Authors: Colin Powell
It Worked For Me (5 page)
I
have always tried to keep my life in perspective with my ego under control. That effort has been helped enormously by a wife and three kids who have never taken me too seriously and who have always held above me an imaginary oxygen mask ready to drop down whenever I needed a whiff of reality. The first time I came home looking sharp in the new battle dress camouflage fatigues the Army adopted in the 1980s, my daughter Annemarie, then about twelve, merely looked up from watching television and announced, “Mom, the GI Joe doll is home.”
Over time, others have helped me keep my ego down. After I retired, I was invited to give a speech to a large luncheon event in Boston. There were about two thousand guests and you needed two tickets, one to get into the room, and the second for the waitress to verify that you had paid for lunch. I was escorted to the round head table by the event’s chairman. As the waitress placed salads before each guest, she asked for meal tickets. She passed by me without giving me a salad. When it was time for the next course she passed me by again. That was when the chairman realized what was going wrong. Mortified, he said to the waitress, “Young lady, this is General Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our honored guest and keynote speaker.” Her simple, no-nonsense response was “He ain’t got no ticket, huh?” The chairman produced a ticket for me. I was getting hungry.
I love when people do their job. Doing your job well, with someone watching, without inflating your self-importance or showing off, is not easy.
Some years ago, there was a human interest segment about a street sweeper on the evening news. I think he worked in Philadelphia. He was a black gentleman and swept streets the old-fashioned way, with one of those wide, stiff bristle brooms and a wheeled garbage can. He had a wife and several children and lived in a modest home. It was a loving family, and he had high ambitions for his children. He enjoyed his job very much and felt he was providing a worthwhile service to his community. He had only one professional ambition in life and that was to get promoted to drive one of those mechanized street sweepers with big round brushes.
He finally achieved his ambition and was promoted to driving a street sweeping machine. His wife and children were proud of him. The television piece closed with him driving down the street; a huge smile was on his face. He knew who he was and what he was.
I run that video piece through my mind every few months as a reality check. Here is a man happy in his work, providing an essential service for his community, providing for his family, who love and respect him. Have I been more successful in what is truly important in life than he has been? No, we have both been fortunate. He has touched all the important bases in the game of life. When we are ultimately judged, despite my titles and medals, he may have a few points on me, and on a lot of others I know.
T
he 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), where I served in Vietnam for a short time as operations officer, was commanded by a wonderful soldier, Major General Charles M. Gettys. I learned a great deal from General Gettys. He was a calm, confident commander, not given to outbursts or showing off his rank. He placed great confidence in his staff, but there was no question who was in charge.
He and I were casually chatting one day when the name of another general came up. He was a highly regarded officer, but Gettys had reservations about him. “Colin, he’s a good guy,” he told me, “but he is one of those ‘busy bastards.’ He always has to be doing things and coming up with new ideas and working absurd hours.”
Gettys’s wisdom has stayed with me, and I have tried to learn from it. He pointed out back then (maybe intentionally) a road I was inclined to travel. I’ve always done my best to come up with new ideas, and I certainly worked hard in all my jobs. But I have tried not to be a busy bastard. As President Reagan used to frequently observe, “They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take a chance?”
I’ve seen many busy bastards over the years . . . I shouldn’t call them bastards, but Gettys’s words have burned into my brain. Most of them are good people, not bastards. They just can’t ever let it go.
A busy bastard never leaves the office until late at night. He has to go in on weekends. He shows up in the morning at hours suitable only for TV traffic announcers, failing to recognize that a couple dozen staff people have to show up at the same time to make sure he gets the support he can’t do without and to prove they’re as committed to the job as he is.
In every senior job I’ve had I’ve tried to create an environment of professionalism and the very highest standards. When it was necessary to get a job done, I expected my subordinates to work around the clock. When that was not necessary, I wanted them to work normal hours, go home at a decent time, play with the kids, enjoy family and friends, read a novel, clear their heads, daydream, and refresh themselves. I wanted them to have a life outside the office. I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work. That kind of environment has always produced the best results for me.
I tried to practice what I preached. I enjoy fixing things, especially old cars, and especially old Volvos. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lives across the river from Washington in a mansion in Fort Myer on a hill overlooking the city. A hundred feet behind the mansion were three garages. When I was Chairman, the garages were always filled with dead circa-1960 Volvos waiting to be fixed or stripped for parts. People who really needed to see me on weekends knew where to find me . . . under a Volvo. If they wanted to visit or chat, I didn’t mind, as long as I could continue working. I enjoyed analyzing a dead engine to discover why it wouldn’t start, reducing the possibilities for the failure down to one, fixing it, and then rejoicing when the engine fired up. My office problems seldom lent themselves to such straightforward, linear analysis. Once a car was running, I had no further interest in it. I would buy a ninety-nine-dollar Earl Scheib paint job and sell it as fast as possible. I was under a Volvo one Sunday in 1989 during our invasion of Panama when the Operations Center called to tell me we had picked up the dictator Manuel Noriega.
