25 November 2010

Interview


I have no idea why Dan thought it was worth recording an interview that morning in my office. Or, better said, I knew he was supposed to talk to someone in business about how things work successfully.

Millicent, the slim and elegant woman from the Copying Company down the hall who I smoke with down by the loading dock sicked him on me. Dan is working on his MBA, and I am cheerful fraud, as you know, and there is nothing more fun than imagining that someone gives a rat’s butt about your life, so I obliged him.

He seemed like a great guy. In his early sixties, still improving himself. He was a tall man with a gentle Alabama accent and a courteous manner. He set up his tape recorder on the table on my desk and I drank coffee. He said he would send the transcript to me, and I was surprised to get it in the traffic the day before the Holiday.

It is very strange.

Interviewer:  It is well, and we are good to go.  

Interviewee:  Okay.  

Interviewer:  I’m ready.  


Interviewer:  Question two, thinking back, how did you prepare to assume a leadership position, was an important theme that you served in through your career?

Interviewee:  We have to go back to the team sports I think and I played football from the time I was nine until college, college senior.  And to participate, and to motivate, and to lead with your teammates without you, know, setting yourself as something special is the essence of corporate culture, military culture and success.  Those skills from team sports translated very nicely into the cadre spirit, you got a military training.  I went through aviation officer candidate school.  We had a marine drill instructor.  Today, my son is serving his drill instructor at Newport, RI and learning those same kind of lessons, and then I ensured that my kids play team sports and in their case lacrosse, so that they would understand the dynamics of group of high performing people, where you harness their skills, their unique skills to their unique strengths.  

It's good stuff. Yeah, in the military, an intelligence officer is kind of an odd beast, attached to organizations but normally not competing within them for advancement against the combat arms guys. Normally there would be only onsies-twosies of intelligence people in any unit. It was relatively rare to be in a pure intelligence organization where you had nest of spies where you could actually you know have 20 or 30 Lieutenants of your same career military occupational specialty, or MOS, to see where you actually broke out.  

So it's interesting, by the time you arrive at the mid-grade, say Lieutenant Commander, commander of the Navy, you then are handed organization that you have to handle.  So applying you know same principles of team sports in front of the people that can do the best for you, try not to marginalize anybody, help those that are, you know, struggling, motivate them on the ability to do inspirational speaking, if I can be permitted that vanity, and that's to motivate the whole team: civilian, enlisted, junior officers and your peers, so that's essentially what provided me the motivation to get in business after retiring and not have be a leader anymore.  

My last big challenge in government was to run a $12 billion budget staff.  And the way the government works is if you are tasked to support a community endeavor. Say if the staff that is entrusted with crafting a budget for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arms of the Combatant Commands and service intelligence centers of excellence. Those activities will be asked to contribute billets, not people.  And you don't contribute your best, you want to keep those back home to help you in your mission, so what you get is mediocrity-to-deadwood people. So the challenge is, how do you get productive labor out of people that really aren’t that motivated to do anything for you and who can't be fired?

Interviewer:  Yes, it’s a dilemma

Interviewee:  It is a dilemma.  But in three and a half years, we managed to turnaround an organization rife with equal opportunity suits and complaints, bitterness, back stabbing and through the same kind of model for competitive sports, bring people together with a common mission, with some inspirational “speechifying”, shared events, you know potluck lunches and stuff like that.  

We managed to get something out of everybody and maximize their capability to help the real truly high performers to high perform. You referenced your southern accent and the military is very much a southern organization.  

I'm from Michigan myself but far and away the contention that today's modern all-volunteer force is essentially a Scotch-Irish organization largely channeled out of rural areas in the south is not far wrong.  So it's an interesting thing, and the ethic of that culture.  Jim Webb has written extensively about it is one of team sports you know, you go with your cohort, you don't fight for your country as much you are fighting for your brothers and sisters.  So that's a really neat piece of culture, a lot of our operating bases are in the south.  

Interviewer:  Right.  

Interviewee:  We were at Cecil Field at Jacksonville for a tour. Here in, Virginia, Norfolk arguably is the largest naval base in the world.  San Diego is not southern per se but it certainly is south and beautiful so.  

