It Worked For Me

by Colin Powell

  His personality made him a good manager, but not a leader who made a difference. Everyone could see it, and I had to let him go. It was difficult, but I hadn’t acted precipitously or in an arbitrary manner. I had tried counseling him, but that didn’t help. He knew my concerns and lack of satisfaction directly from me.

  When I told him that I had to relieve him, I made it clear that I was quite sure he could be successful in another job in a different capacity. He was crestfallen, but the needs of the unit came first.

  During my transition to Secretary of State, I recruited an old friend as a speechwriter. He was one of the best speechwriters I had ever met; he had worked at the very highest levels of government; and I had worked with him before and knew his style. It had all the elements of a brilliant choice.

  It didn’t last long. He kept trying to cram his thoughts into my words, rather than use his skills to enhance my thoughts and words. We had a heart-to-heart one evening, and he quietly found a senior official to work for in another department. I wished him all the best, but my game, my ball.

  What do I look for in subordinates? The usual qualities: competence, intelligence, character, moral and physical courage, toughness with empathy, ability to inspire, and loyalty. Beyond that, I want subordinates who will argue with me and execute my decisions with total loyalty, as if the decision were originally their own. Past performance is examined closely, but I try to sense future potential. I want imaginative and creative folks with ideas and the ability to anticipate. I treasure the person who sees a problem before I do and does something about it before I even know it exists. I treasure the person who sees opportunity before anyone else and smells risks and threats early.

  I also look for people who will fit in with me and with my team. When I commanded a battalion in Korea, my brigade commander asked me to give a company command to a brilliant young captain on the brigade staff. He was an exceptional officer—extremely talented—but he’d let his brilliance go to his head. He had trouble getting along with other captains. His personal behavior left something to be desired and was the subject of much gossip in the brigade. He was good, and I could have managed him, but he would not have fit in on my team.

  I suggested to my boss that the captain be assigned somewhere else. He was. He got off to a solid, though too self-promotional start. But after a few months his personal behavior problems publicly manifested themselves, resulting in an ugly inspector general investigation and his relief.

  On some occasions, I’ve passed on people I probably should have hired. On other occasions, I have stuck with people I should have let go. And many times, people have strengths you need, even when that means you have to put up with weaknesses that you forever have to cover. In selecting people you just hope you bat over .500.

  Because you have to have spice in the stew, I also look for characters. An organization is invigorated when a handful of slightly felonious, offbeat eccentrics are on the team. Some of my most memorable experiences and good ideas have come from folks who get out of the box and have fun. Guys like Tiger Honeycutt. Brigadier General Weldon “Tiger” Honeycutt was my immediate boss in the 101st Airborne. A heavily decorated hero, he never flinched from taking on anybody or anything.

  One weekend the senior leadership of the division was convened to participate in a two-day “Organizational Effectiveness” seminar, run by a civilian academic facilitator. His first instruction was to list on charts our goals and objectives, after which we would discuss our feelings about them. When he finished his opening presentation, Tiger raised his hand. “How much are we paying this son of a bitch?” he asked. Tiger was excused from the course.

  Every morning, I gave him my standard greeting, “Good morning, sir, how are you?”

  His standard reply: “A helluva lot better than you. I’m a friggin’ general and you ain’t.”

  Guys like Tiger are the spice every organization needs.

  When I’m choosing people, I try to support my strengths and fill in my weaknesses. I want people around me who are better than I am in areas where I am not comfortable. I want folks who are smarter than I am, but who neither know it nor show it.

  In selecting a deputy, I always want someone who is tougher and nastier than I can be. I’m the good guy and chaplain. He is the disciplinarian and enforcer. Major Sonny Tucker was my executive officer in the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division. His office was right next to mine; I heard just about everything that went on in there. When someone had displeased me, all I had to do was let Sonny know. Later that day I could hear him through the wall. “C’mere, boy, you made my colonel unhappy; and when he is unhappy, I am pissed. And now I am going to eat your lunch.” After Sonny retired he became a minister.

  I always fully empower my deputy to act for me.

  Early in my tenure as Secretary of State, my deputy, Rich Armitage, was given a document to sign while I was on a trip. The staff put the title “Acting Secretary of State” under his signature. “That’s not necessary,” I told them. “I’m always available through the miracle of modern communications. We’ll never need an ‘Acting Secretary’ while I’m Secretary.”

  The staff was confused about what they should do when I was on the other side of the world. The answer was simple: Rich could sign as Deputy Secretary of State. His signature was as valid as mine. In the very few instances where the law required my signature, I’d sign. Those were the only exceptions.

  The point was, Rich had my total trust and I had his. The staff tried to write this arrangement up in a regulation. I told them not to bother; they’d soon see how it worked. There was never a problem.

