The Leader Fast Lane - Episode 14 - with Andrew Natsios

In this episode, I speak with Andrew Natsios, Executive Professor at the Bush School at Texas A&M. Andrew shares about his leadership experiences at the highest levels of politics, diplomacy, and higher education. We talk quite a bit about USAID and its legacy as well. Some key points:

2:34 - the experiences that shaped his leadership philosophy

5:10 - how leading and managing differ

6:24 - "you can't demand loyalty from you people if you aren't loyal to them"

7:26 - leadership is more about responsibility than authority

11:29 - the importance of getting the real story from on the ground colleagues

20:31 - the two most important roles for senior executives

26:27 - misconceptions about global development

42:04 - leading in ambiguity

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to the Leader Fast Late, the podcast where I talk with accomplished leaders from higher education, public service, and beyond to share real stories, practical principles, and hard-earned lessons listeners can apply immediately. No buzzwords, no shortcuts, just real leaders sharing real lessons you can apply right away. I'm Lane Mears, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Leader in Culture Development at the Texas Tech University System. Today I am joined by Andrew Nazio. Since 2012, Andrew has served as executive professor at the George H. W. Bush School of Government at Texas AM University, and was director of the Scalcroft Institute of International Affairs between 2012 and 2025. He was distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2006 to 2012, and former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2006. He served as U.S. Presidential Envoy to Sudan from 2006 to 2007 and served in the U.S. Army Reserve for 22 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He was vice president of World Division, the international faith-based NGO from 1993 to 1998. He served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1975 to 1987, and was the Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance and as CEO of the Big Dig in Boston after a cost overrun scandal. He is the author of three books and thirty journal articles and contributed to thirteen other books. He edited two books, Russia under Putin, Fragile State and Revisionist Power, and with Andy Card, Transforming Our World, the Foreign Policy of George H.W. Bush. His book on U.S. Aid will be published by Bloomsbury, Guns Are Not Enough, Foreign Aid in the National Interest coming out later this year. Nazio serves on the boards of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, or IFIS, and the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. Andrew, it's really great to have you on the podcast. You've got a very broad and extensive background from government, humanitarian and response and academia. What would you say are the experiences that most shaped your leadership philosophy early on?

SPEAKER_02 2:41

Well, uh two stories. One, uh I kept for the last 30 years a list of management principles, leadership principles, and they're one sentence each. When I take over an institution, I call everyone together and then I go through them all. So and I tell people, you don't have to follow these. I'm following them, and I'm telling you to check myself to make sure I follow. And they are based on my collective experience. So each management position I hold, leadership position, I usually add more principles to the list. And so I use that list. Uh and and the interesting thing is at AID I sent a copy out to everyone of the list, and they would put it in their cubicles. I didn't tell them to, but they did. And when I left, and there would be a meeting with politicals from my successor administrators, they would say that's a violation of rule number six. And the political appointees would say, What's rule number six? Oh, it's a bureaucratic world. You don't have to worry about it. But but uh it was code words for this violates Andrew's principles. So the first principle is that integrity is non-negotiable, and that that um we are here to serve the public, not vice versa, not have the public serve us. And we are in a temporary position, and we we need to maintain the public trust by maintaining a high high position of uh integrity.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

That's excellent. Um I I believe Colin Powell kept a similar uh list of leadership principles, pithy statements that he's been a big influence on me and my leadership styles, and I'm sure that that was uh useful for folks to have in the when we when he first interviewed me in January of 2001, I I took my leadership principles and gave them to him, and he gave me his.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

And his bo his pre leadership leadership principles are the basis for his autobiography. Yeah, it's not it's a not a normal autobiography, it has these principles woven into it, which is quite interesting. And it sold a huge number of copies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

He was a great leader.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

He was.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Well, you started in state politics and later led global humanitarian operations on a huge scale. What did those very different arenas teach you about leading people?

