A Passion for Leadership
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A leader must make time to think and to plan—to strategize.
Leading reform of bureaucracies requires constant attention and effort. A leader attempting transformational change must dedicate herself to the endeavor wholeheartedly. During the waking hours, a leader must always be thinking about what she is trying to do and how to do it. Nothing must be left to chance, and hardly anything is unimportant. For every problem and every challenge that arises, the leader needs to formulate a strategy on how to deal with it, eliminate it, or use it. Before any meeting, press conference or public presentation, I was always calculating how I could advance the reform agenda. Reforming bureaucracies is so complex and support for change often so tentative that loose ends have the potential to unravel the entire effort.
All this strategizing takes time, and it is a common failing of leaders of big institutions that they get so trapped in day-to-day issues, meetings, and travel, they neglect their own agenda—change. I always tried to set aside an hour or so every day to work on my agenda. In the normal course of affairs, the demands of others filled up most of my day. If I wasn’t careful, routine matters would consume the entire day. But during that daily “quiet time,” I could think about what progress was being made, what the problems were and how to tackle them, how various individuals were performing and whether that was good enough, and think through strategies for implementing the change agenda.
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I mentioned earlier that a new leader’s strategy needs to include carefully choosing his lieutenants. This is important because he must delegate leadership and implementation of specific initiatives on his agenda for change whenever possible. Those surrogates must be chosen carefully to ensure that they can deliver results that accomplish the established goals on time and then can lead the effort to gain acceptance and, where necessary, approval.
However, on some initiatives, a leader must lead the effort personally, must be seen doing it—and must take the time to do so. Most of the challenges I faced at the Defense Department were rooted in a structure so complex, cutting across so many organizations, that no one person or entity below the secretary had the authority or resources to solve most problems, including getting the right equipment to the front lines and canceling major programs. Accordingly, more than at either the CIA or A&M, I had to be personally and routinely involved in virtually every consequential initiative and change on my agenda. As an example, in selecting the thirty-odd major acquisition programs to cut in early 2009, I chaired forty meetings over a period of just two months. I met with the task force charged with overseeing the production of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) armored vehicles every two weeks; the same was true of most other initiatives related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the chairs of the task forces were exceptionally able, it routinely required my personal involvement to keep the bureaucracy from smothering their efforts. When we set out in 2010 to reduce projected Pentagon overhead spending—by $180 billion, as I mentioned earlier—between mid-May and mid-December I chaired sixty meetings ranging in length from one to eight hours.
The situation was completely different at A&M and the CIA. In both places, I made wide use of task forces and councils, but other than periodic updates I spent little time with them until their work was complete. The important thing in these circumstances is to prepare a strong and detailed charter for the work of such groups and then to choose men and women to lead them who not only agree with the overall agenda for change (if not the particulars; after all, you do want creativity and give-and-take) but also by virtue of their institutional role and personal reputation can win wide support for those changes. Also, in both places, I assigned my special assistant at the CIA and my chief of staff at A&M responsibility for monitoring the task forces and reporting to me whether they were on track and coming to conclusions compatible with my agenda.
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A transformational leader needs to set priorities in his reform agenda, decide how to sequence his initiatives, and develop creative strategies for change well suited to the specific institution he heads. One size does not fit all. In doing these things, a leader is able to shape the bureaucratic battlefield in ways that significantly enhance the chances for success.
The greatest American presidents have three or four major accomplishments for which they are remembered. If a leader is too ambitious, he will dissipate his energy and focus, lose momentum, and fail. Within the broader agenda for change, a leader must choose his priorities with great care.
Too many leaders give too little thought to which change initiatives ought to be launched early and which should wait. When a leader initially surveys the bureaucratic battlefield, he needs to determine which of his initiatives for change are going to be greeted with enthusiasm and broad support and which are going to provoke the greatest opposition. Whenever possible, the popular changes should be made first and the tougher ones later. By successfully effecting changes that are broadly welcome, a leader creates a positive climate for further change. In doing so, he generates political capital and credibility for when he takes on the controversial or more difficult issues.
This worked especially well for me at A&M. I felt strongly about creating a new undergraduate degree that would reflect twenty-first-century reality by allowing a student, with a faculty adviser’s oversight and approval, to design a degree program that cut across multiple colleges and disciplines. Because this kind of degree was new and nontraditional in that it involved several colleges and no specific major, there was substantial faculty skepticism. So I waited nearly three years to launch it, until I had built up considerable capital with the faculty by, among other things, implementing the program to hire hundreds more faculty and beginning construction of several hundred million dollars’ worth of new academic facilities. I named Elsa Murano, dean of the agriculture school, and Jerry Strawser, dean of the business school, to lead the task force studying the proposal and added as members several former speakers of the faculty senate who I knew would be supportive. It was still a tough slog, but ultimately the degree program was approved.