Interviewer:  And my father was stationed in San Diego during the war. I remember him talking about it to this day. It was not so long time ago.  

Interviewee:  It's the nicest place on the planet.  It's the south of France without all those Frenchmen.  That's pretty good, so anyway that's how I became a leader and I'm very pleased now to be just out on my own, not having worry about writing 75 fitness reports or agonizing about the kid who has been done an injustice and fails in selection, and have to hold his hand for another year and you know, try to make the system recognize that the right thing should be done.  Although in that case we did get him promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and that was pretty good.  But telling a kid that he didn’t make Lieutenant Colonel the first time is the least fun thing I have done in a long time. Making 0-5 is supposed to be a no-brainer.

Interviewer:  But question three, do you actually groom your managers especially for leadership positions in this firm and I am, am I preparing the next generation with some leadership roles in the company?

Interviewee:  I was an assignments' officer for a while in the United States Navy, and there are certain things that officers are expected to do, go to sea you know, in the grade of Lieutenant and Lieutenant Commander should go to sea in every grade, but there are people that don't want to do that because there are ways you could game the United States Navy and avoid any personal risk. The Navy can get you killed but it also can be about as dangerous as being in Post Office, and possibly less so.  But you always had the hammer on them by saying, listen if you don't do what I tell you to do, you are not going to make the next grade.  So you have got to go do it, because I am telling you to.  

If there is somebody that is a little bit out of step with program i.e. a Chief who has chosen to go through a commissioning program, shoot, he is half the way to retirement, he doesn't care, you know, it may be perfectly fine for him to retire as a Lieutenant Commander. You know, so you have to be on the same sheet of music with everybody else to want the same kind of things.  

Our boss down the hall is a retired vice-admiral.  He is an Executive Vice President I know; does he want to be the corporate chief operating officer?  I don't think so, he doesn't care.  I am an executive director now - a position I didn't know I had been promoted to because I don't care.  You know, I'm interested in the compensation, but I have the only title I need that's Captain, United States Navy, retired. Of course, I kind of liked Mr. Deputy Assistant Secretary - that was pretty cool,

Interviewer:  That's pretty cool,

Interviewee:  Yeah, but that was a temporary thing and very bizarre, and in wartime like in the aftermath of 9/11 and in response to the anthrax mail bombs or mail devices whatever they were, very, very strange and unsubtle time.  

Interviewer:  But are we grooming the people?

Interviewee:  Yeah you bet, and we are doing it the same way we would have done it in the military that is to get responsibility and authority until the individual can’t hack it any more.  

Interviewer:  So that navy military culture you see in grooming the executives here just continues right on.  

Interviewee:  Exactly if you can do it, give them more. We are overwhelmingly military here, as I say we work for the Admiral, and the people that he knows can perform are the ones that he recruited actively and we all turned to be military.  The former Chief of staff of the Agency has office is next door. He was a career civil and intelligence analyst, but he was the Green Beret before that you know, so and the guy who just stuck his head a moment ago, was a sworn police officer and then later air force officer prior to becoming certainly an intelligence analyst, career at the Agency.  So our major customer is the Agency, and so our, people tend to come out of having served in military and then served there.  

Interviewer:  Ah.  

Interviewee:  And then I was military and served the Agency at the pleasure of the United States Navy, so you know I have got part of that culture.  

Interviewer:  Fascinating.  

Interviewee:  So yes we, depending on the niche, our missions and the ability to solve our customer relies on the fact that we understand the mission, and if we haven't done the mission then it's very difficult to you know, pretend that you understand what it's like to worry about IEDs underneath your truck and neutralizing those things.  

Interviewer:  Indeed.

Interviewee:  So grooming the managers, we actually go out and find people that were really good at what they were doing, they don't want to deploy anymore and hire ‘em and then continue to do what's actually military model in the corporate model.  

Interviewer:  You know that, that to me in itself is a leadership trait, because you know what to look for to put them in this bottom is kind of a smoother transitional leadership that may seem like a ridiculous statement, but I know for my own sake, if I'm hiring somebody, I want to hire somebody who is already qualified.

Interviewee:  Exactly.  

Interviewer:  That's the best thing to do, although we do bring people up, we’d rather a qualified person.  