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Well, uh first, uh leadership and um management are not the same thing. Management is a matter of business systems, and I have my own business systems which are different than the textbook. And secondly, uh leadership um is about values and vision, which is a little different than management. The entertaining thing is after I ran the big dig, I was uh invited to speak at the Kennedy School where I went to uh college to get my master's degree many, many years ago. And they asked me to talk about my management style, which which one of my friends on the faculty, Richard Zeckhauser, said, it's it's iconoclastic, Andrew. I said, I don't know what I don't know what exactly that you mean by that. I think I know, because it doesn't conform to the textbooks. But one of the principles that's not in my list is that it's a two-way street in terms of loyalty. You can't demand the loyalties of your subordinates if you're not loyal to them, which means you can't damage the institution you're running because they won't help you if you're damaging it. If they think you're strengthening it, even if they don't agree with you on policy, they will help you. And most importantly, they will tell you if you're stepping on a landmine before you step on it. And I learned that very early in my career. If you ignore career officers, uh you will get into trouble, a lot of trouble.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Well, that principle makes me think that uh of something that we focus on a lot here in our uh training with faculty, staff, and students, it's servant leadership. Um, which is like you said, the leadership part of vision, setting a direction and motivating people that way. But the servant part is uh exercising the authority that you have for the good of your people to earn that trust, to have a cohesive team. So um that's great. Was there a defining moment where you realize leadership is less about authority and more about uh responsibility?

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Uh I could bring up, I'll I'll tell you an amusing story. So I I one of the techniques I use is to have an easel in my office with a list of the next quarter objectives. And the list is not for the staff, it's for me. And um I have no more than 12, and I can write it myself so no one can say someone else wrote it down. And it's in my office. I remember at aid, people say, Well, well, you're gonna see the president of a country. You can't have this list up. I said, uh, why not? Is there something classified here? Nothing's classified. And they said, but there's it suggests there are weaknesses in aid. I said, but yeah, we're collecting the weaknesses. I'm leaving it there. Even when the press would come in, they'd get up, the staff would get upset. He said, We get we've got to cover this. I said, No, not covering it. One day I caught a guy, because I had an open door policy, and it was a senior career officer, I knew him well, and he was looking at the list, writing on a piece of paper. I said, What are you doing? He said, Um, we know that you're you have this list for yourself and you read it all day, several times a day. But we want to know what's on the list because we've all perceived that you're not using aid as a stepping stone somewhere else. I kept saying that for six months and they started believing me. So I said, one, you're not going to wake me out. And two, more importantly, we've determined you're not trying to damage the institution, you're at you're improving it, you're fixing it. And um, we can't tell what you're doing, what you want, unless we we know what's on your list. So I'm sending this out to the whole agency once I write it all down. And you said it's not secret. I said, of course not. But but the orders I'm giving all day long are coming from that list. And they said it would be nice to know the list ahead of time. And so they started on a regular basis every quarter, sending it out to everyone, which I think was a very good idea. I should have thought of that earlier, but um uh it was very useful in directing people's attention. Now, someone did ask me after I left, they said we don't we don't have that list anymore, and it's causing unrest in the agency. And they said, How did you determine what 12 things would be on that list? And I said, uh it's intuition, it that's what leadership is. They are the 12 most important things we need to get done the next quarter to stay ahead of everything. And um they could all see, because I tried to always include items on the 12 that included almost everybody in the agency that was functioning. And so and so they all felt a sense of participation in the larger vision. I think that was very important. And and and so I I also um removed, I removed 16 senior people, not with any pleasure. I didn't do it. All of them had either violated a rule or simply were not competent in the jobs they were in. And I and I always did it in an honorable way. I never got sued, I never, it was never in the newspaper. And I did these this at all jobs, not just AID. And one of the career people came in and said, Do you know what the effect is if you're doing this? I said, I hope it's not to demoralize people. He said, No, everybody knew they should be removed, but no one was doing it before. And so it makes our is much the atmosphere now is much better because almost all these people are causing trouble for other people. And by removing them, you made us want to come to work every day. And and that's something I I uh I hadn't thought of, but uh it did have that effect. There's another thing we did that was very interesting. I did it at three or four different jobs. I would send a survey out to the entire career staff on how we were all doing at the senior levels. And it's an anonymous survey. And we sent it out also to the FSNs, the Foreign Service Nationals and A, who are citizens of other countries but work for AID and the field missions. And the interesting thing was we would ask them questions like um, how well are each of the five major management systems, the financial management systems, the personnel management systems, the IT systems, uh services division, how are all of them functioning? And they'd rate them. You could get the lowest you can get is a minus 50, and the highest is a plus 50. I'm not going to go through who got what, but the IT system got a plus 50, the highest possible rating. Later, two years after I was administrator, they did a federal government-wide survey and they rated the IT systems of each federal department and agency. AID got the highest rating. And it's nothing because anything I did, because it was these systems were in place before I got there. But the fact that our staff was rating them that function the same way that the federal government was rating us showed me that they knew what was going on and they were in sync with the rest of the federal government in terms of management systems. Now, we we would aggregate the data and we put it on the website. And one of the uh senior people who didn't get a good rating for his bureau was extremely upset. He said, You can't put this up. I said, Well, why not? It's public information. He said, but it looks bad. I said, Well, that's your problem. You need to fix it. And I and I did tell one of the divisions had a terrible rating, management, and I said, if you don't fix this in the next year, I'm going to start removing people because this is a critical element of the agency's work. They had they went from a minus 50 to a plus 50 in one year.

