Fame, as it is said, is fleeting. What matters in the end is what you have when fame is gone - hopefully a strong and loving family, friends, your own sense of integrity, and a feeling that you have contributed.
We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it.
Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
A healthy sense of humor and humility can help when you are receiving criticism. At the Pentagon I kept some cartoons on a wall in my office. They included many that made fun of me, which helped to keep life in perspective. As the years went on, the number of cartoons grew. I occasionally called to mind the well-known comment by President Harry Truman, “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” After a couple of decades in Washington, I added what New York Times columnist and friend Bill Safire called the Rumsfeld corollary: “Better get a small dog, in case it turns on you, too.”
I have so often in my life been mistaken that I no longer blush for it.
Few of us move seamlessly through life skipping along the top of the waves from one success to another. Making mistakes is human. Having the courage to try and to risk mistakes distinguishes a leader from the rest. It’s easy to look back on things in life that did not work out the way you had hoped and become paralyzed by second-guessing yourself.
Like anyone I’ve had my share of failures and disappointments over the years. At the time some of them seemed monumental. In the Navy, for example, I was not assigned to single-engine aircraft in 1956 despite my every effort. That major disappointment contributed to my decision to give up a career as a Navy pilot. At the age of 28, I managed a congressional campaign in Ohio for a man I greatly admired, and was heartbroken for him when he lost by less than one switch vote per precinct. In 1965 in the Congress I lost an election for a leadership position as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, by one vote. I tried to run for the 1988 Republican nomination for President of the United States, but failed to raise the money needed to be competitive. Each of those setbacks and disappointments changed my trajectory, as they tend to do for anyone. I tried to learn from them, avoid wallowing in regret, and then get on with life.
Then there were the mistakes, miscalculations, and disappointments of more recent vintage, some of which occurred during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the fog of war, miscalculations are of course inevitable. So is the grim reality that in any military conflict a number of Americans in uniform will not survive it.
Unquestionably the hardest task as Secretary of Defense was that I had to make decisions that I knew would mean that young men and women would almost certainly not return home. I also knew that no matter how many precautions we took, there would be civilians who would be killed. All of those who served, sacrificed, and perished, and the many loved ones they have left behind, remain in my thoughts and prayers.
I rose and found myself saying, “I don’t get up every morning and think that the USA is what’s wrong with the world.”
A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
The Nobel laureate economist Dr. Milton Friedman once was asked how he could defend “the greed and concentration of power” of capitalism. His reply is famous and instructive:
“Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russian doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.”
It is important to appreciate that self-interest is not the same as selfishness. The desire to pursue one’s goals, to do well, and to gain wealth - for you family, and yes, for yourself - is human nature.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we learned a rule: “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” If you find a mess, clean it up, regardless of who made it.
If the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, the standing of the institution of the presidency was at a modern historic low. Harlow gave me valuable advice in the early days of the Ford administration when he said something to the effect of “The steady pressure by Congress and the courts is to reduce executive authority. Resolve that when you leave the White House, you will leave it with the same authorities it had when you came. Do not contribute to the further erosion of presidential power on your watch.”
In 1975, Ford was in a heated dispute with members of Congress over funding to the South Vietnamese government. The Congress had voted to withdraw US funding, which made it all but inevitable that South Vietnam would fall to brutal communist control. The President was so angry that he did something uncharacteristic. He started questioning the personal fortitude of members of Congress, suggesting that they didn’t have the guts to stand up to the communities. That was tough language for the 1970s, though regrettably it has become more routine since. Of course, what a president says sets the tone for the rest of the administration. His words echo right down the line and are repeated and incorporated into the public remarks of other administration officials.
What Ford had said about Congress, I told him, sounded like something LBJ might have said. This was not meant as a compliment, and Ford didn’t take it as one. “There is something about that chair,” I said, pointing to the one behind his desk in the Oval Office, “that makes presidents begin to act and talk in a way to make them seem tough.” As a member of Congress and even as Vice President, Ford might have been able to get away with an angry outburst or the use of some ill-chosen words. But less so as the President. I was concerned about how his anger, however sincere and strongly felt, would come across to the American people. Presidents are expected to be measured in their rhetoric. What people liked about Gerald Ford, in contrast to his immediate predecessors, was that he came across as a warm, decent, honest person.
