Remarks By Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff At The Harvard School Of Public Health National Preparedness Leadership Initiative

Release Date: June 13, 2007

Arlington, Va.
Harvard School Of Public Health National Preparedness Leadership Initiative

Secretary Chertoff: I'll talk to you for a few minutes, and then we can be interactive. I thought I would try to sit down and cover what I think are the six basic principles that I follow in leading the department. And I think they're pretty straightforward principles. They probably aren't going to be surprising to you. They are probably reflected in other lists of principles of leadership that you've read.

Like everybody else, my principles have developed out of experience leading in a lot of different contexts. And I consider leading different than managing. Managing connotes kind of really getting into the weeds and making sure you've analyzed and you're implementing every element of the strategy. Management is a big part of what I do, too, but leadership is a little bit different. It's driving an organization forward, and that really is about people, it's not so much about numbers and business processes.

I begin by saying I think that in taking on a responsibility to do a job, the first thing you have to establish is your commitment to get the job done. That sounds really easy, but you need to think about that for a second. There are jobs that you take on that are very, very difficult jobs, maybe impossible jobs. You have to really be committed to succeeding and believe that you can succeed. If you hesitate, if you are fundamentally in doubt about your willingness to see the enterprise through to a successful conclusion, then you shouldn't take the job, because you're not going to succeed. You have to will yourself to succeed. And that puts you in a frame of mind where you are prepared to do whatever it takes – obviously within the law – to get the job done. And to me, that is the foundation of leadership – that commitment to get the job done properly.

I'll give you an example from my own experience in a context that may not, obviously, seem to be relevant, but when you think about it, you'll see it will be. In 1983, I was hired as an assistant United States attorney by one Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had just been appointed United States attorney for the southern district of New York. And I was his first hire, and about a year after I was hired, he called me in and he said, I have this idea of, let's put together a case against the board of directors of the mafia, the commission, and let's take them all down in a single fell swoop using this relatively untested law called the racketeering law that had been used a little bit but hadn't really been fully deployed. And a lot of people said, that is a real pipe dream. That can't possibly happen. No one had actually focused an investigation on this particular enterprise; it was going to require going around and collecting a lot of information. And there was no guarantee that there was going to be direct evidence against the bosses of the families. They had spent their entire criminal lives, decades, insulating themselves from being intercepted or having witnesses who could testify against them. And they enforced it by killing people who would testify against them.

So I might have had good cause to express some skepticism about whether I would take the assignment or not. But I said yes, I was going to do it. And I remember leaving that meeting, and my unit chief was like, good luck, welcome to the job – thinking to myself, I've really got to believe I can do this job. If I have any doubt about my ability to deliver a case at the end of the day, I am never going to deliver a case. I have got to be able to have the determination and the doggedness to pursue this wherever I have to pursue it in order to get the job done.

About a year – a little over a year later, introduced the first indictment. And the punchline to the story is after a couple more superseding indictments, the time came to try the case. Rudy decided a couple months before the trial to go and try a different case involving the Bronx Democratic Committee chairman, and he put me in the first chair, and I tried the case. And everybody was convicted on every single count of the indictment. Everybody went away to jail for a hundred years, or as much of it as they could do.

That, to me, was an illustration of commitment to take on something that people said could not be done and would be impossible to do and to simply say, I'm going to do it.

Now, once you have that, which I think is 80 percent of the game of leadership, then I would say there are five additional things you have to do, particularly with a large organization.

First you have to recognize that you will not succeed in accomplishing everything you want to accomplish. That's not inconsistent with the first principle; it simply requires you to recognize that as you focus your commitment on particular tasks, there's a finite amount of time – if you say, I'm going to get 100 things done as part of my getting the job finished, you're not going to get 100 things done. But if you figure out your five and your 10 things you want to do, then you can start to build a plan to get those things done. And you have to prioritize. And you're going to recognize that there are some things that will be left for the next person.