SPEAKER_03 13:35

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

And I didn't tell them what to do. They knew what had to be done. They did it on their own. But they still were doing that annual survey uh when the agency was abolished. And OP, the Office of Personnel Management told me we were the only federal agency that was doing it when I started it in 2001. And then it's they OPM said everybody had to do it, and the federal government. So when people say IID wasn't well managed, that's it's the exact opposite. The evidence is from objective surveys, including OPM, that uh we were one of the best managed agencies. In fact, we were the second worst ranked agency when I started in 2001. By the time I left in five years, we were we went from uh second to last. The last one was the Federal Aviation Administration, which is a little troubling because they run the airports and the air traffic control. That may always made me nervous. We moved, though, from 34th, 33rd place to 17th in five years. And the uh OPM said that was the fastest movement in the history of the federal government. And I think it's because we tried these different systems.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Well, that makes me think of something we talk a lot with our stakeholders here is psychological safety. Um there are all kinds of books by CEOs of corporations that say there one particular said the greatest fear as a CEO is that your people aren't telling you the truth. Yeah. So it's important for senior leaders to create the atmosphere where people will report to them the real deal on the ground so that senior leaders can take action. And it sounds like you were able to create that.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

Well, I I said one of the rules was I never shoot the messenger.

unknown 15:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it. I do not want to read about it on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, uh I and not know about it ahead of time. So the earlier you tell me there's a problem, the more options we have for fixing it. And they would get lined up sometimes to tell me. And it did it it because we're through all these crises. You know, we were three, people said we were in three wars, two wars. I said, no, we're in three wars. We were in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. And all of them were wars, and we were in the middle of all of those. And so we lost a lot of people, people getting killed on the job. I think 700 people died who were not directly foreign service officers, but they were um their their salaries were paid by aid by our partner organizations. That was it was just in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it was a lot, it was very stressful. And um I think that we we did well under difficult circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Well, follow up on that, um, is you know, you mentioned Sudan, Afghanistan, you've worked in North Korea as well. How can leaders maintain moral clarity when every option, every decision carries real human cost?

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Um you have to get them to participate in the solutions. So I when I would have meetings to make these decisions, I wouldn't just call the senior person. I'd call, have 20 people in my office, including junior officers. And they would I I did that, and the senior people say, Why are you having the junior officers in your room? I said, I want them to understand one, that they have, they they need to tell me what's going on. One, and if they have some creative way that we hadn't thought of, I want to hear about it.

unknown 17:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

And I want them to hear the decision, not filtered through several layers directly from me. Because what would happen is that sometimes the senior people would interpret what I was saying for their own purposes. I don't think maliciously, but um they would, the junior officers would say, you know, that's not what the administrator said. That's not what the decision was. You're you're not you're not really describing the whole decision here. And it disciplined the system. I would also walk around the building and just talk to people randomly. That upset the senior administrators a lot. They said, Why are you doing that? I said, because they tell me stuff that you guys aren't telling me. You told me this new management uh financial management system is working perfectly. I said, that's not what they're telling me in the in the cubicles. And how come you didn't tell me that? And and so it it it it disciplined the system, I think. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