I reminded the President there are two particularly harmful things for anyone in public life. One is ridicule and the other is being seen as not up to the job. My concern was that angry and blustering comments like that might leave the latter impression. I suggested instead that he use what I called an “Eisenhower-type approach” in dealing with political opponents. Even though Ike was known to have a temper, he rarely if ever was angry in public or called anyone names. Like FDR, he would talk about his opponents more with disappointment or sadness than anger.
Unlike Agnew, Dick Cheney didn’t worry about how well he was dressed, and unlike Rockefeller, Cheney did not for a moment see himself as a co-president or even a future one, given his health and age. Instead he worked quietly behind the scenes to focus on policy and kept his views to himself, except when he met privately with the President. Those characteristics made him one of the most effective vice presidents in history and certainly in my lifetime. It also left him open to criticism because he spent no time worrying about what the press said about him and made little if any effort to correct misimpression. As a result, his accomplishments and contributions to the Bush administration were significant, but little known. That’s the way he wanted it. Dick Cheney was the model of a number two.
In the Ford administration, there was considerable consternation among some staff member about First Lady Betty Ford. Being the First Lady of the US has to be a difficult experience. Yes, you live in a large mansion and even host the British royal family for dinner. But you also completely surrender your own and your family’s privacy for four to eight years and for some time thereafter. You are expected not to work to have a life outside of your spouse’s. People comment endlessly on your hairstyle and your dress and can be tough about both. It may be the most visible position in the world without a paycheck.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that as First Lady, “you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.” You are also expected by many to put your opinions in a lockbox and leave them there for the duration.
The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
The unforgivable sin of a commander is to assume that an enemy will act in a certain way in a given situation.
The tens of thousands of new military recruits and junior officers who come through the training pipeline each year quickly develop and appreciation for formality and precision in dress. Shirts and pants are pressed, shoes polished, and salute crisp. These young men and women abide by a strict code of conduct that can penalize a number of things that are not illegal in civilian life: slovenly appearance, tardiness, or disregarding a superior’s orders.
This regimentation can be misconstrued those who have not served in the military as excessive attention to detail or a quaint adherence to dated ethical standards. What does it matter, one might ask, if a button is undone, or a rifle isn’t held the exact way it should be, as long as you know when and how to use it? Why should anyone care what a soldier wears in combat?
Well, there are good reasons why the US military places a premium on ceremony, standards of conduct, discipline, precision, and punctuality. For one thing, uniforms help members of the armed forces identify each other, which can become difficult in the confusion of battle. Attention to detail in small things, such as keeping pants pressed, means that you’re more likely to pay attention to detail in larger things, such as keeping the barrel of a rifle clean, or a pilot carefully reviewing the landing checklist.
It is also essential that troops be able to talk to each other and be quickly understood by using the same precise language and frames of reference. An ambiguous order and a vague wave in the direction of the enemy are what reportedly led to the deaths of more than two hundred British soldiers in the infamous 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade. Precision can be lifesaving. One digit off in a latitude or longitude coordinate can result in a bomb dropped on the wrong target, even on friendly forces. A rendezvous does not succeed if a pilot shows up five minutes after the set time.
In boot camp or officer training school, you quickly learn the phrase “No excuse, sir.” Punctuality isn’t simply a courtesy; it’s a necessity when lives can depend on you and others being in exactly the right place at the right time. Military recruits practice the same maneuvers and drills until they are near perfect. They learn to operate as a single body. Recruits learn to march in formation - something they almost certainly will never be asked to do in battle - but the tradition and practice teach them to obey commands and to be part of a broader whole.
Washington. Grant. Patton. Marshall. Eisenhower. Nimitz. Each was a successful leader. Yet each had a distinctively different personality and style. Contemporaries described George Washington as stiff and ceremonious. Of the low-key U.S. Grant, Lincoln once said: “He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe he had been in this room a minute or so before I knew that he was here.” Patton, by contrast, was famous for making a fuss. Swaggering, theatrical, and confrontational, Patton inspired great loyalty from his troops yet brought a flood of censure onto himself by berating and slapping a soldier.
