A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  Face it. Being a disruptive reformer is a high-wire act, no matter how long one does it. Even if a leader has been in the job for some time and has already successfully implemented numerous reforms, each new change she seeks might well be the wrong move. And if she doesn’t have some failures along the way, she’s probably not being bold enough.

  If you are the leader of an organization, public or private sector, with a strong culture and traditions (that would include, by the way, most universities and colleges), you need to identify those elements of the culture that you must embrace, support, and try to strengthen and those that must be changed to enable future success. If you are seen as a champion for the core elements of the culture, you will encounter less resistance to changing less central aspects.

  Throughout these pages, I have focused on reform—how to start it and how to keep it going, on the need never to become satisfied or complacent. But amid all the change, you need to identify the traditions and those aspects of institutional culture that are core to your organization’s past—and future—success. Not every public bureaucracy or private company has a strong culture, but many do.

  All three of the institutions I led have exceptionally strong cultures and hallowed traditions. The most important cultural feature of each, though, is common to all three: a powerful sense of family. That same feature figured prominently in In Search of Excellence in the authors’ discussion of what qualities were characteristic of the most successful companies.

  In each organization I led, there is a commitment to taking care of one another at all times but especially in adversity or times of need. At the CIA and in the military, because of the inherent risk in the profession and the reality of human loss, the ranks close around the wounded and the families of the fallen. The pageantry of military funerals is well-known, less so are the CIA’s Memorial Wall and Book of Honor remembering those killed while working for the agency. Behind the scenes, both organizations have far-reaching programs to support the families of those who are deployed overseas. Even more important, military and agency families are simply there for each other in good times and bad.

  Similarly, at Texas A&M, the university’s most significant traditions revolve around the Aggie family. When a current student dies, no matter the cause, an evening ceremony called Silver Taps is held at the center of the campus the first Tuesday of the following month in his or her honor. The student’s family usually is there, and on average more than ten thousand students attend the memorial, its silence broken only by the playing of taps. And once a year, Aggies gather to remember all of their number who have died during the past year. This Muster ceremony draws twelve thousand students and others on the main campus, and similar ceremonies are held the same day in some four hundred locations worldwide. On a more upbeat note, the so-called Aggie Network is the envy of many schools because of the willingness of those long graduated to help new graduates find jobs. The Aggie ring is a passport to jobs, friends, and help, a visible symbol of the enduring strength of the Aggie family.

  All three institutions have traditional ceremonies and rites celebrating their history, their uniqueness, and their service to the United States (seven members of Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets received the Medal of Honor in World War II). Those in each organization believe fervently that those on the outside cannot possibly understand what makes it different and singular. On the downside, pride begets insularity, and long-standing but inappropriate practices and behaviors are tolerated because they are “a tradition.”

  All three institutions I led have faced important cultural challenges. For example, changing the culture at the CIA to be more open in its dealings with Congress has been a work in progress since the mid-1970s. Getting the clandestine service to welcome women as case officers overseas was a protracted struggle. For a long time, analysts regarded the operations folks as “knuckle-draggers” and were, in turn, regarded as naive, ivory-towered academics. Getting the four military services to work more closely together has been the work of more than six decades and continues still. Acceptance of gays and women in the military, the latter’s role in combat, and the prevention of sexual assault have been long-standing struggles in the Department of Defense. Texas A&M has had its own cultural issues but was placed on the right track by the tough-minded, reform-oriented president of the university in the 1960s, Earl Rudder, who inherited an all-male military school, and proceeded to admit women, make participation in the Corps of Cadets voluntary, integrate the school, and begin to hire a world-class faculty. Students at the time thought he was destroying the place and everything it stood for, but his historic reforms probably saved the institution and still managed to preserve the core of its culture. Detested then, he is revered today.

  More than a few companies have successfully created a strong company culture, complete with pep rallies and intense focus on customer service and satisfaction. The strongest business culture I have encountered is at Starbucks where, as mentioned earlier, I serve on the board of directors. The twin pillars of the Starbucks culture, in my view, are taking exceptional care of employees in terms of benefits, respect, and opportunities and a strong commitment to corporate social responsibility and leadership. There is a true sense of family. I am confident that other companies have a similarly strong culture, probably in greater numbers than the public expects.

  My approach in each place I led was to do everything possible to strengthen those aspects of the culture focused on the institutional family—and associated traditions—and pride in public service and sacrifice while working to eliminate activities and behaviors detrimental to future success. I tried to break down insularity, build bridges to other institutions whose cooperation was important, and be more transparent to the public and the legislature.

  The reforming leader faces a delicate task in bringing significant change to an organization without undermining or calling into question the institutional tenets that have been central to past success and the loyalty of its people.

