Dealing with a legacy IT system and a legacy corporate culture
With the average adult male spending an average of 29 hours a week watching television (women spend 34 hours), it has been said that many adults feel closer to the people they watch on television than to their own family and friends.
I am a news junkie, and Colin Powell has been a fixture on my television set for well over 15 years. I have seen him at home. He has been in my hotel rooms--even following me into cruise ship cabins and airport lounges. I have seen his speeches, attended press conferences and briefings, watched long--often deeply personal--interviews, marveled at his social grace and titanic intellect, and thanked God that (1) he was on our side and (2) that he was influential in protecting America and responsible for her diplomacy.
So when General Powell, wearing an open-collared brown shirt and carrying a glass of red wine, strolled onto the patio of Aspen's St. Regis Hotel two weeks ago for the networking reception at the Donnelley Group Privacy Forum, my immediate thought was to go up and say, "Hi Colin."
Instead, my wife, Peggy, and I kept a respectful distance, as we had to leave for an early dinner. We never did get to shake the hand of my "old friend."
The following morning, Powell delivered the keynote address to about 200 of us, and it turned out I did not know Colin Powell at all.
Speaking without notes (and without PowerPoint) and with Mrs. Powell in the audience, General Powell was beautifully attired in a suit and tie. His wide-ranging talk was lucid, inspiring to the point of bringing a tear to the eye, and brilliantly incisive on everything from terrorism and the Cold War to American business and the question of outsourcing.
He was laid-back. He was elegant.
To everyone's astonishment and delight, he was one of the funniest speakers any of us had ever heard--a veritable Billy Crystal as he told a number of hilarious stories and laced his entire talk with a series of marvelous zingers and one-liners.
Who knew?
Many of his observations stuck with me, but perhaps the most relevant to American business is how he changed the entire corporate culture of the State Department.
The Arrival
On the morning of General Powell's first day at State, his wife, Alma , reminded him at breakfast that he was not in the Army. "Don't treat them like a bunch of soldiers."
"Yes, dear."
When he walked into the lobby of the State Department and was greeted by 800 of his new colleagues, he stepped up to the microphone and blurted out, "Good morning, troops!"
"Troops are troops," Powell said in Aspen. He was the State Department's new leader, and he knew about leadership. "Leadership is a value-based sense of mission. It is selfless service. It is taking care of the people who get the job done."
When he was lieutenant at Fort Benning, Ga., a first sergeant said to him, "Lieutenant, let me tell you the definition of a good leader."
Powell waited in anticipation.
"A good leader is someone who will be followed, if only out of curiosity."
Powell thought about that, and it made sense. A leader's job is to create trust and convey trust. A leader must walk the walk and give his troops the training and the tools.
The training and tools at State were lacking.
"When I arrived, State was stagnant," Powell said. "It had not done any hiring for a long time. In the Army, we grow our own leaders. The Army does constant recruiting. The army cannot hire an outside CEO."
So Powell made a point of setting up programs that would turn young people on to the idea of diplomacy, international relations and working for the government. Today 50,000 young people a year apply to take the State Department exams.
"State was woefully behind in IT. I knew about IT, because I was on the board of AOL for four years," Powell said.
When he got to the State Department, he found Wang computers everywhere. "Wang computers in 2001!" he said in disbelief. "I lay down, took a nap and put a wet rag on my head. Then I got up."
One of his first moves was to demand that State have modern computers that would be tied together with Internet access department wide. "Forty-four thousand, two hundred fifty-one computers later, I received a certificate attesting that the last Wang had been retired."
But this was only the beginning. He had to crack an entrenched culture. "I told the folks, 'Get rid of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference books. You have Google!'"
With that, he started communicating with e-mails. It took a while, but finally the staff caught on. Pretty soon, to deal with the flood of e-mails, they all got BlackBerry hand-helds.
"They would go to weekend parties and suddenly get a call from me on the Blackberry. The guy would excuse himself to take the message." Suddenly the corners of Powell's mouth twisted into a mischievous smile. "Having the Secretary of State call on the BlackBerry was the greatest chick magnet in DC."
Powell went to the State Department Web site, where detailed information on all the countries of the world was supposed to be found. "I wanted our Web site to be the best--better than the CIA, better than the FBI."
It turned out much of the material was dated. "We update every three months," he was told.
"I did not buy this stuff. These people were on a lunar cycle."
