Duty

Leadership Lessons

Importance of getting out to the field and seeing things firsthand 

“Our visit was critically important because you just have to see and hear some things in person to understand them fully. No number of briefings in Washington could take the place of sitting in the same room with the Iraqis, or some of our own people on the scene, for that matter.” (p. 35)

Keeping your perspective close to the vest

“As one journalist had written in August, ‘Even in his private meetings with lawmakers, top aides and his own senior commanders … he has avoided showing his hand.… He is the … administration official whose views are the least understood.’ I believed that I would maintain maximum leverage in the process, especially with Congress, if the other players did not know exactly what approach I supported.” (p. 75)

Effective meetings focus on the key issue 

“It was frustrating how often we would cover the same ground on the same issue, huge quantities of time consumed in striving to establish a consensus view. Some of the sessions were a waste of time; moreover, they often failed to highlight for the president that under a veneer of agreement, there were significant differences of view. As I would often say, sometimes we chewed the cud so long that it lost any taste whatsoever.” (p. 80)

Importance of having thinking time

“At the CIA, I was able on most days to protect an hour or so a day to work in solitude on my strategies for change and moving forward. No such luck at Defense. One tactic of bureaucracies is to so fill the boss’s time with meetings that he or she has no time to meddle in their affairs or create problems for them. I am tempted to say that the Pentagon crew did this successfully, except that many of my meetings were those I had insisted upon in order to monitor progress on matters important to me or to put pressure on senior leaders to intensify their efforts in accomplishing my priorities.” (p. 82)

His introductory speech to his DoD team

“An hour after I was sworn in on December 18, I held my first staff meeting with the senior civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I wanted them to know right away how I intended to operate. This is part of what I said: 

“First, contrary to rumors in the press, I am not planning any personnel changes and I am not bringing anyone in with me. I have every confidence in you and in your professionalism. The last thing anyone needs, in the seventh year of an administration and in the midst of two wars, is a bunch of neophytes surrounding a neophyte secretary. 

“Second, decision making. I will involve you, and I will listen to you. I expect your candor, and I want to know when you are in disagreement with each other or with me. I want to know if you think I’m about to make a mistake—or have made one. I’d rather be warned about land mines than step on one. Above all, I respect what each of you does and your expertise. I will need your help over what I expect will be a tough two years. (p. 84)

“Third, on tough issues, I’m not much interested in consensus. I want disagreements sharpened so I can make decisions on the real issues and not some extraneous turf or bureaucratic issue. I’m not afraid to make decisions, and obviously, neither is the president.

“Fourth, on style, you will find me fairly informal and fairly irreverent. I prefer conversation to death by PowerPoint. I hope you will look for opportunities for me to interact with soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen—and opportunities for me to do my part to communicate our pride in them and gratitude for their service.

“Fifth, we will succeed or fail depending on whether we operate as a unified team or separate fiefdoms. I will work in an open, transparent manner. I will make no decision affecting your area of responsibility without you having ample opportunity to weigh in. But once decisions are made, we must speak with one voice to the Congress, the media, and the outside world. (pp. 83-4)

Value of symbolic gestures

“I have long believed that symbolic gestures have substantive and real benefits—’the stagecraft of statecraft,’ as I think George Will once put it. Rumsfeld rarely met with the chiefs in the Tank, instead meeting in his conference room. I resolved to meet regularly with them in their space. I ended up doing so on a nearly weekly basis. Even when I had no agenda, I wanted to know what was on their minds. Instead of summoning the regional and functional combatant commanders (European Command, Pacific Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command, and all the others) to the Pentagon to give me introductory briefings on their organizations, I traveled to their headquarters as a gesture of respect.” (p. 87)

