IT WORKED FOR ME | In Life and Leadership
by Colin Powell
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https://www.rapidshare.com/files/1996978598/colinwrked.rarFirst chapter below
CHAPTER ONE
My Thirteen Rules
My Thirteen Rules
President George H. W. Bush was sworn in to succeed President Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1989. The moment he took the oath I ceased to be the National Security Advisor; the torch was passed to my longtime colleague and mentor, General Brent Scowcroft.
After I left the White House, I returned to the Army. In April I was promoted to four-star general and given command of the Army’s Forces Command (FORSCOM), with headquarters at Fort McPherson, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. I had command of all the deployable Army forces in the United States, including the Army Reserve, and I supervised the training of the Army National Guard. I was the first black Army officer to have a four-star troop command.
Shortly after I arrived at FORSCOM, Parade magazine, the long-running Sunday supplement with a readership of more than fifty million people, asked to do a cover story about me and my new assignment—one of those short personal articles aimed at Americans reading their Sunday newspapers over coffee. Since the story was written and the supplement printed many weeks before its August 13 distribution date, Parade had no way of knowing that the 13th would be just three days after I was announced by President Bush to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The article was so timely that I was not able to persuade everyone that its publication date was a coincidence.
Its author, David Wallechinsky, a highly skilled journalist, needed a hook to close the piece. One of my secretaries, Sergeant Cammie Brown, urged him to ask me about the couple of dozen snippets of paper shoved under the glass cover on my desktop—quotes and aphorisms that I had collected or made up over the years. David called and asked if I would read off a few. The thirteen I read him appeared in a sidebar in the article.
After they were first printed in Parade—to my great surprise—the Thirteen Rules caught on. Over the past twenty-three years, my assistants have given out hundreds of copies of that list in many different forms; they have been PowerPointed and flashed around the world on the Internet. Here are my rules and the reasons I have hung on to them.
1. IT AIN’T AS BAD AS YOU THINK. IT WILL LOOK BETTER IN THE MORNING.
Well, maybe it will, maybe it won’t. This rule reflects an attitude and not a prediction. I have always tried to keep my confidence and optimism up, no matter how difficult the situation. A good night’s rest and the passage of just eight hours will usually reduce the infection. Leaving the office at night with a winning attitude affects more than you alone; it also conveys that attitude to your followers. It strengthens their resolve to believe we can solve any problem.
At the Infantry School, they drilled into us constantly that an infantry officer can do anything. “No challenge is too great for us, no difficulty we cannot overcome.” Think back to Churchill telling the world that Britain will “never, never, never give up.” Or more colloquially, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
“Things will get better. You will make them get better.” We graduated believing that, and I continue to believe that, despite frequent evidence to the contrary.
A variation of this theme was also drilled into us: “Lieutenant, you may be starving, but you must never show hunger; you always eat last. You may be freezing or near heat exhaustion, but you must never show that you are cold or hot. You may be terrified, but you must never show fear. You are the leader and the troops will reflect your emotions.” They must believe that no matter how bad things look, you can make them better.
I love old movies and get from them lots of examples that I use for personal reinforcement.
The classic movie The Hustler opens with one of my all-time favorite scenes. It’s set in a New New York pool hall. A young pool whiz, Eddie Felson, played by Paul Newman, has come to challenge the reigning master, Minnesota Fats, played by Jackie Gleason. Also present are the pool impresario, Bert Gordon, a Mephistophelean figure played by George C. Scott, and a handful of spectators.
The match begins, and it is clear that Fast Eddie Felson is very good—maybe great. He proceeds to get the edge on Minnesota Fats, game after game, long into the evening. Fats starts to sweat. Others gather around to watch. Fast Eddie and his manager begin to smell triumph. The king is about to die; long live the new king. Fats, ready to give up, looks over to Bert for relief from the misery. Bert simply says, “Stay with this kid, he’s a loser.” Bert is a gambler and detects a weakness in Fast Eddie, an overconfidence that can be taken advantage of. Fats still seems stricken. He excuses himself and goes into the restroom. After washing his hands and face he comes out, seeming ready to leave. He signals to the attendant, and Fast Eddie smiles in victory, thinking Fats is asking for his coat. But no, Fats extends his hands for the attendant to apply talcum powder. Then, with a catlike smile he says, “Fast Eddie, let’s play some pool.” You know the rest—he crushes Eddie.
Many times when facing a tough meeting, an unpleasant encounter, a hostile press conference, or a vicious congressional hearing, the last thing I would do beforehand was go into the restroom, wash and dry my hands and face, look into the mirror, and say softly to myself, “Fast Eddie, let’s play some pool.” I may be down, but never out. An infantry officer can do anything.
Oh, full disclosure: Paul Newman is the star. At the end of the movie there is a rematch and he beats Fats. I never watch that scene.
2. GET MAD, THEN GET OVER IT.
Everyone gets mad. It is a natural and healthy emotion. You get mad at your kids, your spouse, your best friends, your opponents. My experience is that staying mad isn’t useful. That experience was tested by my colleague the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, who made me—and most Americans—mad, very mad.
Dominique was a career diplomat, a graduate of the most prestigious French national academies, a noted historian, and a gifted poet, and he was very close to the then president of France, Jacques Chirac. With his flowing silvering hair and impeccable suits and ties, he cut quite a figure.
In early 2003, the period leading up to the Second Gulf War, there were repeated debates on that issue in the United Nations Security Council. The presidency of the fifteen-member council rotates every month; France had the presidency in January, with Dominique in the chair. The French were strongly opposed to military action against Iraq and led the opposition to it. They were not alone in their opposition. Germany, Russia, and a number of other countries had joined them. It’s likely that more countries opposed us than supported us.
Council presidents normally suggest a special topic of discussion during their tenure. The topic Dominique suggested for a meeting of the fifteen Security Council foreign ministers was terrorism.
I was uneasy about this meeting. Would it stay on target? Most of my colleagues back in Washington thought the French would convert it into a session about Iraq—a bad idea; they wanted Iraq off the table at the UN. Dominique assured me, however, that it would stay focused on terrorism; there would be no discussion of Iraq. I accepted his assurances.
