Editor's Note: The Taste of Tang

I never liked the taste of Tang. I doubt its powdered pulp has passed my lips in 25 years, but back in the early '70s I drank a lot of it after learning it went to the moon with astronauts. Like most kids, I thought I would get my own ticket to the moon punched by drinking the stuff.
Childhood flights of fancy aside, the popularity of Tang had little to do with its taste, and everything to do with the desire of Americans to savor a masterful achievement by their government — especially when it was faced with a supreme challenge.
Next month, as we seek to honor those lost in the September 11th attacks, there may be some comfort in knowing that our government and the people who serve it have a new sense of purpose that comes from being challenged in an extraordinary way.
We've now heard it said that if the fall of the Berlin Wall revealed the supremacy of capitalism and Industrial Age organizations, the events of September 11th revealed the sluggishness of those organizations to adapt. If the U.S. government succeeds in meeting the challenge homeland defense now poses, its achieved ambition will be more an organizational feat than a technological one. It's a feat, we are told, that will require a vast realignment of information flows, wherein individuals will enjoy greater empowerment as they become less encumbered by organizational structure.
The government does not intend to meet the challenge alone. It is already seeking to enlist the skills of a good number of consultants, some of whom are already hard at work hammering out the template needed to put the government on the threshold of an organizational transformation fit for the Information Age. It's a template consultants within the commercial sector have long appeared to be closing in on, but one that may now ultimately bare the thumbprints of their government-consulting colleagues.
Be they with Booz Allen, KPMG Consulting, Accenture, or even Monday, consulting professionals within government appear to have an extra spring in their step these days, a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that frequently bubbles up to the surface in conversation. Fueled by the knowledge that they are participating in something that aspires to greatness, these consultants today have an incentive their commercial colleagues can only contemplate.
Asked to describe the magnitude of what the government has undertaken with homeland security, Dan Johnson, managing director of KPMG Consulting's government business, doesn't hesitate to make a comparison: "This is like when President Kennedy said, 'We're putting a man on the moon.' It's just that focused."
It's a comparison certain to stir some debate, and one that made my mouth water for a taste of Tang.