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Thank you, Cotti.
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It's amazing how easy he is to fool.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Speaker 2: Appreciate that way too generous introduction and thanks everybody for being here today.
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Cotti is a very good man, a good friend.
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Cotti is somebody that followed me as the regional political director in the Bush campaign in 2000 and then in 2004 became the national field director.
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And he's done an absolutely incredible job and we'll talk more about him later.
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There are three other fellows that are standing in the back that also were involved in our efforts.
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Tim Reynolds, wearing the yellow tie, was the man responsible for the president's turnout activities in Ohio.
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So if you were a John Kerry supporter, you should kick his butt because he did an incredible job and is a really good guy and a really decent fellow too.
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Matt Wilsey was involved with us in the first campaign, came out from Stanford undergraduate and proceeded to help us on the Midwest and help organize in the Midwest.
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One of the youngest people in the campaign, did an incredibly good job.
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And Big Al, you all know Alex Robertson.
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Not only was Al a field man in the 2004 campaign, but you may remember there was a dolphin named Flipper.
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A large, very large dolphin that was dressed up that would follow John Kerry around to remind people that he had flip flopped on issues and that could be the man in dolphin uniforms.
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So all three of those guys, obviously by those experiences, particularly the Flipper experience, were well qualified for Stanford Business School.
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And it's good to be here with them as well and thank you all for the folks that lead the series.
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It's an honor to be part of this series.
1:44
A colleague told me that Colin Powell spoke last year.
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So you guys really got a kind of let down this year in terms of the quality of your speakers.
1:51
I want to talk a little bit about leadership and something that you're all very familiar with.
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And I want to open by talking about the importance of the degree you're all getting, the MBA degree.
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As you know, and has been the case for a long time, getting an MBA is a good thing to do from a personal perspective.
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In terms if you're worried about income, if you're worried about financial opportunities, obviously MBA is a good degree to get.
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But the thesis of what I want to talk about today is that the MBA is also incredibly important to our country and our world because of the unique times we live in, and I want to talk about why.
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And if there's a theme to this, it is the importance of leadership during a period of constant turmoil and how you turn change and constant change into winning.
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For whatever you represent, whether it's a political campaign or a governmental entity or a corporation or a business.
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If you think about the degree you're getting, you're fundamentally getting a degree in helping to lead a complex and large organization.
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And that skill is one that's needed more than ever.
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The reason is if you stop and think about the changes we're experiencing in the world.
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And you think of the headlines you've seen over the past several years, we live in a very unique time in history.
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We live in a time, if you think about it, of constant and transformative change.
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And what that constant and transformative change means, in my opinion, is whatever your entity is, whether it's a governmental entity, a private sector entity, you name it.
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You're either at a time of constant turmoil or constant opportunity, or both.
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And in those kinds of environments, leadership skills, helping people understand what they're dealing with.
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Helping people manage what they're dealing with, and helping organizations win, given what they're dealing with, is more important and is critical.
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There are two big reasons I think we face this time of transformational change.
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One is technology, and the other is demography, and let me talk about both.
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And both are going to have huge impacts on American government, American corporations, throughout most of your work years.
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The first, on technology, has been written about, the best book being the World Is Flat by Tom Friedman.
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The fact is, when barriers are lowered to almost everything, that means there's a world of both constant competition and constant opportunity.
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And so if you're leading an organization, you're never set in a way that you were once set.
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Let me give you an example.
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If in the 1950s or 60s or 70s, you were a leader of a record label or a recording studio, you were pretty set.
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You signed up your successful artists, you made records, they made hits, and you made money.
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Today, if you're the CEO or you're another leader in a record label company, you have to deal with the fact that because of the web.
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And because of technology, any garage band that wants to can also organize concerts, can also have followers, doesn't need a record label to be associated with them.
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And literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands are doing it right now as we speak, using technologies that are available on the web that no longer require the record label.
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If you're a TV network executive or if you're a TV anchor, for most of the last, certainly time since the television was in most homes, you had an incredibly cushy job.
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You had a virtual monopoly, you provided a service that everybody wanted to watch, and if you were with ABC, NBC or CBS, you were pretty much guaranteed pretty good revenues.
5:20
But again, what is the effect of technology?
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The proliferation of websites, video games, cable TV and other sources of information means that whatever you're programming.
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Whether it's the most recent Olympics, the most recent Grammy Awards, the most recent World Series, the evening news every night, fewer and fewer and fewer people are watching you.
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Because in a world that's flat, people have more choices, and they have more options available.
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Constant challenge, constant opportunity.
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If you're the Secretary of Defense in America today, you also face new challenges that you didn't face before.
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In the old days, when America fought a war.
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If we could decapitate the enemy, if we could get rid of its commanders, if we could bomb the barracks, if we could eliminate their munitions facilities, we could win the war.
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But again, because of technological change, we live in a world today where an enemy can build an IED or recruit further soldiers using websites.
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And so in all of these areas, these are all examples of how leadership positions of major institutions in American society.
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Face new and different challenges as well as opportunities today because of technology.
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And the opportunity part's important.
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If you look at some of the best led organizations in the world today, they're organizations that view these challenges as opportunities.
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Example Fox, what did Fox News recently do?
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They bought MySpace, that was a smart purchase.
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That was an understanding of an old outlet, which is the television network.
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That one of the keys to the future, if your goal is to transmit information, is to have a web portal, and a very large web portal.
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Similarly, when it comes to the military, the Secretary of Defense viewed this technological change as an opportunity.