The meeting turned out fine . . . until Dominique left the conference to speak to the large assembled press corps, where he attacked our position on Iraq and made it clear that France would oppose any movement toward military action. I was blindsided; the White House phones lit up. The TV evening news and the press the next day made my embarrassment complete. The press loved the story, but it made life very difficult for me in Washington and at the UN. I was livid and made that clear to Dominique. Meanwhile, the reaction around the country was outrage. Newspapers were calling for a boycott of French wine and for renaming French fries freedom fries. In a nutshell, Dominique had screwed things up for me.
Dominique was in no way a bad man. He was reflecting the position of his government, he would remain the French foreign minister, and he came out looking like a hero to those who opposed us. For several months, Dominique would be my adversary on the Iraq issue, but I knew I could not treat him as an enemy.
Despite the opposition at the UN and elsewhere, President George W. Bush decided on military action and we deposed Saddam Hussein.
In the aftermath of the fall of Hussein, when we needed UN resolutions to restore order and rebuild Iraq, France supported us for six straight UN resolutions.
In February 2004, a crisis in Haiti required us to encourage President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to step down from office and leave the country. As mobs approached his home, we were able to get President Aristide and his party to the airport and on a U.S. plane heading to South Africa, where he thought he would be welcomed. That was a mistake. South Africa refused to receive him at that time. In the middle of the night I called Dominique to ask him to persuade one of the Francophone African countries to accept Aristide before our plane ran out of gas. Half an hour later he called back with a solution, and our anxious pilot soon had clear instructions on where to deposit President Aristide. My colleague and friend had come to my rescue.
We then sent a force in to stabilize Haiti until a UN force could be assembled, with a U.S. Marine general in charge. He had under his command a French infantry battalion. Dominique made that happen. These actions were in France’s interest, but he could have made our lives a lot harder if I had made him an eternal enemy rather than an ally and friend who was an occasionally annoying adversary. I often remind folks that France was with us during the American Revolution. We have been married to the French for more than 230 years . . . and in marriage counseling with them for more than 230 years; but the marriage is still intact thanks to our shared values and common belief in human rights, freedom, and democracy. The ties that bind us are stronger than the occasional stresses that separate us.
Years ago, as a brigadier general stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, I worked for a great soldier, Lieutenant General Jack Merritt. I was in charge of evaluating how the Army should be organized and equipped in the future. General Merritt and I got along well, but one day he made a decision that I thought was shortsighted, unfair, and totally wrong. I asked to see him. When I went in and unloaded on him, he listened patiently with no visible emotion. After I finished my diatribe, he came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and quietly said, “Colin, the best part about being mad and disappointed is that you get over it. Now have a nice day.” He was right. I felt better after getting my anger out, and I did get over it.
Jack Merritt was not the first to teach me this lesson. I originally learned it many years earlier in Germany as a young first lieutenant and company executive officer. One day I got into a screaming match on a phone with another officer and pretty much lost it. My commander, Captain William Louisell, observed my behavior. When I hung up, he said to me: “Don’t ever act that way in my presence or anyone’s presence again.” To make sure I’d learned the lesson he wrote in my efficiency report, “Young Powell has a severe temper, which he makes a mature effort to control.” He nailed me, but also gave me a life preserver. I’ve worked hard over the years to make sure that when I get mad, I get over it quickly and never lose control of myself. With a few lapses I won’t discuss here, I’ve done reasonably well.
3. AVOID HAVING YOUR EGO SO CLOSE TO YOUR POSITION THAT WHEN YOUR POSITION FALLS, YOUR EGO GOES WITH IT.
I got this one from a couple of lawyers. Back in 1978, working as a staff assistant to Secretary of Defense Harold Defense during the Carter administration, I had to referee a heated dispute over some obscure issue. I sat at the head of the table in Secretary Brown’s conference room filled with people and listened to two lawyers go at each other. They quickly got past the merits and demerits of the issue, but the debate continued, and for one of the lawyers it became increasingly personal. As he grew more and more agitated, he got himself tied up in arguments about how the outcome would affect him. I finally lost patience and stopped the debate. I’d heard enough. I decided the issue in favor of the other lawyer, based on the strength of his presentation and reasoning.
The fellow who lost looked crushed, to the discomfort of everyone in the room. The other lawyer looked at him and said, “Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.” In short, accept that your position was faulty, not your ego.
This doesn’t mean you don’t argue with passion and intensity. During Secretary Brown’s tenure, W. Graham Claytor was Deputy Secretary of Defense, and I was his military assistant. Graham was a crusty old Virginian, tough as nails, with high-level executive experience in government and the private sector. Before becoming deputy secretary, he had been Secretary of the Navy, and in private life he had been a distinguished lawyer, president of Southern Railway, and head of Amtrak. I’ve watched Graham go head to head with everyone in sight to advocate a position. If he lost the argument, he became a no less passionate advocate for what Secretary Brown had decided.
I encouraged all my subordinate commanders and staff to feel free to argue with me. My guidance was simple: “Disagree with me, do it with feeling, try to convince me you are right and I am about to go down the wrong path. You owe that to me; that’s why you are here. But don’t be intimidated when I argue back. A moment will come when I have heard enough and I make a decision. At that very instant, I expect all of you to execute my decision as if it were your idea. Don’t damn the decision with faint praise, don’t mumble under your breath—we now all move out together to get the job done. And don’t argue with me anymore unless you have new information or I realize I goofed and come back to you. Loyalty is disagreeing strongly, and loyalty is executing faithfully. The decision is not about you or your ego; it is about gathering all the information, analyzing it, and trying to get the right answer. I still love you, so get mad and get over it.”
No one followed this guidance better than Marine Colonel Paul “Vinny” Kelly, my congressional affairs assistant when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vinny’s job was to get me up on Capitol Hill as often as he could to testify, chat with members, hustle staff, and do all the other things that put you on the right side of the folks who allocate the people’s money. I understood the importance of this activity, but Vinny was always pressing me to do more. He would come into my office late in the evening, after a trying day, to press me to attend another congressional meeting I didn’t think was necessary. We would get into all kinds of arguments, which usually ended with “Vinny, get the hell out of here!” He would leave, disappointed, but accepting. The next day he would be back with new reasons why I had to go up to the Hill. These usually won me over. Vinny knew that “get the hell out” was not about him. His ego was never on his sleeve. He accepted my decision; yet he also knew that his job was to protect me, and so if he still thought he was right and I was wrong, he marshaled new arguments. He also knew Rule 1, “It will look better in the morning.” He was a treasure. When I became Secretary of State, I pulled him off his retirement golf course and made him my Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs.
