Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
A little extra perspective from Brungardt Law conveyed through conversations with individuals of various backgrounds exploring the interplay of practices, policies, and laws with decision making and leadership. An opportunity to learn how to navigate towards productive outcomes as well as appreciate the journey through the experiences and observations of others.
Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
Cultivating Capable Individuals: A Conversation with Allan Mustard
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Welcome to Brungardt Law's Lagniappe! In this episode, Allan Mustard, former U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan, shares with us his experiences and observations from his entry into the Foreign Agricultural Service during the Cold War to his eventual leadership of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.
This podcast is hosted by Maurice A. Brungardt.
Hello, welcome to the Brungert Law Podcast. Purpose of the podcast is to explore what makes for effective practices, policies, and laws which ultimately enable productive decision-making and leadership, particularly in national security. We accomplish this through discussion with individuals representing various disciplines and experiences. Likewise, we also examine what makes for effective decision-making and leadership that will enable good policies, good practices, good laws. Today, my guest is Alan Bustard. He's the former U.S. Ambassador to the country of Turkmenistan. Welcome to the podcast, Alan.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:So, if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about yourself, uh, your background, how you ended up joining the Foreign Agricultural Service.
SPEAKER_02:I grew up on a dairy farm in western Washington state and first became aware of the outside world, the fact that there are foreign countries at the age of five, when my parents took me aboard a uh cargo ship, a freighter, out of Bombay that was run by the Cindia Steam Navigation Company. I was first introduced to people who were not from the United States and who not only spoke a foreign language, but also had a rather interesting cuisine. It was my introduction to Indian food. That sparked an interest in international affairs that led me to study foreign languages first in high school, then in college, and uh ultimately to a foreign affairs career.
SPEAKER_01:And what college did you go to?
SPEAKER_02:I started at Grace Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington, which is a two-year community college, studied German and Russian there, then went on to the University of Washington in Seattle, uh, earned uh two bachelor's degrees there, one in Slavic languages and literature, and the other in political science.
SPEAKER_01:And how did you end up discovering the Foreign Agricultural Service?
SPEAKER_02:I was working for the U.S. Information Agency as a guide interpreter on an agricultural exhibit in the Soviet Union. Uh one evening I was at the Marine Corps Bar. Uh I was actually recruited into the Foreign Service in a bar, uh strange as that may seem, and was in conversation with the assistant agricultural attache, Jim Brough, who said, You speak uh good Russian, you have an agricultural background, grew up on a farm. What you lack is a degree in agricultural economics. If you were to go get that, you could come work for us as an agricultural attache. And I thought that sounded pretty good.
SPEAKER_01:And what was the time frame, the context of that?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that was January 1979, depth of the Cold War during the Brezhnev era.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. So now that pretty much set the groundwork for your eventual career in the Foreign Agricultural Service and eventually becoming U.S. ambassador.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I went back to the States, uh, spent a year working for Jewish Family Service of Seattle, resettling Soviet Jews who were uh being allowed out of the country at that point. And in the meantime, I applied to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, entered the master's program in agricultural economics there.
SPEAKER_01:And when you joined the Foreign Agricultural Service, what were your peers like, the other new members of the FAS?
SPEAKER_02:Most of them at that time had a degree in agricultural economics, usually a master's degree. Many of them were Peace Corps volunteers who had uh gotten the international bug while serving in the Peace Corps and wanted more of it.
SPEAKER_01:In reflection, as you joined the Foreign Agricultural Service, uh, what was the training like from your perspective?
SPEAKER_02:It was all on-the-job training. Uh you came into the agency as a civil servant, you spent uh minimum of two years in Washington learning the ropes, uh, learning how to do the analysis that FAS does, and then they would ship you overseas as an assistant at a Shea to work for uh a section chief who was more experienced.
SPEAKER_01:Did the initial training include elements of prepping you for decision making or leadership, or did you find it was more administrative in nature?
SPEAKER_02:Well, the bulk of the training was very oriented towards commodity analysis. So that was the heart and soul of FAS at the time was commodity analysis. And we were sent over to assess crop conditions. Uh how are the livestock doing? What are the prospects either for competition from that country or for us to be able to sell something to that country? So that was that was the bulk of the training. I think I had a one two-week crash course in personnel management, and I had about a three-day crash course in uh acquisition procurement, and that was it in terms of management.
SPEAKER_01:From your understanding, how has the initial train training changed since when you first came on board? If it's changed at all?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's changed quite a bit because we have had difficulty recruiting people with agricultural backgrounds. So as a result, we now actually have had for the last few years formal courses for new hires to teach them not only about what it what they need to know in order to succeed overseas, but we also teach them a bit about agriculture. A while back I was uh asked to come and talk about the history of the Foreign Agricultural Service, because I'm kind of unofficially I'm the agency historian. And I started out by asking some questions. One question I asked was, what is the difference between lard and tallow? Now, if you grew up on a farm, you know what the difference is between lard and tallow. Lard comes from pigs and tallow comes from uh bovines, cattle. Not one person in the audience knew. And this just gives you an indication. I asked some other questions and they couldn't answer any of them either.
SPEAKER_01:So you were among the few that had a rural background?
SPEAKER_02:Well, uh not at the time I was hired, but if you go fast forward to the 2020s, this the the situation has changed dramatically. There are very few people in the United States now who are involved in production agriculture.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Uh it's it's less than 2 percent of the population that is actually involved in in production agriculture in the United States. So hiring farm kids is a much harder thing to do because there just aren't very many of us left.
SPEAKER_01:Understood. And part of your group when you first came on board, demographically, uh were there women in your class?
SPEAKER_02:That was one of the big shifts that occurred in the 1980s, was up until then we had a few token women and a very small number of token blacks in the organization. Um there was almost a quota, you might say, on how many we would admit. And in the 1980s, that kind of blew open. There was a class action suit filed against the Foreign Agricultural Service in the middle of the 1980s, which FAS actually won. But the judge in deciding the case in favor of FAS ruled you guys need to do a better job of hiring minorities and women to avoid a lawsuit in the future that you might lose. Because we were bringing in blacks, but we were only hiring them for clerical positions. We were hiring very few for the professional series. And that changed in the 1980s. We began recruiting women, we began recruiting members of minority groups, um, and really opened up the agency quite a bit.
SPEAKER_01:And when you left, do you believe that the Foreign Agricultural Service had made productive strides in this regard?