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And one of the results of that opportunity is if you think about how we fight and win wars today.
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The loss of life, of innocent life, the casualties in civilian populations, is incredibly minuscule compared to any other time in human history.
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Second big change in addition to the change, second big challenge, excuse me, in addition to the technological changes occurring, is demographic changes occurring.
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And I think there, there are fundamentally two challenges that institutions that you all will lead will face.
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The first is the fact that we live in a world market.
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We live in an economy, as you all know, where anything you do, anything you make, anywhere you make it, anywhere you do it can be done just as easily somewhere else.
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So again, the advantages of being near a large port, which used to mean if you were in a city like Buffalo or Baltimore or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or New York, you had certain built-in advantages. All of a sudden. Evaporate.
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The second big change we face demographically, of course, is the retirement of the baby boomers, which as GM and Ford are learning today.
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And as our federal government learning, is going to require every institution to rethink how it provides its employees and its customers and others with things like health care and things like pensions.
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So the fact is, if you stop and think about it, in my opinion, the test of your careers, the mission of your careers, will be how do you lead institutions to win during this time of change, change as a result of technology and change as a result of changing demography?
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Why am I an expert in providing this information?
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I don't know that I am, but I've thought a lot about it because as Cotti went over my experience, if you think about what essentially I've been doing since 2000, I've been dealing with a world of turmoil.
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When you are the White House political director, you live in a world of turmoil.
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When you're campaign manager for a re election campaign, you live in a world of turmoil, and when you're the chairman of the Republican Party, particularly in the last two years, you live in a world of turmoil.
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And so what I want to do is share from you, based on my own career experiences, some advice, some lessons I've learned about how to be the kind of leader that is able to transform turmoil and challenge and constant change into opportunity.
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The first lesson, and I think the most important lesson, is the importance of planning and the importance of educating your team, it's more important than ever before.
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There are two different ways you can respond if you're leading an institution to constant change and turmoil.
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One way is to say it's not worth planning, if you're not sure what's going to happen tomorrow, why plan?
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And a lot of folks respond that way to this environment, I actually think the opposite is true.
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If you can plan well enough, you can game out a whole lot of situations you're going to have to deal with, and by gaming those situations out, you'll be in a place to be able to plan for them.
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The single most important part of that planning process is developing the right team.
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Bring in the right people, the smart people and people that you know are the kinds of individuals who can lead themselves during this time.
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Let me give you some examples of how we did this.
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One example that I want to focus on is how we planned the 2004 presidential campaign.
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Before the campaign began, we sent one of our colleagues to each of the different presidential libraries, the Reagan Library, the ford Library, the 41 Bush Library.
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And we asked them to go through the library and get every single memo about the re election campaigns of the various presidents as they ran for reelection so we could look at every document, not just take people's words for it.
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My experience is whether you're talking about a past political campaign or a business experience, everyone remembers having been able to see around every corner knowing everything before it occurs, and they were all geniuses.
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But when you look at the planning documents, you learn a lot more.
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We built the O4 campaign based on those planning documents, we built the O4 campaign based on an incredibly careful analysis of what every eventuality they dealt with.
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Of every concern they dealt with, of every problem they dealt with that we were able to game out, and as a result, we had a campaign model, a campaign infrastructure.
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We hired campaign staff and we built a campaign plan to avoid some of the problems that we had in the past.
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The second part of that effort was a weekly planning session that we had with top campaign staff about what we were going to deal with in the next week, what was John Kerry going to do to attack us?
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What could we do to attack him?
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Let's game every one of those things out.
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Because even though we can't anticipate every single attack, if we plan enough and think enough and game out enough, what's going to happen.
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We'll figure out a whole bunch of things before they're likely to occur and then be able to figure out how Kerry would react to them.
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And so the first most important lesson that I urge you to do in whatever organization you're leading is to bring your team together and aggressively develop a plan, a strategy.
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A plan that anticipates all the possibilities that you're going to deal with, that looks around corners and that figures out the best way to, as a result, win at a time of constant change and constant challenge.
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I'll tell you one of the biggest challenges in a re-election campaign, for instance, one of the things that more than anything else I looked at in building the campaign, very few people start off as campaign manager of a re-election and end as campaign manager.
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You usually get let go in the middle, why?
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Think how hard the job is.
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You're in charge of re electing the President and somebody else is in charge of the White House, so you're supposed to sell a product.
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And yet the single most important thing to the brand of that product, which is what happens in the White House, you're not in charge of.
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And so because of that, we had a very clear system built that we built, by which people at the White House knew what their responsibilities, people at the campaign knew what their responsibilities were.
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And we had to work together and they had to work together, and that was critical to our success.
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Leadership lesson number two, share your strategy, particularly with people who could be rivals within your institution or within other institutions.
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Again, just like there's a reaction that says a wall of constant change planning is worthless, there's a reaction that says, wait a minute, if there are rivals out there, I don't want them to know anything.
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I want to keep all the information closed so it won't get out and so they can't get an edge up on me, I totally rejected that analysis.
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When I built the 2004 campaign, my theory was I wanted everyone potentially involved, whether they wanted to be involved or wanted to hijack the campaign, to know about my strategy and to be included in the strategy.
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I had several groups that were people that regularly talked to the president, the vice president, the chief of staff, Karl Rove, Don Evans, one of his best friends.
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And other people who were involved in a planning group I called the G8 because there were eight people.
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We met on a monthly basis, and I walked through every aspect of my strategy, we were thinking.
