It Worked For Me

by Colin Powell

  The next summer, I wanted something better than standing in a crowd every morning hoping for a day’s work. My opportunity came when the hiring boss announced one morning that the Pepsi plant in Long Island City was looking for porters to clean the floors, full-time for the summer. I raised my hand. I was the only one who did.

  The porters at the Pepsi plant were all black. The workers on the bottling machines were all white. I didn’t care. I just wanted work for the summer, and I worked hard, mopping up syrup and soda that had spilled from overturned pallets.

  At summer’s end, the boss told me he was pleased with my work and asked if I wanted to come back. “Yes,” I answered, “but not as a porter.” He agreed, and next summer I worked on the bottling machine and as a pallet stacker, a more prestigious and higher-paying job. It wasn’t exactly the Selma March, but I integrated a bottling machine crew.

  Very often my best didn’t turn out that well. I was neither an athlete nor a standout student. I played baseball, football, stickball, and all the other Bronx sports, and I did my best, but I wasn’t good at any. In school I was hardworking and dedicated, but never produced superior grades or matched the academic successes of my many high-achieving cousins. Yet my parents didn’t pester me or put too much pressure on me. Their attitude was “Do your best—we’ll accept your best, but nothing less.”

  These experiences established a pattern for all the years and careers that came afterward. Always do your best, no matter how difficult the job, or how much you dislike it, your bosses, the work environment, or your fellow workers. As the old expression goes, if you take the king’s coin, you give the king his due.

  I remember an old story told by the comedian Brother Dave Gardner about two ditch diggers. One guy just loves digging. He digs all day long and says nothing much. The other guy digs a little, leans on his shovel a lot, and mouths off constantly, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.”

  Time passes and guy number one gets a front-end trench machine and just digs away, hundreds of feet a day, always loving it. The other guy does the minimum, but never stops mouthing off, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.” No, guy number one doesn’t end up owning the company, but he does become a foreman working out of an air-conditioned van. He often waves to his old friend leaning on his shovel still insisting, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.” Ain’t gonna happen.

  In my military career I often got jobs I wasn’t crazy about, or I was put in situations that stretched me beyond my rank and experience. Whether the going was rough or smooth, I always tried to do my best and to be loyal to my superior and the mission given to me.

  On my second tour in Vietnam, I was assigned as an infantry battalion executive officer, second in command, in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). I was very pleased with the assignment. As it happened, I had just graduated with honors from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Shortly after I arrived in Vietnam, a photo of the top five graduates appeared in Army Times. The division commanding general saw it, and I was pulled up to the division staff to serve as the operations officer, responsible for coordinating the combat operations of a twenty-thousand-man division. I was only a major and it was a lieutenant colonel’s position. I would have preferred to stay with my battalion, but wasn’t given that choice. It turned out to be very demanding and a stretch for me, but it marked a turning point in my career. Someone was watching.

  Years later, as a brigadier general in an infantry division, I thought I was doing my best to train soldiers and serve my commander. He disagreed and rated me below standards. The report is still in my file. It could have ended my career, but more senior leaders saw other qualities and capabilities in me and moved me up into more challenging positions, where I did well.

  Doing your best for your boss doesn’t mean you will always like or approve of what he wants you to do; there will be times when you will have very different priorities from his. In the military, your superiors may have very different ideas than you do about what should be your most important mission. In some of my units my superiors put an intense focus on reenlistment rates, AWOL rate, and saving bonds participation. Most of us down below would have preferred to keep our primary focus on training. Sure, those management priorities were important in principle, but they often seemed in practice to be distractions from our real work. I never tried to fight my superiors’ priorities. Instead I worked hard to accomplish the tasks they set as quickly and decisively as I could. The sooner I could satisfy my superiors, the sooner they would stop bugging me about them, and the quicker I could move on to my own priorities. Always give the king his due first.

  By the end of my career in government, I had been appointed to the nation’s most senior national security jobs, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. I went about each job with the same attitude I’d had at Sickser’s.

  During my tenure as Secretary of State, I worked hard on President Bush’s agenda, and we accomplished a great deal that has not received the credit it deserved. We forged good relationships with China, India, and the Russian Federation, all major powers and all potential political adversaries. We did historic work on disease prevention in the Third World, including HIV/AIDS, and we significantly increased aid to developing countries. In the aftermath of 9/11, we made the nation more secure. We got rid of the horrific Hussein and Taliban regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the residual problems in those countries exposed deep fissures within the national security team. By the beginning of 2004, our fourth year, the Bush national security team had in my view become dysfunctional, which has been well documented. Since it was obvious that my thinking and advice were increasingly out of sync with the others on the team, the best course for me was to leave. At that time I strongly believed that for his second term the President should choose an entirely new national security team, and I gave that advice to President Bush, but he chose not to take it. I left the State Department in January 2005. President Bush and I parted on good terms.