  The agent of change in bureaucracies should regard reform—institutional transformation—as a marathon, not a sprint.

  I wondered from time to time in my leadership roles whether the pace and extent of change I was pushing was overloading the organizational circuits—whether I was piling too much on the plates of my lieutenants and those who worked for them.

  Previous changes at the CIA and in the intelligence community more broadly had been largely slow and evolutionary. There would be flurries of activity under directors such as Admiral Stansfield Turner, William Colby, and James Schlesinger (in his very brief tenure) and various reorganizations. But all in all, in terms of the way business was conducted day to day, change was quite incremental—that is, until I launched all those task forces that touched on almost every aspect of the intelligence business and involved a significant number of subordinate managers and staff. The short deadlines clearly pushed everyone as well. The initial round of task forces had all completed their work by the summer of 1992, but that fall I was readying an entirely new round of reforms, some of which were as far-reaching as the original agenda. When George H. W. Bush lost his presidential reelection bid, I decided to retire and leave office with him. I always imagined there was a sigh of relief that the yellow tablet full of new changes departed with me.

  A rapid program of reform and change is a rare phenomenon at a big university. Because there are so many constituencies involved with widely varying interests, agreement on almost any change is difficult to achieve, much less implement. At A&M, the initiatives to expand the faculty by 450, begin construction on hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new academic buildings, change the role of faculty and students in decision making, create a new kind of degree program for undergraduates, increase diversity, and much more put a huge new burden on faculty, staff, and administrators. As just one example, hiring a new professor involves a faculty search committee, the department head (or chair), and the dean and can be quite time-consuming for those part
icipating in the process. The faculty in the College of Engineering alone was faced with hiring over 100 new faculty members in a four-year period. When I left the presidency of A&M to become secretary of defense, my tablet was still full of ideas for further change.

  People at Defense were, I think, also weary when I departed in 2011. The department was in the eighth year of the Iraq War and the tenth year of the war in Afghanistan. Both the senior military and the senior civilian leadership had been deeply engaged in the time-consuming and stressful 2009 exercise that resulted in cutting or capping three dozen major acquisition programs and the 2010 effort to cut $180 billion out of the bureaucratic overhead. In the spring of 2011, the president asked that another $400 billion be cut from the budget over the ensuing ten years. When I left, we were nearing completion of the yearlong effort to replace “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with open acceptance of gays in the military. But unlike at the CIA and A&M, there would be no prospect of a breather when I left Defense as the leadership had to continue the war in Afghanistan and complete a strategic review of how to accommodate the additional budget cuts—including what capabilities and missions to give up—and then there was the madness of sequestration that fall (with another $500 billion budget cut).

  Public bureaucracies are unaccustomed to rapid or intensive change, but I think that is because they experience it so rarely. They are like out-of-shape runners called upon to compete in a 10K race. At one point, I thought that the period of rapid change at both the CIA and Texas A&M might require a subsequent period of consolidation for people to integrate and assimilate all the changes. Now I believe a rest period—a moratorium on change—is an invitation to relax and fall back into old, bad habits.

  In contrast, those working for successful businesses are under constant pressure from competitors, the marketplace, and investors to continuously change and innovate; if they slow down or relax, they will no longer be successful. They cannot get tired or rest.

  In the public sector, a single burst of energetic reform should be the starting point for developing a culture of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a long-term, day-in, day-out commitment to searching for better ways to serve the public—the customer. The reform leader should be ruthlessly self-critical in addressing whether he has the energy and the ideas to sustain continuing improvements and, if out of gas, he should get off the road. His change agenda should be aligned with the core values and culture of the organization and use the synergy of the two working in tandem.

  10

  A Flaming Heart

  My first leadership position was as a patrol leader in Boy Scout Troop 522 in Wichita, Kansas. Nothing develops or tests leadership skills like trying to get people to do what you ask when they don’t have to—especially if they are twelve or thirteen years old and you are just a year older. My first leadership training course was in July 1959, the national junior leader training program at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. I was fifteen. That was the last formal leadership or management training I had.

  The Internet and shelves in bookstores are full of books telling people how to be leaders and managers. Nearly all colleges and universities have degree programs on the subject, and many companies and government agencies offer—or require—those climbing the ladder to take such training. Yet I think too often leadership and management are treated synonymously when they are, in fact, very different.

  My dictionary defines a manager as a “person charged with control or direction of an institution or business…one who handles, directs, governs or controls in action or use.” God knows, good managers are vitally important. Every enterprise—whether business, university, government agency, or other institutions—needs people with management skills: finance, marketing, logistics, human resources, information technology, planning, communications, procurement, recruitment, manufacturing, operations, and all the rest. All are endeavors requiring real skill and real competence, and all are essential to the success of any undertaking.