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My theory was, again, think about the potential vulnerabilities, someone's going to get the president, I don't agree with what Melman's doing.
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Well, they're much less likely to do that if they were involved on a monthly basis in helping develop what Melman was doing and helping to figure out a plan for what Melman was doing.
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I did the same thing around the campaign's budget, an area that often in campaigns is criticized for not being done well.
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And I did the exact same thing for the staff on the campaign, having weekly meetings and having regularly weekly meetings with campaign leadership like Cotti, where we discussed and we analyzed our strategy and how our strategy was going forward.
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We did it with outsiders too, we did it with consultants involved in the campaign and not involved in the campaign.
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So all of you won't be involved in the campaign infrastructure, but my experience tells me that if you have a strategy and you share it with everybody and you get input from everybody.
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You'll get much less guff, you'll get much less feedback, and you'll convert rivals into allies, even if they don't initially want to be.
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Because fundamentally, either they offer the criticism there or they're really acting in bad faith and going around the process, and so sharing your strategy is absolutely critical in being successful.
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Lesson number three, Machiavelli was wrong, he said it is better to be feared than to be loved.
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The reason he's wrong is because there's a choice between there's a third alternative between being feared and being loved, and it's to persuade people.
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Leadership is not about people doing what you tell them to do because they're afraid of you.
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because again, in a world of constant change, in a world with all of the turmoil that institutions deal with today, if someone doesn't like you but they're afraid of you, they're going to just do whatever they want later on.
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Similarly, it's not just about their loving you, because simple affection does not give people the confidence that they need to follow you through what's going to be a tough battle. What does?
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Persuading people, leadership is ultimately about listening to others, learning from others, and based on listening and learning, convincing them or developing with them together, The plan that you're all going to follow. Several examples.
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After the 2002 campaign, I went to every single target state that we were going to have to deal with, every single one.
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I met with the governor, I met with the senator, I met with the top business leaders, and the top elected officials.
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I said, tell me everything you want to know about your state, tell me everything you learned about your state in the O2 reelection campaign or campaign that you just have.
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Tell me everything you think is important for the president to win the state.
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And so whereas often in presidential campaigns, like any other multi-state company, you have people who say the national organization doesn't understand what we do in the states.
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They were much less likely to do that because they were persuaded of the success of our strategy because they helped develop it.
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And there's no more important leadership skill than you can have than persuasion.
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And it's something that unfortunately, if you think about who are our kind of leadership icons, they're rarely persuaders.
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They're either guys like General Patton, who everyone views as you got to follow him ciz you're afraid to, or they're people that are these kind of guys, well, we love him because he's such a wonderful guy, these benevolent leaders.
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In fact, there's a third alternative, and the third alternative is someone who is in fact a great leader because they're a great persuader.
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Number four, transparent metrics is absolutely key.
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I can't stress this enough, whatever you lead, whatever organization it is, will have built in bias, particularly something that you might have heard of called confirmation bias.
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Confirmation bias is viewing every piece of information, every piece of data, everything that happens through the lens that confirms what you already think.
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It's human nature, it happens everywhere, it particularly happens in politics.
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And so what we built is we built a system that required so many metrics and so much information that that the effect was you couldn't have confirmation bias.
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So in target states, we polled from Labor Day to the election, every single day, we did a tracking poll in every single state.
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You could say this state feels good or that state feels good, we knew the truth was, we knew whether they felt good because we had objective data.
18:03
Caddy, as national field director, led an effort by which in every single state, voter registration was measured every week and then every month in that state how Republicans were doing and how Democrats were doing.
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Again, you feel great about the fact that you've registered 2 million voters, but if the Democrats have registered 3 million, you haven't won the battle, and so that's an Important one.
18:24
And finally, when it came to earned media, where there's a great danger of focusing on inputs, which is motion and not outputs, which is progress, how many stories you can get in the paper, you need those kind of use of metrics.
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So again, if you stop and think about it, whatever organization or institution you're going to lead, think of areas where you're likely to have bias.
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Think of areas where you're likely to have people who want to focus on motion and not progress.
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And make sure there are transparent metrics, metrics that are agreed on up front and metrics that can ultimately have the effect of making sure everyone's on the same page and understands what's going on.
18:58
Five, focus on problems as opportunities to seize, not problems to reduce.
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If you're reducing a problem you're not gaining, you're reducing how many yards you lose.
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If you're seizing an opportunity, you're gaining, let me give you a good example.
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Republicans and Democrats have for the last 50 years targeted voters the same way based on where people live.
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You talk to your neighbors about voting, both parties have done it.
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Democrats have to turn out the areas, Democrats have a lot of voters, Republicans have to try to turn out the areas where Republicans have a lot of voters.
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In 2000, we lost a bunch of states, large industrial states.
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And we discovered something, that the Democrats had a built in advantage because whereas in the 80s we were the party of the suburbs and they were the party of the city.
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Because of the fact and they had rough equality in population, today we're the party of the exurbs in rural America, they're still the party of the city.
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So if you're targeting based on geography, they have a big built-in advantage.
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In Pennsylvania, the advantage they have is 855,000 votes more in Democratic strong areas and Republican strong areas.
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That was a challenge Republicans all faced, we never knew how to deal with it.
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We viewed it as an opportunity.
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What was our opportunity? What did we do?
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We now target voters the way that Visa and Capital One target customers.
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We no longer target you based on where you live, we target you based on how you live.
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We acquired the same consumer data that Visa and Capital One target to figure out what products to provide to people in terms of what they buy.