George Marshall embodied reserve and formality. The general was reported to have bristled when even the President of the US called him by his first name. By contrast, one of Eisenhower’s distinguishing traits was geniality, which, together with sharp political instincts, positioned him to deal with the outsize egos and national rivalries endemic in coalition warfare.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, who rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor, made his way into the US Naval Academy without completing high school. It was not until after he was made a Fleet Admiral (one of only nine men in America history to wear five stars) that Nimitz received his high school diploma. Nimitz confessed to becoming “frightfully seasick” during his first tour of duty and not long thereafter ran his ship aground in Manila Bay, in what would be career-ending mistake today. He was comfortable leaving much of the glory to the two larger-than-life figures in the WW2 Pacific Theater - General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why we have so many lawyers. We live in the most litigious society on earth. When I was on the board of directors of Boveri, an international power engineering company, the management had to take that fact into account. Often, when they had to build a new facility, they did it outside the US, and one of the reasons cited was the abandon with which lawyers operate in our country.
In a society as litigious as ours has become, it’s natural that leaders have to seek out legal advice. But this reality has drawbacks. One statistic about the Defense Department that stuns me to this day is that the Pentagon has become home to more than ten thousand lawyers. How remarkable is this figure? Well, consider this: The Pentagon has more lawyers than the Department of Justice! Like anybody, lawyers prefer to keep busy. And because the Pentagon is subject to so many lawsuits, many of them frivolous, every level in the Department, up and down the chain of command, is compelled to regularly seek legal advice on issue after issue.
The “tooth-to-tail ratio” is an important concept for anyone trying to hack their way through a bureaucratic thicket. In the military context, the phrase refers to the number of support personnel (“the tail”) required to supply and sustain the troops on the front lines (“the tooth”). A tail too long is a costly and inefficient use of resources for an organization whose primary purpose - indeed its very reason for being n- depends on the teeth. The trick is to try to keep the number of support staff as low as possible, yet still enable those on the front line to do their jobs.
In 2001, I discovered that of the hundreds of thousands of people at the Defense Department, only 14 percent were directly related to combat operations.
Moving a bureaucracy cannot be achieved simply by ordering that something be done, even in a military organization. Instead, leadership almost always requires consent and persuasion. The biggest problem with bureaucracies is the certainty that, as Ronald Reagan put it, they are the “closest thing to eternal life on earth.” The machinery of an organization outlasts any one leader.
If you order a bureaucracy to do something it doesn’t want to do, very often it will ensure that your attempt at change will fail and prove to all that it was right in the first place. Or else it will resort to the tried-and-true tactic of the “slow roll.” Because bureaucracies can almost always outlast leadership, they can appear on the surface to be following guidance from the top, but actually be doing only the bare minimum, ensuring that little, if any, change is accomplished.
In the six years of my last tour as Secretary I could probably count on two hands the number of times I issued a direct order other than an explicit command from the POTUS. It was exceedingly rare. A more effective approach is a form of the Socratic method - asking a series of question that help to move toward a preferred outcome. That was one of the reasons I sent some 20,000 “snowflakes” and memos while I was in the Pentagon. Contained in those memos and notes were a great many more questions than instructions. When I made a specific assertion it tended to be followed by something like “Would you let me know what’s wrong with this?” or “Why isn’t this right?” or “What do you think?” It was more time-consuming than issuing orders, but it had a better chance of achieving results.
Walk around. If you are invisible, the mystique of your position may perpetuate inaccurate impressions. After all, you may not be as bad as some are saying.
When I arrived at the Pentagon in early 2001 with the explicit mission from the newly elected President to transform the largest bureaucracy in the world, the Department I had left nearly a quarter century earlier was barely recognizable. The Defense Department of the mid-1970s was hardly a lean and mean operation. No government organization of that size ever is, and back then we were still fighting the Cold War. But the Pentagon of the mid-1970s was a model of efficiency and decisive action compared with what I found in 2001. To begin with, the Department was drowning in paper. The congressional legislation that authorized funds for DoD had been a single page back in 1962, the year I was elected to Congress. When I first served as Secretary of Defense in 1975 the number of pages had ballooned to 75. But by 2001, it had exploded to 988 pages, crammed with detailed requirements, prohibitions, and stipulations - as well as stipulations of stipulations. The Secretary of Defense was by 2001 required to submit 905 separate reports to Congress each year, even though they were rarely read by any members and were produced at considerable cost to the taxpayer - and to the forest of America. The 535 member of the US House and Senate were sending 2,500 to 3,000 inquiries or complaints to the Department - not every year, not every month, but every week. I also found a backlog of more than 15,000 security clearances pending. Meanwhile, the size of the active-duty armed forces had declined from 2.1M men and women to 1.4M.