4. IT CAN BE DONE.
This familiar quotation is on a desk plaque given to me by the great humorist Art Buchwald. Once again, it is more about attitude than reality. Maybe it can’t be done, but always start out believing you can get it done until facts and analysis pile up against it. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Don’t surround yourself with instant skeptics. At the same time, don’t shut out skeptics and colleagues who give you solid counterviews. “It can be done” should not metamorphose into a blindly can-do approach, which leaves you running into brick walls. I try to be an optimist, but I try not to be stupid.
5. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CHOOSE: YOU MAY GET IT.
Nothing original in this one. Don’t rush into things. Yes, there are occasions when time and circumstances force you to make fast decisions. Usually there is time to examine the choices, turn them over, look at them in the light of day and the darkness of night, and think through the consequences. You will have to live with your choices. Some bad choices can be corrected. Some you’ll be stuck with.
6. DON’T LET ADVERSE FACTS STAND IN THE WAY OF A GOOD DECISION.
Superior leadership is often a matter of superb instinct. When faced with a tough decision, use the time available to gather information that will inform your instinct. Learn all you can about the situation, your opponent, your assets and liabilities, your strengths and weaknesses, the threats and risks. Select several possible courses of action, then test the information you have gathered against them and analyze one against the other. Often, the factual analysis alone will indicate the right choice. More often, your judgment will be needed to select from the best courses of action. This is the moment when you apply your instinct to smell the right answer. This is where you apply your education, experience, and knowledge of external considerations unfamiliar to your staff. This is when you look deep into your own fears, anxiety, and self-confidence. This is where you earn your pay and position. Your instinct at this point is not a wild guess or a hunch. It is an informed instinct that knows from long experience which facts are the most important and which adverse facts, however adverse, can be set aside. As the saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
On the eve of D-Day, General Eisenhower faced one of the most difficult decisions any military commander has ever had to make. The weather was dicey; launching the invasion into bad weather could doom it, but his weathermen predicted a possible opening on June 6, 1944. He had been gathering information and planning this operation for months. He knew it in his fingertips. In the loneliness that only commanders know, he made his decision. He wrote a statement taking all the blame if the invasion failed. Yet his informed instinct said, “Go!” He was right.
In the final weeks of the Civil War, General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was besieging Petersburg and slowly squeezing General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to death. One night Grant was awakened by a staff officer. “We’ve received information that Lee’s army is on the move and massing to attack our flank,” he told Grant urgently. Grant rubbed the sleep from his eyes, thought for a moment, and said, “That’s not possible,” and went back to sleep.
Both generals could have been wrong, and history would have treated them differently. Eisenhower was a masterful staff officer and a gifted manager, but also a great leader. He knew when to trust his instinct. Grant did not make a snap judgment that night. He knew Lee, he had studied him as a man and soldier, and he knew the strengths and increasing weakness of the Army of Northern Virginia. His instinct was well informed, and it took only a minute for his instinct to conclude, “That’s not possible.”
There will be times when an adverse fact should stop you in your tracks. Never let it stop you completely until you have thought about it, challenged it, and looked for a way to get around it. And if you conclude that the gain will be great enough to overcome the consequences of that adverse fact, decide and execute.
I dare not compare myself to Eisenhower or Grant, but a similar though far smaller decision came my way in December 1989, a few months after I became JCS Chairman. On the night of December 1 there was an attempted military coup in the Philippines against President Corazon Aquino. I raced down to the command center in the Pentagon to monitor the action. President Aquino was concerned that members of the air force would join the coup and bomb the presidential palace. She called the White House and asked us to bomb the nearby air base to keep that from happening. I got instructions from the White House situation room to execute the mission. My experience told me it was an easy mission using F-4 Phantom jets from Clark Air Base. My experience also told me that there would be Filipino deaths and collateral damage to property. Regardless of how the coup turned out, Filipinos would surely criticize us for any loss of life and property damage. My instinct told me there might be a better way to accomplish the goal of the mission, which was to keep the palace from being bombed. Admiral Hunt Hardisty, our commander in the Pacific, happened to be in Washington and joined me at the command center. The alternative we came up with was to instruct the F-4 pilots to take off and buzz the Philippine air base in a manner that demonstrated “extreme hostile intent.” If a plane took to the runway anyway, shoot in front of it or crater the runway. If the plane took off, then shoot it down. The Philippine planes stayed on the ground, and the coup ended a few hours later.
If one plane had managed to get off, bomb the palace, and kill the president, my experience and instincts would have failed.
During the crisis, I wasn’t able to reach the Philippine minister of defense, Fidel Ramos. After it was all over I finally got through to him and briefed him on what we had done. He was deeply grateful that we had not bombed.
Whenever I’m faced with a difficult choice, my approach has always been to make an estimate of the situation—a familiar military process: What’s the situation? What’s the mission? What are the different courses of action? How do they compare with one another? Which looks most likely to succeed? Now, follow your informed instinct, decide, and execute forcefully; throw the mass of your forces and energy behind the choice. Then take a deep breath and hope it works, remembering that “hope is a bad supper, but makes a good breakfast.”
7. YOU CAN’T MAKE SOMEONE ELSE’S CHOICES. YOU SHOULDN’T LET SOMEONE ELSE MAKE YOURS.
We are taught in the military to take full responsibility for “everything your unit does or fails to do, and what you do or fail to do.” Since ultimate responsibility is yours, make sure the choice is yours and you are not responding to the pressure and desire of others.
That does not mean your decision has to be solitary or lonely. Seek the advice of others, but be aware that people are always around who are full of advice and sure they know how you should decide. All too often, your decision affects them and they are pushing you in a direction that’s more in their interest than yours. Never forget that your informed instinct is usually the most solid basis for making a decision.
Of course, the choice is not always yours to make. In the Army, for instance, duty will at times require acceptance of that reality.
In 1985, I was selected to be an infantry division commander in Germany. I wanted the job badly—it is the dream job of every infantry officer, and I was eager to get back to troop command. But the Army decided I should remain in the Pentagon, continuing to serve as the senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
A year later, I was able to leave the Pentagon and take command of a corps in Germany, an even larger unit. I was elated, but after six months, I was called back to Washington to serve as Deputy National Security Advisor. Since it seemed that would end my military career, I resisted. If it was that important, I asked, shouldn’t the President call me? He did, and I left my corps. Eleven months later I became National Security Advisor for the remainder of President Reagan’s term.
