It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership

by Colin Powell

“hope is a bad supper, but makes a good breakfast.”

“Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it’s an excuse and not a reason.”

horrific Hussein and Taliban regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the residual problems in those

If you take the pay, earn it. Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don’t disappoint yourself.

I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work. That kind of environment has always produced the best results for me.

As the old saying puts it, “To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”

had many mornings like that over the next fifty years. We all do. Problems come with just being alive, and even more come with responsibility. When they come, you just suck it up and get started again. You are never caught up.

Problems have to be solved, not managed. You can’t get away with burying them, minimizing them, reorganizing around them, softening them, or assigning blame somewhere outside your responsibility. You have to make real and effective changes.

But for each of them the answer has to be “at the point of decision.”

“Walmart updates their entire information system whenever there’s a transaction at a Walmart checkout counter. If I wake up and see on television that a foreign leader has died and his replacement has been announced, I want that reflected on our website background note for that country by the time I get to the office. We may not always be able to

beat Wikipedia or Google, but let’s try.”

Facts are verified information that is then presented as objective reality. The rub here is the verified part. How do you verify verified? Facts are slippery, and so is verification. Today’s

“Hey,” he said quietly, “he don’t pay me to give him happy talk.”

In 2003, American soldiers and interrogators in charge of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad subjected prisoners to horrendous abuse, torture, and humiliation. Their actions were shocking and clearly illegal.

Not long after that, another report came in. The plane the Vincennes shot down wasn’t an F-14; it was an Iranian Airbus passenger jet ascending on a normal flight path.

Try to let a hot potato cool a bit before you pick it up.

If you are a senior leader—military, corporate, or financial—who plans to speak in public, you should make a thorough analysis of each audience you will be addressing. Be sure you are always talking through the questioner or the interviewer to the audiences who really matter.

It reminds the young Patton of two military maxims: “No plan survives first contact with an enemy” and “Even the most brilliant of strategists must occasionally take into account the presence of an enemy.”

Leaders should never bury a problem; you can be sure it will eventually rise from its grave and walk the earth again.

One Tuesday morning I came in and asked if anyone had seen Monday Night Raw wrestling with Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker. I was met with blank stares and bewilderment from the assembled ambassadors, senior Foreign Service officers, and other intellectual types. I described the match. It was a heavily choreographed ballet, I had to admit, yet the wrestlers showed considerable athletic skill and training as they bounced each other on the mat. The bewilderment remained until I told them why the match interested me. Thirty thousand people had come out on a Monday night in a mid-sized city in the Midwest to watch it. This is what average Americans do. They also love NASCAR and Walmart.

These are the folks we really work for. We can’t forget that.

Lincoln slumped in his chair as he read of this latest setback. Moaning slightly he said, “Sure hate to lose those one hundred horses.” The operator felt obliged to ask, “Mr. President,

what about the brigadier general?” Lincoln replied, “I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace one hundred horses.”

deciding what forces to use and how to apply them, planners must think the operation through in its entirety from start to finish. After you achieve your initial military objective, what then? How do you know when it is over, and how and why do you stay on or exit?

Thucydides: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men

When the girl ended her story, the others remained silent. It had been a powerful experience for all of them. We had introduced them to congressmen, cabinet Secretaries, and other dignitaries, but a restaurant manager in Chicago made the strongest impression on them and gave them their most enduring memory of America.

The more outrageous, misanthropic, and narcissistic the behavior, the more it sells. We suck it all up. The news and gossip cycles now move so fast that a falsehood goes around the world at the speed of light and is embedded in a million depositories. The correcting truth seldom gets that kind of distribution.

Housewares manufacturers could tell me what’s happening in housing before HUD, Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac.

Now that Century 21, Amway, Estée Lauder, and other consumer-oriented firms are penetrating China, the country will never be the same.

It is that nurturing person who will begin imparting education, character, values, happiness, and kindness in the heart and mind of that child. In those early days, weeks, and months, the mother is the most important person whom that child knows. If she is not there or does not perform that role, the child has a much tougher road to travel.

“The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.”

My city believed that kids like me deserved a shot at the top. The people of New York City were willing to be taxed to educate the “whole people”—poor kids like me with immigrant parents, Jews who couldn’t get

into other schools because they were Jews, young adults with jobs who could only go to night school (it might take them seven years to finish), kids who lived at home and came in every morning by subway or bus. Education like the one I got at CCNY was how the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free were integrated into America’s social and economic life. Education was—and still is—the Golden Door.

America’s Promise

You can leave behind you a good reputation. But the only thing of momentous value we leave behind is the next generation, our kids—all our kids. We all need to work together to give them the gift of a good start in life.

“Organizations don’t get things done. Plans and programs don’t get things done. Only people get things done. Organizations, plans, and programs either help or hinder people.”