SPEAKER_02:You know, there's a good way to do things, and then there's a wrong million wrong ways of doing things. Uh, and I think FAS missed the boat. They didn't do the right thing. If we wanted to have credible agricultural attaches overseas, we needed to recruit from the land grant universities, which include a number of historically black uh colleges and universities that are also land grants. We could have gone out to the Hispanic universities and colleges and recruited people with agricultural backgrounds, but we chose not to do that. And the reason I think that we chose not to do that was because the leadership of the Foreign Agricultural Service in the 1980s was convinced that women and minorities couldn't do the job. So if we're going to recruit them, why bother to recruit for quality? Let's just throw the doors open and let anybody in. And to some degree that's what happened. So we lost a lot of agricultural expertise during that period because we didn't do the right job of recruiting from places where you find people with agricultural backgrounds who are also interested in international affairs. They're out there, we just didn't do a good job of recruiting them.
SPEAKER_01:And compared to today, do you think that has changed or it's hard to say?
SPEAKER_02:The administrator of uh the Foreign Ag Service recently tried to go back to recruiting people with master's degrees in agricultural economics. He said we have forgotten our roots. Uh whether he'll be successful in that uh remains to be seen. One of the issues we have is that if you go to the land grant universities today and look at their ag econ departments, most of the master's candidates in agricultural economics today, uh about 50 percent of them are foreigners. It's foreign students coming to the United States to study. So you can't take them into the Foreign Agricultural Service because you have to be a U.S. citizen and have to be uh able to get a top secret security clearance to join the Foreign Service. Uh that's a problem. So again, there's a shrinking pool now that makes it more of a challenge.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. Going to your comment about now there's a good way of doing things and a variety of bad ways of doing the same thing. Throughout your career, what are some of your observations of what contributes to your and your colleagues' uh decision-making skills and leadership development?
SPEAKER_02:Well, you know, you can learn lessons from anybody. Um there was no formal leadership training in the Foreign Agricultural Service when I was coming up through the ranks until about the middle of the 1990s when Administrator Dwayne Auker decided that we should start something called the Leadership Academy. And we were all put through about a two-week course in leadership. Uh until that time, you basically learned by observing people who were your role models, and role models can be positive or they can be negative.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Uh so I more or less was an autodidact. I did a lot of reading. I read books on leadership, I read books on management. And then I had certain role models who were very positive, and I had some I had two in particular role models that I worked for who any time I had had a decision to make, I would think, what would so-and-so do? And I would do the opposite.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. In terms of the role models and the books, are there any particular books that still remain with you that you would recommend to someone uh to read?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I've got a whole list. Um I've got a whole list of of books. Um when you post the podcast, I think it'd be easier for me just to give you the list and you append that to the podcast than rather to have me sit here and try and dictate it.
SPEAKER_01:Fair enough. Just thinking if there is one or two that particularly came to mind that you know you've gone back to over the years. Uh that again, the there there's plenty of quality literature out there, uh, but sometimes there are ones that for whatever reason they strike one personally as the most influential. So I was just kind of curious if there was any one or two books that you periodically even today will turn to.
SPEAKER_02:Well, actually, if you want to try a book of fiction that I go back to regularly, it's Twelve O'Clock High by Byrne Leigh, which of course was uh turned into a movie uh after World War II and uh uh a TV series, that movie is used in in leadership training. And it actually is a true story. Okay, it was it was fictionalized, uh it's the fictionalized account of the 918th bombardment group of the Eighth Air Force during World War II. Uh it actually, if you divide 918 by three, you come up with 306, and it was the actual story of the 306th bombardment group in World War II. It is a tale of how to take a failing organization and turn it into a winning organization uh through leadership. And it's all a true story, basically. Uh it's the story of uh uh Colonel Frank Armstrong, okay United States Army Air Forces, uh, who turned around the 306th at a critical juncture in World War II.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. And in terms of role models not necessarily asking you to name names, but in terms of their particular traits that influenced you. What stands out?
SPEAKER_02:Openness, willingness to communicate, uh open door policy, willing to hear what others have to say. Uh leaders who fail are those who close the doors and uh insist that you make appointments a day in advance before you come in. My uh oral history transcript has uh some rather pointed anecdotes about people who had closed door policies and where that led to catastrophe.
SPEAKER_01:In terms of your own personal uh experiences leading uh others, mentoring, uh guiding folks uh in a particular direction, whether it was uh to execute foreign policy or how they uh could more effectively uh lead their own teams. Um what comes to mind uh that you found successful in when you were providing guidance to others?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's a two-way street, you know. Um there are people who are receptive of coaching and there are people who are not receptive to coaching. And what I found successful was when I had somebody uh working for me who was receptive to coaching and wanted more because that individual wanted to succeed and saw that success was something that could be achieved through learning. Uh there are people who come to the job and are convinced that they already have all the answers. They know more than you do. Uh and they are not receptive to to any kind of coaching. So I thought that was in re reflecting on that question, I think that is the single most important element is that if a person is receptive to being coached.
SPEAKER_01:Takes two to tango.
SPEAKER_02:It really does. Once you have somebody who's receptive, everything else is just a downhill slope from then on, because you, as the uh more experienced person in that relationship, you see more. You you you understand more about where events are going to lead. And you're able to say, hey, uh, did you consider this? Did you think about that? Are you communicating with the people you need to communicate about this? Uh are you do you have the technical skills you need to succeed in this, or do you need some coaching in the technical skills of how to do this? And these are the sorts of things that if you've got someone who says, Yeah, I know everything. I already know that. You know, I have a master's degree in agricultural economics. I don't need you to tell me how to do this. Okay, that's great. Go ahead. Uh, do what you need to do. And then if that person fails, it's well, it's not my fault. You know, uh you didn't tell me how to do this. Well, okay, I tried, but you're not receptive.
SPEAKER_01:In terms of leadership and going to your particular role as U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan, um, do you recall any sort of particular enthusiasm or apprehensions you may have felt as you were entering that new role? You're leading a diplomatic mission. You are the president's envoy, the special representative uh to the country.