  In the years that have followed my government service, I have traveled around the country and shared my life’s experience with many people in many different forums. At these events, I always emphasize, especially to youngsters, that 99 percent of work can be seen as noble. There are few truly degrading jobs. Every job is a learning experience, and we can develop and grow in every one.

  If you take the pay, earn it. Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don’t disappoint yourself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Street Sweeper

  I have always tried to keep my life in perspective with my ego under control. That effort has been helped enormously by a wife and three kids who have never taken me too seriously and who have always held above me an imaginary oxygen mask ready to drop down whenever I needed a whiff of reality. The first time I came home looking sharp in the new battle dress camouflage fatigues the Army adopted in the 1980s, my daughter Annemarie, then about twelve, merely looked up from watching television and announced, “Mom, the GI Joe doll is home.”

  Over time, others have helped me keep my ego down. After I retired, I was invited to give a speech to a large luncheon event in Boston. There were about two thousand guests and you needed two tickets, one to get into the room, and the second for the waitress to verify that you had paid for lunch. I was escorted to the round head table by the event’s chairman. As the waitress placed salads before each guest, she asked for meal tickets. She passed by me without giving me a salad. When it was time for the next course she passed me by again. That was when the chairman realized what was going wrong. Mortified, he said to the waitress, “Young lady, this is General Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our honored guest and keynote speaker.” Her simple, no-nonsense response was “He ain’t got no ticket, huh?” The chairman produced a ticket for me. I was getting hungry.

  I love when people
do their job. Doing your job well, with someone watching, without inflating your self-importance or showing off, is not easy.

  Some years ago, there was a human interest segment about a street sweeper on the evening news. I think he worked in Philadelphia. He was a black gentleman and swept streets the old-fashioned way, with one of those wide, stiff bristle brooms and a wheeled garbage can. He had a wife and several children and lived in a modest home. It was a loving family, and he had high ambitions for his children. He enjoyed his job very much and felt he was providing a worthwhile service to his community. He had only one professional ambition in life and that was to get promoted to drive one of those mechanized street sweepers with big round brushes.

  He finally achieved his ambition and was promoted to driving a street sweeping machine. His wife and children were proud of him. The television piece closed with him driving down the street; a huge smile was on his face. He knew who he was and what he was.

  I run that video piece through my mind every few months as a reality check. Here is a man happy in his work, providing an essential service for his community, providing for his family, who love and respect him. Have I been more successful in what is truly important in life than he has been? No, we have both been fortunate. He has touched all the important bases in the game of life. When we are ultimately judged, despite my titles and medals, he may have a few points on me, and on a lot of others I know.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Busy Bastards

  The 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), where I served in Vietnam for a short time as operations officer, was commanded by a wonderful soldier, Major General Charles M. Gettys. I learned a great deal from General Gettys. He was a calm, confident commander, not given to outbursts or showing off his rank. He placed great confidence in his staff, but there was no question who was in charge.

  He and I were casually chatting one day when the name of another general came up. He was a highly regarded officer, but Gettys had reservations about him. “Colin, he’s a good guy,” he told me, “but he is one of those ‘busy bastards.’ He always has to be doing things and coming up with new ideas and working absurd hours.”

  Gettys’s wisdom has stayed with me, and I have tried to learn from it. He pointed out back then (maybe intentionally) a road I was inclined to travel. I’ve always done my best to come up with new ideas, and I certainly worked hard in all my jobs. But I have tried not to be a busy bastard. As President Reagan used to frequently observe, “They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take a chance?”

  I’ve seen many busy bastards over the years . . . I shouldn’t call them bastards, but Gettys’s words have burned into my brain. Most of them are good people, not bastards. They just can’t ever let it go.

  A busy bastard never leaves the office until late at night. He has to go in on weekends. He shows up in the morning at hours suitable only for TV traffic announcers, failing to recognize that a couple dozen staff people have to show up at the same time to make sure he gets the support he can’t do without and to prove they’re as committed to the job as he is.

  In every senior job I’ve had I’ve tried to create an environment of professionalism and the very highest standards. When it was necessary to get a job done, I expected my subordinates to work around the clock. When that was not necessary, I wanted them to work normal hours, go home at a decent time, play with the kids, enjoy family and friends, read a novel, clear their heads, daydream, and refresh themselves. I wanted them to have a life outside the office. I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work. That kind of environment has always produced the best results for me.

  I tried to practice what I preached. I enjoy fixing things, especially old cars, and especially old Volvos. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lives across the river from Washington in a mansion in Fort Myer on a hill overlooking the city. A hundred feet behind the mansion were three garages. When I was Chairman, the garages were always filled with dead circa-1960 Volvos waiting to be fixed or stripped for parts. People who really needed to see me on weekends knew where to find me . . . under a Volvo. If they wanted to visit or chat, I didn’t mind, as long as I could continue working. I enjoyed analyzing a dead engine to discover why it wouldn’t start, reducing the possibilities for the failure down to one, fixing it, and then rejoicing when the engine fired up. My office problems seldom lent themselves to such straightforward, linear analysis. Once a car was running, I had no further interest in it. I would buy a ninety-nine-dollar Earl Scheib paint job and sell it as fast as possible. I was under a Volvo one Sunday in 1989 during our invasion of Panama when the Operations Center called to tell me we had picked up the dictator Manuel Noriega.