It’s hard to fault the choices the Army made for me. Most of them turned out to be superb. But I have had more freedom to follow my own instincts and choices since I left the Army.
It’s easy to be flattered into a job. When I left the State Department, I was flattered by offers of top positions in major corporations, most of them in the financial world. The monetary rewards were stunning and the work not terribly demanding. I was told I didn’t need to know anything about banking, finance, or exotic financial instruments like hedge funds and derivatives. Experts would be present to help me. One investment bank pressed me hard, repeatedly upping the money and the title. The offers were definitely tempting.
I understood the financial and social value of these positions. But my instincts said no. Did they want me for what I could do for them? Or did they want me for the celebrity I could bring them? My instincts said I would mostly be a door opener and a dinner host. And the truth was I didn’t have any relevant experience or background in the business, nor any desire to learn it. I couldn’t care less about finance. In the end, I preferred my flexibility and independence. They were trying hard to make a choice for me, but I held out for my own choice.
One of my best friends helped me shape my instinct. Over lunch, he listened as I laid out all the offers. He replied simply, “Why would you want to wear someone else’s T-shirt? You are your own brand. Remain free and wear your own T-shirt.”
As it turned out, my instinct turned out to be not only right about my immediate choice, but also prescient. Most of the promised monetary rewards I passed up turned out to be fairy tale money. Firms that offered me top jobs either failed or came close to failure in the 2008 crash and ensuing recession. I’m glad I dodged that bullet!
These temptations pale in comparison with the choice I faced in 1995, two years after retiring from the Army. In those two years, I stayed out of the public eye, enjoyed private life, wrote my memoirs, and traveled the country speaking. But when my book was published and I went on a six-week book tour, I became more public than ever. The crowds were overwhelming. I had never imagined I’d get that kind of turnout. At every appearance the issue of running for political office arose. People were talking about me as a presidential candidate. It was incredibly flattering.
Though I’ve never had political ambitions, all the attention forced me to consider running. I debated what to do. What was best for me, my family, the nation? I reached out to friends and experts, and listened carefully to new friends who pushed me to run. A strong instinct told me that I had an obligation, a duty, to run. I had ideas about where the country should go and about how to fix what I saw was broken. But I was divided. An equally strong instinct warned that running for president would be a terrible choice for me.
The two months when I wrestled with that decision were perhaps the most difficult of my life. I was deeply conflicted, lost weight, had trouble sleeping. My family was split, which didn’t make my choice easier. My very closest friends argued against running but were willing to help if I decided to choose that course. They knew me as well as I knew myself and felt a presidential campaign was not right for me.
The decision was mine to make. What drove my final choice was the reality that I did not wake up a single morning wanting to be president or with the fire and passion needed for a successful campaign. I was not a political figure. It was not me. Once I accepted what that instinct was telling me, the choice was clear, the decision easy.
I get asked almost daily if I have any regrets. The answer is no. It was my choice, my family’s choice, and the right choice. I have no regrets and no reason to second-guess. I moved on and found other things to do to satisfy my need and my responsibility to serve the country. I disappointed many people but left others happy. It was my choice. It had to be.
8. CHECK SMALL THINGS.
We are all familiar with the old rhyme that begins, “For want of a nail . . .” It reminds us how small actions can result in large consequences.
Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things—a feel for what is going on in the depths of an organization where small things reside. The more senior you become, the more you are insulated by pomp and staff, and the harder and more necessary it becomes to know what is going on six floors down.
One way is to leave the top floor and its grand accoutrements and get down into the bowels for real. Don’t tell anyone you are coming. Avoid advance notices that produce crash cleanups, frantic preparations, and PowerPoint presentations. Yes, sometimes you need to give lots of notice so folks can prepare their homes as if they were selling them. But I always preferred to just drop in and wander around. A maintenance shop with dirty mechanics, parts strewn around, and no senior officers lurking told me more about the state of maintenance than any formal quarterly reports.
Whenever I inspected barracks, I looked over the bunks and the displays of wall lockers and footlockers (long gone; troops now live in barracks resembling small college dormitories). I also made a beeline for the latrine. Not just to see if it was clean. Was there a shortage of toilet paper, were any mirrors cracked, were there any missing showerheads? Finding any of these situations immediately told me one of several things—the unit is running short of upkeep money, no one is checking on these things to get them fixed, or the troops are not being supervised well enough. Find out which and fix it.
I detested whitewashed rocks lining a pathway. And the smell of fresh paint meant they’d heard I was coming. Fresh cookies were another dead giveaway.
Once in Korea, we got word that the admiral commanding Pacific forces would be visiting our post and would walk through my battalion area. I was delighted. We lived in ancient, disgusting Quonset huts; we couldn’t get parts for the stoves or paint for the outside. Because we were short of paint, I was told to paint the front but not the back of the mess hall the admiral would walk by. He walked by and saw the fresh paint. It was so fresh compared to everything else he saw that he wasn’t fooled. We should have sat down and told him our problems and not forced him to be a detective.
The followers, the troops, live in a world of small things. Leaders must find ways, formal and informal, to get visibility into that world. In addition to my dropping in, I relied on a cast of informal observers who had direct access to me to tell me about details the system would not normally offer up to me. They also told me when I was totally screwed up and the “commander had no clothes.” In my military commands, they were my chaplains, my command sergeant major and his network, my inspector general, and GIs coming in on “Open Door” night. In my National Security Council and State positions, I always had trusted friends outside and agents inside the organization who prowled the basement and kept me informed. Leaders need to know ground truth and not just what they get from reports and staffs.
One day at the State Department, about two in the afternoon, I was wandering around and ran into a young lady leaving the building. She did not seem to recognize me, or else she didn’t let me know that she recognized me. I asked her why she was leaving so early. “I’m on flextime,” she told me. “I started at seven a.m.”
That got me curious; I didn’t know much about flextime. I fell in stride with her and talked about how it worked for her and her fellow employees. I learned more about the program than I had ever heard from my staff. It was a good program, I realized—worth expanding. Meanwhile, she still didn’t acknowledge who I was.
To needle her, I said, “Gee, I’d like to get flextime. How did you do it?”
“Ask your immediate supervisor,” she responded.