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And we figured out based on developing models, what it tells us about their political behavior, about the issues they care about, about how they like to get information.
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And so we were able in 2004 and now again in 2006, we're able to target voters at a much more precise number than we've ever been able to before and reach out in a way we weren't able to before.
20:46
The American electorate went between 2000 and 2004 from being an electorate that was 81% white to 77% white, and George Bush got 3. 5% more votes.
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Where did those votes came from?
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They came from Hispanics and they came in some states from African Americans, why?
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Because through microtargeting, we were able to reach people in their households, which allowed us to reach folks who previously we hadn't been able to reach. That's an example.
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Again, view challenges as opportunities to be seized, not challenges just to be reduced.
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And finally, my sixth leadership lesson is use technology to empower people.
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If you study the Walmart inventory management system, that is one of the reasons that store is so successful, and it's one of the reasons the employees of that store are so successful.
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That company uses a system to decide what they're going to order and to figure out what their customers.
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Want that is incredibly sophisticated because the employees of those stores and the managers of those stores are understand what it means, what people buy, when they buy, and what it means.
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We did the exact same thing with respect to the field staff, guys like Alex, guys like Tim, in the 2004 campaign.
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We provided the same kind of information about what it means, how consumers, in this case voters, think and what they're doing to our field team, to our equivalent of our sales force, and they were more effective as a result of it.
22:07
Several personal lessons then open it up to your questions.
22:11
Personal lesson number one.
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There's an old saying that says, success leads to happiness.
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In my opinion, the opposite is true, happiness leads to success, find your passion and you'll be successful at it.
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If you feel like you're going to work and rolling eyes about going to work, you're not likely to be successful there.
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If you're excited to go to work because you love what you're doing, you are likely to be successful there.
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The most successful people in America are people that have a passion for what they do because it's not really like working for them, and that's critically important to remember.
22:39
Second, if you want to be a leader, don't say you're a leader, don't have a door sign that says leader, don't go around being called your title, act like a leader.
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Acting like a leader doesn't mean what your title is, it doesn't mean who reports to you, it means, in my opinion, you work the hardest, you help the most you share the credit, and you accept the blame.
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Leadership is something that happens when you do it, not when you're anointed as it.
23:05
Third, manage down not up.
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And this is very inconsistent with what often happens in corporations.
23:12
You hear all this stuff about corporate bureaucracies, and you got to think about the politics of it, let me give you my own experience.
23:18
I went to work for the President in May 1999, June 1999, excuse me.
23:24
And in the beginning of the campaign, there were five of us who were regional political directors, as Cottie mentioned.
23:30
And the big thing that everyone told me, including the top people at the campaign, was when the president goes to one of your states, you gotta go with them on the plane.
23:38
You want to see him, he wants to see you, you gotta get to know him, you gotta work him.
23:41
He's got to view you as your buddy.
23:43
We had the first test coming up, which was the Iowa straw poll and the Iowa caucus, it was in one of my states.
23:49
I left Austin, went up to the state and said, I'm not coming back until we win.
23:53
And so where George Bush got to know them by the fact that they were managing up, they were figuring out how to cultivate their relationship with him.
24:01
>> Speaker 2: He never talked to Ken Mehlman.
24:02
He never heard from Ken Mehlman until Ken Mehlman was the first guy that came back to him with a big victory, the biggest victory ever in the Iowa straw poll and then the Iowa caucus.
24:10
Why, I was managing the team there.
24:12
I was focusing on managing down folks I could actually control, not worrying about the politics up.
24:18
And whatever your entity, this will be counter to a lot of advice you'll receive.
24:22
My experience is if you keep your head down and you work incredibly hard and you focus on that which you can control, then the people at the top will absolutely love you and want to promote you along the way.
24:35
Four, focus on doing well, not what's next.
24:38
A lot of people are all worried about what are they going to do next.
24:41
And whatever the job is, they're always looking to the next step.
24:44
My own experience, again, is from my law firm to the Capitol Hill, from one Capitol Hill office to another, to Austin, Texas, to being field director of the campaign.
24:54
To being White House political director, to being campaign manager of the reelection, to being RNC chairman, I have never, ever sought out my next job.
25:02
In every single case, someone came to me and said, would you be interested in doing this?
25:07
I would usually respond, sure.
25:10
But again, I was focused on what I was doing, not what's next. Five, everybody matters.
25:16
Here's how I first met Cottie Johnson.
25:18
I'm sitting at my office, sitting at my desk in Texas, working on stuff for Iowa.
25:24
Karl Rove walks up with Cottie standing next to him and says, this is Cottie, he's friends with the president. Make him your bitch.
25:32
>> [LAUGH] >> And Cottey was an intern at the time.
25:36
And most people, like in any organization, treated interns like they weren't worth that much.
25:42
I gave Cottie responsibility.
25:44
I gave him tremendous opportunities.
25:46
And there's no doubt in my mind, not only was he the youngest regional political director of all, not only was he a fantastic field director in the 2004 campaign.
25:56
But there's no doubt in my mind I will one day work for him.
26:00
The fact is, everybody in an organization matters.
26:03
And if everyone in that organization, from the guy that answers the phone to the lady who is the CEO.
26:09
If every one of those people feels every single day like what they do is the single most important thing in the world, then you as a leader have succeeded because that organization is successful.
26:19
So if there's one theme to this hopeful advice that I hope you find interesting and useful, it is to be a good leader means it can't be about you, it's gotta be about the organization.