  Do I look for good managers or good leaders? Let us bury that old distinction. Good managers are good leaders, and good leaders are good managers. But great leaders have a special touch that separates them from managers. Good management gets 100 percent of a team’s designed capability. Great leaders seek a higher ground. They take their followers to 110, 120, 150 percent of what anyone thought was possible. Great leaders do not just motivate followers; they inspire them. The followers are turned on by their leaders.

  Superior leaders also tend to be superior managers. They are rare gems. Always be looking for the person with the potential to give you 150 percent.

  In the early 1980s, we were working hard to see if we could use simulators to make unit training cheaper and more effective. I was a brigadier general in the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, when we received for testing new tank gunnery simulators.

  Tankers love to race cross-country and shoot their main gun. It is how they train to win in battle. But there are downsides. Not the least of these is the cost of the shells they fire, up to $1,000 each in 1981 dollars. For that reason, each tank crew got an allocation of only ninety shells per year.

  This is where the simulators came in. Could the same level of proficiency be achieved using simulators? We were instructed to test our new simulators to find that out.

  The crews were put in an isolated booth replicating the inside of a tank turret. The terrain rolled by on a screen; enemy tanks popped up; and the crews engaged them with an electronic gun.

  We selected two tank battalions to test the concept. One got the full ninety rounds per tank and did not train on the simulator. The other battalion got only fifty rounds, but had hours of training per crew on the simulator. We then reversed the battalions and repeated the trials.

  In the first trials, the battalion with no simulator time scored better. But then when we put the same battalion on simulator training, they scored higher again. We cut fifty rounds to forty rounds, and the same battalion won. We reversed the process again; the same battalion kept winning. The analysts were bewildered.

  The answer was simple. The difference was the battalion commander. He was determined to do better, no matter what we threw at him. He drilled that into his soldiers. Every night they worked on it. Every man was determined to do his best and to hell with the analysts. The other battalion was a goo
d battalion, but the commander didn’t have those extra qualities of hunger, competitiveness, drive, passion, and imagination that his buddy did and that infected his whole unit.

  I don’t want to carry this lesson too far. Simulators are great for training, and we do a lot with them today that you couldn’t dream of thirty years ago. Yet we can never have enough battalion commanders like the one who kept winning no matter what.

  On the whole, I like people who work hard, have a purpose, inspire folks, spend time with their family, have fun, and aren’t busy bastards. I like a happy team. I work hard to make sure my followers work hard, and I work hard to make sure they enjoy their work. That can only come from believing in what they are doing and feeling they have been prepared and equipped to get the work done.

  I set high but not impossible standards. Mine are achievable with maximum effort.

  I do not like to see an atmosphere of fear in an organization, where shouting, screaming, and abuse of subordinates are common. You’re probably saying, “Well, who does?” You’d be surprised. I have worked in fear- and abuse-filled organizations and have seen a lot more. Their leaders were at bottom insecure bullies who substituted Sturm und Drang for leadership. I have never known any leader who got the best out of his people that way.

  “What is a leader?” people ask me.

  My simple answer: “Someone unafraid to take charge. Someone people respond to and are willing to follow.”

  I believe that leaders must be born with a natural connection and affinity to others, which then must be encouraged and developed by parents and teachers and molded by training, experience, and mentoring. You can learn to be a better leader. And you can also waste your natural talents by ceasing to learn and grow.

  PART IV

  Fast Times in the Digital World

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Brainware

  Diplomats live on information. It’s the coin of the diplomatic realm. The flow in and out of an embassy is enormous. Limit or interrupt the flow and an embassy is a beached whale.

  Since the earliest days of the nation, our diplomats around the world gathered information about the country they were assigned to, sent it to Washington, and in turn received information and directions from Washington to convey to that country’s leaders.

  In the early days dispatches were handwritten and sent by whatever means available, mostly stagecoaches and sailing ships. As communications technology advanced, and trains, automobiles, steamships, telegraph, and undersea cables brought us into the twentieth century, the State Department adapted . . . and continued to adapt as the twentieth and early twenty-first century brought us radio, telephones, fax machines, satellites, video links, and many other techniques, culminating in the Internet revolution, with all its many applications.

  Adapting to new technologies brings with it many challenges. It’s one thing to install new hardware and software. It’s far more difficult to change people’s brainware. Even if your people have at their fingertips the latest computers, Internet connections, smartphones, iPads, and data-crunching systems, their heads and hearts may remain in the twentieth century . . . or earlier.

  When I became Secretary of State in 2001, I walked in as a born analog information junkie working hard to become digital. I realized that ancient temporal, spatial, political, cultural, and social barriers to getting, sending, and sharing information had been knocked down or massively penetrated. Information, capital, risk, opportunity, and social connections were speeding around the world at the speed of light. Before joining the State Department, I had served for several years on the board of AOL. I had a pretty good idea of what was possible. And I had learned a lot from my son, Mike, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. But not as much as I learned from just watching my digitally hardwired-from-birth grandkids. Abby and PJ, the two youngest, then four and two, once started screaming in the back of the car their aunt Linda was driving, “Auntie Linda, Auntie Linda, you didn’t turn on the GPS. We won’t know where we’re going. We’ll get lost.”