What we've done at DHS is we've sat down in a couple of iterations, really every year or maybe every 18 months, we've set some goals about what we want to accomplish, and then we measure how close we get to those goals. Particularly in a political environment, it is sometimes very difficult to achieve goals because many other actors have to engage cooperatively, and a lot of times they don't and you don't have control over it. So you sometimes have to adapt, and you have to recognize that maybe something isn't going to be achieved and you'd rather do something else. But I don't think you can ever lead an organization without a clear sense of five to 10 things you really want to get done by the time you're finished.

By the way, I talk about being finished because I really do believe in the "life is short" theory of leadership. No one is around forever, and you cannot conduct yourself like you're going to be around forever. In fact, I actually believe in term limits, and I've been term-limited in every job I've ever had. When I was U.S. attorney, I knew it was going to be basically a four-year stint, and I knew that I had to get done in that four years what I wanted to get done.

So, for example – and I keep going back to this, because some of my earliest experiences are probably the most vivid – I found that prosecutors often had a tendency to kick the final decision to pull the trigger down the road, always in the hope of finding that holy grail of evidence that would make the case perfect. It's never going to come. But what does happen while you're pushing the case down the road is the guy you're looking for is continuing to commit crimes. So it's not like he's resting. He's out there doing bad stuff. And there are times I walk in and I say, your case is ready to go, and you've got to pull the trigger on the case because life is short.

And that quality of setting goals and then operating as if you have a time limit – I think people used to laugh at me, I'd come in every week, like, what have you done now, what have you done now, how are we getting there? You have to jam people to get things done. It is unpleasant. There's a lot of resistance to it. And sometimes you have to know – you've got to let a little steam off. We're doing that now in the department. We've set some very ambitious things that have to be done by the end of this president's term. And I tell people, there are some things I'm determined to get done before this president leaves office.

And there's a lot of (inaudible) about the deadlines, and I will, given a good reason why a deadline can't be met, I'm always willing to extend. But there better be a good reason. And I think that that's part of identifying (inaudible).

Lesson three: listen. You learn a lot by listening to people. I encourage all the people in my organization to give me bad news first. I don't punish people for giving me bad news. I do punish people for not giving me bad news.

I also listen to my opponents and my adversaries. Again – for some reason I'm in a mode to think back to my days in the courtroom – but I learned to listen very carefully to my adversaries' cases in the courtroom, because although a lot of times when I was a prosecutor, defense attorneys were blowing smoke, usually, unless you're dealing with a person who's really incompetent, somebody who is taking a contrary position, there's some germ of truth to what they're saying. You may disagree with them, they may be overstating it, there may be something they haven't mentioned. But it behooves you to listen and understand what your opponent's – where your opponent's head is at, because it helps you calibrate how you deal with that in an adversarial context. And I take that listening context across the board. I think you have to listen very carefully, even to people you don't like and that are critical – if for no other reason than to be able to understand where they're coming from so you can address that.

Fourth is, you've got to speak. This is a lesson I've learned in this job. Constant repetition of the message, while boring and mind-numbing, is critical. It is very hard to lead unless you can communicate, and it's very hard to communicate against all the background noise, because the signal-to-noise ratio is very unfavorable to the person sending out the signal.

So speaking simply, clearly, directly, in analogies and terms that are accessible to the ordinary individual I think is a critical part of leadership.

The fifth and probably the hardest part is integration. We integrate in our department – and again I go back to my old lesson of when I used to work with different police agencies and FBI and they were always turf conscious. And the way I got over that is I always gave them participation in the whole planning process. I brought them in. I'd ask them their advice on how to present the case in court. And as they got invested in the mission, they began to look at their job less as, I have a task to do, I'll do it and then I'm going to walk away because my job is done, and more on how do we get the job done. That clearly identifying the mission, investing people in the mission, getting them excited and committed to the mission is, I think, an important part of integration.

I think we've done a lot to do that in our department. And a lot of what we do at the border is we bring people together and we actually are working to institutionalize and cross-pollinate by sending people into different components so they can begin to learn how different components operate.