26:31
And that approach is particularly important at a time when everybody involved in all of our organizations will deal with a period of turmoil, will deal with tremendous challenge, will deal with tremendous change.
26:42
If everyone in the organization understands that you as a leader have planned incredibly well.
26:46
Have shared your strategy with people in a very effective way.
26:50
Have persuaded people as opposed to telling them what to do.
26:53
And are leading in a way that they know you're thinking of what's best for them, not what's best for you.
26:57
Then you'll, in my experience, find that people are willing to follow you anywhere and everywhere through a period of tremendous challenge and tremendous turmoil.
27:05
So thanks for the opportunity to speak with you, happy to answer your questions, and good luck to all of you in your careers.
27:09
Your country needs you, organizations need you.
27:13
We face a lot of challenges, and there's no doubt in my mind that folks will be up to making sure we deal with those challenges. Thanks a lot.
27:18
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Questions, comments, insults? Yes, sir.
27:36
>> Speaker 3: I'll throw the first one out there.
27:38
You did a great job of talking on leadership and not about politics, but I'm sure everyone wants to know a little about what's going on.
27:45
And New York Times ran an article on Sunday about your counterpart Howard Dean and his new strategy on the 50 states approach.
27:53
I'd be very interested to hear your opinion of the Democrats' new approach.
27:58
>> Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I think we have a 50 state approach as well, I don't call it the 50 state approach.
28:02
What I described that we did in 2004, which was targeting voters based on how they live, not where they live, is something that, with the number one goal of my chairmanship when I was elected chairman.
28:13
And I've had In the last two years.
28:14
That approach is now available in all 50 states, essentially for the cost of just doing a poll.
28:22
So, something which we spent a million or $2 on a particular state is now available free for all 50 states.
28:29
And we built a web platform that we trained, I think, 15,000 people in 46 states in how to use it.
28:35
So I agree with the 50 state strategy, I think that's important to do.
28:39
Look, the article, the bottom line is, I think what Dean is saying is, it shouldn't be a Washington driven party, which I completely agree with.
28:50
On the other hand, if all you do is write a check to people in the states, then it seems to me you're focused more on running for reelection.
28:58
As chairman of the party as opposed to saying, I want a really good system that works in a really effective way.
29:03
And I think that's some of the mistake that they've got right now.
29:06
At the end of the day, though, look, what Howard Dean does and what I do is important, but far, far, far less important than the candidates that run, the ideas they run on, and the issues that they talk about.
29:16
And so, I thought it was an interesting article, but at the end of the day, I think that what really matters are the ideas in our country and people out debating those ideas.
29:24
And where the candidates are on those issues and those ideas. Yes, sir.
29:29
>> Speaker 1: You talked about the importance of planning and strategy, and you also talked about how we live in a world that's in turmoil and constant change.
29:37
And I know a lot of leaders out there struggle between how much time and resources to put toward strategy versus, okay, we need to move because things are changing so quickly.
29:45
We just have to be in motion.
29:46
Can you talk about how you decide, it seems like you put a lot of emphasis on the strategy, how do you decide between, okay, we need to broadly [INAUDIBLE]?
29:54
>> Speaker 2: Well, the more you plan, the more you can immediately not have to talk, because you've already gamed the thing out.
30:00
I mean, again, our goal was each day to beat Kerry when it came to earned media, which was unprecedented. Here's why.
30:11
You're a challenger campaign, it's just you.
30:13
If you're a White House, if you've got the whole government, everything you say, not only does the White House have to be comfortable.
30:18
You got to check to make sure what you're saying isn't inconsistent with something the Department of Commerce did last week and last month.
30:24
And so, what you do in that situation, in my opinion, is you anticipate everything you can.
30:28
You game as much as you can out.
30:29
You do your homework beforehand so you can move at a moment's notice.
30:32
And I think that's the key.
30:34
With more planning and more thought, you ultimately find that you're able to move in a way that is very quick and very nimble, and you can adapt.
30:42
And that's, I think, how you want to spend your time.
30:46
So, more planning up front means less talking and more acting at the moment's notice. Yes, sir.
30:56
>> Speaker 2: What did you think the Democratic Party did wrong in the Kerry campaign as opposed to what you did right?
31:01
>> Speaker 2: I think that they made two fundamental mistakes.
31:04
First of all, I think they misread the election a bit.
31:08
Most presidential reelections have fallen in one of two categories.
31:11
Think of Clinton's reelection and Reagan's reelection, these guys had approval ratings in the upper 50s, and their opponents were pretty weak, and it was clear they were going to win.
31:21
Then you look at 41, Bush in 1992, and you look at Carter in 1980, it was pretty clear they were going to lose.
31:27
They had very low numbers.
31:29
Our numbers were lower than any president who had been reelected in the modern time.
31:32
Bush's approval rating was 48, and the right track was in the low 40s.
31:36
And they misread them to think it was just a negative referendum on Bush.
31:40
And they thought just by saying I'm not Bush, they would win.
31:44
And so, first, they misread the environment, but second, they misread those past campaigns.
31:48
Clinton won in 92 because he was the man from hope. He offered people hope.
31:53
Reagan won in 1980 because he offered people the hope of strong leadership.
31:56
Simply running against the other guy, in my opinion, is not what people When they're unhappy with things, they want an alternative that satisfies the concerns that they have about whoever the incumbent is in office, and I think that those were the two challenges that they had in the campaign.
32:11
They ran a very good campaign, they raised a ton of money, I have nothing but respect for what they did, I'm not in any way diminishing it by those criticisms, I do think those were two strategic errors that they made, though. Yes, sir.