To achieve especially challenging goals, a leader should always be prepared to tailor his reform strategy to the culture of the institution. This requires investing much thought in tactical creativity—as well as unorthodox approaches and the element of surprise—in developing strategies for implementation.
My determination to increase diversity at A&M required just such a tailored, unorthodox strategy. While the number of minority students there had grown over the years, the percentages significantly lagged the changing demography of the state. I was determined to change this, but I knew I had to shape the initiative carefully to win broad support among conservative former (and current) students, the board of regents, and others important to the university. More than a few among them saw no value in greater on-campus diversity and certainly no value in spending money to achieve it. So, my strategy had to be designed specifically for Texas A&M and its culture.
In December 2003, a few months after the Supreme Court approved limited use of affirmative action in college admissions, I announced a number of measures we would take to increase minority recruitment and enrollment. We would establish a statewide network of “prospective student centers”—permanent recruitment, admissions, and financial offices (with bilingual staff) in predominantly minority areas of major Texas cities and along the border with Mexico. I announced twenty-four hundred new four-year scholarships (six hundred per year) of $5,000 per year for first-generation college students who came from homes with $40,000 or less in family income. For families at that income level, we could stack other scholarships and grants so those students could go to A&M virtually free. Demographically, about two-thirds of those scholarships would go to minorities, the remainder to poor whites.
At the same time, I announced A&M would not use affirmative action in the way it was being used at most universities, that is, assigning students extra “points” in the application score if t
hey were of a certain ethnicity. Everyone would be admitted purely on the basis of individual merit. Most A&M students and alumni applauded the merit-only approach—until I announced a couple of days later that we would no longer use legacy (previous family attendance at A&M) as a factor in admissions. As I told the Aggies, we couldn’t have it both ways: purely merit-based admissions and legacy. The shit that hit the fan as a result of these combined admissions initiatives came from the media, minority leaders in Texas already deeply skeptical of the university’s commitment to greater diversity, some alumni, and a number of faculty. With respect to race-blind admissions, most minority leaders figured the new approach was just a dodge to avoid increasing the number of minority kids and evidence of hostility at A&M to minorities.
Within days of my public announcement, I was summoned to the state capitol to meet with a dozen or so legislators who came from racial minorities. They lambasted me in the most graphic terms for the better part of two hours. Years of testifying before Congress had inured me to this kind of treatment, so I just sat and took it, repeatedly and politely reaffirming my commitment to bring more minorities to Texas A&M. I didn’t make much of a dent in their anger. One very powerful African-American state senator, Royce West of Dallas, who had been impressed with how I had quickly responded to his criticism of A&M’s poor record in using minority-owned businesses, berated me publicly and stated his disagreement with my decision. Privately, however, he said he wanted to help and told other minority leaders around the state that I should be given a chance to succeed. He invited me to Dallas to talk with minority community activists and the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News, in both cases accompanying me and introducing me. He repeatedly avowed that I had delivered on what I had promised in the past and he had confidence I would do so again. I will never forget his confidence and his willingness to take a risk by supporting me. He helped buy me the time I needed to make my strategy work.
Sixteen months after arriving on campus, I implemented a tailored strategy for increasing diversity at A&M: rejecting the use of both affirmative action and legacy, and allocating millions of dollars to a unique and aggressive recruitment effort. The strategy was controversial among both external and internal audiences. But sometimes a leader must decide what is in the best long-term interest of the institution, suck it up, make a tough decision, put his head down, and plunge ahead—even if alone. I was convinced that if I was to meaningfully increase minority representation at A&M, I had to have an unorthodox strategy consistent with the institution’s culture. I was determined to convince Hispanics and African-Americans that I was dead serious about increasing their numbers in both the student body and the faculty and equally determined to persuade the university community that greater diversity was essential for Texas A&M’s stature and its future.
I spent the next three years implementing that tailored strategy. It worked. By fall semester 2006, African-American freshman enrollment was up 77 percent from the fall of 2003; Hispanic freshman enrollment was up 59 percent. Our success in enrolling minorities, especially compared with a number of other major public universities nationwide where minority enrollment was declining in absolute terms, was recognized in a front-page article of The Chronicle of Higher Education and by the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle. (Between 2002, before I launched my initiative, and 2012, African-American and Hispanic undergraduates at Texas A&M increased from 10.6 percent of the student body to 23.6 percent, a major step forward, though there is room for continued improvement.)