Attempts to curb the “rule of the desks” - the literal translation of the word bureaucracy - typically encounter one of the basic laws of physics: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It has bested a good many US presidents and corporate officers alike. When President Truman recognized that Eisenhower would succeed him in the White House, the reportedly made a grim prediction. “Poor Ike - it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ and nothing will happen. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
As he reflected on his own years in the Oval Office, Truman lamented the yawning gap between perception of being supposedly the most powerful man on earth and the reality: “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them… That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”
There is nothing that confirms the instincts of a resistant bureaucracy more than a leader who attempts something new and fails. It proves the folly of trying something new in the first place and dissuades new leaders from even trying anything similar in the future. Nonetheless, it’s worth keeping in mind that those who carry out an organization’s day-to-day are not villains seeking to thwart a leader’s every move, and if you start with that mindset, you will probably not gain much traction. Opposition to a new approach isn’t always the result of a grand conspiracy. Judge Laurence Silberman’s Law of Diplomacy also applies to bureaucracy: “Every government looking at the actions of another government and trying to explain them always exaggerates rationality and conspiracy, and underestimates incompetence and fortuity.” When there is resistance, it usually has more to do with inertia than animus.
That famously independent bureaucracy consists of a cadre of career foreign service officers who tend to be well-educated, intelligent, multilingual, experienced, and dedicated to their work. But over time they can sometimes come to view their responsibility not as representing America to the world, but the other way around. Having served in Brussels as US Ambassador to NATO, I had a good sense of what our foreign service officers experience. When he was Secretary of State, George Shultz had a practice of asking newly confirmed US ambassadors to identify “their country” on a globe in his office. Invariably the newly minted envoys would point to the country where they had been assigned. Shultz would then gently point out that “their country” was actually the USA.
After a long and exhausting wrestling practice, and with no shortage of studying to do, it was tempting to hit the showers. But instead, after most workouts I would run two miles to get in top shape. I knew that if I didn’t discipline myself to make that extra effort, I wouldn’t be as competitive.
Wrestling taught me what every young person needs to learn at some point: discipline. I had to watch what I ate. I sometimes spent time in a rubber suit running around in the heat of the school’s boiler room. There were many moments when I’d be ready to toss it in and go off with friends to have a milkshake at the diner. But I kept at it for more than ten years.
There is also an intellectual component to wrestling that folks who have not participated in the sport might miss. It is a bit like a chess match, where you need to analyze your opponent’s moves and plan your own. Of course the goal is clear - to pin your opponent to the mat before he can pin you or to win on points. But there are a great many combinations and techniques one can use to achieve that goal.
A match can be won or lost at any moment. The first time you are less than totally focused, you can find yourself on your back looking up the ceiling.
As Rocky sat down, he turned to me with a satisfied smile. “Don, there’s a lesson there,” he said. “People respond in direct proportion to the extent you reach out to them.” In private interactions, Rockefeller could be an intimidating bully, as I had observed firsthand a number of times in the White House meetings. Yet I could see why he had been such a successful politician for so many years. He knew that if you reach out to people, generally they’ll reciprocate.
In 1962, I conducted my first press conference. I was beginning my first run for election to the US House of Representatives. I was 29 years old and probably looked even younger. To most people in Illinois’s 13th Congressional District, I was a complete unknown. Facing reporters and cameras and talking in effect to hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose votes I was seeking was a totally new experience for me. It did not come naturally.
Fear of public speaking is often cited as one of the more common fears that people have. My view of how to handle it is straightforward and parallels my attitude about a lot of difficult tasks: Just do it!
After a few weeks on the campaign trail, my wife, Joyce, and my campaign manager took me aside and told me the brutal truth: I was not a good public speaker. I put my hands in my pockets, they said. I looked at my notes more than at the audience. I spoke too closely to the microphone.
Very few of us are good at something when we first start out. We get better with practice. Joyce and Ned decided I needed to practice in an empty auditorium while they offered blistering words of criticism, which as you might imagine was not the most pleasant experience.
The best way to deal with a crisis, of course, is to be prepared before it occurs.
