The Art of Networking and Public Diplomacy

But what a cause!

I think this is about connections, and I'm a little embarrassed to tell you that that the first thing I thought of was the telephone, because when I was deep in the advertising business, the word for connections was the telephone.

"Ma Bell" had given up her dominance, and all the local Bells ran around doing advertising campaigns. We must have done at least three. And the word was always: "Connected . . . we're connected -- let's put this to music -- how to connect to one another . . . got it? . . . we're connected."

But today I realize that the consequences of the Internet mean that the connections take place in many different and complex ways –- and some of them are very dangerous.

But to talk for a minute about the ways that they are extremely productive. In my mind, the Internet and that ability to be wired, to be in dialogue is really about collaboration.

For me, this is an era of collaboration. The international coalition for the war on terrorism is an elegant sum of collaboration. And it stands for the safety and resolve and liberation for people in countries everywhere, especially for women.

Soon after 9-11, we set up, with the leadership of our Counselor to the President, Karen Hughes, a rolling news cycle in Islamabad and the United Kingdom, which joined in as a partner to the United States, so we could build a rapid-response team.

And it was also Karen who recognized that if we didn't get on the issue of women of Afghanistan early, absolutely nothing would happen in their behalf. And the funny thing was, it didn't seem like the time, because we were in a war. It was hard to imagine that we also had to help build a government. And the Congress, and women in Congress and groups who cared about this issue quickly networked with Washington and put this idea together.

In the State Department we had been doing a book on the oppressive regime of the Taliban, and we quickly added to that an important dimension: how many women were already out there who were capable of making a contribution to this government?

And that feature became the front piece of the book in a quick adaptation, which was put on our Web site and downloaded by all the embassies in adjacent countries. And all of a sudden, we had women at the table at the Bonn conference when they were discussing how to put their government together.

Today, there are two women in that government. I think they would never have been there without this particular instant unity and agreement on a common goal.

In business, when I was in that life, we thought that collaboration was invented by the Japanese as we followed some of the skills they had. But what I know now is that State and all the other government departments have absolutely mastered networking.

There is no choice. You can't do anything without Defense. You have clear everything with the National Security Council (NSC) -- and all these acronyms I've had to learn since landing at State.

It's too complicated, there is too much at stake, there are too many people involved, so that we constantly check back and adapt and modify everything that needs to be done.

Our collaboration starts at 8:30 in the morning in Secretary Powell's roundtable.

And by the way, there are eight women around that table with awesome responsibilities –- and a few good men.

Listen to what they do for a living -- the Executive Secretary of the Department and head of Human Resources. But then there is Global Affairs, Arms Control, Consular Affairs –- she's certainly in the hot seat now –- and Educational and Cultural Affairs, a bureau over which I have jurisdiction.

And then there are the heads of several regional bureaus. Now let me give you a profile of this woman who, to me, looks just like the cheerleader who grew up. She's got a wonderful smile -- and a master's degree. She speaks Russian, German, and Arabic. Her name is Beth Jones, and she is the Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Listen to her network. She has 53 ambassadors, 82 posts, 48 countries, the Holy See, and five multilateral missions. Her budget is over $300 million; she supervises 2,500 people.

Her issues are security and safety of the embassies, which is really a big issue now, and NATO, peacekeeping in the Balkans, budding democracies, market economies, Caspian energy, and of course, the war on terrorism. By the way, her salary is $130,000 a year, which is very modest pay for that kind of CEO.

But can you imagine how she and her team spend every day in the most elaborate and consequential form of networking?

So I listen carefully at the 8:30 meeting because some of it is ritualistic and some of it comes from a very different frame of reference for me, coming from the private sector

What I'm trying to bring to all the communications that we put on the table every day is the need to understand who you are talking to -- beyond the government and the elites into larger populations. We also need to be able to talk with emotion, not just the rational "scrubbed-up" delivery of what I call "government-speak." And also, being careful to show the full face of the United States.

We used to speak of information as power, but in the Internet era, we recognize that power resides in open networks, not necessarily in classified files.

