Robert Gates Leadership Quotes

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.

Self-discipline is central to the leadership of institutions and to reforming them. A favorite saying of mine is "Never miss a good chance to shut up." I won't tell you how many times in a congressional hearing I just wanted to scream. How often in the White House Situation Room I wanted to say, "That's the dumbest idea I ever heard." How often in a briefing at the CIA or the Pentagon I wanted to tell someone where to stick his PowerPoint slides. Senior leaders want to blow off steam-shout at people- all the time. But to be an effective leader, you have to suppress those urges.

And because seeking the truth is what we are all about … the possibility—even the perception—that that quest may be tainted deeply troubles us, as it long has and as it should. —ROBERT M. GATES, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

Honor is defined as "honesty and integrity in one's beliefs and actions," integrity being "adherence to moral principle and character." Words like these are not heard much in our public discourse today. But I believe these words and what they represent are the bedrock of effective leadership. If you seek to lead men and women, you must persuade them to follow you. That means they must trust you. Herbert Asquith, British prime minister from 1908-1916, wrote, "To speak with the tongue of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good if a man does not inspire trust." A leader's actions must match his words. People must believe he means what he says, that his promises matter and are not just idle rhetoric. Integrity in action becomes moral authority, and it is moral authority that moves people to follow someone even at personal risk or sacrifice-- or even when they disagree.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans66 when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.67 The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.68 America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.

Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his son in 1943, "The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men .... The idea is to get people working together... because they instinctively want to do it for you.... Essentially, you must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair and cheerful." Devotion to duty. Sincerity. Fairness. Good cheer. These are not qualities taught in school. Formal education can make someone a good manager, but it cannot make a leader, because leadership is more about the heart than the head. How does any organization teach courage, integrity, a love of people, a sense of humor, the ability to dream of a better future? How can any training program inculcate personal character and honor? Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people -- to empathize, understand, inspire and motivate.

When I was interviewed to be president of Texas A&M, I told the search committee that if they were looking for someone to maintain the status quo, they had the wrong guy. “I don’t do maintenance,” I told them. My interest, I continued, was taking on the challenge of making a good institution better. I would be “an agent of change” while preserving the core values and traditions of the university. This was, I had discovered, my “core competency.” I loved all three institutions I led, but part of that love was the conviction that each could be better.

Dr. Ray Bowen, proposed that A&M strive to be recognized as one of the ten best public universities in the United States by 2020 while at the same time maintaining and enhancing the distinctiveness of the institution. He mobilized a broad effort involving more than 250 people on and off campus to assess the current strengths and weaknesses of the school and how to achieve his goal. As mentioned earlier, the nearly two-year-long study was called Vision 2020. The conclusion was honest and stark: “We are good but not good enough.” The report expressed “steadfast determination to build on strengths, eliminate weaknesses, seek opportunities, and face threats creatively and energetically.

To be successful agents of change—of reform—leaders not only must be able to envision a new way forward but also must be practical, with the skill to build broad support for and implement their vision.

How you make people more efficient and productive, more effective, more responsive, more open-minded, better at their jobs, is little affected by the placement of their organization on the chart. There is one exception to this general proposition: getting rid of boxes on the chart—reducing layering—is almost always a good thing.

Before issuing a single directive or making a single decision, a leader should talk to people at every level of her organization, from the front office to the mail room. Career employees often have startlingly insightful views about the strengths and weaknesses of their organization, which of course they know well; as a result, they often have well-informed ideas for practical ways to improve it.

To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it….But one can be a true politico and be at the same time incapable of administration. To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually tends toward disorder. In running any organization, both people and things have to be kept straight from day to day.

The recommendations were presented as twelve overarching ideas called “Imperatives.” In brief, they included strengthening the faculty both in excellence and in size, enhancing both the graduate and the undergraduate academic experiences, emphasizing the liberal arts, increasing ethnic and geographic diversity, expanding and enhancing the physical plant and landscape, developing more “enlightened” governance, attracting more financial resources, and building closer ties with the local community and the state of Texas.

The important thing to remember is that in any public or private sector organization, whether it has three million employees or three, having a clearly defined and achievable vision—or set of goals—and getting the priorities right in moving forward are the preconditions for successfully leading change. After all, as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will wind up somewhere else.