It's harder with different agencies. I still run into other agencies where there is very much the attitude, this is my agency, I only care what my bosses think; go take a hike. And that's a very – I would say, that's the toughest nut to crack. Some people argue, well, we ought to analogize this to Goldwater-Nichols and simply have commanders across the civilian domain. The problem is, that's not going to work, because the military has a fabulous ability to execute orders once they're given. Civilians don't execute that way. You can't order them to move places they don't want to move; they quit. There are a host of different ways people can resist you.

So you have to use more carrot than stick. And I think integration and jointness is important, but we use a coordination rather than a command-and-control model.

The last – and again, I'm going to say this is the second-most, maybe the most important element that (inaudible), and I think about my style, is emotional resilience. You are going to get the living daylights beaten out of you the higher you go up the ladder. The presumption of the press is that as you increase in rank, you become stupider and more venal – (laughter) – so that the lowest-level person has the most credibility.

When I was a line prosecutor, I was smart and tough and had a lot of integrity. As soon as you become a presidential appointee, all that disappeared, and now you're just chopped liver. You're going to get a lot of criticism. You're going to have a lot of bad days. How you deal with that emotionally – people will watch you, and they will get from your body language and your style a sense of whether they ought to give up or not. And again, I'm going to go back to the courtroom, which I guess I'm now saying turns out to be a great leadership training thing.

When you're trying a case, you're going to have bad days. And you have 12 people who are sitting in that box and they're doing nothing other than watching you every single minute. And they're going to look to see whether they think you're having a bad day. And they're going to tell that by looking at your body language.

What happens in the courtroom is very much of a dynamic interpersonal exercise, in which you are basically telling 12 people, make a very important decision, by putting your trust in them. And that – since they almost always want to do the right thing, and since they don't know you – by definition or they wouldn't be seated in the jury – your ability to influence them and inspire confidence in them is totally based on your behavior when they're looking at you. And what that teaches you is you've got to get your own head straight and you've got to be able to, through your own emotional resilience, be able to have the people who work with you feel that they can also bounce back. And that, to me, is something that you live with every single day.

So those are my six principles, distilled in the car on the way over – (laughter) – but also reflective of a lot of thinking that I've had to do. I've had the great challenge but also the opportunity of coming to a brand-new department. The challenge of that is we've built a lot of the basic structures that most other department secretaries take for granted. And that's been very painful at times, and at times we've wound up doing a lot of different things that we shouldn't have to do because the structures weren't there.

But the upside is that it has given us a lot of incentive to think very concretely and very specifically about what we need to do to accelerate the process of building the department. And it's encouraged a certain self-consciousness about the job because we haven't been able to rely upon existing structures, and it's also created a certain fluidity in the organization, which gives us maybe an ability to move things a little bit more than more stable organizations.

Anyway, so that's my pitch. And I can take questions. Yes.

Question: Secretary, regarding DHS, I think you guys imported 180,000 people, 22 –

Secretary Chertoff: It's 208,000 now.

Question: And I guess they did something similar at the Department of Defense after the war. Where do you see your department, versus when they put everyone together back then, and can you draw any comparisons?

Secretary Chertoff: I think we are much further accelerated in integration and jointness than they were even 20 years into DOD. That's largely because we've been able to look to them and absorb their lessons, it's not because we're better than they were. I would note the first Secretary of Defense committed suicide, and the second one went to jail or something. But we've learned a lot of their lessons.

Honestly the biggest challenge now is patience, particularly in Congress, and the constant obsessive desire to reorganize everything, and the belief that by adding new bureaucrats and czars and super-czars and emperors that that's the way you cut through problems.

I believe that some – reorganization is not a bad thing periodically, but we're at the point now that I can get – if we can at least get stability, and they will let us do our jobs in building the department over the next five years, we'll be basically where DOD is. In the last few years, I've seen a huge change. And I credit DOD with giving us a lot of help. They really have been phenomenal partners – the best agency partners we've had in government. It's a bit transformative. When I came in two years ago, I was warned that DOD would actually be very difficult to deal with. But because of a series of experiences we've had with them, they actually have become absolutely outstanding partners, very helpful in every way, the most cooperative and the best friends we could have in any interagency group.