“I’ll do that on Monday, after he comes down from Camp David,” I told her. She didn’t miss a beat. “Good,” she said. “I hope you get it.” She went through the door and I stood there not knowing if I’d been had. But I had learned a lot about flextime, a small thing for me, but a big thing for her and lots of my employees.
9. SHARE CREDIT.
When something goes well, make sure you share the credit down and around the whole organization. Let all employees believe they were the ones who did it. They were. Send out awards, phone calls, notes, letters, pats on the back, smiles, promotions—anything to spread the credit. People need recognition and a sense of worth as much as they need food and water.
In the military we make a big deal of change-of-command ceremonies, where the new commander assumes responsibility of the unit from the old commander, symbolized by the passing of the unit colors. These ceremonies normally function as celebrations of the commanders. The troops are assembled in formation on the parade field. The dignitaries arrive and the old and new commanders make speeches. The old commander is praised and given an award. The troops stand and listen, usually in the sun.
Lieutenant General Hank “the Gunfighter” Emerson, one of our most colorful generals and one of my favorite commanders, was not fond of these ceremonies. When I took command of my battalion in Camp Casey, Korea, he was my division commander. At that change-of-command ceremony, at his insistence, only the two commanders, their staff, and the company commanders stood in the middle of the field. No troops stood behind them, but they were invited to sit in the bleachers and watch the two senior officers pass the battalion colors from the old to the new commander. There were no speeches. I loved it.
A few years later, it became time for the Gunfighter to give up command of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the famous 82nd Airborne Division. Protocol and expectation required the old-fashioned ceremony with thousands of troops. I was then a brigade commander in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which was part of his corps. He ordered me to Fort Bragg to command the formation at his change-of-command and retirement ceremony.
After we’d practiced the ceremony to perfection, the day came. As we stood there in the sun waiting for it to begin, the Gunfighter signaled me to come up to the reviewing stand for new instructions. He directed me to return to the formation and order all the officers to do an about-face and gaze at their troops. I was then to order the officers to salute their soldiers. We conducted the ceremony, and the officers turned as he had directed and saluted the troops. It was a deeply moving moment. The gesture was the only way he could truly show that credit for his success belonged to the soldiers who had served under him.
It is the human gesture that counts. Yes, medals, stock options, promotions, bonuses, and pay raises are fine. But to really reach people, you need to touch them. A kind word, a pat on the back, a “well done,” provided one-on-one and not by mob email is the way you share credit. It is the way you appeal to the dreams, aspirations, anxieties, and fears of your followers. They want to be the best they can be; a good leader lets them know it when they are.
When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishment or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility.
Share the credit, take the blame, and quietly find out and fix things that went wrong. A psychotherapist who owned a school for severely troubled kids had a rule: “Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it’s an excuse and not a reason.” This rule works for everybody, but it works especially for leaders.
10. REMAIN CALM. BE KIND.
Few people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos. The more serious the situation, usually accompanied by a deadline, the more likely everyone will get excited and bounce around like water on a hot skillet. At those times I try to establish a calm zone but retain a sense of urgency. Calmness protects order, ensures that we consider all the possibilities, restores order when it breaks down, and keeps people from shouting over each other.
You are in a storm. The captain must steady the ship, watch all the gauges, listen to all the department heads, and steer through it. If the leader loses his head, confidence in him will be lost and the glue that holds the team together will start to give way. So assess the situation, move fast, be decisive, but remain calm and never let them see you sweat.
The calm zone is part of an emotional spectrum that I work to maintain.
I try to have, and every leader should try to have, a healthy zone of emotions. Within that zone you can be a little annoyed, a little mad, a little loving. Within your zone you are calm (most of the time). You are interested. You are caring, yet you maintain a reasonable distance. You are consistent and mostly predictable (which does not mean you are dull and boring, or that you will never surprise them, or that you will never explode and come down hard on somebody). Your staff knows pretty much what your zone is and how to act accordingly.
Sometimes I do explode. Sometimes my explosions are right and justified.
One day, back in the hard-drinking old days in the Army, I was at wit’s end dealing with DUI incidents. I was a brigade commander. A sergeant was standing before me about to be punished for driving under the influence. It was a serious offense. He knew he was facing a reduction in rank and a fine. He stood there and begged me to let him off. My punishment, he told me, not his own actions, would hurt his family. I flipped. He was the one who was hurting his family, not me. I stood up and slammed my fist so hard on my desk that the glass cover shattered with a great crash. My staff came running and rescued the sergeant, scarcely believing that their usually calm and cool commander had totally lost it. Frankly, it felt good, and I wasn’t sorry to let them realize it could happen again.
I have occasionally exploded again, but I’ve never broken another glass desk top. I’ve learned how to display extreme, out-of-my-comfort-zone displeasure without destroying government property.
In the “heat of battle”—whether military or corporate—kindness, like calmness, reassures followers and holds their confidence. Kindness connects you with other human beings in a bond of mutual respect. If you care for your followers and show them kindness, they will reciprocate and care for you. They will not let you down or let you fail. They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them.
11. HAVE A VISION. BE DEMANDING.
Followers need to know where their leaders are taking them and for what purpose. Mission, goals, strategy, and vision are conventional terms to indicate what organizations set out to accomplish. These are excellent and useful words, but I have come to prefer another and I believe better term—purpose. Think how often you see it—“sense of purpose” . . . “What’s the purpose?” . . . “It serves a purpose.”
Purpose is the destination of a vision. It energizes that vision, gives it force and drive. It should be positive and powerful, and serve the better angels of an organization. Leaders must embed their own sense of purpose into the heart and soul of every follower. The purpose starts from the leader at the top, and through infectious, dynamic, passionate leadership, it is driven down throughout the organization. Every follower has his own organizational purpose that connects with the leader’s overall purpose.
I once watched a TV documentary about the Empire State Building. For most of the hour, the documentary toured the wonders of the building—its history and structure: how many elevators it had, how many people worked or visited there, how many corporate offices it had, and how it was built. But at the end the story took a sharp turn. The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks.
The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.
Good leaders set vision, missions, and goals. Great leaders inspire every follower at every level to internalize their purpose, and to understand that their purpose goes far beyond the mere details of their job. When everyone is united in purpose, a positive purpose that serves not only the organization but also, hopefully, the world beyond it, you have a winning team.