Interviewee:  Absolutely. We hired the daughter of a shipmate in the Navy, who is now with Oracle, who wanted to get into the business, so she had an internship with DIA, there was a hiring freeze, she couldn't join the government, but she had a clearance and so we had her over here and you know let her understand a little bit about business, and eventually she did go to DIA.  So yeah, and would be delighted to hire her back if she choses to leave the government.  

Interviewer:  So another question, how would you characterize your leadership style, and do you find that that leadership style changes in different situations?

Interviewee:  Yes, I mostly have got over being a Navy Captain, but sometimes it comes out, normally in traffic around here.

Interviewer:  You must live in northern Virginia!

Interviewee:  Well I live in Arlington now but it was Fairfax for ages and it literally made me crazy.

Interviewer:  I'm in Vienna so…  

Interviewee:  Okay you know, you know exactly – you were the I-66 and I was the Shirley Highway to the Beltway -  that's actually a great way to go.  

Interviewer:  It's a great ride.  

Interviewee:  Anyway it's a little off topic.  

Interviewer:  Yes.  

Interviewee:  Actually it's not, I mean I think traffic is one of the things that drives everybody crazy here. You are either a half hour early or you are half hour late, you can't ever plan anything, you try to do something perfectly straightforward and discover that you are in the middle of the Metro construction – Route 7 in Tysons Corner with absolutely no ability to influence your direction, the time you will arrive or anything else.

Everybody here is Type A as well, so that's what I would try to do whether I was on active duty or here or I was proud of saying at Health and Human Services that nobody quit or cried while I was the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary because my boss was crazy, he was a political appointee and had wild mood swings, and when he went off his medication he would you know, berate people, belittle them, make them cry and stuff so the key is to try to recognize what's important to people, to respect them, even with that famous dead wood I talked about on our budget staff, they are human beings, we are entitled to respect and with that respect you can get something out of them.  

So it's maybe a little bit self-serving, if you will, but being nice to people gets the mission accomplished.  And if you were there you get the mission accomplished then you have to deal with the people as they are and you have to recognize what's important to them.  And I do like people, so relaxed, firm, have a core set of values that people understand, so that they know that you are playing them square and not playing favorites.  And if you can radiate that sense of fairness or better put you know, sincerity is everything and once you could fake that, you are in.  

Interviewer:  Fake sincerity?

Interviewee:  Well, it's a bit disingenuous, but I think that's true. I mean, even if you don't, even if you really don't like something or somebody or the way they are doing it, the worst possible way to replace the situation is combat him and sometimes you have to fire people you know, but more often than not I think you could modify behavior through constructive engagement and so even if you don't like him and even if you don't want to do it, and even if you’d rather fire them, you have to sincerely try to work with what you got and help people out so, and the good sense of humor is absolutely essential when you are deployed, when it doesn't look like you are ever going to back to you know homeport again, when you are on  day 111 without having seen land, you have to laugh, because if you don't laugh you will go crazy.  So that's the way I would characterize that.  

Interviewer:  Does it change in different in situations?

Interviewee:  Yeah, sometimes you just got to be a hard ass, you know if things really are disintegrating around you, man up, if you got to raise your voice and motivate people that way, do what you got to do, but it's situational.  If you have been through those high intensity things, you have to be able to come back and say you know, relax, you know, we are in port again, why don't you go to the Exchange, you know, in the Navy we call it rope-yarn, just say hey, take the afternoon off we are not going to charge you leave. Relax.

I was having a meeting at CIA headquarters when the first airplane went into the World Trade Center, and I said that's interesting, a B-25 bomber once you know, flew into, I think it was the Chrysler building, maybe it’s the Empire State, but a few minutes later they said there was another one, I said okay everybody out of here, get out and evacuate, don't look back, just get home. I was still active military at that point, so I said okay, so we mobilized and went to the alternate location, went to work and then to respond to what we thought was the opening shots of a war and it was.  So you do what you got to do.  

Interviewer:  What are your personal strengths and how did they play out in your approach to leadership, have you found that you have to work around any particular weaknesses?