32:24
>> Speaker 3: You mentioned that leaders have an obligation to working for the best for their organizations, sometimes that responsibility would be the leader to step down.
32:32
Given the recent resignation of Bishop Dunn at HD, given the current calls for Dennis Hatchet resignation.
32:39
When and why should a leader step down, both for personal reasons and for political reasons?
32:44
>> Speaker 2: That's a great question.
32:45
I think a leader ought to step down, when he or she believes that they are no longer able, for whatever reason, to be effective as the leader of the organization.
32:54
And what often happens in a situation is you think what's fair, and when you're a leader, your job is not to do what's fair, [LAUGH] your job is to promote the organization.
33:04
And I certainly have always felt like if ever whether it was fair or not, something I did, made me less effective at leading, I wouldn't have the right to lead the organization.
33:16
So I think each leader has to look to the unique situation and say, would it be the best for the organization if I were to step down?
33:22
Not what's fair or what's right, and again, if there's a theme that I tried to get across and probably didn't do it as well as I should have great leadership is about generosity, great leadership is about literally saying you're serving others.
33:35
And if you view it that way, then ultimately the decision of whether to step down, whoever you are, becomes easier, because you stop and you think, what's good for the organization now? What's good for me?
33:45
But it's a really good question, it's one that each case you have to look at, I think, based on the facts. Yes, mom.
33:52
>> Speaker 4: What are your feelings and concerns about the Mark Foley situation?
33:56
>> Speaker 2: Obviously, the first and most important feeling and concern is that it's awful and terrible that kids who were brought to Washington, who are essentially put in an in loco parenti situation, were subjected to disgusting and vile and totally inappropriate email conversations.
34:16
So the first thing is, disgust at Mark and anger on behalf of those kids.
34:23
Secondly, I think that they need to look and figure out how to make sure, something like this never happens again.
34:30
How to make sure that these kids are protected.
34:32
How to make sure that there's not any kind of a situation where a kid is going to feel, even if they're not exploited by something that a congressman or any other person of responsibility says.
34:44
What I said a minute ago about everyone in an organization mattered.
34:48
The fact is that, one of the challenges of leading any organization, in my opinion, whether it be the congress or a corporation or whatever, is when you're leading, you have a lot of constant busyness that occurs and you have constant burdens.
35:07
And when you start, what starts happening is you start all of a sudden saying, okay, I'll get away with this or I'll do this or I'll cut this corner, and that's something you have to constantly guard against.
35:16
So, I think it personally, I was very offended by it, and I think not only does it need to be fully investigated, potentially prosecuted, the kids need to be protected.
35:24
But it also requires whatever you're leading, whenever you're in an organization, the people that are the weakest, the people that are the most vulnerable, all will be the people that you're trying to protect the most in any organization.
35:36
>> Speaker 4: We talked a lot about the need for great leadership talent, excluding people in this room that work for you, do you think there is a gap between the panel, between the private and the public sector today? >> Yes.
35:47
>> Is it widening, and if so, how do we solve that?
35:49
>> Speaker 2: That's another good question, I think there is something of a gap, I think that it is higher in the private sector than the public sector.
35:58
And I wouldn't agree that all the people in this room fall in the high talent part of it, by the way.
36:04
>> [LAUGH] >> I think the best way to solve it is a couple things, one is, I hope everyone in this room will think about public service.
36:12
I think that we need more people in public service, particularly people that have done things in business and thought about things from a business perspective.
36:19
Second of all, I think both sides have got to stop this kind of politics of personal destruction, we've got to recognize people will not go into public service, if they think if you disagree with them, you're going to call them evil.
36:31
And, I don't believe that people on the other side of the aisle, ideologically or politically are evil, I think that they want the same things, we just disagree about how to get there.
36:41
And it's incumbent on all of us to stop and say, wait a minute, how do we make sure we do that?
36:45
How do we watch everything we say?
36:46
You know, earlier this year, I'll give you an example.
36:48
Earlier this year, in the beginning of 2005, we put out a piece on Reid and it pointed out his son was a lobbyist.
36:56
And I didn't see it, and it went out and he was really upset and he should have been upset and I felt really badly about it.
37:03
Why is it relevant that his son is a lobbyist?
37:05
Talk about the issues, don't talk about him, we took it off the website, and it was something that we did that was wrong and it was something that was inconsistent with that spirit.
37:13
And so I think you'll get better people in public service, if public service doesn't become what it's become too often, which is a circus to attack people.
37:20
Both the last two administrations, in the case of the Clinton administration, Zoe Baird, potential Attorney General, in the case of the Bush administration, Linda Chavez, the potential Secretary of Labor, weren't able to get their jobs because they had, quote, nanny problems.
37:36
It is clearly important to follow the law.
37:39
But the notion that because somebody had that situation, they ought to be run out of town on a rail, I think is a mistake.
37:45
I think there's too much a criminalization of political differences, if somebody disagrees, I thought that the way that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were handled in that whole leak thing was outrageous and was wrong and was unfair.
37:57
And there's examples on the other side too, that have happened that have been unfair.
38:00
So what we need to do, if we want the best people to be involved in public service, we oughtta, in my judgment, make it easier, not harder, I worry frankly about the same thing in corporate America.
38:09
Obviously what happened at HP is appalling and unfortunate.
38:12
At the same time, I worry that the reaction to what happened at Enron and other companies, which is Sarbanes Oxley, has the effect of saying to people, I don't want to be director of a company anymore, why should I?