SPEAKER_02:About six months in, the uh regional psychiatrist came down from uh Moscow uh to do one of the usual routine checks that that that uh the regional psychiatrists do. I, of course, asked my uh my country team, I said, please set a good example, make an appointment with her, with the regional psychiatrist, sit down with her for an hour, and then encourage your staff to do it because she needs a baseline of how crazy we all are uh so she can tell if we're crazier than usual the next time she comes. So uh they did, and and she and I, of course, had about a one-hour set-down uh over uh steak dinner at uh one of the three steakhouses in in Ashkabat. And she asked me that question. She said, How how's the transition going? How hard has it been for you to make the transition from being a section chief in an embassy to being in the ambassador? And I stopped and just wow, uh nobody's asked me that before. And I kept trying to think of something that had bothered me, and I finally said, you know, uh this has been a very smooth transition. I hadn't really thought about this before because the job is so similar to being a section chief in an embassy. You're dealing with people, you're dealing with policy, and you're dealing with programs. So if you are competent as a section chief and are competent at at dealing with people, personnel, with programs and with policy, then you can handle uh an ambassadorship. You just have to show greater leadership. It's it's a I wouldn't say it's a quantum leap, but it's maybe an order of magnitude more complicated because there's more going on. It's like dealing with a uh 12-lane freeway instead of a two-lane freeway. But if you know the fundamentals of leadership, you can do that.
SPEAKER_01:Looking outward and reflecting on that time. So going from leading the folks at the embassy in this new role as U.S. ambassador, now interacting with your counterparts from Turkmenistan, reflecting. Do you think you were appropriately enabled, empowered as to what you were supposed to be doing on behalf of the United States?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely not. Um in uh June of 2016, I was summoned to the foreign ministry and informed that uh our new embassy, which was under construction, was in violation of the local building code. The uh uh city of Ashkabat is a is in the process of becoming a totally planned city where all buildings are aligned in perfect rows and they are all faced with white marble. It is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest concentration of white marble-faced buildings in the world. The president had flown over our chancery, which was under construction uh in his helicopter, as he uh did every month, flew over the city to check on construction progress, and had discovered that our chancery was seven meters north of an imaginary red line to which it was supposed to be tangent, not protruding over. So we were ordered to stop construction, which uh I did. Uh, the the repercussions, if we had not done that, were going to be quite severe. There were going to be sanctions imposed against us, against the company that was building the chancery, and against the Turkish subcontractors. People were actually going to end up in prison over it if we didn't stop construction. So I ordered construction to stop, and that got me into a fight with uh the uh Office of Overseas Building Operations, OBO, with which I assume you are familiar.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I uh I actually served in an assignment as a uh site security manager for OBOs.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay, so you know. So OBO tried to continue with the construction in spite of uh uh the the prohibition by the Turkmen government. Uh that got me into a fight with them, and the result was that uh the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia decided that we were going to stop doing certain interactions with the government of Turkmenistan. The result of that was that the Turk government of Turkmenistan would not approve appointments with me, with their officials. So for the next roughly three years, I was not able to get appointments with senior government officials, and this principal deputy assistant secretary of state couldn't understand why not. Uh the economy was tanking, I needed to get in to talk to the uh head of the central bank, I needed to get in to talk to the Minister of the Economy, and I couldn't get appointments with them. When I left post in 2019, I had a whole list of outstanding appointment requests that the government of Turkmenistan refused to honor because of this uh disagreement, we'll call it that, between OBO and the government of Turkmenistan over construction of the embassy.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I can only imagine some of the complications this must have created. I mean, for for our listeners, Turkmenistan is the world's 52nd largest country, but it has the fifth largest reserves and natural gas.
SPEAKER_02:Uh so it was also important to us at that time because we had a war going on in Afghanistan. It's on the border with Afghanistan, and we were we had use of Turkmen airspace for evacuating wounded warriors. It was the fastest route to get them out to uh Lonstuhl, uh where the military hospital is. So we we had good reason to want to have good cordial relations with uh Turkmenistan and OBO screwed that up.
SPEAKER_01:How do you think this could have been avoided, or could it have been avoided? Because in one sense, uh what the government was asking, uh the Turkmenistan government, uh it was very idiosyncratic in nature. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02:Actually it's not, because uh all countries have building codes. It's just a decision that you're going to uh abide by the building code. Um after OBO began to accuse me of having been the root of the problem, um, I blew the whistle to the OIG, Office of Inspector General of the Department of State. OIG did a full investigation, which uh cleared me and made it clear that OBO knew about the red line. OBO simply ignored the red line. So uh it was known knowledge. Uh they should have done it, they chose not to do it.
SPEAKER_01:So giving OBO the benefit of the doubt, since there are no representatives here to sort of defend themselves, uh but for lack of awareness, whatever the cause of maybe, negligence or uh intentional, this compromised our ability to support our troops in Afghanistan.
SPEAKER_02:Potentially, it could have led to that. Fortunately, uh I was able to maintain uh relations at some minimal level. Uh I was able to communicate with the foreign ministry. Uh I did have regular meetings with the foreign ministry. So we were able to have minimal communication uh to maintain those lines of communication between Afghanistan and Lon Stuhl using Turkmen airspace. Uh but my ability as the ambassador to meet with local officials, host country officials, was completely compromised.
SPEAKER_01:With that in mind, what do you think you did that worked, uh that allowed you uh to lead our foreign policy initiatives under those sets of conditions to be able to engage with uh the officials of Turkmenistan?
SPEAKER_02:Well, the engagement with officials of Turkmenistan had to be done at a lower level, um, and that meant that we were not able to meet with the ministers themselves. It meant that my lower-level staff could occasionally get in to meet with lower-level uh personnel, but we were not able to accomplish very much at the policy level except by interacting with the foreign minister himself.
SPEAKER_01:So you were extremely then reliant on your team and those at the mission.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Especially the local staff. One of the things about Turkmen culture is that if you went to high school or college with somebody, you have that social connection that transcends any government prohibition on contact with foreigners. And so those of my local staff who were high school or college classmates of people in government could talk to them, invite them over for dinner, could could tell them, hey, we're having this problem in the embassy, can you help out? And that was useful to a degree. Now, obviously, people at that level, again, are not policy-making officials, they couldn't really influence policy, but they could give us guidance as to how to work around problems, how to try to solve problems.