  While I was making the transition to Secretary of State, I interviewed a number of candidates for senior positions. Toward the end of one of these interviews, an extremely able and gifted Foreign Service officer asked if I would mind if he went out to jog in the afternoons.

  “You can go home and jog as far as I’m concerned,” I told him. “I trust you to know how to get your work done without me maintaining a sign-out sheet on you.”

  The very fact that a senior officer would ask such a question pointed out how necessary it was to demonstrate to my staff that I wasn’t a busy bastard.

  My mentor in this style of operating was Frank Carlucci. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, Frank was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense; and I became his military assistant. Because Frank always tried to leave the office at a reasonable hour and avoided the place like a plague on weekends, I worked reasonable hours and so did everyone else on his staff. We ran a very efficient office.

  In the spring of 1981, I persuaded Frank to release me for a field assignment. The officer who replaced me, a compulsive worker, stayed late every night. Even though Frank only rarely came in on weekends, and never for more than a couple of hours, his new military assistant felt he had to be there. Sure enough, all those extra hours generated more work for the entire staff. The workload expanded to fill the time. Most of it was make-work, anything but necessary or important. Frank found himself with additional paper he didn’t ask for, need, or expect. He had to start working longer hours!

  In late 1986, in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal, Frank became President Reagan’s National Security Advisor and I became Frank’s deputy. Our task was to reorganize the national security system and fix the deficiencies that had caused the scandal. Even during this stressful, demanding time, with a presidency at risk, Frank maintained his long-standing work habits. One of my responsibilities as his deputy was to keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t have to work late. I didn’t have to worry. Left to his own devices, with no crisis pending, he would leave at 3 p.m., play tennis, and go home. He worked hard, was incredibly well organized, and got the work done. The staff followed Frank’s lead.

  By the time I had reached my most senior positions, I never went to the office on weekends unless a war had just started or some other crisis demanded my presence. On Fridays, I left the office with tons of work; I was far more efficient in the quiet privacy of my home. I expected my staff to do likewise. If you have a reason to go in, then go in, but never think that going in just for the sake of going in impresses me.

  President Reagan was a joy in this regard. He didn’t need encouragement to keep reasonable work hours. When Frank Carlucci became Secretary of Defense, I took over as National Security Advisor. As I’d done earlier with Frank, one of my jobs was to watch the President’s schedule to make sure we didn’t keep him late. Toward the end of the day, we gave him a homework package. He was normally upstairs in the residence with Mrs. Reagan by six o’clock. Friday afternoons were even better. Right after lunch, he usually got an end-of-the-week briefing from Secretary of State George Shultz. Reagan would listen patiently but with limited attention. Around 2:15, when he heard the drone of Marine One descending onto the South Lawn, he’d perk up. It was time to leave for Camp David! He’d arrive t
here by 3 p.m., and short of an emergency, stay until Sunday evening. Seldom were guests invited to Camp David. The President relaxed, read staff papers and books, and spent time with Mrs. Reagan. This was their time. And, hallelujah, it was our time to get caught up, spend time with our families, and rest up and get ready for the demanding week ahead. The nation was safe without the President whizzing all over the place on weekends. Our only concern was the books he was reading. Despite our best efforts, old friends would now and again slip seriously odd books into his briefcase, generating often unanswerable questions Monday morning. One Monday, the President came in brimming over with curiosity about how trees create pollution.

  Reagan loved relaxing at his ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains just outside Santa Barbara, California. We loved it even more. We were condemned to camp out in fancy cabana suites on the beach at the beautiful Santa Barbara Biltmore hotel. Twice a day the senior staff assembled to see what we needed to tell him. We’d telephone up to the ranch and brief him, and we’d send up intelligence, situation reports, and papers for him to work on. If no crises were looming, we could quietly take care of business and prepare for the challenges ahead or split for the pool or the beach, making sure we could monitor everything in case of an emergency. It was rare for anyone to have to brief him at the ranch. I went up just once, to brief him on a treaty we had just concluded with the Russians to reduce our nuclear weapons inventories.

  I worked hard all my life and always expected those who worked for me to do likewise. But I tried not to generate make-work. I learned early that a complete life includes more than work. We need family, rest, outside interests, and time to pursue them. I always keep in mind a lesson taught to all young infantry lieutenants: “Don’t run if you can walk; don’t stand up if you can sit down; don’t sit down if you can lie down; and don’t stay awake if you can go to sleep.”