AMBASSADOR'S REMARKS AND PUBLIC EVENTS

Leadership
Remarks by Ambassador Ross Wilson
Global Leadership Forum
Bahcesehir University

Istanbul, Turkey, June 2, 2006

I have to say first how humbled and honored I am to be invited to share a podium with President Demirel for the second time this week.  We were in Sanliurfa on Monday.  President Demirel is a great citizen of this country.  For over three decades, he was one of the world’s outstanding leaders.  He helped make Turkey a freer and more prosperous place.  He nurtured the strategic choice that previous Turkish leaders made to ally with the United States and countries of Western Europe.  He helped ensure that NATO successfully converted Cold War victory into peace and stability in Europe and Eurasia.  This contributed immensely to a world of rising opportunity for the people of this country and for friendship and cooperation between Turkey and the United States.

President Demirel, the United States and most of all Turkey owe you an immense debt of gratitude.

Mr. President, Rector Batum, academicians, students and guests, it is a special pleasure to be at Bahcesehir University today.  Rector Batum and Burak Kuntay were among the first to call on me after my arrival in Ankara last December.  They asked if I would consider speaking at this Global Leadership Forum.  I immediately said yes.  You young people here represent the future of this country, and so the honor is mine to share some thoughts with you on leadership and on the world.

My words won’t be as profound as what President Demirel had to say.  Mostly I’m going to tell some stories collected over nearly 30 years of my public service.  In line with today’s theme of leadership, they illustrate some of the items I try to keep in mind as I lead a US Mission in Turkey of over 1000 people and manage what is one of our most important and complicated bilateral relationships in the world.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the English verb “to lead” as “to show the way by going in advance.”  This is a good first principle, and it’s the excuse for my first story.

During our American Revolution, an officer in civilian clothes was traveling from city to city when he rode past a group of soldiers busily repairing a small fortification of rocks and tree limbs.  Their commander was shouting instructions, but making no attempt to help them.  When the passer-by asked the commander why he wasn’t helping, the man in charge replied with great dignity, “Sir, I am a corporal.”  The stranger apologized, got off his horse, and helped the exhausted soldiers himself.

When the job was completed, he turned to the corporal and said, “Mr. Corporal, next time you have a job like this and not enough men to do it, go to your commander-in-chief and I will come again to help you.”  Too late the corporal recognized his General, George Washington.

Washington led his soldiers to victory by showing the way, in this case literally and with his hands.  He led his corporal by showing him that the way to lead isn’t by barking commands, but by doing, working with others, and setting an example that people could follow.  This sums up one of the core ideas of leadership, whether it’s in the military, elsewhere in government, in international affairs, or even just in our daily lives.  To lead means to show the way by going in advance.

A second principle that I have tried to apply throughout my professional life – as a leader and as a follower – has been listening.  I once read the observation of a municipal leader in our state of Colorado who said, “The reason God gave us two ears and one mouth is that so we would listen twice as much as we talk.”  Leading is about listening and taking every possible opportunity to learn from others.

When I meet with my staff, the general expectation is that I will dispense wisdom, they will outline their problems, and then I will dispense more wisdom.  My expectation is that they will talk, and I will listen and learn.  By listening, I hope to enable them to draw the right conclusions and judgments themselves, or to make recommendations to me, or at least to learn which questions to ask and how to ask them.  I try to apply the same principle as ambassador to Turkey.  The United States does have a leadership role in this country and in the world.  One of the most effective ways of exercising that leadership is, it seems to me, to listen and engage; it certainly isn’t to bark commands.

I’ll illustrate a third item on my list of leadership principles, which I must note isn’t intended to be complete, with another story.  In the summer of 1949, terrible wildfires swept much of the American West, including one of our mountain states, Montana.  To deal with this, our Forestry Service adopted techniques learned during World War II, one of which was to parachute firefighters behind the fire line – behind enemy lines, as it were.  During one episode, a forest fire engulfed a parachute brigade.  They panicked and ran.

