President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Good afternoon, friends and colleagues,
You are the first to have entered the management personnel reserve. As you know very well, the objective in setting up this reserve is to make work in public administration, in business, and in other public organizations more effective than it is today.
It must be admitted that we have not worked on establishing this kind of reserve for quite a long time now. In fact, it would be more precise to say that we never worked on this before, because you know yourselves on what principles the personnel reserve during the Soviet period was built.
I am not going to give an evaluation of what was done during that period. There were probably some positive aspects in the personnel selection carried out back then, but overall, what we are doing today is a completely different kind of undertaking.
All of you here today are people who have already established yourselves in your careers and are to a considerable extent already leaders in your professions. As President of this country, I am pleased to see this, because we wanted the first people in this personnel reserve, the President’s reserve, to be people of distinction. The selection was made based on the rules drawn up by the Government and the Presidential Executive Office, and the main criterion was ‘best selecting the best’. Well, the very best are sitting here in this room today.
This management personnel reserve’s formation is truly an undertaking for the entire country. This work has only just begun, but we need to form this reserve if we want to advance. We are all aware that renewal of personnel, development of human resources potential, and getting new people into the appropriate positions are things that have been taking place very slowly in our country. We are often at a standstill, and the reserve bench has a very short line-up. We always end up reshuffling one and the same pack of cards. It was precisely this situation that motivated us to establish this new reserve.
I hope there will be demand for this personnel reserve right from the start. We are not making this kind of list to simply pin up somewhere and say, here are all the excellent people we’ve found, come and take a look at them. Even as we meet, some of the people on the presidential list have already received appointments to new positions. I hope this will continue on an enviably regular basis.
Another important aspect I wanted to note is that this reserve should be a system that is well-organised and open to all. I make a principle of this because, when we decided to go ahead with this project, some people said that we should not make it all public, as, who knows, someone or other on the list might not end up getting appointed to some new position in the future, and then it would look like the reserve is just there as decoration, and the actual decisions are based on entirely different principles. But I think this would be the wrong approach. I think that we should indeed speak openly and publicly about those who might be appointed to the relevant positions. ‘Might be’ does not necessarily mean ‘will be’, of course, because life is always full of twists and turns, but I think nonetheless that open access to the reserve and making it public in nature are the guarantees that we will actually move in the right direction, and that the people in the reserve will sooner or later occupy worthy positions in public administration, in government institutions, and in business, and will, in general, receive new professional appointments.
That is about all I wanted to say for a start. I would like to hear what you have to say, hear about your plans. I want you to tell me if anything has changed in your lives after the publication of your names. If anything has changed, has it been change for the better, or have you suffered persecution and attacks from competitors and superiors? If this is the case, this is reason to appoint you in place of these superiors. I am just joking, of course, but only half-joking, you understand.
So, colleagues, please, let’s begin exchanging views.