Interviewee:  Yeah, I try not to start drinking until I get home.  Personal strengths, good focus, fair attention to detail although the thing that I have to work around is sort of I’m good at what interests me, and I'm not particularly good at what doesn’t, so that discipline is you got to stay focused on stuff and here is something that I found, some of the best leaders that I've run into in my government career hate numbers. You know, when the budget meetings come into, so okay we got to do the program for next year, we got to adjust the 5 year plan, their eyes glaze over and you can tell that sitting through one of these budget meetings where you are racking and stacking programs and trying to evaluate the relative merits of what the organization is doing and those things if you are going to stop doing because there is simply not enough resources, you know, they just wanted to be over, you know charismatic, intelligent, good officers, male and female doesn't matter, you know, if you don't understand the stuff that you don't have an interest in you are going to wind up with the budget guys making policy for you.  

I would see it again and again and again.  You see it in business, too, particularly the ability to focus on things sort of you know are not that interesting or revenue after profits are you know the quarterly numbers of being able to manipulate those things to your advantage without sandbagging the organization and maintaining a certain integrity that the corporate guys can say, okay if they say they are going to do it, they probably will and we won't have to meddle too much with them, that's important.  So staying focused on the details that you may not be interested in is what I work around and I think it's played out pretty well even if it doesn’t interest me that much you know.  

Interviewer:  Obviously.  

Interviewee:  Social network played a key role in success, oh my god, that's everything.  It goes back to the team sports thing that has echoed its way and woven its way through all of these questions.  If I didn't know the guy who hired me here I wouldn’t be here. Jake sent me a Korea, when I was LTJG, or got me out of there, I forget which. Then he sent me some place else when he came back from Europe, so I have known the guy I'm working for, for around thirty years.  

Interviewer:  Wow!

Interviewee:  I have known most of the people in this relatively small area of business, probably between 15, 15 to 20 years, because, if you are in the intelligence field you know the people from other services you know, because everybody gets posted back here in Washington sooner or later, so it's good stuff, the quarterly publication I edit is the Journal of the Naval Intelligence Professionals, so I'm linked in to people as old as Mac, my 91-year-old drinking buddy, who goes back to the battle at Midway.  

Our Executive Vice President is a leader of the national intelligence community, in addition to the Navy, he is our professional organization’s chairman, so this network goes across all the companies, across the decades of government service, is unified by a sense of mission and team, and without the network none of us would be anything.  

Interviewer:  Wow!

Interviewee:  You know, and they say that Washington is about networking, but this is about more than that, it's about comradeship, shared sacrifice, commitment to mission, patriotism and a certain raffish humor because we are old Navy.  It's often said there are two navies, the one that existed before Mount Pinatubo blew up in the Philippines and the kind of prim, proper one that exists today.  We were not prim and proper, we were hard drinking, hard partying, cigarette smoking, liberty hounding, ne’er do wells, if not rapscallions, if not you know, in my first squadron, some of the pilots stole a car, they needed to get back before military curfew so they appropriated the vehicle of an Army captain, who protested quite vehemently.

I chose to sleep under the pool table at the Hialeah officer's club, in Busan, Korea, and take my chances when military curfew ended in the morning.  The pilots decided to go back to the boat, so they stole a car, left it at Fleet Landing and returned to the ship on the Mike Boat shuttle.  

The Naval Investigative Service, the forerunner of Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) followed them across the pacific and finally confronted them when we were about to approach Pattaya Beach, Thailand, the single most exotic, wonderful, magical liberty port in all the world.  

In punishment, they were placed in the house arrest confined to quarters – HACQ-so they were punished and to to watch the rest of us go to beach, and I had the best four days I have ever been had in my life, absolutely incredible, and they sat on the lawn chairs on the black non-skid of steel beach and looked at the land and the Grace Hotel coffee shop was a place that everybody in Bangkok went after the bars closed, at about 2 o' clock.  So every nationality on the planet was represented there, Russians, Chinese, Thais and Koreans and Vietnamese, it was absolutely incredible, it's like the bar scene in Star Wars.

Okay anyway there are two navies and being able to inspire others with rewards like that is a powerful tool.  So that kind of goes back to the social network, okay, our question was? …sorry!

Interviewer:  That's okay it's good stuff, please anything you want to say.  