Despite the approaching flames, the commander of these firefighters, a man named Dodge, took out some matches, and set afire the tall dry grass that ran up a hill ahead of him.  The new blaze caught and spread rapidly, momentarily adding to the inferno.  He stepped into the middle of the burned-out area left behind, laid down and called out to his crew to join him.  He invented what came to be known as an “escape fire,” and it later became a standard part of fire training in the US Forestry Service.

Dodge’s men, however, either thought he was crazy or never heard his calls.  They ran right past him.  All but two were killed in the blaze.  Inside his escape fire, commander Dodge survived virtually unharmed.

What happened?  The men lost their ability to follow, to think coherently, to act together, and to recognize that a life-saving idea might be possible.  This is what happens is a disaster or a crisis, as I’m sure President Demirel knows well.  Leaders need to think clearly and coherently, they need to ensure their followers are well-practiced, and they need to have a plan – or at least be able to come up with one.

They also need agility to adapt that plan to the circumstances they face.  Here I have another story on the “Maradona Principle.”  Many of you are footballers or football fans.  You will recall the great Argentine footballer Diego Maradona.  In the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals, Maradona personally scored one the great goals in World Cup history by running 60 meters from inside his own half all the way downfield past five defenders before booting the ball into the English net.

The remarkable thing:  Maradona ran in a virtually straight line.  How do you beat five World Cup quarterfinalists by running in a straight line?  Maradona was fast, but the answer is that the English players reacted to what they expected him to do.  They expected him to move right or left.  Maradona’s eye was on the goal.  He knew the defenders’ expectations.  And he was able to exploit both these things to go straight on in and score.

The real influence a leader has is not so much related to a particular decision or brilliant thing he might accomplish; in truth, good leaders make just as many mistakes as everyone else.  It is, rather, in his ability to see the goal, design a framework, condition others’ expectations, cope with the unknown – and failure, and drive the matter home to a successful conclusion.  Franklyn Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did exactly this in World War II, just as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that started functioning a week ago owes to the drive and determination of Presidents Demirel, Aliyev and Shevardnadze and many others.

A fourth principle is putting people first.  This is especially important in international affairs and politics, and it’s often forgotten.  Every country is made up of its people and their leaders – who are human beings and who like being treated a certain way – and not another.

George Washington understood this when he encountered exhausted infantry in the story I told a minute ago.  In most walks of life, the circumstances are less dramatic.  I recently read an interview with a vice president of the American retail giant Wal-Mart whose job it was to open new stores.  The interviewer asked, “What keeps you up at night?”  The Wal-Mart executive replied, “People.”  For him, the biggest impediment to the expansion of his business was not locating stores or finding the right products, but finding and hiring the right people.

A good leader puts his people first, makes the best out of their abilities, and aims them – by his own example – at service, commitment and excellence.

A counterpart to putting people first, and a fifth principle of leadership, is letting them do their jobs.  The famous European pianist Christoph Eschenbach writes about his experience under Georg Szell, a Hungarian refugee of World War II who was conductor of one America’s best orchestras from 1946 to the early 1970s.  Szell of course succeeded by letting his musicians do their jobs, but any good conductor has a lot to say about how they do their jobs.  But Eschenbach remembers standing backstage with Maestro Szell after a long rehearsal and watching him get carried away.  He writes:

We were talking about a passage in the Mozart Concerto I was playing when Szell spotted a cleaning lady mopping the floor.  He gave her a stern conductor’s look, grabbed the mop, and bellowed at her, “Don’t do it that way.  Do it this way.”  And he proceeded to mop half the stage.

Leaving aside the fact that this great musician probably had better things to do, he had in one moment ensured that his cleaning lady would long detest him for being presumptuous and dictatorial.  Rather than getting the most out of this lowly staff member, he ensured he would get nothing; if he knew so much about cleaning, he could do it himself!