SPEAKER_01:That particular um comment, so prohibition on interacting with foreign nationals, could you explain a bit about that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, at one point the uh uh foreign ministry informed us that we could not have contact with uh Turkmen nationals without the min uh ministry's permission. And I pushed back against that. I said, you know, if you keep telling me this, I'm gonna pull out my cell phone, I'm gonna call Washington, I'm gonna tell Washington to have the Office of Foreign Missions inform the ambassador that he can't have dinner with an American citizen without permission of the Department of State. And uh that that upset them. I said, well, it's called reciprocity. The R-word. And they didn't like the concept of reciprocity, but I said, if you want to tell me that my officers cannot meet with host country nationals here in Turkmenistan without your permission in advance, then I'm gonna tell you we're gonna reciprocate, we're gonna do the exact same thing to you. And Washington backed me up on that. OFM was great, the Office of Foreign Missions was great, uh, backed me up on these sorts of things. Uh at one point they came to me, the the Turkmen government uh said that I needed to paint my uh personal vehicle white. Because all cars are supposed to be white, because that brings good luck or something like that. I'm not sure. Um I had a black RAV 4 that was my personal runabout. And I said, okay, if you force me to do that, uh I'm going to call Washington, have OFM tell your ambassador that he has to paint his car red, white, and blue, the colors of the American flag. We will reciprocate in kind. And they backed off. Uh I I didn't have to paint my car white.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. During this time as ambassador, did you find yourself reaching out to fellow ambassadors for advice or guidance or others reaching out to you?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yes. Uh it's probably the most closely knit diplomatic corps I've ever encountered. Uh we were constantly summoned to participate in ceremonies. So uh if a hotel was opening, we would be summoned for the grand opening of. That hotel. If the president was doing something uh special, we would be summoned for that. There was an annual tree planting uh to celebrate uh uh uh the uh Persian New Year, Novruz. So we were regularly congregating, and when you're sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for something to happen, or you're standing in the middle of a parking lot waiting for something to happen, what do you do? You talk to your colleagues. We socialized together, and yes, there were there were certain ambassadors who were very well plugged in, uh particularly the former Soviet state ambassadors. Uh so I would socialize with them, and then uh I, of course, as I was ambassador of the largest embassy in Ashkabat. We had uh if you don't count the Marines, we had uh about 26 officers and specialists, which made us the largest embassy by far in Turkmenistan. And as a result, we had resources at our disposal that other embassies did not have. If you only have three officers in your embassy, you don't have a dedicated economics officer who's studying the economy. You don't have a dedicated political officer who is studying the politics. So oftentimes the smaller embassies would look to us for guidance or for help in figuring out what's going on in the country. So absolutely, we there was a lot of interaction within the diplomatic corps.
SPEAKER_01:And what about among your peers in the U.S. Foreign Service? Did you find yourself sometimes picking up the phone and reaching out to an ambassador? Oh, yeah, whether it was in the region or halfway around the world, hey, I have this situation.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah, absolutely. Six weeks into my uh my uh tour of duty, I had a personnel issue that came up, and I got on the phone to Marsha Bernicat, who had been the discipline DAS, as they call it, the uh the deputy assistant secretary in HR who deals with disciplinary problems. And she was in Bangladesh at that point, so I got on the phone and called Dhaka, and okay, Marsha, how do I deal with this? And she she gave me some very good professional advice. So absolutely yes. George Kroll was uh was in Tashkent uh initially, and then he moved to uh Astana, Kazakhstan, and I was on the phone with George periodically to pick his brain because he was an experienced ambassador, too.
SPEAKER_01:And did you find you were picking brains on policy issues or on personnel issues, or all of the above?
SPEAKER_02:All of the above. I mean, uh when you're a first-time ambassador, if you're smart, you'll reach out to more experienced colleagues and and and ask them for advice. So uh to me that was that was just kind of obvious that I would reach out to some of my my old friends who know more than I know.
SPEAKER_01:In terms of advice, uh you're among the the few that I've encountered that actually formalized some kind of leadership program for uh individuals at post. If you wouldn't mind sharing uh how that started and how it evolved and what motivated you to do that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I hit the jackpot in 2002 in that I was uh invited to participate in the senior seminar uh in foreign affairs, which used to be about two dozen people who spent 10 months at the Foreign Service Institute studying leadership and management. And they were drawn from across the uh foreign affairs community as well as the FBI uh and uh the military services. So it was started under President Kennedy. Um it ended uh when uh Colin Powell decided that it it it had no longer, it no longer served a purpose and should be revamped and made broader, not just 24 people. But I was in the penultimate program. Uh it was 10 months of very intense study of leadership and management. We traveled around the country, met with leaders ranging from the superintendent of schools in Seattle to George Schultz down in Palo Alto, to uh we met Colin Powell. We met all kinds of people all over the country who shared their insights into leadership and management. And at the end of it, I thought, you know, the Foreign Agricultural Service paid for a 10-month sabbatical to study leadership and management. I need to give something back. So I, if you look in this bottom shelf here, these are my notes from the senior seminar.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Quite a few binders.
SPEAKER_02:Quite a few binders and other materials. I plowed through those materials and distilled them down into a uh six-session crash course in leadership, which I then began to teach to my subordinates. So when I went to Moscow in 2003, uh for the next five years, uh any subordinates who wanted to take that crash course were allowed to take that crash course. I did the same thing in uh Mexico and then did it in New Delhi. And when I got to Oshkabot, I began offering it in Oshkabat to officers who wanted to take it. Uh, after one of the inspections by uh the uh Marine Corps, uh the uh Marine inspector came to me and said, Um, the Marines would like to take this course too. Why are you not offering it to them? So I started including some of the Marines in that course. So that's the genesis of it. It came out of the senior seminar and uh is something that reflected 10 months of uh intensive study.
SPEAKER_01:What are elements that you've maintained uh in that course, and what are elements that you've seen as uh worthy of deletion or modification?
SPEAKER_02:Well, the course itself is basically an outline of the the fundamental the fundamental premise of the course is that there's only one person in the world who can teach you leadership. Look at yourself in the mirror, that's the person. I cannot teach you how to be a leader. Only you can teach yourself how to be a leader. And what I give in the course is a framework for how to teach yourself leadership skills. And it's all based on uh observation of the world around you, much of it through reading of current events in the mass media. So uh I identify five attributes that a leader has to have, which are communication skills, interpersonal skills, technical skills, cognitive skills, and then your character, which tends to be overlooked a lot. And then I steal something from Colin Powell. Colin Powell teaches us that leaders have four tasks. Tell the followers what the mission is, give the followers the tools they need to do the job, tell them how they're doing, and watch out for them. And if you create a matrix of these five attributes and the four tasks, you come up with a matrix of what a leader needs to do. It's really pretty simple. And then I tell them, go out and find readings in the popular literature in mass media that exemplify these five characteristics and four attribute or five characteristics, the attributes and uh the four tasks of the leader, look for both successes and failures. Because we can learn as much or more from failure as we can from success.