Not long ago I spoke at a conference for the leaders of a credit rating company. Their whole focus seemed to be on reducing losses, eliminating high-risk applicants, purging bad debt, and speeding up the process. These goals are all essential to the success of the company, I told them, but they are all negative and hardly inspiring. Isn’t your real purpose to find the right people to give credit to? Isn’t your purpose to help people buy homes, educate their children, plan for their future? Isn’t that what this conference should be all about?
Google’s corporate mission statement is identical with its purpose: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The founders set out to serve society, and created a remarkably successful company.
To achieve his purpose, a successful leader must set demanding standards and make sure they are met. Followers want to be “in a good outfit,” as we say in the Army. I never saw a good unit that wasn’t always stretching to meet a higher standard. The stretching was often accompanied by complaints about the effort required. But when the new standard was met, the followers celebrated with high-fives, pride, and playful gloating.
Standards must be achievable (though achieving them will always require extra effort), and the leaders must provide the means to get there. The focus should always be on getting better and better. We must always reach for the better way.
12. DON’T TAKE COUNSEL OF YOUR FEARS OR NAYSAYERS.
This one has a long history. You can trace it back to Marcus Aurelius, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and hundreds of others. Perhaps the best known comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Fear is a normal human emotion. It is not in itself a killer. We can learn to be aware when fear grips us, and can train to operate through and in spite of our fear. If, on the other hand, we don’t understand that fear is normal and has to be controlled and overcome, it will paralyze us and stop us in our tracks. We will no longer think clearly or analyze rationally. We prepare for it and control it; we never let it control us. If it does, we cannot lead.
I will never forget my fear the first time I came under fire. In 1963 I was the advisor to a Vietnamese infantry battalion. We were walking in column down a forested trail when we were hit by small arms fire from an enemy ambush. We returned fire and the Viet Cong enemy quickly melted back into the forest. It was over in a minute; but one soldier was killed. We wrapped him in a poncho and carried him until we found a place to bring in a helicopter. That night, as I tried to sleep on the forest floor, I was filled with the realization that the next morning we would probably be ambushed again. And we were. My body was filled with the gut feeling that I could be the next one killed. I was taller than the Vietnamese, and as the American advisor, I was a more valuable target. I stuck out.
That morning, and every morning, I had to use my training and self-discipline to control my fear and move on—just like all the Vietnamese, just like every soldier since ancient times. Moreover, as a leader, I could show no fear. I could not let fear control me.
Naysayers are everywhere. They feel it’s the safest position to be in. It’s the easiest armor to wear . . . And they may be right in their negativity; reality may be on their side. But chances are very good that it’s not. You can only use their naysaying as one line in the spectrum of inputs to your decision. Listen to everyone you need to, and then go with your fearless instinct.
Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations?
13. PERPETUAL OPTIMISM IS A FORCE MULTIPLIER.
In the military we are always looking for ways to leverage up our forces. Having greater communications and command and control over your forces than your enemy has over his is a force multiplier. Having greater logistics capability than the enemy is a force multiplier. Having better-trained commanders is a force multiplier.
Perpetual optimism, believing in yourself, believing in your purpose, believing you will prevail, and demonstrating passion and confidence is a force multiplier. If you believe and have prepared your followers, the followers will believe.
Late one winter’s night in Korea after a very tough week of field training, my battalion of five hundred soldiers was waiting for trucks to take us back to our barracks at Camp Casey, twenty miles away. Word came down that we had a fuel shortage and no trucks were coming. We had to march back that night. The troops were exhausted, but we saddled up and started marching cross-country, with some grumbling in the ranks about higher headquarters.
After we launched, my operations officer, Captain Skip Mohr, reminded me that we had an outstanding requirement to make a forced twelve-mile timed march to qualify our troops to participate in the Expert Infantryman’s Badge competition. He had plotted it out on the map; we would be twelve miles out in about half an hour. “Let’s pick up the pace and go for it,” he told me.
“Will that be pushing them too hard?” I wondered out loud.
“You know these kids,” he answered. “They are tough as hell and will do anything we ask of them. They can do it.”
I knew he was right.
We paused just before the twelve-mile point, took a ten-minute break, loosened our winter clothing, and then went for it, over some terrible hills. It was tough going. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with these younger soldiers. But I pushed it, and so did they, magnificently. At the last mile, we could look down at the lights of Camp Casey. We fell into step and marched into camp in the middle of the night singing out a cadence and waking up everybody in the camp.
It was a great night. We had demanded a lot from our soldiers. But we had prepared them, we believed in them, they believed in us, and we had the confidence and optimism that they would succeed.
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THE LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF COLIN POWELL
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https://www.rapidshare.com/files/3517139838/colinleadr.rarThird chapter below
CHAPTER THREE
THE EGO TRAP,
“Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.”
ONE OF THE PIVOTAL MOMENTS in Colin Powell’s career was prompted by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the dismantling of the U.S.S.R. In the spring of 1988, National Security Advisor Powell and
Secretary of State George Shultz flew to Moscow to prepare for President Reagan’s visit to the Soviet Union. During their first meeting, Premier Gorbachev looked across the table at Powell and, through his translator, delivered an unequivocal message: General, I’m ending the Cold War, and you’re going to have to find yourself a new enemy. In his years as a public speaker, Powell often built this story into his speeches. I once heard him confess to a corporate audience—with a good dose of self-effacing humor—that this was unwelcome news from the Soviet premier. The first words that came into his mind, he told his audience, were, “But I don’t want to find a new enemy!” Why? It’s simple: He’d invested twenty-eight years in this particular enemy. It was painful, Powell said, to realize that “everything I had worked against no longer mattered.” The prospect of finding a new cause—of starting all over again—was daunting.
But as Gorbachev moved ahead with his purposeful unraveling of the Soviet empire, Powell acknowledged that he had no choice: He had to give up his tried-and-true adversary. Even harder, he had to protect his own sense of self-worth, purpose, and mission. Just because his enemy was disappearing, it didn’t mean that he was disappearing. The lesson he ultimately took away from this episode, he told his audience a decade later, was, Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it. The lesson was crystallized, Powell went on to say, when he overheard a conversation between two lawyers in the Department of Energy. One had just lost an important case and was thoroughly dispirited. “Hey,” said the other. “You lost the case, but you didn’t lose you.”
