A Passion for Leadership (7 page)

At the same time, I announced A&M would not use affirmative action in the way it was being used at most universities, that is, assigning students extra “points” in the application score if they were of a certain ethnicity. Everyone would be admitted purely on the basis of individual merit. Most A&M students and alumni applauded the merit-only approach—until I announced a couple of days later that we would no longer use legacy (previous family attendance at A&M) as a factor in admissions. As I told the Aggies, we couldn't have it both ways: purely merit-based admissions
and
legacy. The shit that hit the fan as a result of these combined admissions initiatives came from the media, minority leaders in Texas already deeply skeptical of the university's commitment to greater diversity, some alumni, and a number of faculty. With respect to race-blind admissions, most minority leaders figured the new approach was just a dodge to avoid increasing the number of minority kids and evidence of hostility at A&M to minorities.

Within days of my public announcement, I was summoned to the state capitol to meet with a dozen or so legislators who came from racial minorities. They lambasted me in the most graphic terms for the better part of two hours. Years of testifying before Congress had inured me to this kind of treatment, so I just sat and took it, repeatedly and politely reaffirming my commitment to bring more minorities to Texas A&M. I didn't make much of a dent in their anger. One very powerful African-American state senator, Royce West of Dallas, who had been impressed with how I had quickly responded to his criticism of A&M's poor record in using minority-owned businesses, berated me publicly and stated his disagreement with my decision. Privately, however, he said he wanted to help and told other minority leaders around the state that I should be given a chance to succeed. He invited me to Dallas to talk with minority community activists and the editorial board of
The Dallas Morning News,
in both cases accompanying me and introducing me. He repeatedly avowed that I had delivered on what I had promised in the past and he had confidence I would do so again. I will never forget his confidence and his willingness to take a risk by supporting me. He helped buy me the time I needed to make my strategy work.

Sixteen months after arriving on campus, I implemented a tailored strategy for increasing diversity at A&M: rejecting the use of both affirmative action and legacy, and allocating millions of dollars to a unique and aggressive recruitment effort. The strategy was controversial among both external and internal audiences. But sometimes a leader must decide what is in the best long-term interest of the institution, suck it up, make a tough decision, put his head down, and plunge ahead—even if alone. I was convinced that if I was to meaningfully increase minority representation at A&M, I had to have an unorthodox strategy consistent with the institution's culture. I was determined to convince Hispanics and African-Americans that I was dead serious about increasing their numbers in both the student body and the faculty and equally determined to persuade the university community that greater diversity was essential for Texas A&M's stature and its future.

I spent the next three years implementing that tailored strategy. It worked. By fall semester 2006, African-American freshman enrollment was up 77 percent from the fall of 2003; Hispanic freshman enrollment was up 59 percent. Our success in enrolling minorities, especially compared with a number of other major public universities nationwide where minority enrollment was declining in absolute terms, was recognized in a front-page article of
The Chronicle of Higher Education
and by the editorial board of the
Houston Chronicle.
(Between 2002, before I launched my initiative, and 2012, African-American and Hispanic undergraduates at Texas A&M increased from 10.6 percent of the student body to 23.6 percent, a major step forward, though there is room for continued improvement.)

My priorities when I became secretary of defense—getting more troops into the war zones, getting them the equipment they needed to succeed in the missions they had been given, getting them home safely, and, if wounded, getting the best possible care for them—were not the priorities of the senior leaders in the Pentagon. They were preoccupied not with waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but with planning and procuring equipment for future wars against major nation-states. I had to shape my strategy accordingly. The most immediate change I had to make, shocking to me, was to get the senior leadership focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Obama's onetime White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said you should never let a crisis go to waste, an important lesson for all leaders. Further, I would add, if a new leader manages a crisis effectively, it can have an enormous ripple effect, enhancing his authority and his ability to address other problems.

My first management crisis as secretary was the result of a series in
The Washington Post
in February 2007 detailing the squalid living conditions and bureaucratic morass that troops recovering from their combat wounds had to deal with at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The Walter Reed scandal demonstrated that while the medical care was superb, outpatient wounded soldiers undergoing further treatment and rehabilitation were being neglected; they had to fight the military's health bureaucracy at every step on their difficult paths. Both Walter Reed and the defense establishment more broadly presumed—hoped, really—from 2003 on that the war in Iraq would be wrapped up relatively quickly, we could begin withdrawing our troops, and we could get back to “business as usual.” There wasn't much interest in disrupting established organizations, routines, and programs, much less creating and funding new ones aimed at meeting the immediate war-related needs of troops and commanders.

Walter Reed provided me with an opportunity to address this mentality—and related shortcomings—in ways that also tackled the broader issues affecting the war effort. I declared that helping our wounded warriors and their families would be our highest priority “after the wars themselves.” Because so many different elements of the Pentagon were involved, I created the Wounded Warrior Task Force, which reported to me every two weeks on our progress. The task force was just the first of several I created to accomplish other priority tasks associated with turning the wars around. They would become an essential instrument for me not just on matters relating to the wars but on other problems in the department as well.

I knew I personally would have to shape the Pentagon battlefields and devise strategies for winning the internal fights over providing better support for the troops. And the fights came fast and furious, including those over better armored vehicles (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) to provide significantly better protection for troops on the move—a program opposed by virtually all of the senior civilian and military leaders; improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and better detection of, and defenses against, roadside bombs (bureaucratic paralysis and air force opposition complicated solutions); reduced medevac times in Afghanistan—again opposed by nearly all the top brass. One action that certainly helped shape the internal battlefield for the years ahead was my firing of the Walter Reed hospital commander, the surgeon general of the army, and the secretary of the army less than three months after I took office. I made clear that when it came to getting the troops what they needed and taking care of them, I would not tolerate neglect, obstacles, or halfhearted commitment.