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My priorities when I became secretary of defense—getting more troops into the war zones, getting them the equipment they needed to succeed in the missions they had been given, getting them home safely, and, if wounded, getting the best possible care for them—were not the priorities of the senior leaders in the Pentagon. They were preoccupied not with waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but with planning and procuring equipment for future wars against major nation-states. I had to shape my strategy accordingly. The most immediate change I had to make, shocking to me, was to get the senior leadership focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Obama’s onetime White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said you should never let a crisis go to waste, an important lesson for all leaders. Further, I would add, if a new leader manages a crisis effectively, it can have an enormous ripple effect, enhancing his authority and his ability to address other problems.
My first management crisis as secretary was the result of a series in The Washington Post in February 2007 detailing the squalid living conditions and bureaucratic morass that troops recovering from their combat wounds had to deal with at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The Walter Reed scandal demonstrated that while the medical care was superb, outpatient wounded soldiers undergoing further treatment and rehabilitation were being neglected; they had to fight the military’s health bureaucracy at every step on their difficult paths. Both Walter Reed and the defense establishment more broadly presumed—hoped, really—from 2003 on that the war in Iraq would be wrapped up relatively quickly, we could begin withdrawing our troops, and we could get back to “business as usual.” There wasn’t much interest in disrupting established organizations, routines, and programs, much less creating and funding new ones aimed at meeting the immediate war-related needs of troops and commanders.
Walter Reed provided me with an opportunity to address this mentality—and related shortcomings—in ways that also tackled the broader issues affecting the war effort. I declared that helping our wounded warriors and their families would be our highest priority “after the wars themselves.” Because so many different elements of the Pentagon were involved, I created the Wounded Warrior Task Force, which reported to me every two weeks on our progress. The task force was just the first of several I created to accomplish other priority tasks associated with turning the wars around. They would become an essential instrument for me not just on matters relating to the wars but on other problems in the department as well.
I knew I personally would have to shape the Pentagon battlefields and devise strategies for winning the internal fights over providing better support for the troops. And the fights came fast and furious, including those over better armored vehicles (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) to provide significantly better protection for troops on the move—a program opposed by virtually all of the senior civilian and military leaders; improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and better detection of, and defenses against, roadside bombs (bureaucratic paralysis and air force opposition complicated solutions); reduced medevac times in Afghanistan—again opposed by nearly all the top brass. One action that certainly helped shape the internal battlefield for the years ahead was my firing of the Walter Reed hospital commander, the surgeon general of the army, and the secretary of the army less than three months after I took office. I made clear that when it came to getting the troops what they needed and taking care of them, I would not tolerate neglect, obstacles, or halfhearted commitment.
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When I became DCI in November 1991, my strategy for change was to blitz the CIA and the other intelligence agencies with multiple initiatives for change, all with short deadlines. Unlike the Defense Department and A&M, where the need for change was questioned by more than a few, virtually everyone in the CIA and other intelligence agencies recognized that we had entered a new and very different world. Thus, there was little opposition to the overall effort, though there would be to specific proposals.
In intelligence organizations, secrecy and “need to know” are integral elements of the culture, but I decided that there was nothing particularly sensitive about the structural and procedural changes I was contemplating or, for the most part, changes in the way we did our business. Thus, at the very beginning, I made clear that reports of the two dozen or so task forces would be widely circulated for comment and reaction, as would the drafts of any decision memo I prepared to implement the recomme
ndations of the task force. I wanted the most inclusive process possible, with the widest possible number of intelligence professionals invited to participate.
Of course, sometimes the best of intentions go awry. One of the task forces I established was to examine how the CIA, in particular, could be more open in its relationships with the media and the public. Many good ideas surfaced, including declassifying decades’ worth of analytical papers dealing with the former Soviet Union, providing greater availability of senior agency officials for media interviews, facilitating access to already declassified documents, and easing access to classified files for scholars. Unfortunately, we were subjected to considerable—deserved—criticism and mockery when it was revealed in the press that the task force report on “openness” had been classified “secret.” I immediately declassified it, but the damage was done, thus proving, yet again, that old habits die hard and bureaucracies are often their own worst enemies.
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One strategy new leaders often use in reform initiatives is reorganizing the bureaucracy. But all too often, they confuse organizational and name changes with real change. They believe that moving the boxes around on the organization chart, changing the lines for who reports to whom, making dotted lines into solid lines, and the like will fix problems and represent real change. They are nearly always wrong. When you get a new boss who is bent on changing things by changing the boxes, it usually means he isn’t really serious about change or he doesn’t understand how to lead it.