Richard Haass on Leadership | Big Think

Richard Haass on Leadership

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Richard Haass applies the lessons of warfare to the business world.

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Dr. Richard Haass:

Dr. Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position he has held since July 2003. He is the author or editor of eleven books on American foreign policy, including War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (Simon and Schuster, May 2009). He is also the author of one book on management: The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization (Brookings, 1999).

From January 2001 to June 2003, Dr. Richard Haass was director of policy planning for the Department of State, where he was a principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate to hold the rank of ambassador, Dr. Haass also served as U.S. coordinator for policy toward the future of Afghanistan and U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. For his efforts, he received the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award.

Dr. Haass has extensive additional government experience. From 1989 to 1993, he was special assistant to President George H. W. Bush and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. In 1991, Dr. Haass was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for his contributions to the development and articulation of U.S. policy during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Previously, he served in the Departments of State (1981-85) and Defense (1979-80) and was a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate.

Dr. Haass also was vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, the Sol M. Linowitz visiting professor of international studies at Hamilton College, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Haass holds a BA from Oberlin College and the Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Oxford University. He has received honorary doctorates from Hamilton College, Franklin & Marshall College, Georgetown University, and Oberlin College.

Dr. Richard Haass was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What advice do you have for effective leadership?

Richard Haass:Actually it’s the same book, pretty much. The Power To Persuade was the first edition then we reissued a second edition which probably had 10% new material and changed the title so, they’re essentially a similar book.

Two things, one was teaching at the Kennedy School of Government and I couldn’t find the book that I felt told students who were thinking of careers in government but also can and I’ll get to this second but also in the private set. I couldn’t find the book I really liked and I had a lot of experience myself working in government.

What I wanted to do was to produce a book that will help people figure out what it is they wanted to accomplish and figure out how to accomplish it and the model I came up with was a compass that everybody had to think about their north which is their bosses, their south their staff, their east their colleagues and their west which who are those outside their organization but they still had to interact with. How they had a work off for those four directions of their compass to help them figure out what it was they could accomplish and to help pave the way to accomplishing it and that was essentially the model or the structure.

And I interviewed a lot of people and looked at a lot of people and essentially said, what explains why some intelligent people succeed and others fail and I wrote it mainly at the time for people going in to government but I’ve increasingly concluded that it makes just as much sense for people who are running a fortune of 500 companies because when you look at what the worlds these people now run or operate in, it looks an awful lot like a political world. They’re facing all this independent constituencies. They’re under the glare of 24/7 media and a constant new cycle. They’ve got to deal with unions, they’ve got to deal with competition globally and domestically, they’ve got to deal with environmental groups and citizen groups and state legislatures and Washington D.C.

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