  When I became Secretary, I was anxious to see how the department had been keeping up with the information technology revolution. The picture I saw was unsatisfactory. We had many generations of computers and incompatible systems—including a large number of antique Wang desktop computers, running legacy programs. (Wang had gone into bankruptcy eight years earlier, a geologic era in the technology world.)

  Most State Department computers were not Internet capable. Of the desks that offered some kind of connectivity, many had two computers, one connected to the internal State Department unclassified network and the other to the internal classified network. Internet access was normally provided by at most a couple of dedicated computers shared by an entire office or even an entire floor. Other challenges included lack of security certifications and firewalls, little or no budget planning for information technology, and decentralization of systems throughout the department—all resulting in a waste of money, space, and people.

  We had not invested money in the people and equipment needed to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology.

  The other big problem I found was a long-standing controversy between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency over who should have responsibility for designing and providing the communications pipes into many of our more than 250 diplomatic and consular posts worldwide. Our embassies and consulates are not just staffed by State Department personnel; they are aggregations of people from many different U.S. government agencies. They all need information access.

  Congress was not happy with the way the system was being managed. State and the CIA had tried to appease critics and different constituencies by creating a bureaucratic kluge. Responsibility for the communication pipes was switched yearly between State and the CIA. Congress reacted to this absurdity by creating a new office within the Office of Management and Budget to manage the system. Ugh. My only responsibility would be to pick the leader of the OMB office, who, according to congressional dictate, had to come from the private sector. Luckily, when I became Secretary the congressional solution had not yet been implemented. We still had a small window to find a more realistic solution to the problem.

  Under the leadership of my Undersecretary of Management, Grant Green, we started to fix things. First, we pleaded with congressional leaders to hold off on creating the OMB office until we had time to review the situation.

  Next we made a deal with CIA director George Tenet to conduct a study to determine who was best suited to contract for, install, and maintain embassy broadband pipes, State or the CIA. The study gave the nod to the CIA, and I took my staff out of the game, but not until securing an agreement that I would set the communications requirements, approve the CIA’s candidate to manage the pipes, and provide an annual report card on the manager. Tenet agreed, and we signed a treaty. Within a year, our communications capacity had significantly increased, costs had dropped, and Congress got rid of the OMB law. Soon thereafter, State determined that much of our communications traffic could be sent securely over commercial Internet circuits, giving us an even more reliable and less expensive capability.

  Meanwhile, we worked on our hardware needs. After a series of false starts with private contractors, we asked our staff to determine our computer requirements. They concluded that we needed more than 44,000 new computers, and we persuaded Congress to fund them.

  Soon we had placed an Internet-connected computer on every desk in every embassy and every office in the department; every user had access to both the State systems and the public Internet. We accomplished this installation in less than two years. The last embassy we brought up to date was in Gabon; they complained about being last.

  At the same time, we budgeted to avoid obsolescence. Four years down the road we would start replacing our by then out-of-date systems. We also developed a new messaging capability to move us from the world of telegraphic communication and diplomatic cables to email-bas
ed systems. We even allowed mobile devices to access our office systems. In short order, we moved from 1945 to 2001. The system is even better today.

  This is another example of “taking care of the troops.” You have to give your troops the tools they need to get their jobs done, or they will have no reason to believe in you or take seriously your missions and goals.

  Because the State Department lives on the information flow in and out of embassies, I performed this little test whenever I visited an embassy: I’d dart into the first open office I could find (sometimes it was the ambassador’s office). If the computer was on, I’d try to get into my private email account. If I could, they passed. Their network pipes were working, and they were using their computers and the Internet.

  Bringing in new hardware and software was complex and difficult, but most of the problems involved were practical and functional. Permanently changing brainware was a far greater challenge. I was determined to revolutionize the way our people thought and worked. We had to persuade the entire State Department that we were now in a transactional, not a lunar, world. We no longer lived a time-bound existence where our work and actions are measured by clocks and the passage of days. Computers and email have eliminated physical, geographic, calendar, and clock constraints to communication. Diplomatic messages no longer travel by riders on horseback, or by couriers on trains, ships, or planes.

  The leader starts to change institutional brainware by setting the example and changing his own.

  To complement the official State Department computer in my office, I installed a laptop computer on a private line. My personal email account on the laptop allowed me direct access to anyone online. I started shooting emails to my principal assistants, to individual ambassadors, and increasingly to my foreign-minister colleagues who like me were trying to bring their ministries into the 186,000-miles-per-second world.