Mistakes will always be made, but the least we can do is try to make original mistakes, rather than repeating old ones.
Everything that is done in a crisis is observed by someone - whether members of your family, colleagues at work, or a larger group such as the employees and shareholders of a corporation, the American people, or even people across the globe. As such, a leader’s words and actions need to be well calibrated.
When something completely out of the norm occurs, the last thing a leader should do is panic or, perhaps more to the point, give the appearance of panic. Besides being unhelpful to decision-making, it reduces confidence in those looking to you for reassurance and a sense that there will be a path forward.
It is difficulties that show what men are.
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.
If it were a fact, it wouldn’t be intelligence.
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.
Kahn had a clever way of sorting through ideas. I called it the “above the line and below the line” approach. He would start by drawing a horizontal line across a piece of paper. He then considered the entire universe of ideas, potential courses of action, or options that he was mulling. He placed those that seemed more favorable above the line, and those less appealing “below” it. That way, not idea was discarded. By returning to his list and working on it, Kahn could draw new ideas by considering the entire range of options - eventually reducing the number above the line to the point where he would zero in on an optimal choice. This inclusive approach provides time to reflect, rather than make a quick decision. It also allows you to reconsider those you have put below the line, which can help develop options you might not have thought of otherwise.
At the level of grand strategy - involving truly large-scale decisions - almost every possible course of action comes with negative consequences. Few issue that reach the President’s desk are risk-free or without potentially unpleasant outcomes. The same goes for a business leader. If they were easy decisions, they would have been made at a lower level. It’s always the toughest decisions that find their way to the top. Further, CEOs, presidents, and prime ministers often are asked to decide on matters on which their most senior advisors are not in agreement.
At the top there are no easy choices. All are between evils, the consequences of which are heard to judge.
If you get the objectives right, a lieutenant can write the strategy.
If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.
Losing a job is almost always a shock for an employee and their family. But it is not an unfamiliar event in our highly mobile and competitive society. Sometimes by letting someone go who may not be a good fit, you are actually doing them a favor. With the change, that individual can reevaluate their skills and find a niche where they can be more productive, however daunting that task may seem at the time.
Some of the most successful people in the world have known that kind of disappointment. Henry Ford faced bankruptcy on five separate occasions before he eventually founded the automotive company that bore his name. Walt Disney was let go from a newspaper because he “lacked imagination.” Albert Einstein was expelled from school. Abraham Lincoln failed as a businessman and several times as a political candidate before attaining the presidency. People with grit, perseverance, and determination learn to pull up their socks and go about the task of remaking and improving their lives.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The idea of surprise - surprise of all kinds - deeply influenced my thinking when I returned to office as Secretary of Defense.
“Governor, the DoD is one bureaucracy where you won’t need to worry whether your orders will be followed.” There may be other department in the executive branch that will not respond promptly to a direction from a President, but not so in the Pentagon. “The risk with DoD is that you might direct the Department to do something and later regret it.”
“It takes everyone to make a happy day.” Maybe it is because it came from one of our youngsters, but I have always found what she said to be rather profound.
Personal challenges or hardships can tell you a good deal about an individual. I’ve found that those who have had to struggle and work their way up to a position of responsibility often develop the grit that leads them to work a bit harder and be more willing to address tough issues than those who have had an easier ride.
Many people have the ability to review something and make it better. Few are able to identify what is missing.
I have read hundreds of resumes over the years, so let me suggest a few things that you may not learn from a career counselor. Before drafting a resume, don’t simply follow someone else’s template. Instead give a good deal of thought to what you are trying to accomplish. As Samuel Johnson once said, “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Second, consider a resume’s purpose: Contrary to popular understanding, it is not to get a job. The goal of a resume is to get you to the next step. It is to make you stand out so that a recruiter or employer will decide it is worth their taking the time for a face-to-face interview.
There are some folks - career counselors, outplacement experts, sometimes even parents - well-meaning as they may be, who fail to emphasize the importance of being absolutely 100 percent accurate in every word in a job application or resume. Recently, a well-credentialed man showed me his resume. He had served with distinction in the US military, but his resume read as if he had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said he had “run” this and “created” that. A seasoned employer sniffs out puffing in a nanosecond, and tends not to like it.
A’s hire A’s. B’s hire C’s.