When I became DCI in November 1991, my strategy for change was to blitz the CIA and the other intelligence agencies with multiple initiatives for change, all with short deadlines. Unlike the Defense Department and A&M, where the need for change was questioned by more than a few, virtually everyone in the CIA and other intelligence agencies recognized that we had entered a new and very different world. Thus, there was little opposition to the overall effort, though there would be to specific proposals.

In intelligence organizations, secrecy and “need to know” are integral elements of the culture, but I decided that there was nothing particularly sensitive about the structural and procedural changes I was contemplating or, for the most part, changes in the way we did our business. Thus, at the very beginning, I made clear that reports of the two dozen or so task forces would be widely circulated for comment and reaction, as would the drafts of any decision memo I prepared to implement the recommendations of the task force. I wanted the most inclusive process possible, with the widest possible number of intelligence professionals invited to participate.

Of course, sometimes the best of intentions go awry. One of the task forces I established was to examine how the CIA, in particular, could be more open in its relationships with the media and the public. Many good ideas surfaced, including declassifying decades' worth of analytical papers dealing with the former Soviet Union, providing greater availability of senior agency officials for media interviews, facilitating access to already declassified documents, and easing access to classified files for scholars. Unfortunately, we were subjected to considerable—deserved—criticism and mockery when it was revealed in the press that the task force report on “openness” had been classified “secret.” I immediately declassified it, but the damage was done, thus proving, yet again, that old habits die hard and bureaucracies are often their own worst enemies.

One strategy new leaders often use in reform initiatives is reorganizing the bureaucracy. But all too often, they confuse organizational and name changes with real change. They believe that moving the boxes around on the organization chart, changing the lines for who reports to whom, making dotted lines into solid lines, and the like will fix problems and represent real change. They are nearly always wrong. When you get a new boss who is bent on changing things by changing the boxes, it usually means he isn't really serious about change or he doesn't understand how to lead it.

If a leader wants real change, he must realize the main target is
how
people do their work, not
where.
How you make people more efficient and productive, more effective, more responsive, more open-minded, better at their jobs, is little affected by the placement of their organization on the chart. There is one exception to this general proposition: getting rid of boxes on the chart—reducing layering—is almost always a good thing.

Rearranging the organizational boxes, especially if it involves physical relocations, also is enormously distracting to an organization. Employees will be preoccupied with whether their personal and office status has improved or declined in the reorganization—as well as whether in the game of bureaucratic musical chairs they might find themselves without a job. The large CIA office analyzing Soviet foreign and domestic affairs was moved to a building distant from the agency's headquarters in the early 1980s; I believe it affected the quality of its work for up to two years. Whether in the public or the private sector, try to leave the boxes, both actual and organizational, alone unless absolutely necessary.

Finally, how a leader informs her organization and external constituencies about her strategy for reform and how she intends to proceed is an important decision. She needs to decide whether to be low-key and simply announce each initiative or make a big splash.

If you have done the proper preparatory work in terms of consulting with a broad array of your constituencies and shaping the battlefield, my preference is to go with the big splash. A strategy I used again and again wherever I was in charge was to blitz the organization with multiple actions simultaneously, the totality of the measures communicating seriousness of purpose, heft, and the reality of change. For anyone bent on change, one individual gesture or action will often not be persuasive; a dozen or more announced simultaneously are hard to ignore or dismiss. Laying out the full breadth of what you plan to do has dramatic effect, gets people's attention, and can build enthusiasm and excitement. Announcing initiatives all at once reduces uncertainty about hidden agendas or future surprises. Whatever apprehension employees feel can be mitigated by making clear that they all will have the opportunity to help shape the actual implementation.

Less than a month after I was confirmed as DCI, I gave a speech to leaders of the intelligence community about their future:

Now it is time to look ahead to needed changes in priorities, mission and structure.

I have been around too long to underestimate the difficulty of changing longstanding structural arrangements, old habits, and vested bureaucratic interests. Yet, I believe everyone agrees that change must come to the Intelligence Community and that it must come now. I hope and believe that through a cooperative, inter-agency and intra-agency effort in which all points of view are represented and have a hearing, and where people and institutions have a say in shaping the future structure, we can in fact bring about real change.

I then described in detail the potential areas for change we would examine, laying out ideas for what needed to change, where we were headed, but without prejudging the conclusions of the two dozen task forces I would establish. Because of my preparatory work, and my reassurances, this speech was greeted with enthusiasm, in stark contrast with the disastrous speech I had made as the CIA's deputy director for intelligence almost exactly ten years earlier.

I had a similar experience at A&M. In remarks to the faculty senate a month after my arrival on campus, I laid out the priorities for change that would dominate my tenure as president of the university. I said that in each case, the issues would be addressed by deans, faculty, and administrators working together. I described the provost's and my listening sessions during the preceding weeks with the deans of the colleges, department heads, and faculty and the conclusions I had drawn from those sessions in terms of the four areas of change that would be our focus. The response was quite positive. I covered much of the same ground in a university-wide convocation three weeks later, with all the various constituencies of the university community in attendance.