38:23
And I think that you're seeing in the business world, some of the same things you're seeing in politics.
38:27
If we want to cultivate leadership, we should not make leaders people, who we want to throw darts at all the time and figure out ways to attack.
38:34
But part of why that happens is because leaders don't act in ways that is consistent with the trust that they're providing, so it's a two way street, I think we've got to do both I'll give you an example, CEO compensation.
38:45
I don't believe it ought to be legislated, I'm a free market guy.
38:48
But at some level, when you've got a CEO of a company making $50 million a year, and you got some guy that works for him in the company making $15,000 a year, I don't think that's fair.
38:58
The first thing I did in the bush campaign in 2004, I wrote the budget, I was in charge, you know what I did?
39:03
I was the one guy in the campaign, who got less money than the campaign manager in 2000 did.
39:08
Everyone else's salaries went up, because I thought that gave me the authority to lead, we need more CEOs, that will think like that.
39:15
If it's not about you and it's about them, if you're making 300 times more than anybody else in the company, it's about you.
39:20
So I think both of those are part of what you need to do in that situation. Yes, ma' am.
39:27
>> Speaker 1: If leaders are to be selfless, as you mentioned before, good leaders, how do you make sure you have enough time for things like family, making sure you're abiding by your own family, the our own values, and taking some time for yourself?
39:40
>> Speaker 2: You have to make it a priority, that's critically important.
39:44
And you ought to recognize, in my opinion, whether it's serving in government or serving as CEO of a company, it's not a lifetime career, it's a temporary thing.
39:52
And I think that the extent to which people are CEOs for a period and then move on to something else, is probably a good thing in some cases, because Because I think, again, if you want to have that balance, that balance is important to being happy and to being successful, you literally have to make it a priority.
40:07
I am much happier if I get four or five days a week, a chance to work out.
40:12
It's amazing, the difference in my total mental attitude, in my ability to be productive and all that.
40:18
People say, how do you do it? I do it.
40:21
So I choose between meeting with the senator or working out, I'll meet with the senator another time.
40:27
I'm going to make time to work out because it's important to my priorities and my focus.
40:30
Second of all, in terms of your values, there's nothing more important than that.
40:34
As Cottie will tell you, I used to, in all my campaigns, I would always say in the meeting, if you have to choose between losing or breaking the law or violating rules, lose.
40:45
There's nothing more important than doing things that are consistent with the law and consistent with ethics, and that's obviously critically important also.
40:52
So I think you just have to, you can't get caught up in the moment, and you have to remember the long term. Yes, ma' am.
41:00
>> Speaker 2: So it sounds like you've risen to the challenge in every role you face.
41:05
I would love to know what you view as your greatest challenge professionally and how, besides figuring out the way to gain any possible outcome, might be to overcome that.
41:17
>> Speaker 1: That's a good question.
41:19
I mean, I think the biggest challenge so far professionally, was the challenge of how do you manage a campaign successfully, given that there's a White House?
41:31
I mean, essentially, what you are, is you're a colony whose survival and success is critical to the survival of the mother country.
41:40
[LAUGH] So how do you deal with that?
41:42
And the way we dealt with it was by, again, when the president asked me to do this, I said the there's two things I want to have, or I don't want to do it.
41:51
One is, I want to be in charge of every hiring fire, and two, I want to make sure I'm in charge of all spending.
41:58
If I'm really in charge of spending, and I'm in charge of who works there, I'm in charge.
42:01
And the president said, that's really smart thinking, you've thought about this.
42:05
And so, if you ever go and this is about anything you do in life, if you go into something, you got to have it, you're making a mistake.
42:15
The lesson I got out of that is, go in, if you want it so badly, you're going to end up with a bad deal.
42:21
Go in saying, I want it, but I want it on the right terms.
42:24
And if you think about what those terms are up front, then my experience is you'll be successful.
42:29
But I certainly hope my professional challenge, I'll have more big challenges in the future.
42:34
I mean, I hope that at the age of 40, I haven't had the biggest challenge of my life that'd be kind of depressing, but I'm sure there'll be others too. Yes, sir.
42:44
>> Speaker 3: The country, by most respects, is quite politically divided right now.
42:49
And kind of from, [COUGH] September 11th to now, it's just become more and more divided.
42:54
What do you see either changing that, do you think over the next few years, it will come back together, or will it just continue to bifurcate between the Democrats and the Republicans?
43:07
>> Speaker 1: Two thoughts on it, one is, if you think about most times in American history, we were very divided during our wars.
43:15
World War II was an exception and a lot of people view it as because it was an exception, they view it as the norm.
43:20
But if you think about it, whether it was the Spanish American War, whether it was the World War I, whether it was the Korean War, Vietnam, America often is divided by war as opposed to being united by war.
43:33
And that's always a challenge we face, and so being at war, which we are, from a historical perspective, we face that challenge, and it requires us to constantly work to try to unite people.
43:44
But that's just partly the nature of being at war.
43:47
Second thing that we've got to deal with, I think, with respect to that is that, again, technology has the effect of people listening to and talking to people that they agree with.
43:57
The effect of blogs and talk radio is whether it's Air America or Rush Limbaugh, you can listen to and talk to people that you agree with all day long.
44:05
And if you do that, then you're less likely to be able to have the kind of consensus that comes together on things, and so that's a challenge we face.
44:12
That all having been said, I actually think in many ways our country is less divided, our politics is very divided.