As managers, so much of who we are is wrapped up in what we do. We carefully create the status quo, and then we become prisoners of it. Our self-esteem, our career histories, our enterprise infrastructures, our technologies, our cultures and traditions, our skill sets, our views of competitors, customers, and partners—all of these combine to make us who we are, at least in the workplace. And this is perfectly understandable. After all, humans are creatures of habit. Habits help us set limits on choice making. Habits make us predictable to our colleagues, and therefore easier to work with. Habits serve us well. The problem arises, as Powell discovered in his conversation with Gorbachev, when our habits focus us primarily on the past. It’s gratifying (and again human) to want to dwell on the marketplace of yesterday, where we fought good battles and enjoyed great victories. It’s tempting to see the marketplace of today (and tomorrow) as being very much like the marketplace of the past. Unfortunately, it can’t be, and it won’t be. Effective leaders, therefore, look beyond yesterday—and beyond today. They don’t cling to familiar territory. They don’t let their egos distort the organizational agenda. They look for a Gorbachev to tell them that their worldview is outdated.
They ferret out clues to what tomorrow may look like. They use this information to set a new course, and to help others adjust their circumstances—both the individual and the corporate status quo—to reflect tomorrow’s conditions.
CHANGE BEFORE YOU ARE FORCED TO CHANGE
Of course, Gorbachev didn’t provide the only clue that the old world order (in which Powell had invested those twenty-eight years) was fading away. By the late 1980s, Powell was seeing many signs that truly massive changes were underway. Not only did the “evil empire” collapse, but the Warsaw Pact imploded, the Berlin Wall fell, and the ideologies of Marxism and Leninism sank into disrepute. Literally billions of people around the world embraced democracy and market economies for the first time.
What did all this change mean for the U.S. military, of which Powell became the senior military leader in 1989? The answer was not immediately obvious. Some people argued that the military should continue doing what it had been doing for decades. After all (this argument went), Russia and several of the other successor states to the Soviet Union were still nuclear powers. They were still autocratic and deeply suspicious regimes (as they had been for decades, or even centuries). The best strategy, these people argued, was to stay the course and upgrade what had been done in the past with improvements in quality, cost-efficiencies, and the like. Powell listened hard to these arguments. He also listened hard to people on the other side of the debate, who said that the world had changed fundamentally, and that the U.S. military had to catch up with, and get ahead of, those enormous changes. When he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he made it clear that he agreed with the reformers, and that simply “staying the course,” even with “continuous improvement” goals would be a prescription for irrelevance. Yes, he reasoned, the world was still a very dangerous place, and the United States still had multiple global responsibilities, some of which would need the force of military power to fulfill. So, clearly, there was an important place for the military. But, just as clearly, the military needed a new mission.
In the military, to put it in corporate terms, the end of the Cold War meant that our product line was now out of date…. I had to restructure in a way so that … the new, smaller force, with a new mission, had the same quality and efficiency as the larger force and the same morale. And we did that. In late 1989, Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote the following:
I saw it as my main mission to move the armed forces onto a new course, one paralleling what was happening in the world today, not one chained to the previous forty years. The vision that Powell and his colleagues inherited back in the late 1980s was of a Free World standing up to an Evil Empire. It was a monolithic, reductionist worldview:
Everything that happened anywhere in the world could be traced back to, and explained by, the uncomplex ideologies of the Cold War. Most military planning keyed off of this monolithic vision. If we could just figure out the Soviets’ next strategic move and block that move, the military analysts reasoned, our security would be assured. The next war, it was assumed, would look very much like the last war.
For example, as Powell recounts in his autobiography, the Cold War mission of the Navy included protecting the North Atlantic sea-lanes so that U.S. forces could get to Europe quickly and engage Warsaw Pact forces on the ground. This was a lesson that had been learned in World War II—fully fifty years earlier—and that no one had ever unlearned.
When we assumed the chairmanship in 1989, Powell was convinced that it was time to unlearn some lessons. Working with like-minded colleagues—but also giving his critics plenty of air time—Powell began shaping a vision that revolved around a leaner, nimbler, more mobile, technologically “smarter” military that could anticipate and put out fires from multiple sources around the world. He assumed that some of these fires would be small scale, and that they would involve new strategies and new kinds of weapons.
In the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, one could make the case that Powell and his colleagues underestimated the nature and scope of a transformation that was already under way. One could argue that they should have pushed harder and gone farther. But hindsight is proverbially 20/20. Powell deserves credit for both foresight and courage, in choosing more than a decade ago to deliver a message that few in the military wanted to hear. The move was courageous in part because few felt a sense of urgency. We had won, right? Why change the strategy that won the Cold War?
As Americans have now learned so painfully, the so-called first war of the twenty-first century is being fought under entirely new rules of engagement. The enemy is not a nation, or an organization, or an individual. The enemy is borderless, shrouded in secrecy, and “virtual.” The goals, and even the mindset, of the enemy’s foot soldiers are unfathomable to many Westerners. Most often, the combatants will fight not in the daylight, but in the shadows. And although Powell no longer has responsibility for military planning, he still has strong opinions on the subject of national security in changing circumstances. He argues today that the United States needs a new multidimensional mix of military and nonmilitary initiatives. This, in turn, requires us to involve ourselves in new kinds of missions, organizations, allies, weapons, technologies, intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and diplomacy.
That sounds almost self-evident, does it not? But consider an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 19, 2001, just a week after the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters. Even though the U.S. armed forces will be receiving up to an additional $17 billion, reported the Journal, “it’s not clear whether the new money will go toward truly changing the way the Pentagon does business—or instead, pay for the same kinds of high-priced tanks, planes, and ships that the military brass, the defense industry, and Congress have championed in the past. While the Pentagon has indicated its intention to engineer a major shift over the long term, it already faces pressure from defenders of the status quo.” So let’s recapitulate. Even after Powell’s initiatives of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and even after a decade’s worth of accumulating evidence that the military needed to change, and even after the horrific punctuation on September 11, 2001, there is still a chance that the additional $17 billion that was shaken loose by that tragedy will wind up supporting the military’s traditional ways of doing business!
In the private sector, companies often turn a blind eye toward a changing environment. They circle the wagons to protect existing products, processes, sunk costs, and habits. Why? Because the status quo is enormously powerful. People invest in the status quo, both personally and professionally. They build up their current enemies, and then they become dependent on those enemies. The health of their egos
becomes linked, in a perverse way, with the health of their enemies.
In such circumstances, expert and energetic leadership is needed. Great leaders in business continually press for new positions. They do so not just in times of crisis, when it’s relatively easy (and often too late) to get most people to check their egos at the door, but also when things seem to be motoring along just fine—and, yes, even if the financials look good. They find ways to share their own sense of urgency.