So Powell told them, "When I wake up at 5:30 and CNN says some country has new foreign minister, I want that on the Web site before I get to the office."
"Wal-Mart and Target update with every transaction," he said. "We have gone from a lunar to a transactional world."
In the old days when Powell--as a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or a member of the NSC--wanted to talk to the U.K.'s Prime Minister, he would have to ask what time it was in England.
"Now time does not matter. With e-mail, the message is there for him when he is ready."
"Time, space, geoboundaries are broken," Powell added. "The world is flat."
Powell the Raconteur
As well in analyzing the state of the world, terrorism, immigration, Iraq and Afghanistan, Colin Powell is a terrific storyteller who let fly with a string of anecdotes about his experiences in the Army and as Secretary of State. His first meeting with Gorbachev, dealing with the Chinese over a downed U.S. reconnaissance plane, and how one Saturday morning using his home phone, fax and computer he single-handedly kept Spain and Morocco from declaring war on each other, were not only hilarious but instructive. Powell made international relations (and by extension, business) often seem like Theater of the Absurd.
Powell's Q&A
General Powell took a few questions, the most interesting of which was how did he deals with hot-tempered colleagues. For example, Norman Schwartzkopf, field commander of Desert Storm, was reported to have a short fuse.
"I was senior to Norm," Powell said quietly.
He went on to say that in actuality, Schwartzkopf was senior to Powell, having joined the Army two years earlier, but that Powell outranked him. "We were both infantry guys," Powell said, "and I would let him blow off. Better he blows of at me than at his underlings."
When Schwartzkopf was in a temper and called, Powell got off the phone as quickly as he could, assuring his caller that he would get right on the problem and get back to him the next day.
Powell related that he learned about dealing with tempers one day when he was sitting on the sidelines watching a bunch of Pentagon lawyers in an argument. It got heated--really heated. Finally the lawyer who won did so because his antagonist was so hot.
Powell related how President Bush 41--under whom he served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs--relished Oval Office debates among Chief of Staff John Sununu, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and himself. "We got into heated arguments," Powell said, "but it was never personal. Our egos were never on the line."
"Never let your ego get so close to your position on an issue that when you lose the argument, you have lost your ego and your manhood--and ultimately who you are."
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition
Colin Powell Biography
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pow0bio-1
U.S. Department of State
http://www.state.gov/
Letters to the Editor
In response to "Making E-correspondence and Web Sites Readable," which was published on July 12, 2005:
Following up on the story about eye movement studies that are being looked into currently, when I joined account management at BBDO-Pittsburgh in the mid-sixties, we were aware of eye movement studies done in the '50s and '60s that used a mechanical device called a "tachistoscope". Don't hold me to the spelling, but this machine followed the eyes as they read a print ad. I am not making this up. I just don't know where I would go to research it to verify the spelling, and what researcher operated the darn thing.
--Tom Girgash
I read with interest the bit about typefaces.
The best research on this is, I think, that done by Prof. Colin Wheildon in Australia, first shown to me by David Ogilvy in February 1985. It is the only case I know of where the sole measurements were not "expert" opinion, but comprehension and ease.
Readers were asked to read something, then say what they had just read and how easy they found it to read. Changing from serif to sans in the case of a full page of copy reduced good comprehension from 67% to 12%. Of course, the sans may have looked prettier.
--Drayton Bird
In response to "The Corporate Pitch," which was published on July 14, 2005:
Well said. Although if all CEOs followed your advice, we'd never have had the entertainment of seeing Tom Carvel and the air in his ice cream or my personal favorite: Sy Sperling and his toupee.
--Stefanie Pont, with Pont Media Direct
Where did you get that verse, Denny? I remember that Ogilvy wrote in his "Confessions ..." that logos weren't really necessary. Based on that theory, his direct marketing arm did a hell of a job for IBM online: all text newsletters when other large companies were trying html and even streaming media across 58k lines.
--Dev. Kinney, with Dev.Kinney/MediaGraphics, Inc.
Don't forget my favorite, the late Dave Thomas of Wendy's. He was the ultimate Mr. Nice Guy and ran his business (and his life) according to his values of honesty, integrity, hard work and giving back to the community.
--Mary Wall, with KnowledgeBase Marketing
I'm sad to hear the GM employee ad campaign worked so well--seems a bit crass after announcing a couple months prior that they'll be AGAIN cutting jobs by about 30K over the next couple of years.
--Janan Compitello, with Douglas Gould and Company
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