That that makes me think of um I was a young Foreign Service officer working in Zimbabwe, the deputy chief of mission, the number two person in the embassy, just below the ambassador. And in Mark Johnson, State Department, great guy, great leader. Um he would invite junior officers to sit with him on some higher level meetings. And his admonition was either before or after the meeting, depending on how it went, if I invite you to be uh in the meeting, it's because I think you have something to offer. Don't sit there and just uh suck it in timid. If you're in the room and you have a thought, I want you to share it because you have a different perspective. And and uh I I uh admired that perspective and uh tried to You know who used to do that, you know where you got that from Colin Powell. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Yes, and that's where I got it too.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Okay. Yeah, fascinating. One question is is um a follow-up on this discussion of some high-stakes situations is how do you manage yourself in high high stress, high-stakes times?

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Well, uh I would try to surround myself with people who had opposite characteristics. I would, I, I, I used to get uh a little paranoid sometimes that there were plots, you know, and that there was more intrigue than there always is intrigue in the federal government between agencies and departments and all that. But sometimes I would make it up just because I was under stress. And I knew I was doing that. And so I had people who had the opposite tendency. They would analyze things and say, well, Andrew, there's a different explanation for what's happening. And I was surrounded myself so that when I would get onto onto one of these binges, not not it's not a yelling binge, it was it was I would, I would, I would just get uh uh upset, and they would calm me down. And they knew that was their purpose is to go in and say, Andrew, there's another explanation for what's happening. Or uh while this is going on, you you should know that we have allies that you don't know about. And so um I would always, it's it's the two most important things an executive does is to choose staff, uh, the executive level staff uh and the uh headquarters level, and then the senior executives. I did not have a very large staff. Uh my successors had dozens and dozens of people in the administrator's office. I had uh four or five, that was it. And I I try to run things through the bureaus as opposed to through my staff. And I didn't have 25-year-olds telling people with 30 years' experience what to do. I said, if you if you're arrogant, if you're a young staff sending a message for me, you will be removed from your position. You're to treat senior career officers with respect. And and so that was uh, I think an important technique uh when I was running things. But I uh the second thing you need to control is the financial management system. If you don't have control over finances and how money is being spent and how personnel are being chosen, you don't control the agency or department you're in. You're you are presiding instead of managing.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

On this again, the theme about high stakes times uh and and operating within that, you've talked about the input, wanting to facilitate good input to make decisions, empower people to um act on your orders. But how this is something I've I've talked to a few of the people on the podcast. Podcast is how do you make decisions, high-stakes decisions, when there's imperfect information?

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Oh, because uh another principle, there's always there's never enough information. Information is always inadequate.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

You'll never get everything you need to know. You're just going to have to uh try to maximize the information. And then if you discover you've made a mistake, you need to alter course. You don't, you know, if you're if you're in the middle of an attack and you realize you've made a huge mistake, you need to change direction before you get defeated.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

I I agree. It sounds like you're you're you're a decisive leader, which which I admire. I've I've worked for leaders who are indecisive, and the the effect of that is uh it it's a morale killer and it's a motivation killer. Um but decisive leaders that can pair it with the uh bent of recognizing when they may have made a the wrong decision and being able to adjust, I think that's an ideal. We're gonna shift to uh your leadership uh well leadership at scale is the topic here. Um during your time leading USAID, you oversaw multi-billion dollar programs across conflict zones. What does effective leadership look like at scale? For for example, when you're that far removed from what's going on on the ground?