While I was making the transition to Secretary of State, I interviewed a number of candidates for senior positions. Toward the end of one of these interviews, an extremely able and gifted Foreign Service officer asked if I would mind if he went out to jog in the afternoons.
“You can go home and jog as far as I’m concerned,” I told him. “I trust you to know how to get your work done without me maintaining a sign-out sheet on you.”
The very fact that a senior officer would ask such a question pointed out how necessary it was to demonstrate to my staff that I wasn’t a busy bastard.
My mentor in this style of operating was Frank Carlucci. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, Frank was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense; and I became his military assistant. Because Frank always tried to leave the office at a reasonable hour and avoided the place like a plague on weekends, I worked reasonable hours and so did everyone else on his staff. We ran a very efficient office.
In the spring of 1981, I persuaded Frank to release me for a field assignment. The officer who replaced me, a compulsive worker, stayed late every night. Even though Frank only rarely came in on weekends, and never for more than a couple of hours, his new military assistant felt he had to be there. Sure enough, all those extra hours generated more work for the entire staff. The workload expanded to fill the time. Most of it was make-work, anything but necessary or important. Frank found himself with additional paper he didn’t ask for, need, or expect. He had to start working longer hours!
In late 1986, in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal, Frank became President Reagan’s National Security Advisor and I became Frank’s deputy. Our task was to reorganize the national security system and fix the deficiencies that had caused the scandal. Even during this stressful, demanding time, with a presidency at risk, Frank maintained his long-standing work habits. One of my responsibilities as his deputy was to keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t have to work late. I didn’t have to worry. Left to his own devices, with no crisis pending, he would leave at 3 p.m., play tennis, and go home. He worked hard, was incredibly well organized, and got the work done. The staff followed Frank’s lead.
By the time I had reached my most senior positions, I never went to the office on weekends unless a war had just started or some other crisis demanded my presence. On Fridays, I left the office with tons of work; I was far more efficient in the quiet privacy of my home. I expected my staff to do likewise. If you have a reason to go in, then go in, but never think that going in just for the sake of going in impresses me.
President Reagan was a joy in this regard. He didn’t need encouragement to keep reasonable work hours. When Frank Carlucci became Secretary of Defense, I took over as National Security Advisor. As I’d done earlier with Frank, one of my jobs was to watch the President’s schedule to make sure we didn’t keep him late. Toward the end of the day, we gave him a homework package. He was normally upstairs in the residence with Mrs. Reagan by six o’clock. Friday afternoons were even better. Right after lunch, he usually got an end-of-the-week briefing from Secretary of State George Shultz. Reagan would listen patiently but with limited attention. Around 2:15, when he heard the drone of Marine One descending onto the South Lawn, he’d perk up. It was time to leave for Camp David! He’d arrive there by 3 p.m., and short of an emergency, stay until Sunday evening. Seldom were guests invited to Camp David. The President relaxed, read staff papers and books, and spent time with Mrs. Reagan. This was their time. And, hallelujah, it was our time to get caught up, spend time with our families, and rest up and get ready for the demanding week ahead. The nation was safe without the President whizzing all over the place on weekends. Our only concern was the books he was reading. Despite our best efforts, old friends would now and again slip seriously odd books into his briefcase, generating often unanswerable questions Monday morning. One Monday, the President came in brimming over with curiosity about how trees create pollution.
Reagan loved relaxing at his ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains just outside Santa Barbara, California. We loved it even more. We were condemned to camp out in fancy cabana suites on the beach at the beautiful Santa Barbara Biltmore hotel. Twice a day the senior staff assembled to see what we needed to tell him. We’d telephone up to the ranch and brief him, and we’d send up intelligence, situation reports, and papers for him to work on. If no crises were looming, we could quietly take care of business and prepare for the challenges ahead or split for the pool or the beach, making sure we could monitor everything in case of an emergency. It was rare for anyone to have to brief him at the ranch. I went up just once, to brief him on a treaty we had just concluded with the Russians to reduce our nuclear weapons inventories.
