A Passion for Leadership by Robert M Gates Page A

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.
    Because the changes I had to make as secretary of defense in the Bush administration would take time, they did not lend themselves to a single dramatic announcement. But under President Obama, I gave a long press conference announcing thirty-three major programs I was cutting and why. In this case, while all these decisions had been discussed and debated intensively inside the Pentagon, and the civilian and military leaders of all the services had played a big part in identifying the options and making recommendations, for maximum political effect I had kept what we were up to secret from all external constituencies (the defense industry, the media, and, most important, Congress). I think this can be an effective tool for a leader if used selectively. Of course, I kept the president informed and, at the last moment, briefed the leaders of the two Armed Services Committees. The announcement was a bombshell, just what I wanted. When, a year later, I announced that long list of “efficiencies” cutting nearly $180 billion in overhead costs from the Pentagon budget, I used the same approach of extensive internal consultation and collaboration while keeping external audiences in the dark. The result was another bombshell. This approach, in both cases, yielded significant political and public opinion advantage and went a long way toward assuring success in making the changes.
    A lengthy and carefully prepared public statement was necessary in both cases because all of the changes—and the reasoning behind them—were in many cases interrelated and held together by a common strategy. Announcing the decisions and reforms piecemeal—or worse, allowing them to leak, as so often had happened in the past—would have lost this cohesive rationale and thus been far less persuasive and politically effective. The results upended the