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Well, one thing with AID in particular, it we're talking about countries in a different culture, different society, different value system on the other side of the world, um where we don't have media in most cases to know what's going on, other than the cables coming in from the embassies and the missions. So I traveled 25% of the time. And I didn't travel to the Paris, the Gulf, I would once a year, but I traveled to the to the um crisis areas, and and I I always insisted on I always met with the Foreign Service separately from the Westerners. And the reason I did is they would sometimes say things that they would not say to anyone else if if an American were in the room. It was always very interesting to hear their perspective on things. And they would tell me stories, extraordinary stories, about what was really going on in the country. Um so uh that that the traveling helped a lot to make the right decisions and steer things in the right direction. Uh, it also always showed me that the marginalization of AID in Washington was the exact opposite of the reality in the field. The reality in the field, we were the dominant American institution, not the U.S. military and not the State Department. I had heads of states tell me after I left office, the most important American institution are not your NGOs or private sector or contractors, not the State Department. It's AID. They are the dominant institution in our country. And I would always get the presidential suite at the best hotel when I was traveling, or I would be in a presidential guest house. And I'd say, why are you treating me this way? I mean, you're acting like I'm a head of state. They said, you're more important than the Secretary of State of Defense is to us. And we weren't giving them any money. The money went through NGOs, through contractors, through American universities. So the money wasn't about them about them getting more money. It's that they needed the technical assistance or the support if they're in a conflict. AID did a lot of conflict work programmatically. And so uh I realized that how AID was perceived in the field was very different than it was in Washington.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

I echo that sentiment. I think that's something that that did not come to light uh last year when AID was being shut down, is the primary role the USAID played in a lot of these countries as the face of the United States and the American people and the goodwill and ally building role that uh that uh USAID had that we've largely um done away with. Yes, yeah. But let's dive in a little bit more about international development. Um you've written about famine, conflict, and fragile states. What are the biggest misconceptions that leaders have about global development?

SPEAKER_02 26:42

I was at a hearing and there was a prominent senator, I will not mention his name, he's not in the Senate anymore. I've known him for many years. He's not a particularly close friend of mine. We had been adversaries. And it was on uh a hearing on the reconstruction of Haiti after the terrible earthquake that killed a large percentage of the capital city. And the government was destroyed. And I said, this is an opportunity for AID to go in and help them rebuild functional ministries. Because if you look at the surveys that the World Bank had done, AID had done, half the bureaucracy were ghost employees. They really didn't exist. And we were not providing their salaries, but the World Bank was. And um uh it was very it's a patrimonial, very corrupt patrimonial state and extremely dysfunctional, as you may know. I said, AID is about building institutions because that's what makes development permanent and what advances the needle, as they say. And this senator said, who supported foreign aid, he said, he said, institutions. I never heard of that before. I said, well, that's the problem. You can't see institutions. It's not the building, it's the rules that make up what the institution stands for. A university is made up of the way in which we recruit professors, how we promote them, how we recruit students, and how they get admitted, how they get graded, how they get rewarded, how research is done, who funds it. Um, it's all of the rules and business systems, it's not the buildings. And there is a lot of uh misconception that uh development is monument development, that it's it's buildings that you can see. The most important thing about schools is not the school building, it's the teachers and the students and the incentives they have they have at work and the textbooks that they use. The least important thing is the building itself. So I argue that in fact one of the misconceptions of development is that policymakers want development that's rapid, visible. You can see it and touch it, and you can quantify it, you can count it. In fact, institutions cannot be easily quantified, they can't be seen, and they're not quick. They take 20 or 30 years to build. So what the pol when I say policymakers, I mean the White House, all presidents of either party, the Congress, um, the State Department, the Defense Department, OMB, they all have the same demands, and they go back to the founding of the program of AID and ID. Because I went through the archives and the aid administrator was saying the same things that I'm saying now in 1962. Policymakers want rapid response. I mean, you can't do this stuff rapidly.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Yeah. And uh the we we wrestled with that. Uh I was I was a democracy and governance officer, a DG officer, and so um, while our health colleagues could distribute mosquito nets and and and medicines, which was very easily quantifiable, um, our work was much more long-term and difficult to measure. Levels of democracy, independence of the judiciary, the strength of the rule of law, those types of things.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Um that are but in but in the health area, building the institution so that that work could get done without us, you can't see, and it's much harder to do it.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Um so yeah, that was that was the tension is we need to report results every year to Congress. We need to report the impact that we're making when it's uh much A, a much longer-term prospect and B, it's it's it's difficult to measure. And we're we're facing some of the similar, uh maybe not at the same scale, but issues in our work here at the Office of Leader and Culture Development, because we're tasked with building the capabilities of leaders across the Texas Tech University system, um emphasizing character, values, all things that I think everybody would say these are vitally important to the ongoing successful operation of the universities and teams within them, but they're difficult to measure.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