In the following Powell quote, try replacing the word Russia with a noun from almost any competitive business sector. For example, take out Russia and insert the mainframe, or the eight-track player, or the carburetor, or protectionism, or, simply, your currently accepted business model. Powell’s strong statement assumes new urgency:
First, you need to understand that Russia is not coming back. But you can’t have a vacuum of mission. That leads to anxiety and dread. Dig deep and rip out that old mission and fill it immediately with a new mission and then start training for it. You cannot tolerate a vacuum!
CHECK YOUR EGO
Good leaders have healthy egos—sometimes even way healthy egos. And that’s more or less a necessity: Leaders have to possess a strong sense of self, and a strong pride of self, to do what they do. “When I get up in the morning,” a CEO once said to me, “I feel a responsibility for 55,000 families.” That takes nerve, self-assurance, and a steady hand. And, of course, the CEO almost never acts alone. A strong ego is also needed to mobilize teams in support of exceptional goals. So ego is a good and necessary asset in a leader.
The learning point, made earlier in the Powell-Gorbachev story, is that leaders can’t wed their egos to the status quo, because the status quo inevitably changes. Great leaders take a deep breath, then walk right up to change and shake its hand. They check their egos and try on a new self-image. And when it comes to the people around them, they use the power of their egos to inspire and instigate change, rather than to resist it. I believe that leaders nowadays ought to embrace Powell’s lesson on ego with a real sense of urgency. Waves of social and economic change—big waves, powerful waves—are already crashing on the beach and splashing over the seawall. Managers who cling to their established positions and standard operating procedures will place their enterprises in jeopardy.
We will need to work together well because we have a great challenge before us. But it is not a challenge of survival anymore; it is a
challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous ideological foe we confront as we did for all those years, but now it is the
overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success, the success of the values that we hold dear, that has given us the challenges that we now face.
REINVENT YOUR JOB BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
When managers lock their egos into a fixed position—by which I mean both job and mindset—they not only jeopardize their enterprises, but also jeopardize their own careers. The simple fact is that no matter who we are, our jobs are becoming obsolete. The skill sets and habits that we call upon to do our work are a little less valuable every day. So unless we’re ready to withdraw from the field and retire, we have to seize the initiative. Believe me: Whoever you are and whatever you do, someone out there is gunning for you (or at least for the resources that you control). We therefore have to continually reinvent our jobs, and make obsolete some or all of our accustomed activities, before someone else does. And if we are leaders of organizations, we have to create a climate in which we value people according to their ability to learn new skills and grab new responsibilities, thereby perpetually reinventing their jobs. This world is changing so much. And I have got to make sure that the State Department is on top of it, and I have got to make sure I am pedaling as fast as the corporate world is pedaling, the non-profit world is pedaling, the advocacy world is pedaling.
In such a climate, the most important question in performance evaluations is no longer, “How well have you performed your job since the last time we met?” Instead, it’s, “How much have you changed your job?” What exciting new initiatives have you launched? What new projects have you started? How many cross-disciplinary action teams have you been invited to join?
What innovative steps have you taken to boost efficiency, customer service, quality, or sales? What new skills and competencies have you learned, and how have you applied them to improving things around here? Which of last year’s job responsibilities have you delegated, outsourced, automated, or eliminated, and what new responsibilities have you snared?
When leaders ask questions like that, they help to ensure that people’s egos aren’t entangled with their current titles or job descriptions. And people who can answer those kinds of questions assure themselves of growth, development, and authority within their organizations.
Powell warns against getting stuck in one’s position. Specifically, his advice is: Be flexible, be willing to change your opinions in light of new facts, and don’t get hung up on any particular course of action if it’s not essential to your mission. On top of that, be willing to question and change your mission when new “enemies” arise. One level down, I think, Powell is arguing that one’s ego can be either an asset or a liability on the path to success. Leaders help avoid stagnation—in their people and in their enterprises—by helping people optimally apply their egos to change, both in the marketplace and within the organization. Leaders understand that “checked egos” make certain kinds of communications easier, and can make the group collectively far more productive. While working in the Reagan administration, for example, Powell got to know Ken Duberstein, the White House chief of staff. According to Powell, Duberstein had a gift for getting the members of the White House staff (some of whom were no doubt blessed with healthy egos) to get beyond their own passions and agendas and work together. The resulting work environment was highly collegial, productive, and fun.
When Powell wrote about not getting stuck in one’s position in his memoirs, his advice to the reader was: Be willing to change your opinions in light of new facts, and don’t get hung up on any particular course of action if it’s not essential to your mission. Good advice, to be sure.
But as is the case with every chapter in this book, Powell’s advice has rich multiple layers. I believe that the real power of managing egos is twofold. First, to help people avoid stagnation and paralysis in themselves and their enterprises. Second, to help people creatively apply their “egos” in new directions in order to capitalize on the constant changes in the external marketplace and the internal organization. So whether it’s charting a course of action for one’s enterprise, or charting a course of action for one’s career, Powell’s advice is useful indeed.
To conclude, I might add that Powell walks the talk on his advice to the “nth degree”: A May 21, 2001 U.S. News & World Report blurb says that “It’s the little things that have State Department workers cooing over their boss, Colin Powell. Their latest brag: Powell does his own photocopying and gets on his hands and knees to fix the machine when it jams.”
Now there’s someone who literally doesn’t let his ego get too close to his position!
POWELL PRINCIPLES
1. Look past today, and monitor the environment for tomorrow. Don’t get stuck in the past. Even in the best of weather, look for competitive clues on the horizon. Adapt to new situations, and, after embracing change, respond to it with innovative action.
2. Challenge the prevailing wisdom. What are the data telling you? Is it the same thing that your gut is telling you? If not, why not? What are those sea-lanes really going to look like in the war we’re most likely to fight?
3. Guard against competitive myopia. Change your model before someone else changes it for you. The corporate graveyard is full of organizations that failed to take preemptive action.
4. Make change mean growth. Humans resist change. Change precipitates growth. Therefore, humans resist growth—even though it’s growth that will keep them happily and gainfully employed. So leaders need to connect these dots in more constructive ways. Make change equivalent to growth, and make growth equivalent to satisfaction. Apply this lesson to your own career and personal development—regularly.
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