I worked hard all my life and always expected those who worked for me to do likewise. But I tried not to generate make-work. I learned early that a complete life includes more than work. We need family, rest, outside interests, and time to pursue them. I always keep in mind a lesson taught to all young infantry lieutenants: “Don’t run if you can walk; don’t stand up if you can sit down; don’t sit down if you can lie down; and don’t stay awake if you can go to sleep.”
M
any years ago I was the warden—the senior lay person—of a small suburban Episcopal church in northern Virginia. During that time our bishop assigned to our parish an elderly priest to serve as an assistant pastor. The priest was in some kind of personal distress and needed a parish home. I never knew the nature of his problem. Whatever it was, we were pleased to take him in. We welcomed him into the church family, treated him as one of us, and ministered to him, just as we ministered to each other. Nobody asked about his problem or pried into his life.
He was with us for a year. On his last Sunday he was assigned to give the sermon. I listened to it in my usual proper Episcopalian position, right rear of the church. I’m sure it was a good sermon, but one sentence hit me with special force and has remained with me for four decades. At the end of the sermon, the priest looked over the congregation and with a smile on his face quietly concluded: “Always show more kindness than seems necessary, because the person receiving it needs it more than you will ever know.”
He was talking about himself, of course. The lesson was clear: Don’t just show kindness in passing or to be courteous. Show it in depth, show it with passion, and expect nothing in return. Kindness is not just about being nice; it’s about recognizing another human being who deserves care and respect.
Much later, when I was Secretary of State, I slipped away one day from my beautiful office suite and vigilant security agents and snuck down to the garage. The garage is run by contract employees, most of them immigrants and minorities making only a few dollars above minimum wage.
The garage is too small for all the employees’ cars. The challenge every morning is to pack them all in. The attendants’ system is to stack cars one behind the other, so densely packed that there’s no room to maneuver. Since number three can’t get out until number one and two have left, the evening rush hour is chaos if the lead cars don’t exit the garage on time. Inevitably a lot of impatient people have to stand around waiting their turn.
The attendants had never seen a Secretary wandering around the garage before; they thought I was lost. (That may have been true by then, but I’d never admit it.) They asked if I needed help getting back “home.”
“No,” I answered. “I just want to look around and chat with you.” They were surprised, but pleased. I asked about the job, where they were from, were there problems with carbon monoxide, and similar small talk. They assured me everything was fine, and we all relaxed and chatted away.
After a while I asked a question that had puzzled me: “When the cars come in every morning, how do you decide who ends up first to get out, and who ends up second and third?”
They gave each other knowing looks and little smiles. “Mr. Secretary,” one of them said, “it kinda goes like this. When you drive in, if you lower the window, look out, smile, and you know our name, or you say ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or something like that, you’re number one to get out. But if you just look straight ahead and don’t show you even see us or that we are doing something for you, well, you are likely to be one of the last to get out.”
I thanked them, smiled, and made my way back to where I had abandoned my now distraught bodyguard.
At my next staff meeting, I shared this story with my senior leaders. “You can never err by treating everyone in the building with respect, thoughtfulness, and a kind word,” I told them. “Every one of our employees is an essential employee. Every one of them wants to be viewed that way. And if you treat them that way, they will view you that way. They will not let you down or let you fail. They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them.”
It ain’t brain surgery. Every person in an organization has value and wants that value to be recognized. Every human being needs appreciation and reinforcement. The person who came to clean my office each night was no less a person than the President, a general, or a cabinet member. They deserved and got from me a thank-you, a kind word, an inquiry that let him or her know their value. I wanted them to know they weren’t just janitors. I couldn’t do my job without them, and the department relied on them. There are no trivial jobs in any successful organization. But there are all too many trivial leaders who don’t understand this oh so simple and easy to apply principle.
Taking care of employees is perhaps the best form of kindness. When young soldiers go to basic training they meet a drill sergeant, who seems to be their worst nightmare. He shouts at them relentlessly, he intimidates them, he makes them miserable. They are terrified. But all that changes. Their fear and initial hatred turn into something else by the end of basic training. The sergeant has been with them every step of the way: teaching, cajoling, enforcing, bringing out of them strength and confidence they didn’t know they had. At the end, all they want is for their performance to please him. When they graduate, they leave with an emotional bond and a remembrance they will never forget. Ask any veteran the name of his drill sergeant and he will know it. My ROTC summer camp drill sergeant almost fifty-five years ago was Staff Sergeant (SSG) Artis Westberry.
Being kind doesn’t mean being soft or a wuss. Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of confidence. If you have developed a reputation for kindness and consideration, then even the most unpleasant decisions will go down easier because everyone will understand why you are doing what you are doing. They will realize that your decision must be necessary, and is not arbitrary or without empathy.
As the old saying puts it, “To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