Uh not that they're unimportant, but we just need to find ways to measure those impacts over time because um through through qualitative as opposed to quantitative analysis.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

Now I ask my students because I go through the nine schools of development that have evolved since World War II, and and and I go through them in my book as well. My book is called Um Guns Are Not Enough, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, it'll be out, published by Bloomsbury in the fall. My uh it's actually it's already advertised on Amazon right now. So um one of the theories of development is culture matters. And it goes back to Max Weber's famous uh article on um on institutions. He he created this analogy that most developing world countries are what are called clientelist or patrimonial states, where everything's based on personal relationships, and institutions are very weak. And all of the advanced industrial democracies, whether they're they're Japan or South Korea, Canada, the US, or or Europe, are uh driven and run by strong institutions, not by personal relationships. And Douglas North won the Nobel Prize for Economics as an economic historian because of his theory of institutions. Most development economists now on the left and the right are institutionalists. And and and I think most career officers in aid are also institutionalists. However, the policymakers are not where we are, and that was that's one of the issues. That's one of the issues.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

Well, wrapping up our our our discussion of USAID. Um there was a lot of misinformation out there over the past year about USAID's role, what it was doing specifically. And I don't want to get into details about how how things went down, but um I would like to hear your your perspective on foreign aid writ large. Some of the criticisms were that it was not advancing uh uh national interest, that people that it was viewed as more of a an altruistic uh um effort. But I guess my question is was foreign aid as we practiced it, was it more about moral responsibility or national interest or both?

SPEAKER_02 33:39

It's it's both. And the problem, and I I I use three examples, okay? AID helped build, helped implement the Green Revolution. Half our budget in the late 60s and the 70s was to implement the Green Revolution, which was an effort by Dr. Norman Borlog, who's a professor here at Texas AM. Uh, he's a plant breeder. He was a plant breed. He won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for the Green Revolution, probably the most extraordinary event of the 20th century that very few people know about. It it quadrupled yields per hectare, per acre of land, with only a 30% increase in land taken by breeding plants that are far more, food plants that are far more efficient at producing food. And it he he is estimated to have saved 300 million people's lives.

SPEAKER_03 34:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

I mean, an extraordinary accomplishment. But he had to, he had someone, he needed someone to implement it. We implemented it. We spent half our budget during the Cold War to implement it. It was extraordinarily successful. We've never, we've never explained that to the American people. But the reason that Asia is what it is now, I don't mean China, I'm talking about Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, is because of the Green Revolution. All countries that have moved on to becoming advanced industrial democracies started out by developing large agricultural surpluses. That was possible because of the Green Revolution. We were the ones that implemented that. And it was a huge success story. And it saved lives. And I argue in an essay I wrote for Prism, which is a military journal at the National War College, they asked me to write it. It's called, um, you can get it online. It's called Foreign Aid in a Period of Great Power Competition. And what I argue is AID played a major role in winning the Cold War, but it's been unstudied. People think we wasted all this money during the Cold War by giving it to corrupt dictators. Well, we did give some money to corrupt dictators, but they keep pointing out these countries at three countries in Africa: Saire, Somalia, and Sudan. Only 6% of the aid budget was spent during the Cold War in Africa. Most of it was spent in Latin America and Asia, because the threat of communist expansion in Asia was scaring everybody. And we were successful in taking some of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, AID affected almost every area of life in South Korea. Late 50s, 1950s, 40% of the population was acutely malnourished. It now has a 70% college graduation rate itself, higher than us, well higher than us. And it's the 11th largest economy in the world. In the 1950s, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. We were the ones that helped the South Koreans accomplish that. Is that in our interest? Yes, it is, because it's one of our closest allies and trading partners. The countries in Asia that we helped now take$350 billion worth of trade from the United States, exports from the United States. Did we plan it that way? No, we did not. But did it have that effect? Yes, it did. Is it that in our national interest? Absolutely. It's employing millions of Americans. But that's not why we did it. We did it because these countries were extremely poor, and we thought uh it was in our national interest, and from a moral and ethical standpoint, it was uh the right thing to do to help them to evolve, and they have. So it's both at the same time. Some people have trouble accepting that. Now, that for me, the health money, the health accounts, and the disaster management, famine relief, relief for refugee emergencies, that's 55% of AIDS budget before it was abolished. Those accounts should be distributed based on need alone, even to our adversaries. The rest of the budget, you can distribute it where it's important strategically for the United States. But if you run the programs possible at the same time, they can also have a beneficial effect beyond our national interest for the people in the country itself. But the health accounts and the disaster relief affect whether people live or die. You cannot use those for strategic interest purposes, in my view. You need to make a distinction between what kind of programming you're doing. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Well, shifting to um uh our final thematic area is on leadership advice. If you you know you've you've worked in higher education for some time there at Texas AM and the Bush School. How does that differ from your time leading in a in a public sector role for the government or in a nonprofit sector?

