’m beginning to observe something all of you probably have—most cities in the United States are starting to look a lot alike. They all have a Target. They all have a Best Buy. They all have a Pizza Hut. They all have a McDonald’s. They all have a Jiffy Lube. Suddenly we’re beginning to see standards knit the community together in the way we operate as a society. The same thing is beginning to happen in healthcare. It’s happening in environmental management. It’s happening in energy. It’s the whole idea of being networked, the laws of networking. I think we are going to find as we get deeper into genetics that some of those same rules and laws begin to govern in the areas of genetics. I don’t intend to resolve that tonight but it was just a thought I wanted to leave with you and maybe it’s something we can talk about again.

I will leave tonight saying that one of the reasons I have enjoyed my association with all of you is because it’s an atmosphere where I learn constantly, where I am contributing to important things, where I have relationships that have lasted years and I expect will enrich my life for years. I feel as though what I am doing, when I’m working on this with you, is fulfilling and it’s clearly spawning new opportunities. I look at the relationships I see beginning to form among this group and it’s very much about a network. There are relationships that are coming from this that I think are not just important personal relationships but valuable economic relationships, as well as important public policy relationships. So thank you for your willingness to continue to support this. To my former colleagues, who are former governors, thank you for your willingness to be part of it. I’m looking forward to working with all of you as we go forward in the future. (Looking at his watch.) And I think I’ve kept my commitment. Thank you.