Question: Thank you.

Question: Mr. Secretary, you indicated that you believe in term limits. Obviously at some point you're going to be gone. And what will the letter that you left to your successor read like?

Secretary Chertoff: What the letter would say is, first of all, before I leave, come in, because we need to train you to do the job. You can't – in this environment, given the fact that we are constantly vulnerable – you can't do it the way they used to do it, where the old group left, they left empty file drawers, and everybody else had to come in and rediscover the wheel. Your obligation, as soon as you know you're nominated, is to come in, not only we're going to brief you, but we're going to take you through an exercise so you understand that on the first day of the job, if you're called upon to do certain things, you know how to deal with it.

The second thing the letter will say is, we have – and we're in the process of doing this – populated the senior ranks of the department with experienced career professionals in the number two and number three spots and the components, so there will be people there waiting while you're filling your jobs with political appointees. And that should help you a lot.

And the third thing I would tell him is we will have compiled, hopefully, a doctrine, kind of a "lessons learned" of all the stuff we've done over the last few years. You're not bound by it, but you want to at least try to learn the lessons of what we've put together through a lot of pain and experience in the period since September 11th, 2001.

Question: I'd like to thank you for being here this morning. I'm sure it's very hard for you to meet all these requests, but you have a group of people who are in a learning mode, so I think your impact will be quite strong here.

I'm very interested in your first lesson, which is the commitment one. Do you find that leaders mold themselves around the task and develop that commitment, or should be taking tasks around which they start with that strong commitment to believe in the task?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, you have to – a little more like the first, but not completely. I think you have to accept the job with a commitment to the basic task. If you come in with a commitment to do certain things, and you only want to do those things you're committed to, and that doesn't align properly with the organization, you're in the wrong organization. If someone says to me – tried to put me in a department where I wasn't committed to the purpose of the department, I would probably find a few things that I could get interested in, but I wouldn't be able to bring the energy to it. I only took this job because it happened to be at the center of something I cared very deeply about, which was national security and homeland security, having lived through 9/11 at the Justice Department. If somebody had come to me and said, be head of NASA, I probably would have said that's a great job but it's not the right job for me; I can't be committed to it.

Question: I'm Isaac from Israel. I'm sorry for my poor English. But I have some international experience with crisis leadership. And for us, you are an example, a master, a president of crisis leadership. How can you mobilize your excellent leadership and treat the crisis leadership here and internationally?

Secretary Chertoff: I've been through a lot of crises, and experience is a great teacher. I think what I've learned is this. Part of it is writing down the lessons, but it's more than that. You really have to exercise the process for people to fully understand and begin to develop the skills of how to lead in a crisis.

No amount of reading is going to do it for you. Now, experience is the best teacher; unfortunately there is a high cost when you make mistakes, although we're all going to have to do that. You will always – and you learn to be honest much more from your mistakes than you do from your successes, because everybody who's – I used to say every time I – if I had a bad day in court or if I lost the case, I spent much more time analyzing what I did than if I won. If I won, it was great, I was wonderful, I never thought about it again. So it's the defeats and the problems that actually are the learning experiences.

The best substitute for that is a process of putting people into an exercise mode. When I came into the job, I was a little skeptical about that. It seemed like play-acting. But after living through a couple of real-life events, I realized actually it turns out to be very useful. And people, once they get into the process, it does tend to surface problems that are unaddressed.

So that is – and the other thing is to cultivate your subordinates, to make sure they get the experience, and that you are open and transparent with them about how you're making decisions and how you're managing things.

So I would say training, exercising – really, really emphasizing exercising – and the cultivating subordinates who then take the lesson they learn and take them out into the rest of the world. And I think that's how you do it.