SPEAKER_01:An individual that comes to mind, uh, because sometimes he's been described as a failed leader, uh is former president Jimmy Carter. How would you contextualize him?
SPEAKER_02:Jimmy Carter lacked the strategic vision. He lacked the cognitive skills. Now, let me differentiate between intelligence and cognitive skills. Carter uh you can't be dumb and be a nuclear engineer, which is what he was. He was trained as a nuclear engineer in the Navy. So obviously highly intelligent. But Carter as a leader tended to delve into details that were way below his pay grade. Um if you look, for example, at the uh botched rescue of the hostages in Iran, Carter was dictating how many helicopters they could use.
unknown:Okay?
SPEAKER_02:That's not something the president should do. It's the the task force commander of putting together the task force of military operatives who were going to go in and rescue the hostages, should have decided how many helicopters they were going to have. So I think Carter failed not because he lacked intelligence, but because he lacked the cognitive skills to know what his role was and when to delegate decisions to people who had better technical skills.
SPEAKER_01:And what do you think he did well?
SPEAKER_02:Well, his moral character was unparalleled. Uh we have rarely had a president who was as morally um astute as President Carter. Uh he really set the standard for morality in office.
SPEAKER_01:Tell us a little more about uh your leadership crash course and the sense of over time how you saw it evolve.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the main evolution was that uh every morning you pick up the newspaper and you scan it and you you look for uh course materials. And uh it's a target-rich environment. You know, there are a lot of people out there who are very good at certain things, but they we all have blind spots. And somebody lets their blind spot get the better of them, and you have uh something that goes off the rails.
SPEAKER_01:That reminds me of something uh that I read uh and it was about overestimating one's abilities and underestimating the environment, uh, which can apply at an individual level in terms of making decisions uh or at a much higher level strategically speaking.
SPEAKER_02:Um Well, there's such a thing as a tactical error with strategic consequences, and uh you encounter that a lot in foreign affairs.
SPEAKER_01:Could you give us an example?
SPEAKER_02:Uh I guess the biggest example I ever had to deal with personally was in Bosnia when I was based in Vienna and covering Bosnia-Herzegovina. And uh we had a a blow-up that didn't affect me personally, but uh it wasn't something I was personally involved in, I should say, but it affected all of us who were dealing with the Bosnians at the time. There was a uh stribilization force, which was the multinational force that was maintaining the peace in Bosnia, sent out a patrol. It was commanded by uh uh a U.S. Army lieutenant. They would come in on six-month rotations. So they get kind of a briefing before they arrived. This is Bosnia, this is what you're supposed to do. They got a little handbook that was about an inch thick on that they were supposed to read. And then they were sent out and to do their jobs. So this patrol went out and was running around the Republika Srbska, which is the Serbian side of Bosnia, which of course was bifurcated between the Muslim Croat Federation and the Serbs. Uh, while they were out on patrol, they came across a bunch of ethnic Croatian fighters who had been trapped behind enemy lines, and they were trapped there and wanted to get out, and so they surrendered to this American army, a bunch of Humvees. Well, there wasn't room in the Humvees to transport them. So the lieutenant and the lieutenant couldn't raise headquarters on his radio, it's mountainous, and the radio connection didn't exist. So he turned them over to the local police, because that's what army regulations call for. If if uh if if a an enemy combatant surrenders and you don't have the capacity to take them uh under control yourself, you turn them over to the local constabulary. So they turned these ethnic Croatians, Croats, to the Serbian police, and they were killed.
SPEAKER_01:So this would be an example of an established practice or policy that undermines productive decision making.
SPEAKER_02:Correct. The issue went all the way to the president, President Clinton at the time, and uh uh President uh uh Izitbegovich of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was a tactical decision with strategic consequences because it threw a wrench in uh what we were trying to accomplish in Bosnia. Uh not just not just the military, not just the State Department, but I as uh at the point, at that point was working for the Foreign Agricultural Service. We were doing food aid, we were doing technical assistance, we were trying to interact with the Bosnian government, which was already dysfunctional at that point. Um and this just made it more dysfunctional.
SPEAKER_01:So the flip side of this is for the young officer in the field who has to now make this decision as to what to do, had he made the opposite decision, he's you know, this is speculation at this point, but we could probably imagine the young officer thinking, well, if we take charge of these individuals and bring them back with us, I'm in violation of my policy, and there are going to be repercussions for me.
SPEAKER_02:Well, he wouldn't have been in violation of the policy. The policy was you can either take them into custody or you can turn them over to the local police. I mean, the the alternative for him was to take one of the Humvees or two of the Humvees, because they're supposed to go in pairs, send it, send it for help, say we need a truck up here to haul these POWs back. Okay. There there were alternatives that he could have pursued. But uh again, you take a uh lieutenant who's pretty junior, he's going by the Army regulations, and he completely zoned out on what the strategic consequences of this were going to be turning ethnic Croats over to ethnic Serbian police.
SPEAKER_01:So with that in mind, uh and looking back, what do you think have been established policies or practices within the government, whether they were part of the U.S. Department of State or the Foreign Agricultural Service, that you found would enable people, allow them to make good decisions uh to uh be effective leaders?