A leader, or those who aspire to that role, regardless of whether in the public or the private sector, must have integrity.

A leader must be friendly, approachable, and accessible but ought not to allow too much familiarity. After all, he’s still the boss. It may sound stuffy, but a leader has to maintain his dignity, another old-fashioned notion. He must be cautious about the activities he agrees to join.

Taken together, I think it is no exaggeration to say that CIA and the Community have not seen so much change in decades—especially in so short a time. And the best part is that every single measure has been a team effort—all of us working together to improve the way we do our work, not just because the Cold War is over, but also because of wide recognition top to bottom that we can do better. The task forces, the many comments that helped shape decisions on their reports, the cooperative spirit among CIA and Community managers—all this was critical to so much being accomplished. All this reflected the value of the broadest possible involvement of our people at every level.

A leader must not only explain to and reassure employees that their jobs are important to the overall mission of the organization; he must ensure that their work really does contribute, that it is not pointless make-work or wheel spinning.

A successful leader, and especially one leading change, treats each member of his team with respect and dignity.

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.

It is a rare company where the head of a line unit—an operating division—will offer the CEO a dramatic proposal for transforming (or eliminating) his own organization. I never had a line of executives outside my office anywhere I worked who were there on their own initiative to tell me what was wrong with their outfit and how they intended to fix it. I am confident the same is true of most CEOs. Leaders have to understand that a bureaucracy is incapable of reforming itself.

A final, and critical, technique for implementing change is ensuring follow-through.

Those techniques used in formulating the agenda and making decisions—transparency, inclusiveness, decisiveness, micro-knowledge (but not micromanagement), and accountability—all will continue to be essential in implementation.

The more frequently you intrude, implicitly reminding them it is your change, the less they will believe it is theirs. Successful implementation, in short, depends upon them. The leader cannot hold individuals accountable for driving change if he refuses to let go of the steering wheel. He must trust his subordinates, replace them if necessary. But he mustn’t micromanage them.

No matter what room I was in, I always knew I was not the smartest person there. This was not false modesty. A D in freshman calculus and being in the presence of anyone who had mastered biochemistry, mathematics, or engineering—which I could never have done—were constant reminders to me of my limitations. What I brought into the room was a willingness to listen (I got better at that with every passing year), an ability to analyze and synthesize large and diverse amounts of information, opinions, and recommendations and come up with practical solutions to problems and proposals for reform. That, and a willingness to be bold.

Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.

Disclosure of details in the CIA budget, for example, could reveal major new allocations for a covert operation or new investments in satellites. Too much transparency by a company could expose investments in new products or changes in strategy that would provide advantages to competitors.

The leader of an organization is the engine of change and reform, and his work is never done. If his yellow tablet keeps filling up with ideas, he should keep on truckin’. But if a leader cannot sustain his enthusiasm, energy, and creativity to keep making his institution better, he needs to step aside for someone who can.

When he met with the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, I accompanied him as his note taker. I will never forget Brzezinski introducing me to Sadat not as his aide or staff assistant but as his “colleague.” It was a tiny gesture of respect, but one I remember vividly nearly forty years later. Zbig was a demanding boss but unfailingly polite to those who worked for him. I was lucky to work for several such bosses, including the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and the DCI William Webster. The gangster Al Capone allegedly once said, “You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” Still, never underestimate the power of a kind word.

Leaders can—and, when necessary, must—level tough criticism at individuals, but due regard for their dignity requires doing it in private, not adding embarrassment and humiliation to the equation. Criticism, done privately, is far more likely to bring about constructive change. “Praise in public, criticize in private,” as the saying goes.

To quote President Harry Truman, “Always be nice to all the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy

Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people—to empathize, understand, inspire, and motivate.

The Nobel laureate Anatole France once wrote, “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” To those who believe our institutions can be better than they are, I say, Dream. Believe. Plan. Act.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr.

President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it is a bureaucracy.” Don

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59

Blind faith in Saint Anthony Fauci may go down in history as the fatal flaw of contemporary liberalism and the destructive force that subverted American democracy, our constitutional government, and global leadership.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and