You can tell a good deal about the quality of a manager or leader by the people he brings in as members of his team. For whatever reason there seems to be a pattern. Effective leaders - A’s - tend to attract other A’s, smart and talented people, who in turn create a culture of excellence. By contrast, B’s hire C’s, and even some duds who could generously be termed D’s. One reason for this is that B’s are not comfortable hiring people who might outshine them. As a result they tend to recruit and retain people who are nonthreatening to their position.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, Gerald Ford handled his personnel problem in a different fashion. He told the Nixon Cabinet and the existing White House staff that he was going to keep everyone in their current positions. He opted for continuity over change. That was a mistake - and I told him so at the time. I believed Ford needed to establish his own team in order to make clear that this was his administration, not a continuation of Nixon’s. But he was uncomfortable having to tell people who had served loyally that they would have to leave. Much later he did decide to make some changes. Unfortunately, those late changes left an impression that he wasn’t satisfied with the individuals who were departing. That would not have been the case if, at the outset, Ford had simply said that as the new President he wanted to bring in his own team.
Sometimes effective management requires an edge. The always quotable former Texas governor John Connally used to say, “You can’t cut a swath through a henhouse without ruffling a few feathers.” My advice upon entering an organization is to build your own team - and do it fast - while recognizing that it won’t be the happiest task in your life. Get any reassignments over with as quickly as possible. Tackling that task early will be worth it. You will benefit, and those departing will know they are not leaving because of poor performance, and those who remain in your organization will feel good knowing that they are part of your new team.
The secret to successful leadership and management is not really a secret: It’s picking the right people. The well-known phrase “Personnel is policy” is accurate. Leadership depends on the human element more than any other. In fact, I would venture to say there is no more important priority for someone in authority than personally selecting those tasked with carrying out their guidance.
People are policy. Without the best people in place, the best ideas don’t matter.
It is a truism that the purpose of talking is to be understood. Good participants present opinions and thoughts with clarity and precision, and with a minimum of jargon or acronyms. Doing so makes it less likely that participants will leave with misunderstandings. Importantly, those who write and speak clearly - free of jargon and cant - are most likely to be the ones who think clearly and are therefore indispensable for good decision-making and sound policy.
I am unable to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent, and I can’t afford either.
There were occasions when I abruptly ended a meeting in progress and advised the participants that we would reconvene when everyone had had time to fully prepare. The response was usually surprised looks all around. In my experience some leaders don’t end meeting when it’s clear they’ve become a waste of time. Instead they sit there and let the meeting experience a slow, painful death of its own. With a war ongoing and most folks working twelve-plus-hour days, six or seven days a week, I knew they couldn’t afford to sit through meetings that simply meandered through the subject matter without adding value. So I encouraged everyone to get up and find something more useful to do.
Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no basis other than the complaining question, “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.
If, despite your best efforts, the boss decides to go in a direction other than the one you suggested, it’s your responsibility to carry out that decision and support it fully. However, if it is something you feel so deeply about that you cannot in good conscience support it, you have no choice but to resign. There is no middle ground. Not carrying out orders, diverging from guidance from above, or complaining to outsiders undermine the trust and teamwork that are required for an organization to succeed.
In the execution of the boss’s decisions, work to be true to his views in both fact and tone.
If you want to be an actor, take any position with Meryl Streep or Clint Eastwood, even if it means getting them coffee, making photocopies, and starting at the very bottom of the ladder. Do whatever it takes to fit into that person’s universe. If you learn from the best, and closely observe the talented people around you, it will be time well invested.
Dick Cheney, whom I hired as my assistant back in the Nixon administration, likes to say that I responded to good work by piling on more. That is true. When a boss finds someone who is capable, has initiative, and has a good attitude, he looks for incentives to keep that person around and help them advance. One of the best ways to do that is to give them even more responsibility.
I never heard Dick complain about his salary, or ask for a better office, or angle for a promotion. Instead he put his head down, took on more and more responsibility, offered sound advice, didn’t bother me with every little thing, and did the work asked of him. More than that, he did work that wasn’t asked of him but that he knew needed to be done. If you do your best at what you have been assigned, whether you like the particular task or not, you will be surprised how quickly those around you take notice.
Dad wrote that the decision to quit was my call. But he went on to say, “Once you quit one thing, then you can quit something else, and pretty soon you’ll get good at being a quitter.”