SPEAKER_02:Well, actually I think uh uh I look more to the military for a good practice, which is uh the commander's intent. If you're in the military, uh the commander tells you, this is this is my intent, this is why we're here, this is what we're going to do, this is what we need to do. Okay and uh I learned about this again in the senior seminar. We went out to the uh Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and the commandant of the Air Force Academy shared with us his commander's intent document, which was about three or four pages long. And it was just big, a bullet list of, you know, this is what I like, this is what I don't like, this is what we're here to do, this is what we're trying to accomplish. Here's some suggestions I have for how to be successful in your job here. So I took that with me when I went out to the uh to Moscow uh for the Foreign Agricultural Service. I wrote up a Section Chief's intent document, uh, told my subordinates, this is what I expect from you, this is what you can expect from me, because loyalty has to go in both directions, otherwise leadership fails. You uh here are some things you can do that will make you a stronger employee and make you more successful. Everybody wants to be successful, of course, because that's how you get promoted. Uh did that in all of my overseas posts, up to and including the uh the ambassadorship in Ashkabat. So I got to Oshkabat and put it out now as the ambassador's intent instead of section chief's intent. Uh the result of that was that in November of 2015, uh, Office of Inspector General sent a routine inspection team out to do a routine inspection of Embassy Oshkabot. And the head of the inspection team came to me and he said, um, well, I have good news and bad news. Uh the bad news is that we're only allowed to put in our inspection report one best practice. And we've decided that the best practice we're going to showcase is something else, something your RSO is doing, which you as a DS officer will love. But your ambassador's intent document has gotten so many favorable comments from across the embassy. Everybody loves it. It tells them what they need to know. Uh we're going to put it in its own text box in the final report as a uh as something to be emulated. This is this is a practice to be emulated. So uh the i it comes down to communication. You know, you're communicating the grand scheme of things so that people understand this is what we're here for. This is why we are doing what we're doing. Um don't lose sight of the greater purpose of our presence in this country.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I always like to say communication is primarily the root of all failure and success. Yeah. And you can have your message perfect, but it could still get lost in the delivery.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh but it's definitely an important part when it comes to decision making and ultimately leadership. Um speaking of which, uh mistakes. Are there any recurring themes that you have observed or even reflecting mistakes you have made uh when it came to decision making or leadership? Any commonalities that perhaps people could learn to avoid? Because it seems that again, decision making and leadership, uh, as I'm finding more and more, and I found through the progression of my career uh and as as an attorney when I'm advising people, uh it's it's a learned skill. You can actually become a better decision maker, a better leader. Uh, but sometimes people need to have the light shined on how mistakes are made and that there are recurring themes.
SPEAKER_02:Well, to me, uh the lesson I learned over the years is that the so-called hard decisions are usually pretty obvious. What makes it hard is emotion or some sort of vested interest. Uh somebody's ox will get gored. So uh people talk about personnel issues as being hard decisions. You know, I need to discipline this person, I need to take an adverse action against this person, I need to fire this person. And I'm one of those rare federal managers who has actually fired people. I have documented and fired people.
SPEAKER_01:Um That's a rarity considering the bureaucracy that's involved.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it is a rarity. But I did it uh and did it more than once. The decisions themselves are not hard. The decisions are easy. The question then becomes: am I willing to invest the time and effort necessary to promulgate this decision and then to push it past the resistance that I'm going to encounter. And if you have weak managers who don't have backbones, they'll say, oh, that's such a tough decision to make. I can't, I can't do that. Whereas if you have people who have moral principles and a backbone, they'll say, no, it's worth the effort because it's going to avert problems downstream. People will see that I am a decisive leader and that I will do the right thing, and they'll back off and they'll do the right thing themselves. They won't try to challenge me, which is what I found over my career. It was interesting when I went to Mexico, uh, we had an employee in our embassy in Mexico who'd been there for uh almost 20 years, uh, who was notorious for doing no work.
SPEAKER_01:I assume this is a locally employed staff.
SPEAKER_02:Locally employed staff. He was notorious for doing no work. And uh when I started to document him and to make clear you're going to start doing your job, he picked up the phone and started calling his buddies in Washington, with whom he had worked previously, uh asking them to intervene on his behalf and you know get Mustard to back off. And they told him, There are a lot of people we can control, Mustard's not one of them. And he ended up retiring. Uh we got rid of him, an unproductive person who was drawing a federal salary and was doing no work, and I got rid of him. Was that a hard decision? No, it was not a hard decision. Was it difficult to get rid of him? No, because I had already established a track record that people knew about of getting rid of people who didn't want to return to the government the work that they were supposed to uh for the salary that they were receiving.
SPEAKER_01:So it sounds like you were able to effectively uh carry out the management side, and that is you mentioned the track record, uh, and this ties into how we evaluate employees in the government, specifically from our respective experiences in the Foreign Service and the employee evaluation process. But a lot of times, especially when you're dealing with a less productive individual or a poor performer, um in order to actually capture that in their evaluation, which happens on an annual basis, if you haven't already counseled them about it, uh then you can't make those references. And uh it seemed to me that something that as an institution, uh the Department of State uh uh still needs a lot of work in is educating folks about how the evaluation is actually a year-long process. Yes, we have courses people go to, uh they're told about the respective areas of the foreign affairs manual, the the cycle you're supposed to give the counseling sessions, how you document it where. But it seems to me there still was a a lack in substance that people could learn from to turn this into actual practice.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah, well, uh one of my muses in that regard is a State Department officer named Debbie Pedroso, who uh was absolutely fabulous and walked me through how to do ongoing documentation of non-performers and underperformers. Uh she was an HR uh officer in Mexico, and it was Debbie who basically taught me that Microsoft Word is all you need. You open a Word document. Word processing is great because you open a document, you create it, and then periodically you add things to it, and you just make a chronology in that Word document of every time there was a screw up and you counseled the person, and then at the end of every week, you print off that document, you hand it to the person and say, please read this and sign an acknowledgement that you read it. And then you countersign it, file it away. If they refuse to sign, say I won't sign that, say, okay, fine. Uh I'll get a witness here who observes you, and they'll sign as a witness, witnessing that you actually read this document. Um you get a pile of those, and then you have the fodder for the performance evaluation. And if it comes to a termination, you have the documentation for that. So one person we got rid of in part because she could not do a travel voucher without screwing it up. So, what did I do? I filed copies of the travel vouchers that she screwed up. That was evidence. So you keep this documentation through the course of the year, and then when the time comes, there it is. You've got the documentation, you've got what you need.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's take it a step further or dig it a little deeper. How do you think it is that some people, when they are in positions of supervision, management leadership, they are still unable to have that sort of engagement with an individual? Because obviously the first step is to give an individual the opportunity to correct their performance, uh, conduct issues aside. But what do you think it is that people hesitate to even have that sort of encounter with someone? Is it a lack of training? Is it, you know, can these things be taught?
