Deep dives do not a leader make, nor bullet points a policy.
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Out in the real world, management and leadership training might profit from less theory and home-spun advice.
Here are seven modest proposals to start with. Offer a minister three points to make; providing two insults them, while four could overload them. Never start a top job on a Monday, when weekend gossip and the weekly meetings schedule distract the troops. Do not under-estimate the importance of fatigue in the taking of decisions. Rely on the judgment and counsel of those who love you as well as those who work with you. In addition, listen to people with fewer gadgets, less jargon but more battle-won experience. Trust advisers with scars rather than tattoos. Expect ministers sometimes to be swayed more by chance remarks from colleagues in the parliamentary corridors than by comprehensive briefing papers. Look beyond the usual suspects in search of mentors and role models.
On that last point, those being groomed for leadership might heed advice from a distinctly unlikely source. When asked about how to cope with crises, Stalin recommended literature: "If you read a lot, then in your memory you will always have the answers how to conduct yourself and what to do". Stalin was an inveterate micro-manager, more total immersion than deep dives. Stalin's references were to Chekhov and Tolstoy.
His suggestions on how to learn about power - its basis and purpose, its use and abuse - could have been refreshed by two recent, deeply serious studies of power. They are Working by Robert Caro (Bodley Head. 207pp. $50) and Bill Burns' The Back Channel (Hurst. 501pp. $65 ).
Caro's justly celebrated biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are studies in the shaping, twisting, moulding "force that is political power".
One deals with the destruction and re-building of much of New York's urban landscape - its bridges, its highways and its neighbourhoods. The other concerns a Texan senator, then president, who stole an election, dominated the Senate, advanced civil rights, launched the Great Society welfare programs, and vainly prosecuted the war in Vietnam.
For its part, the memoir by Bill Burns, formerly both under-secretary and deputy secretary of state, and ambassador to Russia and to Jordan, appraises recent power politics in Jordan, the wider Middle East, Russia, Iraq, Iran and, of course, the United States. While Caro is trudging through a fifth volume on Johnson, covering his terms as president, Burns is now managing the Carnegie Endowment.
Any student of power and governance should be intrigued by the substantive examination of power - the secrets, the insights and the analysis - in their books. Such students should also seek to learn from the writers' methods of work. There both historian and diplomat have much to teach a decision maker.
Policy makers might learn from a writing style which is colloquial, conversational but certainly not chummy.
Having conducted 522 interviews for The Power Broker before being confronted with 45 million pieces of paper in the LBJ Library, Caro counsels indefatigability. Turn every page, assume nothing, track down hidden clues, prompt yourself to ask ever more questions of your material. Total immersion needs to be sustained.
Caro's might seem like guidance from an uber-nerd, but he goes on to argue for a quite elegant sensitivity to nuance, inflection and context. At awkward points in discussions, remain mute and rely on people's need to fill a silence. Understand that a sense of place is vital to any wider comprehension of how things really work.
Burns has also spent a lot of time behind a desk but desks scattered around the world connected by innumerable stints working on aircraft.
Immediately after the Second World War, the US State Department boasted a Deputy Secretary for Substance. (The other deputy did Management.) Titles have been amended, but substance - the substance of power especially - has been Burns' forte.
Early on Burns recalls a golden age when grown-ups were in charge, a valuable model for ministers and senior public servants alike. That was the administration of Bush I (1989-92), "a unique mix of caution and daring", when the decision-making team worked well together, the United States was determined not to be "diddled", American leverage was used for the greater good and one negotiation after another was successfully concluded.
Burns moves on to less skilled teams producing less durable results. Although his own contribution was remarkable, Burns regularly includes considered, occasionally brutal self-criticisms. Obliging the great and good to think and publish where they had erred would be a therapeutic discipline.
Moreover, Burns' book contains an appendix of declassified policy advice. Those documents are precisely the sort of candid, insider notes to power and on power which Caro has been seeking by turning every page. Burns' is genuinely frank and fearless advice.
Burns' cables are polite but not fawning, trenchant rather than truculent.
Burns is a diplomat who has, in that phrase of Stalin's, learned how to conduct himself and what to do.
He is prepared to urge wholesale reform, in the form of a "radical re-structuring of our national security institutions". He warns when policy (here in the Middle East) is "heading in exactly the wrong direction" or when (relations with Russia) "we face three potential train wrecks".
He insists on common sense: "First, we need to keep a sense of perspective". Policy makers might learn from a writing style which is colloquial, conversational but certainly not chummy.
The two writers remind us that values frame and sometimes shame us. The cardinal value they teach is intellectual honesty, surely one foundation of integrity.
- Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.