  I believe, however, that leadership is much more than the sum of these skills, much more than managing well. The best definition of a “leader,” as described early in these pages, is “one who guides, one who shows the way.” We surely need good managers here in America, but we are desperate for leaders.

  While my formal training in leadership began and ended in the summer of 1959, in reality my education in leadership has continued for the last fifty-five years. From effective bosses and bad ones, from working for so many presidents and observing countless other leaders at home and abroad, from watching multiple corporate and university executives, I have learned what makes good and even great leaders. And I have tried to distill those lessons here.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his son in 1943, “The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men….The idea is to get people working together…because they instinctively want to do it for you….Essentially, you must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair and cheerful.” Devotion to duty. Sincerity. Fairness. Good cheer. These are not qualities taught in school. Formal education can make someone a good manager, but it cannot make a leader, because leadership is more about the heart than the head. How does any organization teach courage, integrity, a love of people, a sense of humor, the ability to dream of a better future? How can any training program inculcate personal character and honor?

  Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people—to empathize, understand, inspire, and motivate. Years ago, I read a story that during the American Revolution, General Washington was making his rounds through a camp of soldiers when one private, John Brantley, who had gotten a little drunk on stolen wine, asked Washington if he would have a drink with him. The general declined, saying, “My boy, you have no time for drinking wine.” As he began to ride away, Brantley yelled, “Damn your proud soul—you’re above drinking with soldiers.” Washington turned back, saying, “Come, I will drink with you,” and a jug was passed around. As Washington rode away, Brantley called out to him, saying, “Now I’ll be damned if I won’t give the last drop of my heart’s blood for you.” A personal touch earned loyalty unto death. That’s not learned in a classroom.

  If you fundamentally don’t like or respect most people, or if you think you are superior to others, chances are you won’t be much of a leader—at least in a democracy like ours. Just because you are high on the organizational ladder and can tell people what to do doesn’t make you a leader. Just a boss.

  —

  Unfortunately, we are living through a period when improving people’s lives through institutional reform is exceedingly difficult. Most Americans these days don’t see many organizations trying to make their lives easier. Indeed, they are pretty disgusted with all of the bureaucracies they see complicating their lives and with those who lead them—elected and appointed officials as well as those in charge of big organizations in the private sector. At the federal level, Congress, taken as a whole, is about as popular as head lice. Yet more than a hundred years ago, Mark Twain wrote, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Members of Congress focusing on parochial interests and getting reelected rather than the national interest goes back to the beginning of the Republic.

  While observers like to point out (correctly, in my view) that both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been deeply polarizing, they tend to overlook the reality that of thirteen U.S. presidents over the last eighty years only Eisenhower, Ford, and Bush 41 did not evoke deep animosity—even loathing—from partisans in the other party. At his nadir, neither Bush 43 nor Obama reached the low level of public support and disdain President Truman encountered. As I wrote in Duty, my own father, a small-business Republican, referred to FDR as “that damned dictator,” and I was ten before I realized Truman’s first name wasn’t “goddamn.”

  Still, during 1947–48, at a time when politics was every bit as polarized and ugly as today, and with the Republicans cont
rolling both houses of Congress, Truman sent historic proposals to the Hill to create the Marshall Plan, establish NATO, restructure our entire national security apparatus (the National Security Act of 1947), and provide aid to Greece and Turkey (the foundation of our containment policy toward the Soviet Union). All were enacted into law—thanks especially to the support of the Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and the Republican congressman Richard Nixon.

  During my career, our national political life was shocked by the Vietnam War and then Watergate (and Nixon’s resignation), both episodes characterized by pervasive lying by public officials and resulting in a dramatic increase in public mistrust of government. In subsequent years, oil embargoes, interest rates and inflation (both above 15 percent), the Iran-contra scandal, Clinton’s impeachment, going to war in Iraq based on wrong information, the Great Recession, and one scandal or failure after another have hammered home to the American people again and again the message that government is corrupt, its leaders lie, and most are incompetent.

  And yet, despite all that, as in 1947–48, there were enough members of Congress during the turbulent 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century willing to reach across the aisle and work together so that essential business—such as approving budgets—was accomplished and important legislation passed, including the Clean Air Act Amendments under Bush 41, welfare reform under Clinton, legislation in 2001–2 to protect the nation against terrorism, and much more, all with significant support from both parties. That was because of a few dozen senators and representatives—I call them bridge builders—who placed the national interest above party interest in order to do the nation’s business. Such people are, today, an endangered species.