SPEAKER_02 38:41

Well, I've had three careers. One career is the state government in Massachusetts, 14 years, in executive and legislative roles, and then I had my international development career in World Vision and AID, and then I had my career as an academic for 20 years, so it's supposed to be temporary. Uh because I was at Georgetown teaching for six years before I came here, so it's 20 years. And I had to relearn, and I was a diplomat for a little while, I was also a military officer. Each job, you have to relearn what you do. And I when I was a diplomat as an envoy to Sudan, it took me six months to understand what my job was each day. And once I got the hang of it, I think I did a pretty good job. Condi Rice told me I did, and the career diplomats did as well. But I had to relearn, because it's not a program management institution, the State Department. It's about policy and about how you influence people in other countries and how you protect the national interests of the United States, how you look at the risks involved in each option that you're looking at, which is very different than AID, and it's very different in state government. And so you when when you take any job, you need to look at what the rules, informal and formal rules of the game are of the job you're in. That's the first and most important thing. How does the institution work that you're in? What are people being incented to do on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, on an annual basis? What's the purpose of the institution? You have to you have you have to analyze that to understand what how you fit into that. That's very important, I think. Um, I I think another rule that people should follow is to treat everyone with respect. I would try to I try to make as many friends as possible because you're gonna make enemies. If you do the right thing, you are going to make enemies. You don't start out that way, but that's what happens. And you shouldn't cower from doing it if it's necessary, but don't go out to make enemies, don't go out to cause trouble. You've got to also choose your shots. You cannot get into fights on everything. So choose your shots and be strategic. That's some of the advice I give. But but you are also you have to learn what the institution technically does. And I I I wish I had read all these schools of development before I was the aid administrator. I read them afterwards while I was teaching, because I teach a course in development theory and practice. I wish I had known some of this stuff when I was the agent, I would have done some things differently. So I think reading the literature when you're in the job, if you weren't trained for it from the beginning, is very important.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

I appreciate that. One of the one of the values that the Texas Tech University system has identified that permeates the entire system is organizational acumen. The importance of people that operate within the system to understand how it operates, who does what, how to navigate it in line with what you've just said. Yeah. That's great. How how can leaders develop the ability to operate effectively in ambiguity?

