A Passion for Leadership (26 page)

In these and countless other cases, meeting a metric became an end in itself, and organizations went terribly wrong. But even in situations where there is no fraud or cheating, a priority on meeting statistical benchmarks can be distorting if not destructive—as in the medevac case. Metrics are a tool. Their use, or misuse, reminds me of a line by the Scottish literary figure Andrew Lang, who said of someone, “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than for illumination.”

Never look at numbers in isolation from other considerations in evaluating performance, including intangibles such as quality of product or services, morale, friendliness, and that special effort by an employee to help someone; while it takes extra time (and thus may blow the hell out of the response time metric), it transforms a cold bureaucracy into a willing and warm operation with a human face. Use metrics for illumination, not support. That will benefit both business and the public sector.

The leader needs to keep a cold, hard eye on his initiatives and be honest enough with himself—or open to the views of colleagues—to admit something isn't working and then pull the plug fast.

In companies as well as government, I have seen leaders stick with a bum idea too long, all too often because it was their brainchild. A leader should recognize that not every idea and initiative will pan out, and move on.

Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York once said, “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.' ” I have been around long enough to fully appreciate the law of unintended consequences, even of reform. And I can bear personal witness to the fact that change is not necessarily always for the better. So how do you avoid changing things for the worse? As the historian E. H. Carr observed, “Change is certain. Progress is not.”

I have sought in these pages to link “change” with “reform,” to make clear that the change I advocate is intended to improve the performance of an organization and, in the case of public institutions, also to make them more responsive to the people they were created to serve. But that is not always the way change works out. Everywhere I have worked, I have seen leaders make changes that were misguided and retrogressive. From ill-conceived reorganizations at the CIA to ill-informed and wrongheaded decisions by administrators and the board of regents at Texas A&M, virtually unworkable congressionally mandated restructurings in the executive branch, and specific decisions within Defense, I have seen the results of bad decisions regarding change.

The list of misguided decisions in business also is a long one. Think about the Ford Edsel in the mid-1950s or New Coke in the 1980s. More broadly, consider some of the big retail chains facing challenges wherein a new CEO took them down the wrong path of change that worsened the problem or, in some cases, even destroyed the company. As a board member of the TRW corporation, I witnessed a wrongheaded strategic decision on an acquisition that ultimately led to the demise of the hundred-year-old company. There have been big mergers that never really worked out, and of course the financial meltdown in 2008 was due in large measure to really bad business decisions.

In no case, public or private, did the decision makers intentionally head the organization in the wrong direction; to a person, I suspect they thought they were making things better or a wise business move. So how does a leader avoid constantly roiling the waters for no purpose other than the appearance of change, and how does he avoid making changes that turn out badly?

Acknowledging that there are no guarantees in life, especially when it comes to avoiding mistakes, I believe there are ways to minimize change going wrong. Every decision involves risk, but a leader can mitigate that risk by continuing throughout her tenure to use the techniques described earlier to test every idea for change she or others have. Specifically, she should be open and transparent about what she is considering, consulting widely within the organization and with her stakeholders. She must listen to her employees and encourage constructive criticism and candor. Abraham Lincoln captured this approach thus: “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west.” The opinions a leader gets on each proposed change may not affect her decisions at all, or they may lead her to revise her plan or cause her to abandon it altogether. But if she proceeds, she will have had the benefit of thorough scrutiny, and she will have a pretty good idea of potential risks, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and criticism.

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 participating 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).