‘In May, I helicoptered into an open area at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida as a couple of hundred exhausted, hungry men training to be Army Rangers emerged from the deep woods to assemble for a few words from me. One of my key staff people, Ryan McCarthy, had been a Ranger captain, and he alerted me that these guys had not eaten or slept in days and were filthy and barely conscious. He told me that ordinarily they would not remember me or my visit. But, he said, if you bring them frozen Snickers candy bars, they will never forget you. He added that I should make the soldiers eat while I was talking because if they didn’t, their instructors would take the candy away from them after I left. I’ll never forget the look on those soldiers’ faces as we hauled coolers full of Snickers bars out of the helicopter to pass out to them. Months later I was still hearing from parents and friends of those soldiers who had heard about my visit.’ (p. 465)

When you have power, you don’t have to flex it

“There was another factor that made me comfortable assuming a less publicly assertive role. I wrote earlier about the unparalleled power and resources available to the secretary of defense. That ensures a certain realism in interagency relationships: the secretary never has to elbow his way to the table. The secretary can afford to be in the background. No one can ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.” (p. 91)

What happens when leaders cling to incorrect assumptions

“Our fundamentally flawed and persistent assumption from the outset, that the Iraq War would be a short one, caused many problems on the ground and for the troops. As the months stretched into years, those at senior levels nevertheless clung to their original assumption and seemed unwilling to invest substantial dollars to provide the troops everything they needed for protection and for success in their mission, and to bring them home safely—and if wounded, to provide them with the very best care.” (p. 104)

The difficulty of getting the whole organization to focus on the key activities

“Even though the nation was waging two wars, neither of which we were winning, life at the Pentagon was largely business as usual when I arrived. I found little sense of urgency, concern, or passion about a very grim situation. No senior military officers, no senior civilians came to me breathing fire about the downward slide of our military and civilian efforts in the wars, the need for more or different equipment or for more troops, or the need for new strategies and tactics.” (p. 115)

Creating urgency in the organization

“I challenged them to look for opportunities to apply a sense of urgency and a willingness ‘to break china’ if it involved getting something to the fight faster or in larger quantities: ‘The difference between getting something in the hands of our combat forces next month versus next year is dramatic.… We must all show up every day prepared to look at every decision and plan affecting our combat operations through the lens of how we can do it faster, more effectively, and with more impact.’” (p. 127)

An organization needs to think in an agile way to prepare for an uncertain future

“In order to succeed in the asymmetric battlefields of the twenty-first century—the dominant combat environment in the decades to come, in my view—our Army will require leaders of uncommon agility, resourcefulness, and imagination; leaders willing and able to think and act creatively and decisively in a different kind of world, in a different kind of conflict than we have prepared for for the last six decades.… One thing will remain the same. We will still need men and women in uniform to call things as they see them and tell their subordinates and superiors alike what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.… If as an officer—listen to me very carefully—if as an officer you don’t tell blunt truths or create an environment where candor is encouraged, then you’ve done yourself and the institution a disservice.” (p. 134)

The value of a deliberative decision-making process

“As Obama would tell me on more than one occasion, ‘I can’t defend it unless I understand it.’ I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyze, and reflect. He would sometimes be criticized for his ‘dilatory’ decision making, but I found it refreshing and reassuring, especially since so many pundits and critics seem to think a problem discovered in the morning should be solved by evening. As a participant in that decision-making process, I always felt more confident about the outcome after thorough deliberation. When the occasion demanded it, though, Obama could make a big decision—a life-and-death decision—very fast.” (p. 299)

Someone is always messing up; the key is to detect it early

“My second warning was that at that very moment, one or more people in each of my colleagues’ departments or agencies were doing something that was illegal or improper or engaging in behavior that they, as the boss, would hate. The key, I said, was to have mechanisms in place to find such people before they did too much harm. This warning, a couple of cabinet secretaries told me later, was the one that really made them sit up and take notice.’ (p. 302)

Organizational change comes through affecting day-to-day activities 

“I have long believed that the way to change bureaucratic culture and performance is not through reorganization but by affecting day-to-day operations and ways of doing things. You need to get at the essence of what people are doing and encourage, incentivize, or force them to alter behavior. The crux of what I was trying to accomplish through the efficiencies effort was to pry open all the components of the defense budget that cost hundreds of billions of dollars but didn’t get close scrutiny either within the Pentagon or by Congress. We needed to get at that daily ‘river of money’ running through the building, as my Bush-era deputy Gordon England had so eloquently put it. We made a beginning, but only that.” (p. 465)