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Well, uh there are two schools of thought at the Kennedy School. One school of thought is you use quantitative methods to analyze the situation to come up with the optimum public policy choice. So everything has to be quantified, and then you do regressions and correlations, and you're supposed to come up with an answer. Now I don't accept that. I mean, it's useful to have those skills, that is not how government works or society works. There's a second school, which is you need to determine the political interests of each of the stakeholders in whatever institution you're in. It's affected by what you're doing. If you're trying to, as I did try to successfully, I think, fix the finances of the mass transit system for Greater Boston, it's called the MBTA. We had to determine what groups would be affected by this massive reorganization of the finances. And the the bill we came up with was 150 pages long, is extremely complicated. But the first step was who's going to be affected? Because if we're going to adversely affect all of the interests, the bill's not going to go through. Why are we wasting our time with it? Go on to something else. Or make amendments to the bill so that it may not fix everything, but it fixes 80% of the problem. 80% is enough to justify spending time getting the bill through. But so the second uh the second uh school of thought of the Kennedy School is what I would call political management. Not in the sense of a political campaign, but in the sense of understanding stakeholders and How they react to changes. And so I fall in the second category. I think political science, frankly, has been taken over by quant people, and I think it's a disaster. And I would urge your political science department to abandon that obsession with numbers because it is misleading political science. The journals should either be shut down, the political science journals, or they should change their policy. If you don't use mixed methods, you shouldn't be publishing articles. And I'll give you an example. There are all these studies, not just one study, dozens, that show AID gave money based on how countries voted in the Security Council of the United Nations. Obviously, you're buying votes with foreign aid. I said, Well, that's baloney. I could use cruder language. And one of the scholars who was doing this research sat next to me at Georgetown. I said, Did you ever interview any career people in the State Department or AID? Because this is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. And if you published articles on this, you are misleading the public and students because it's utter and complete nonsense. One, I used to sign the allocation agreements every year. We didn't consider, we don't even know how countries voted. We didn't care how they voted. And frankly, the international organization's office of the State Department is relatively weak. The money is controlled, in fact, almost all of it, by the regional bureaus. You think they're going to take instructions from I.O. as to how the money should be allocated? She said, Well, and Andrew, how do you explain this high correlation? I said, are you aware that we orchestrate who's on the Security Council? And there's this shock and disbelief. He said, Well, what do you mean? I said, I sat through every morning meeting of the Secretary of State for five years. He the Colin Powell and then Condi Rice said, the aide administrator will sit in the morning staff meeting. Every year when the regional caucuses voted on who would be voted onto the 15 rotating seats in the Security Council to UN, we would try to get our friends on the on the council. And he said, Well, how did you do that? I said, Well, I watched it. Colin Powell would say, the only way we're going to switch this vote is if President Bush calls the president of Chile, let's say. I'm just making this up. I can influence the vote in Peru if I call a foreign minister. And in Colombia, if uh Don Rumsfeld calls a defense minister, we can switch their vote. We chose, who did we choose to run? We recruited candidates. We chose our friends who were already getting foreign aid. We didn't want Fidel Castro on the Security Council. You notice he never made it? Why do you think he never made it? He's very popular in Latin America. We made sure he wasn't on it. And it doesn't make any difference who the president of the United States was. Obama did this, Jimmy Carter did this, Richard Nixon did this, and Jack Kennedy did this. Okay? We but we don't advertise it. And he said, Well, I said, Did you interview anyone to find out? And he said, No, we didn't. I'd never heard of this before. And I and he was a scholar of international uh organizations. I said, How could you have missed this? Because they use numbers.

SPEAKER_03 47:19

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

Okay. And so he went back and the scholars calculated the numbers to see whether countries were already getting foreign aid before they got on the Security Council, and they were. And he said, We've been misinterpreting this data for 20 years now.

SPEAKER_03 47:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

And I can point out area after area where the same thing has been done. And I termed this in an article I wrote called the um obsessive measurement disorder. I meant uh I you I created that term. The essay is called The Clash of the Counterburecracy and Development. It was published by the Center for Global Development uh 12, 14 years ago. The interesting thing is that the term is taken off. Now, I meant it to ridicule people who use numbers all the time. You know, James Q. Wilson says in his book Bureaucracy, I had him for a professor 50, 45 years ago. And he said, in organizations that use numbers to manage everything, the risk is you will only do things that can be counted, even if what you're doing is irrelevant.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Well, Andrew, thank you so much. Um any last bits of advice you'd like to share with listeners?

SPEAKER_01 48:33

I I think I've given too much advice.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

So well, thank you so much for joining me on uh on the podcast. It's been a leadership journey and get practical takeaways we can all apply in leading our team. So um if today's conversation sparked a moment of reflection or a lane change in how you think about leadership, take a minute to share this episode with someone you lead or learn from. Join me next time and I'll be joined by Ginger Carrick Davis, Chief Strategy Officer at Barry Barrios Technology, who served in multiple senior leadership roles at NASA's Johnson Space Center and is a former regent of the Texas Tech University system. You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep leading with purpose, integrity, and clarity, especially when it's hard.