Question: Earlier you mentioned command and control versus coordination. And I'm just wondering if you can elaborate on that. If one agency or one department says to another, I don't want to control you, I want to coordinate you, could you explain what the difference is?

Secretary Chertoff: Yes, that is the hardest – that is the single hardest thing in my job in dealing with a crisis. In some ways, when – I'll give you two examples. When we had the August 2006 airline plot last year, which was disruptive, in London, it required us immediately to change the way we did business at our border with TSA. That was a comparatively easy crisis for me to manage for the following reason: Other than the intelligence community, virtually all of the operational activities that had to occur were within my domain. So I could simply tell people, bring them in and say, you've got six hours to do this; show it to me and then we'll execute on it. And that happened. We executed within a six-hour period, and within a day, we had fully integrated it in the department. So that was a success. But it was easy because I did have command and control over my department.

In virtually every other case, I have other departments I have to work with. And so I can't tell someone in that department, you must do this, because they'll say, well, I don't take orders from you.

Department heads are equals. Now, the President does have command and control over the executive branch, but the President is not the person you want to have micromanaging operational activities, because that's really a waste of his time. We owe him better service than that. We should be able to manage operationally, and only present him with issues to decide that are truly of some significance.

So how do you coordinate, which is persuading or convincing people to do something, rather than ordering them to do it? And I think there, two things work best: a lot of training together, and a lot of planning together. If you show up the day of the event and introduce yourself, you will have a lousy time coordinating. If you've worked for a long period of time, and you've developed team spirit, you will be able to coordinate quite well. To me the greatest lesson of Katrina was the day before the storm hits, if you don't have the plans and the training and the exercising done, you're lost. No matter how good you are, you're going to have good problems, because people will simply never have worked together. It's like putting – on a different scale – like collecting a group of phenomenal baseball players who have never played together and sending them out against a team that's mediocre but that's played together for a year. The mediocre team is going to win, because people have never – maybe individually are great, but they've never worked together.

So the key to coordination is, you've got to bring everybody who is likely to be involved in this together to start to plan how they would do things, and they've got to start exercising. And as they do that, they will begin to be able to function as a team. You flush out and identify areas of dispute in advance, and you resolve them, and, if necessary, you go to the President and the President says, oh, this is how to resolve them.

It gets more complicated when you deal with state and local government because the President can't resolve those. They're independent, constitutional actors. And a poorly understood element of this federal government is that the President doesn't get to order a governor to do something. Now, the President can federalize the National Guard, which is the largest leader a governor has, but the tools are clumsy, and the more advance work you do, the easier it is to coordinate. Coordination is the least appealing when you turn up for the first time in an event.

Command and control is the opposite. The way the military (inaudible) command and control, and the Coast Guard is a service, and so I get to see this as Secretary of the Coast Guard, is they train to the point – because they have a command and control system, that they are truly interoperable. You could take a battalion and shift it to another command, and it would seamlessly fit in to the command and control because there is a very clearly demarcated system. That doesn't work with coordination.

Question: You mentioned that the higher you go in leadership, the more likely your credibility is to suffer. I'm wondering, in your experience, what the most important element or quality to communicate for reestablishing your credibility would be?

Secretary Chertoff: My rule is, the most important thing – if I win or lose a debate or something, I'm going to get frustrated with it, but there's one thing I will not compromise on, which is, I will absolutely tell the truth, and I will keep my word. If I say I'm going to do something, I will do it. But one thing that, in my mind, would be a summary firing offense, would be for someone to give me false information deliberately, which I would then regurgitate, or for me to make a promise and then someone doesn't live up to that commitment. Because that's the only thing I will walk out of this job with at the end, and it's the only thing that allows you to function. And I will sometimes say to people, I'm now going to tell you something you're not going to like. But I think – that, to me, is the only – even that, for the media at large, is not always sufficient, but I do think that the one way – I think if you lose your credibility and if your word no longer matters, then everything – no matter how smart you are and how good you are, you're finished. I think if you have your credibility, you can get a lot done.

All right, thanks very much.

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