Interviewee:  I think a large part of the leadership is the ability to inspire others.  I think you can see how I do things that matter. You know, have a set of core values that people understand, be honest, be true to your word, understand that you know sometimes you got to do the things you don't want to do.  There was an employee I had on the budget staff who had MS, and part of the process of her disease was that she would act out in the workplace. She was very, very disruptive, and my predecessors, bless their hearts, had never documented a thing.  So we were in the midst of a full out personal crisis.  So I had to do the hard stuff, that was put down the mission, go to the HR people, and say okay how do we take care of this employee, how do we help her get the help that she needs, and then I began to systematically document each incident and report it so that we could help her get to the point where she could qualify for medical retirement.  

And that was a process that took three years, and we eventually got her the help that she needed and brought tranquility to the staff so that there wasn't somebody shouting and screaming in the workplace.  So sometimes you just have to dig down and do the right thing, even if it's easier to ignore it.  In inspirational, yeah I like, I like meetings where you tell people what's going on.  They are not meetings to just have meetings that's the bane of government life, and corporate life, for that matter.

The key is to communicate honestly what's happening to the workforce so that they know what's going to happen to them, you get their buy-in for their support in doing what you have to do and it's absolutely essential.  And I think the ability to communicate and motivate and inspire is absolutely central to that.  So whether it was at health and human services and saying, listen you got to be ready for the next public health scare because god knows what Bin Laden has been cooking up on those one acre plots in Sudan that we found out about, and be able to motivate and understand different groups of people.  

At Health and Human Services it tended to be doctors, epidemiologists, you know very high performing, highly trained people.  On a budget staff there tended to be people that had very strong financial and accounting backgrounds. In the military, it tended to be you know troops, sailors and be able to get them all marching in the same direction.  So know your audience, be square, tell them the truth and tell them where we got get to, and with that you know you could get there.  

What motivates me now? Money. You know I had a whole lot of time not having.  We all had the greatest darn careers in the Navy but there was no money, you know it's check-to-check and that was okay at the end.  But for the most part it was check to check for 27 years.  So getting out, I think I mentioned before, it's not the title, I don't want to be a Vice President, I don't care if I am an Executive Director or a Senior Director or just a Director, I don't care.  The money is going to help me quit one of these jobs someday, and the job I would like to quit most is the day job. So, when one retires, it's not like you are retiring, since you finally get to pick the job you want to do.  

Interviewer:  Well said, I'm looking forward to that, visionary leader?

Interviewee:  Yeah, yeah, I found in the military once you got beyond the first couple of introductory jobs it was all improvisation and approach. You say okay, you are going to be the squadron intelligence officer or you are going to be an air wing intelligence officer or ship’s assistant intelligence officer.  Once you get beyond that, if you are not making up your own job, then you are really not thinking the things through, you are not having fun that's for sure.  From the time I was Lieutenant commander I invented every job that I had.  

Interviewer:  Really.  

Interviewee: I think it started with DESERT STORM.  My pal Mike, who later was director of the National Security Agency and director of National Intelligence was a J2 at DIA, so he was the chairman's intelligence officer… General Powell and I happened to show up on the staff just after Saddam had occupied Kuwait, and he said, hi JR, he is a good South Carolina boy and I said hey, Admiral what is happening, he says, well I think we are going to have a war here, and I said, okay, what can I do?  And the series of jobs in wartime you know, the job is victory.  So how you get to the victory depends on whatever the enemy, the enemy gets a vote in the stuff, so the opponent is going to determine your job when you get over them. Three real quick vignettes.

The Admiral called me down one morning after the normal round of updates and said, “We need somebody to go over to the Hill and talk to the Senate majority leader, I said yes sir and I turned around and started to walk out of the room.  And he said, were you interested in knowing what you are supposed to tell him? I said, “I assume, you want me to tell him a good story about what we have been doing.”

And he said “good.”

You know that kind of trust and confidence placed in somebody makes you perform at your highest level, absolutely inspirational.  