The leader needs to personally drive organizational change

“Above all, if a secretary actually intends to run the Pentagon—and make real changes—as opposed to presiding over it, he must be selective in identifying his agenda, and both realistic and single-minded in developing strategies for achieving each specific goal. Exhortations to be more efficient or to achieve some broad goal are akin to shouting down a well. Very specific objectives, with tight deadlines and regular inperson reports to the secretary himself, provide the only way to get people focused and to ensure they are performing.” (p. 577)

Quotables

“I remember sitting at the witness table listening to this litany of woe and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? I have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm. It was the first of many, many times I would sit at the witness table thinking something very different from what I was saying.” (p. 17)

“I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reform. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can’t pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who’ve been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?” (p. 53)

“And right there in the middle of a war zone, in the equivalent of Fort Apache, Baghdad, I got a PowerPoint briefing by Iraqi officers. PowerPoint! My God, what are we doing to these people? I thought. It took a lot of self-control to keep from bursting out laughing.” (p. 63)

“PowerPoint slides were the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them. As CIA director, I had been able to ban slides from briefings except for maps or charts; as secretary, I was an abject failure at even reducing the number of slides in a briefing.” (p. 81)

“I came to believe that virtually all members of Congress carried what I called a ‘wallet list,’ a list they carried with them at all times so that if, by chance, they might run into me or talk with me on the phone, they had a handy list of local projects and programs to push forward. And some became pretty predictable.” (p. 89)

“I decided I had to be the principal advocate in Defense for the commanders and the troops. I would be both ‘urgent’ and ‘ruthless.’” (p. 118)

“Secretary Rumsfeld once famously told a soldier that you go to war with the army you have, which is absolutely true. But I would add that you damn well should move as fast as possible to get the army you need. That was the crux of my war with the Pentagon.” (p. 148)

“I kept a 1942 quote from Winston Churchill in my desk drawer to remind me every day of certain realities: ‘Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.’” (p. 182)

“One young soldier in Afghanistan asked what kept me awake at night. I said, ‘You do.’” (p. 220)

“I received word that same afternoon that the Sunday meeting with the president had been changed to nine-thirty a.m., thus requiring me to fly all night from the West Coast to make it. I saw the handiwork of the NSS in this and told my staff, ‘Tell them to go fuck themselves. The president and I agreed on five and that’s when I’ll be there. If they go at nine-thirty, they’ll do it without the secretary of defense.’ The meeting was changed back to five.” (p. 383)

“In the question-and-answer session, a retired PLA general aggressively pursued the Taiwan arms-sales issue. I replied that the Chinese had known full well at the time we normalized diplomatic relations in 1979 that arms-sales to Taiwan would continue. Why, then, I asked, did China still pursue this line? The general’s response was as direct as it was revealing. China had lived with the Taiwan arms sales in 1979, he said, ‘because we were weak. But now we are strong.’” (p. 416)

“As I had told President Bush and Condi Rice early in 2007, the challenge of the early twenty-first century is that crises don’t come and go—they all seem to come and stay.” (p. 523)

“Interestingly, when Petraeus arrived to take command in Baghdad, he corrected a member of his staff who complained of a ‘strategic communications problem.’ No, we have a ‘results problem,’ Petraeus said, and when the violence in Iraq declined dramatically under his leadership, the strategic communications problem took care of itself.” (p. 575)

“All too frequently, sitting at that witness table, the exit lines were on the tip of my tongue: I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit. Find somebody else.” (p. 581)

“But as I told a military audience at the National Defense University in September 2008, war is ‘inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain.’ I warned them to be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. ‘Look askance,’ I said, ‘at idealized, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war, where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared; where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.’ I quoted General William T. Sherman that ‘every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.’ And I concluded with General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s warning that ‘no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.’” (p. 591)

“I am eligible to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I have asked to be buried in Section 60, where so many of the fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan have been laid to rest. The greatest honor possible would be to rest among my heroes for all eternity.” (p. 594)