SPEAKER_02:Uh some some people are vertebrates and some people were born without backbones. And people without backbones should not be promoted into management. So that's a that's a problem with the performance evaluation system where everybody walks on water. I served on a total of about a half a dozen selection boards uh over my career. And what I saw was over time they became progressively more and more laudatory. Nobody makes mistakes, nobody ever does anything wrong. And what really bothered me was seeing in some cases officers who would claim credit for things that other officers had done. And I knew this because in one case there was an officer claiming credit for something I had done. And I I blew the whistle on that one. I said, this one's gonna go to the IG because that's a violation of 18 U.S. Code 1001. And uh the individual was called by HR and was told uh this is what's gonna happen, and he agreed to have a uh Sharpie used to black out that line in his evaluation. So falsification of performance evaluations, I think, is a problem, inflation of performance evaluations. Uh the system is clearly broken. And as a result, you have people promoted into management who don't have a clue as to how to manage.
SPEAKER_01:Well, in a discussion I had with someone the other day, any system technically is going to be flawed. Yeah. Uh, because the primary ingredient is human beings, and we're all flawed. Um is it best to stick with what we have, the devil we know, um as opposed to trying to tweak it further? Because it's been tweaked over the years.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um and you know, it's not simply a matter of checking boxes, uh, written narratives have to be provided. I do agree. Uh there is a a tendency towards uh being laudatory. Um however, is should we just simply stick to it but make it more substantive and ensure that people are doing the counseling sessions appropriately? Uh they are capturing uh comments shared regarding good and bad performance uh from those counseling sessions.
SPEAKER_02:I I don't have a um uh a magic bullet for this. Uh I think those are. Are all ideas that could be pursued? But the issue really at its core is that you have managers who won't manage, and you have leaders who won't lead, and they need to be weeded out. And that's uh that's a task that I'm not, and you're not in a position to deal with at this point, but that's that's what needs to be done.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, especially for those that may be in those positions that are listening to us. Uh what about your experience in encountering individuals who you could clearly see they were good decision makers, effective leaders, but they hadn't been promoted.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, I've encountered a few of those, and those are the ones that uh I would give very specific instances uh in my write-ups of them demonstrating why they they should be promoted. Because what selection boards are looking for is not a laundry list of everything you've accomplished. They call it the accomplishment statement, but it not isn't really an accomplishment statement in the sense of this, I did this and I did this and I did this. It's I acquired the following skills by and here it's demonstrated in this. Okay, that's the accomplishment. People who understand that when they're writing uh uh a rating officer statement can then capture why a person should be promoted. It's not that he did or she did that, X, whatever it was, it's that the rated officer has demonstrated the ability to perform at the next higher level through this series of actions or this accomplishment. And if you bear that in mind, you can get the people promoted. Sometimes it takes a couple of years. But uh I had a very good record of getting subordinates promoted if I thought they deserved it, if they had demonstrated those skills. Um I had a couple people leave the Foreign Service because they thought I didn't give them credit, but they were people who I told uh, you know, if you want to get promoted, you're gonna have to learn HR. You're gonna have to learn to manage personnel, you're gonna have to learn supervisory skills. I'm not gonna recommend you for promotion to FO2 until you do that. And okay, well, if that's the way you're gonna be, then I'm gonna leave the Foreign Service. Okay, fine, goodbye.
SPEAKER_01:Uh well, with that in mind, and you speaking of those that you evaluated, um what in what ways did your subordinates contribute to your particular ability to make effective decisions and to leadership development?
SPEAKER_02:I had some subordinates. I wasn't sure if I taught them as much as they taught me. Uh when you're dealing with people with very deep technical expertise and private sector uh experience, uh you can really draw on them both for substantive knowledge of what you're working in as well as the people with more private experience, uh private sector experience than I ever had. They were able to bring a perspective that I lacked. And so uh I had one in I had a subordinate in Moscow who absolutely outstanding. He's now the chief of the uh of the Attache Service and the Foreign Agricultural Service 20 years later. Uh absolutely phenomenally good officer and his first tour. And I once said to him, I I'm not sure if if I'm learning more from you than I'm teaching you. He was that good. And I knew at that point that he was going to go on to the highest levels of the service, and in fact he has. You know, you run into those people and you nurture them and you share with them as much as you can, and then you s you you you learn as much from them as you possibly can, too, and it's a two-way street.
SPEAKER_01:Speaking of the individuals uh in an organization, uh, and uh one since this is a a topic nowadays, uh when we look at the diversity of a team of personnel, is it necessary for an organization to reflect the society from which it draws its people?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think we proved uh prior to World War II that it may not be utterly necessary because we had a foreign service that was made up of white men. Um and American foreign policy was reasonably successful uh from independence through that. So it may not be absolutely 100% necessary, but it makes it better, it makes it more effective, and it certainly opens lines of communication that otherwise are closed off. And if we're going to say that communication is is the single most important attribute of a successful organization, which I think there's a case to be made for that, you want to have as many lines in the water as possible. It's easier for a woman to talk to other women in many cases and to talk about issues of interest to women than it is for a man. Okay? So we should have women in the Foreign Service. There is an affinity between ethnic groups. So if you have a native speaker of Spanish on your staff who can talk to Mexican officials in colloquial, highly fluent Spanish, you're going to get farther with them in terms of the give and take and the information flow and be able to negotiate things than with somebody who has to speak through an interpreter. Okay? So should we have Hispanics working in the Foreign Service? Absolutely, yes, because they're going to give us a perspective and give us insights that we otherwise won't have. So can you have a foreign service that is does not reflect the society? Yeah, you can, and we did for a couple hundred years. Um is it a good idea? No, it's not a good idea. We should pursue diversity because it makes us stronger and it gives us a better perspective on what's going on in the world.
SPEAKER_01:So then it makes sense for efforts and resources to be expended to achieve this. Now the question is perhaps how should they be allocated?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think two things. First of all, it all begins with recruitment. Why are we not recruiting from universities that reflect the diversity of America? Why are we not out there actively recruiting people interested in foreign affairs careers by going to the universities that have foreign language programs, that have international relations programs in their political science departments? Why are we not going out there recruiting these people? So it I I think it starts with recruitment. We should be bringing in people at the mid-level. I know this is a very touchy subject, especially with uh the American Foreign Service Association, the union of the Foreign Service, that if you've come up through the ranks and you've gotten to the mid-level and then some guy parachutes in from the private sector, has the same grade you have because of the private sector experience, uh, that uh you see that as closing off your opportunities for promotion farther on. Um I get that, but I also get the fact that when you bring in people at the mid-level who have private sector experience, you're gaining something. You're gaining you're gaining people who have a completely different perspective on how an organization should be run and on how to interact with foreigners. And I think that can be very valuable. So I think we should be looking at that as well. And again, finding people who are interested in a foreign affairs career but don't want to come in as a junior officer at the age of 35, 40, 45.