44:18
But if you stop in 1970, a huge percentage of the American people, >> [COUGH] >> Had the ridiculous belief, measured in polls, that interracial dating or marriage was morally wrong.
44:29
The big stain on American history has always been race relations.
44:33
And while race relations aren't perfect today, they're so much better than they've been in a long time in American history, in my opinion.
44:39
That's an example where I think Americans of good conscience, particularly younger people, have come together in a way that you never would have predicted in 1970.
44:48
That's one example of people coming together.
44:51
>> Speaker 1: Second is the efficacy of free markets.
44:53
In 1980, Ted Kennedy runs for president, he ran on a full employment platform, literally, full employment.
44:59
There was legislation called the Humphrey Hawkins Law bill that Hewitt Humphrey proposed.
45:06
And the law said the government will essentially create public works jobs to guarantee full employment.
45:10
No one says it anymore, people fundamentally agree about the efficacy of free markets.
45:15
And while there's disagreements about specifics on tax policy, regulatory policy, and litigation policy, there's an agreement on free markets, peace through strength.
45:24
There was a time when wearing an American flag on your lapel was a political statement, no one thinks that anymore.
45:29
One of the great things about our country is that even when we've disagreed in the past, we almost always come together afterwards and unite and agree that, you know what, whatever we decided was the right thing to do.
45:41
And I think that's generally been true with civil rights, it's generally been true with free markets, and it's generally been true with having a strong national security and a pride in our patriotism.
45:51
That doesn't mean all three are perfect, that doesn't mean all three have solved every problem.
45:55
But that does mean, if you listen to talk radio, or you sometimes watch in D. C.
45:59
, you think Americans are so divided, our politics are so divided, I think our country is also pretty united in many ways. We'll do two more.
46:11
>> Speaker 4: I believe earlier you mentioned that as a leader, your responsibilities to the people that you're leading. >> Speaker 1: Yes, sir.
46:16
>> Speaker 4: And we're just talking about right now either in a country where the country seems to be pretty divided, or maybe an organization with different beliefs on how to go forward.
46:24
So given that, and knowing that maybe you're trying to persuade one group and that's not working, how do you go forward and act to be a true leader and represent all of the people you're supposed to be looking out for?
46:36
>> Speaker 1: It's a great question.
46:37
And particularly in government, it's a hard thing to do, and it's something you got to work to do every single day.
46:42
I think what you try to do is, you look for opportunities where you find things that you believe in, that other folks might believe in too, but they might believe in it from their perspective, not from your perspective.
46:54
I'll give you an example.
46:55
The president proposed last year personal social security accounts.
46:59
Conservatives believe in personal social security accounts because they believe very strongly in the free market and what the free market means.
47:06
I, last year spoke and gave a speech at the NAACP, and I talked most about social security reform.
47:11
People were stunned, why would you talk about that at the NAACP?
47:14
Well, if you look at the stats, you find out that 4 out of 10 African Americans over 65 years old, when they retire, all they have is a social security check.
47:22
They don't have a pension because too many folks have had to live paycheck to paycheck.
47:25
And so, I always argued social security reform from the perspective not only of the traditional conservative free market ideology.
47:33
But from the perspective of saying, imagine what would happen in this country if everyone who lived paycheck to paycheck could actually retire with a serious nest egg.
47:41
Now, people may disagree with the fact that that would happen, but the point is, if you can think about public policy from that perspective, you can find a good result.
47:48
I'll give you another example, the environment.
47:50
I was an environmental lawyer when I practiced law.
47:53
I think that some of the most promising things we can do with respect to the environment is to apply free market principles to solving environmental problems.
48:02
A great example is what they did with acid rain and the reductions in sulfur dioxide, that was essentially a free market approach.
48:09
In Maryland, my home state originally, there is wars for a long time, a net loss of wetlands along the Chesapeake Bay.
48:16
That's been reduced big time because of a free market approach, that's an example.
48:21
So I think what we all have to do is look for ways that say, how do we accomplish the goals that people on the other side have using the means that we have?
48:30
Or how do we accomplish the goals that we have using the means that they have? Final question. Yes, sir?
48:37
>> Speaker 3: Do your personal politics ever apply to the politics of the White House that you promote? >> Speaker 1: Sure.
48:42
>> Speaker 3: And if so, how do you navigate that moral.
48:45
>> Speaker 1: I mean, yes. What are examples?
48:48
We'll talk in a few years or something.
48:50
[LAUGH] But absolutely, I mean, look, I'm the chairman of the party.
48:54
Again, it's not about me, if I wanted to promote what I believe in, I would run for office and I'd be able to promote them.
49:01
I generally agree strongly with the president, I generally agree with the party.
49:04
But there are plenty of issues on which my approach is different than the party's approach, and what do I do in those situations?
49:11
I don't do something I believe to be unethical, if our party came out with something I believe to be morally wrong, I wouldn't be out promoting it.
49:19
But you ultimately say, at the end of the day, where do I agree more than where do I disagree, and you figure out where to go with it.
49:25
But that's in most entities, most private sector, certainly entities, you won't have the same kind of challenge you have here, where you're at promoting things, and do you agree with everything?
49:34
But anyone that says I agree with everything, that if you're a camp, a party chairman, or you're working for a political individual, it seems to me they're either not telling you the truth, or they're kind of an idiot.
49:44
Because there's obviously going to be areas of disagreement, and that will be one of my memoirs.
49:51
>> Speaker 1: [LAUGH] >> Speaker 1: Thank you all for being here and enjoy your evening and good luck to you all. >> [APPLAUSE]