A sixth key item for any leader is to remember what you stand for.  One thing I’ve figured out in six months here is that Turkish citizens have a pretty defined sense of who they are.  As American ambassador, I am always conscious of what I stand for and what values my country strives to represent.  One way leaders act regarding values I’ll illustrate with another story that is told in a book entitled Born Losers: a History of Failure in America.

The book recounts the story of one William Henry Brisbane who ran a small store in the Midwestern city of Cincinnati in the 1840s.  It seems that Brisbane went to his bank one day and applied for a loan.  The bank did some checking.  Word came back that Brisbane had failed at every occupation he tried, including farmer, publisher and physician.  The bank investigator predicted that Brisbane would keep failing for the rest of his life.  The crowning evidence was the fact that he had inherited $100,000 – a fantastic sum in those days – and run through most of it in a very short period of time.

The story of this loser would have ended there, except that the author of this 21st century book looked further.  It turned out that Brisbane was a very successful plantation owner in the state of South Carolina.  He had decided slavery was wrong.  He sold out and moved north to areas where slavery was outlawed.  Then he felt guilty about leaving his slaves behind.  His $100,000 went to buy them back and set them free.  Other money went to publish books against slavery and to train himself as a physician to care for slaves who had run away.

Brisbane was not a loser or a failure, but a leader.  He remembered the principles of justice, liberty and “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Not every issue is so dramatic as slavery and human freedom.  But the leader who will be respected and followed his whole life long will be one who, among other things, is honest, true and lives a life guided by real values.

That brings me to a last item on my leadership list – imagination.  This is the quality that separates the outstanding from the merely excellent.  The Chairman of the Board of the Sony Corporation, Akio Morita, tells a story about two shoe salesmen who arrive in a remote corner of a tropical rainforest to investigate sales possibilities for their companies.

One sends a telegram back to his head office:  “No prospect of sales.  The natives do not wear shoes.”  The second wires an urgent message:  “No one wears shoes here.  We can dominate the market.  Send all possible stores.”

The first salesman saw a problem; the second found an opportunity.  That kind of philosophy made Sony one of the most successful corporations in post-World War II history.

That brings me back to where I started.  In talking about the legacy of President Demirel, I observed that the US-Turkish alliance in NATO that he did much to nurture helped create rising opportunity for the people of our two countries and the world.  We responded to threats from the Soviet Union not by drawing in, regarding everyone as an enemy, and relying only upon ourselves.  No, we responded by building from within and building out, by fundamentally changing the circumstances we faced so as to protect ourselves and our way of life, and seeing the struggle against Communism as an opportunity to secure a better world – not just avoid or contain a worse one.

Let me illustrate this with a more modern example.  For the past 20-25 years, the United States has faced rising drug trafficking, illegal immigration and potential instability in Latin America, including in neighboring Mexico.  We’re still struggling with these issues, but look at what have been the cornerstones of our response over the last 15 years.  We negotiated free trade agreements with nine of our Western Hemisphere neighbors to change their economic paradigm; these are among the fastest growing economies in the world.  We have provided billions of dollars in counter-drug assistance to change their security paradigm.  And to change the politics, we worked together our partners in the Organization of American States to support policies of democracy and good governance.  A history of dictatorships has been replaced – not completely, but largely – with democracies.

Not everything we have done has been popular, but the strategy was the right one.  It has transformed what were long hostile and, frankly speaking dependent relationships into genuine partnerships for economic freedom, democratic values and security.

Today, the United States and Turkey are working together in the Caucasus and Central Asia toward just such ends.  We are collaborating to stand up and support a strong, new, democratically-elected leadership in a free Iraq.  We are consulting closely on the diplomatic strategy and tactics to prevent a nuclear Iran.  Yes, the world is full of problems.  As leaders, the United States and Turkey can and should seize the opportunities those problems represent to transform the region and the world into a better, more secure and more prosperous place for our peoples.  That will be showing the way by going in advance.