SPEAKER_01:Understood. With that in mind, do you think there are some groups, whether it's women uh or ethnic groups or religious groups, that perhaps uh they they have to work harder to prove themselves?
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I I in the 1990s, when I was the resident sovietologist at the Department of Agriculture, um I found that that the women worked much harder than the men did who worked for me because they were uh they had to prove themselves. They had to prove they were as good as the men, as late as the 1990s. Um to some degree it's still there's still a bit of a hangover of that. I mean, in the 2010s, when I was an ambassador, I found that the women in the embassy would work their tails off. Um some of the men did, but some of the men couldn't be bothered to to do more than what the absolute minimum was to get through the day. So I think there's still an element of that with women at least. In terms of uh ethnic minorities, I can't say that that I saw a correlation.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And in terms of the Foreign Service, whether uh it's the Department of State, Foreign Agricultural Service, you know, the military, because you know, there's the Defense Attaché's office, and there's a whole variety of representation of the different uh government agencies.
SPEAKER_02:Uh I called it the alphabet soup in uh New Delhi because we had so many, and in Mexico too. Mexico we had uh 44 different agencies at post.
SPEAKER_01:So with that in mind, what are some common uh mis no some false perceptions that say American society has about our Foreign Service?
SPEAKER_02:Well I think most Americans have no idea what the Foreign Service does. They uh they they really don't know. And uh I I members of my my family had absolutely no idea what I did for a living. Um I I I I think there it's not so much a m misconception of what the Foreign Service is and does as much as it is uh a lack of awareness of what the Foreign Service is and what it does. Uh I can remember uh having to get a physical before I joined the Foreign Service, and I I got it at uh at an Air Force base up in uh Rantoul, Illinois, and I kept saying I need to take the Foreign Service physical, and the guy on the phone at this military base said, Flight service? And I said, No, not flight service, foreign service. He said, Foreign Legion? You're joining the Foreign Legion? I said, No, I'm not joining the Foreign Legion, I'm joining the Foreign Service. Um, most Americans don't even know what the Foreign Service is.
SPEAKER_01:So, in one sense, would it be fair to say that's actually a failure of not necessarily current, but over time, of senior leadership to employ practices so that the American public is aware of what the different professionals of the Foreign Service are doing.
SPEAKER_02:I wouldn't say that. I'd say it's a failure of the American educational system, which doesn't even teach geography anymore. You take the average American and show them a map of the world in which the countries are not marked and ask them to identify what countries are which and they can't do it.
SPEAKER_01:So then again, it would be a failure of the leadership in the educational system, whether at the state, federal, local level.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh if if if we're going to live in a globalized society, which, like it or not, we do live in a globalized society, we at least ought to know something about what's going on in the outside world beyond the borders of the United States. I mean, YouTube's got all kinds of great videos of man on the street interviews of people being shown a map and say, can you show me Australia? And can you show me Iraq? Can you show me Afghanistan? Can you show me Canada? And people who can't do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Uh I've seen those. Um speaking to our audience here, for those that are contemplating a career in the Foreign Service or international relations in the private sector, uh, or that are currently in those roles, what guidance, what advice would you have for them?
SPEAKER_02:Well, uh if if you're still young enough that you can acquire high fluency in a foreign language, do that. Uh learn learn foreign languages if you're in your youth, if you're in high school, college. Uh pick one or two or three foreign languages. Uh we certainly did that for our daughter. When we went to Vienna, our daughter was entering first grade. We put her in a German medium Montessori school. She came out of that speaking both uh uh high German with an Austrian accent and Viennese, uh, the Viennese dialect. Uh and we we kept her in German medium instruction all the way through school, which of course meant that starting in fifth grade she had to start running French. And uh then, of course, we went to Moscow and she spent five years in Moscow being tutored in Russian. So she speaks three foreign languages reasonably fluently. Her German is basically near native. Her French is very good by virtue of having spent a year in in Paris as well. So learn foreign languages. She, of course, has not pursued a foreign affairs career. She's uh she's doing something totally different here in the United States. But uh the the point here is that get them get them started young learning foreign languages. And then the second thing is learn about America. Learn about America because when you go abroad, people don't want to hear your views on their country. They want to hear about America. They want to know how America works, what makes it tick. You have to understand your own history, your own geography, you have to understand your politics. And there's nothing more embarrassing than being overseas as a diplomat and finding somebody who is obsessed with America and knows more about America than you do. You're the native, and this is a foreigner who maybe has never been there but has read everything he or she could possibly lay her or his hands on, and has read up and can name all the state capitals, uh knows all about the Civil War, and you don't.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there there is a uh I want to go so far as to say a tendency, uh, but a lot of times we underestimate uh what others know about us, uh, regardless of their particular educational level. Speaking of America and being familiar with it during your career, what were sort of the common themes or characteristics of America that you found that resonated with your counterparts that they liked about the United States? Things that we should continue to promote uh that others value uh in these foreign countries.
SPEAKER_02:Oh the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, uh freedom of speech, uh freedom of movement, uh the constant striving for uh equality, we're not there yet, um, but but we've made tremendous strides since 1865. So uh our continuing efforts to achieve uh equality across society, the rights that are defended by law under the Constitution, uh that's what really resonates with people. And uh that of course, the fact that that this is uh the that they're under threat right now, uh that's raising a lot of concerns around the world. I hear from my friends, friends I've I've I've known from my foreign affairs career, uh foreign diplomats with whom I interacted, they're all scratching their heads saying, What in the world are you doing?
SPEAKER_01:Reaching out to folks in the audience who may be in similar roles or close to filling uh senior executive or senior foreign service roles. Um any guidance you would give them.
SPEAKER_02:Um remember you swore an oath to the Constitution. Go back and reread the Constitution as amended. Read the amendments, and um you swore allegiance to it, you're bound.
SPEAKER_01:Constitution, first and foremost.
SPEAKER_02:That's right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Alan, I appreciate this time. Any final thoughts?
SPEAKER_02:No, I think uh I think you've uh pretty well covered it all, Maurice.
SPEAKER_01:Well, again, uh I I can't express enough my appreciation to have this opportunity uh to go down a bit of memory lane with you and to delve into your experiences. Um hopefully our listeners are benefiting, whether it's at an individual level or in a capacity as a leader uh decision maker. So with that, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you very much.