We have to hurry to get into the Information Revolution in the government. It's happening all around us, and we set up a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week group who do nothing but screen everything that's come out while we were sleeping, translate it from the 30 languages that we have to deal with, put it on the table in the morning and start responding to the latest events and issues.

And this is not just wartime dialogue, this is the dialogue in the kind of crisis environment into which I parachuted in October 2001.

So it's not only the amount of information loose in the world. A harmful lie, a rumor, of which there are many, can travel so fast you can find yourself trying to catch up with events.

In Afghanistan, when there was a common rumor that we had bombed a hospital and we had killed all these women and children, it took us time because we are bound by something they're not: We have to tell the truth. So, we go, we check it out, it takes us a day; by the time we come back, they have moved to another lie. So we say, "Remember the other day? we checked and it turned out to be false. And so, to some extent, we catch-up on it.

But there is another aspect to networking that is a part of my life now. Bin Laden and his henchmen, who send young men to their death, and their own sons to safety, are very adept at using the Internet and the communications systems that we now think of as modern.

I have a vivid picture in my mind of an Afghani man, and he's holding the body of his recently killed son, and he says, "Bin Laden, where are your sons?"

Now that's a vivid picture, and if I could, I would send that picture around everywhere, especially to the audiences in the world that still believe –- or need to believe –- that it's not bin Laden's work, and that the al Qaeda didn't do these things. There is a profound need to believe that these things didn't happen in this way -- so we're battling, always, perceptions and rumors and distortions.

I think of connection as a continuum that ends up as community. And I can't think of anything that's a nicer word than what we are trying to strive for among ourselves and all the peoples of the world -- a sense of community.

We just had a conference with 160 public affairs officers from our embassies around the world –- by the way, that's a great job; you might want to think about applying. We go into each of the embassies, each of us in public affairs, and we try and represent the face and the picture and the truth of the United States.

We were together for three days, and it was inefficient compared to doing a digital video conference or a global webcast like this. But there is always that need to connect on a personal level. My Arab and Muslim friends always say to me, "Don't forget, in our world, one-on-one communication is always superior."

So we have these more intimate meetings, and now when we go back to the network with these connections all over the world, we are becoming a community.

As a country we need to improve our communications with the Middle East. And now we are developing many programs, the thrust of which will depend heavily on the ability of our Web site to translate in six languages immediately and 30 very quickly, so that we talk to many constituencies around the world.

A lot of things we need to do is simply to open the dialogue -- that's the kind of communication battle we're in right now.

For example, we're trying to get something that looks like an "American Room" in every university in the Middle East, thinking that if they'll give us a room, we'll give them a picture of the United States through computers, pictures, possibly music, and many other aspects of communication. We're asking Hollywood to help us design these rooms, and the Smithsonian to help build them.

We're trying to find all those exchange people that we've had visiting us, and tap into them as an alumni databank and create emissaries all over the world to help get out a more balanced story about the United States.

I had to say to our exchanges people, "You don't have a databank as good as any car dealer would have." You lose the people who come here if you can't keep track of them and think of what they have learned. Every visit here can be a transformation.

We're trying to put together an Arabic magazine for young adults because, often, when you read through the Arabic press, we're either mentioned falsely, or not at all. For instance, there was a big article on the reconstruction of Afghanistan and there was never one mention of the United States.

So we don't even have a voice in some places.

The Voice of America is putting together a new radio channel because in some parts of the world, the only thing people can hear is the radio, and often only in short wave.

In closing, let me say that the United States, given the way it handles resources, and the process of approving budgets, cannot tell the full story of the United States without the help of the private sector.

And so I and a number of others of us have gone to ask American businesses and multinational companies everywhere in the world: can you help us get the word out? Can some of your people go and visit the schools and activate a dialogue?

All you need to talk about is, what is it really like here, warts and all. And how can we correct some of these misimpressions and distortions.

And also, open the door to listening to the people around the world who are so disenfranchised from us.

Thanks you.