Two: It was amazing to be close to Colin Powell, to be in meetings with him, to see his leadership was absolutely astonishing.  I mean I have never admired a military officer the way I admire Colin Powell and not only as an officer as a person.  He used to say, tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, tell me what you think, never get it mixed up, always tell me which one of those things are.  Great guy, and he could give you your head so long as you were doing something that was advancing the mission like more understandable, more efficient and it was all good.  And there was one, oh yeah, we saw a satellite imagery one morning that indicated that there were some MIG-23 fighters, positioned in the odd place at Tulia air base and there were trying to figure out well, I looked at and said, that's the great Ziggurat temple of Ur, that’s the oldest structure that human beings constructed that we know to exist on the planet.  So what they are trying to do is to get us to destroy a national, a national, international human treasure by putting those airplanes there.  

So secretary Cheney happened to be in the room and McConnell looked at him and said, do you know anything about the temple, I said but I can type something up real quick and I did, handed to the admiral, admiral handed to the secretary, and the next thing I knew walking back to my desk, the secretary of defense was reading those words as if they were his about this treasure of humankind that we were not going to hit in order to preserve cultural in Iraq.  That was amazing but that was a kind of leadership and freedom that those guys gave us under stress, it's truly inspirational and it drew the best out of all of us.

Sometimes it didn't work out. Third vignette, we had this great target and we had a couple of slick Air Force officers come in and say, okay here is how we are going to do it.  We know that, we got the blue prints to the bunker because it was built by a Swiss firm.  We know it's too thick for any of our bombs to get through.  So here is what we are going to do, we are going to put one bomb and put a crater into the roof of that bunker and then with extreme precision we are going to drop another bomb right into that same crater, and that one is going to go through and then it's going to go all the way through the next couple of floors and down to the basement where they got the alternate diesel fuel storage and then, blam, we will get great secondaries and we will destroy the bunker, which is a key communications hub, and everybody in the meeting nodded, which included the Chairman and the Secretary and all of that, and so we all went away and the day's air plan, or the nights air plan in Iraq happened and I got up at about 2 o'clock in the morning here to go in and see what had happened and I got there in time to see CNN with video coverage of that bunker, and that hole, and those bodies of women and children who had been placed in the bunker as a place that was safe by their husbands who were Baath party officials, and so, so.  

So, I guess sometimes stuff works out, sometimes it doesn't.  Anyway working for visionary leaders like Mike McConnell and Colin Powell convinced me that if you don't think through which you are going to do before you get engaged, you will wind up in that classic situation where yeah, I came here to drain the swamp but in the meantime we have been fighting alligators, so we haven’t to quite got to the water level yet.  That was particularly difficult time how I lead through it.  Man, when the airplane hit the Pentagon I had just transferred from that budget staff about three months before and I had been working on new office spaces because everybody played hop-scotch in the Pentagon while they were doing the renovation of the building.  And I had just moved the staff into very nice quarters on that side of the building.  

So as we were relocating to the emergency alternate location and I was with Director of central intelligence George Tenet I mean with him like with him, and we were watching the towers, and I was watching him as the first tower came down, they would  periodically cut to the pictures of the Pentagon, and it's best I could determine the 40 odd people on my little staff were at the apex of the explosion and I thought they were probably all dead.  

So they were not as it turned out and this is one of those weird ironies of life, nobody’s cell phone worked that day of course, so yeah, God only knows but finally later that day, it was just the camera angle, they were on the other side of one of the fire doors, they were all okay, didn't lose anybody and I, you know absolutely was overcome by elation, only to discover that well, there was good news, bad news, the airplane didn't go through your budget staff but it did go through the Navy Command Center, and my pals Dan and Vince were both killed at their desks.  

So how do you lead through it?  I went back to the staff and helped them you could imagine that the people that were there that day were pretty shook up so we helped by being there, you know what you do when you lose all your records, all your computers, your hard drives, it's amazing, so anyway we helped them out as we could and got things back on track and said there is continuity, you guys are okay, this is going to be okay.  And then it was interesting everywhere else, everybody was kind of in shock but that clearly would be the most difficult, the most unresolved and then at Health and Human Services trying to energize a response to what we assumed was going to be a biological attack against America, you know nobody quit and nobody cried while I was there and we got the mission right.  

I think. I dunno.

Interviewer: I think that is about enough.

Interviewee: I certainly hope so.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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