It Worked For Me by Colin Powell Read Free Book Online

anyone, but why take a chance?”
    I’ve seen many busy bastards over the years . . . I shouldn’t call them bastards, but Gettys’s words have burned into my brain. Most of them are good people, not bastards. They just can’t ever let it go.
    A busy bastard never leaves the office until late at night. He has to go in on weekends. He shows up in the morning at hours suitable only for TV traffic announcers, failing to recognize that a couple dozen staff people have to show up at the same time to make sure he gets the support he can’t do without and to prove they’re as committed to the job as he is.
    In every senior job I’ve had I’ve tried to create an environment of professionalism and the very highest standards. When it was necessary to get a job done, I expected my subordinates to work around the clock. When that was not necessary, I wanted them to work normal hours, go home at a decent time, play with the kids, enjoy family and friends, read a novel, clear their heads, daydream, and refresh themselves. I wanted them to have a life outside the office. I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work. That kind of environment has always produced the best results for me.
    I tried to practice what I preached. I enjoy fixing things, especially old cars, and especially old Volvos. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lives across the river from Washington in a mansion in Fort Myer on a hill overlooking the city. A hundred feet behind the mansion were three garages. When I was Chairman, the garages were always filled with dead circa-1960 Volvos waiting to be fixed or stripped for parts. People who really needed to see me on weekends knew where to find me . . . under a Volvo. If they wanted to visit or chat, I didn’t mind, as long as I could continue working. I enjoyed analyzing a dead engine to discover why it wouldn’t start, reducing the possibilities for the failure down to one, fixing it, and then rejoicing when the engine fired up. My office problems seldom lent themselves to such straightforward, linear analysis. Once a car was running, I had no further interest in it. I would buy a ninety-nine-dollar Earl Scheib paint job and sell it as fast as possible. I was under a Volvo one Sunday in 1989 during our invasion of Panama when the Operations Center called to tell me we had picked up the dictator Manuel Noriega.
    While I was making the transition to Secretary of State, I interviewed a number of candidates for senior positions. Toward the end of one of these interviews, an extremely able and gifted Foreign Service officer asked if I would mind if he went out to jog in the afternoons.
    “You can go home and jog as far as I’m concerned,” I told him. “I trust you to know how to get your work done without me maintaining a sign-out sheet on you.”
    The very fact that a senior officer would ask such a question pointed out how necessary it was to demonstrate to my staff that I wasn’t a busy bastard.
    My mentor in this style of operating was Frank Carlucci. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, Frank was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense; and I became his military assistant. Because Frank always tried to leave the office at a reasonable hour and avoided the place like a plague on weekends, I worked reasonable hours and so did everyone else on his staff. We ran a very efficient office.
    In the spring of 1981, I persuaded Frank to release me for a field assignment. The officer who replaced me, a compulsive worker, stayed late every night. Even though Frank only rarely came in on weekends, and never for more than a couple of hours, his new military assistant felt he had to be there. Sure enough, all those extra hours generated more work for the entire staff. The workload expanded to fill the time. Most of it was make-work, anything but necessary or important. Frank found himself with additional paper he didn’t ask for, need, or expect. He had to start working