Leadership Saturday #2: Colin Powell
And his rules for leadership
Thirty-three years ago, I had the great privilege of working directly for General Colin L. Powell, who at the time was the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here is how it came to be . . . along with a few lessons I learned at the feet of this master.
When it was time to wrap up my department head job in an F-14 squadron, several friends urged me to remain in the cockpit to burnish my chances of being screened for command. But my father’s suggestion that I do something different to (as he put it) restock the intellectual cupboard, combined with the Goldwater-Nichols defense reform legislation of 1986, opened a different path. Thus, I arrived early in 1990—as a Beltway Rookie—at the Pentagon to serve as an action officer in the Joint Staff’s Joint Operations Directorate’s Current Operations section, otherwise known as the J-33 JOD. My friends thought I was nuts.
To my surprise and delight, I was diverted on arrival from the West Hemisphere Branch to serve as one of three officers in the Central Command Branch, which was responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East. I arrived just before Saddam Hussein began rattling his sword about burning Israel and taking over Iraq’s “19th province” of Kuwait.
The Soviet Union was collapsing at the time, which drew most of the Pentagon’s—and Powell’s—attention. But the gathering storm in Iraq gradually thrust we “JOD-ites” in the limelight, and ultimately into a key role when Saddam invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990. We were key members of the Crisis Action Team, and were frequently in front of the Chairman, helping write and gain approval for deployment orders and answering a plethora of questions. So, I saw him frequently.
Not long after the war was over, Powell sacked his senior aide and pulled me out of the J-33 on short notice to replace him. I offered, to his executive assistant’s annoyance, that I would only be able to serve one year rather than the two years remaining in Powell’s term because I had screened for command and needed to move on. But Powell either took that as laudable chutzpah, or more likely just needed an aide quickly, because he hired me right away.
What a wonderful course in leadership that year! If becoming a leader demands study, observation, and practice . . . well, observing Colin Powell was a master class. How he crafted his speeches—certainly alongside a gifted speechwriter, but just as often writing them himself on 5x7 cards on his airplane on the way to an event. His patience with my mistakes (I’m afraid I wasn’t a great aide; it simply wasn’t in my makeup). How he could graciously say “no” to a foreign counterpart who was asking for too much . . . or more firmly say “no” to an ambitious American general who was doing the same. What it was like to fly with him in an old Russian-made helicopter as the first U.S. officers (along with his public affairs officer Colonel Bill Smullen) to enter recently-liberated East Germany, and to watch former East German soldiers bewildered by this Black American general shaking their hands. How he managed to focus his attention on just the right things at just the right times. How he used a calibrated sense of humor or dramatic statement to great effect. How he deftly melded his heady experience from previously serving as the national security advisor with his own chutzpah gained from growing up in the Bronx—a devastating combination that disarmed the staid Washington, DC intelligentsia and charmed the media. It was an amazing experience.
Along the way I was exposed to “Colin Powell’s Rules for Leadership” (which also happen to be some pretty good rules for living). Here is the humble wisdom of this “simply Army infantryman” (which is how he described himself to me) who became the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2. Get mad, then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done.
5. Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.
8. Check small things
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision. Be demanding.
12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
Despite what I view in many ways as unfair the tarnishing of his service as Secretary of State in the context of (what is in 20/20 retrospect) the flawed rationale for the second Iraq war, Colin Powell was a remarkable leader and role model for many young officers like me, and for a few old ones as well. I’ll be eternally grateful to this man, who we lost in October 2021, for what I learned from him.
I’ll have more to say about Powell at certain points during the series on the Anchors of Leadership we will commence at the end of July.