July 28, 2002

Colin Powell, Secretary of State in the current Bush administration, has the reputation of being a very talented man. So talented is he that a large section of the American people and intelligentsia think that, with him around and available, the wrong man is sitting in the White House.

Powell is a quintessential role model of a self-made man who has struck it big in the American social and political landscape. His is a typical story of the son of a poor Jamaican immigrant from the Caribbean rising to the pinnacle of power and popularity in a country which does not, ordinarily, help immigrants, especially those visibly handicapped, as was the case with Powell’s parents.

Powell had an exceptionally brilliant career in the military. He became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989 under George Bush Sr and held that post for four years. He was the youngest officer in that coveted position and the first black American in what had always been a white preserve. Powell made it because of his exceptional abilities and command of military and political affairs. His commanding talent enabled him to serve both the Republicans and the Democrats with equal finesse and dignity.

Powell became a hero during the Gulf War when he called the shots from his privileged position in Washington. Such was his prestige that neither Bush Sr, nor the temperamental General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of ‘Desert Storm’ against Iraq, dared to challenge his strategy. Fame and fortunes thus gathered could have, possibly, paved his way to the White House. America has had precedents of war heroes becoming presidents. But Powell shunned that temptation, for reasons he has not, to date, shared in public with anyone.

However, Powell developed a style of leadership uniquely his own — a style anchored in caution, deliberate analysis and hands-on application which enabled him to bask in the limelight of popular approbation. He could not be dislodged from that pedestal, even after his retirement from the army in 1993.

Oren Harari, a professor of management at the McLaren School of Business, university of San Francisco, who writes and lectures on management styles and transformational leadership has chosen Powell as the exponent of a unique new style of leadership: one that has become Powell’s hallmark.

Harari’s book on the leadership secrets of Colin Powell is not a biography of an acclaimed hero. It is more a primer on Powell’s philosophy and practice of what Harari describes as ‘mission-and-people-based leadership’. Because of his own humble origins, Powell was, perhaps naturally, endowed with this kind of leadership style and management of people. As a soldier in the field (he also served in Vietnam where he won a Purple Heart for bravery and leadership) he learned to identify himself with his comrades-in-arms.

He learned to understand the nature of problems a field commander was confronted with every day and hour. Instead of being overwhelmed by them, Powell reckoned that he could use them to get to know his juniors and learn to communicate with them.

Of course no leader in the world is a superman to solve all the problems requiring his direction and indulgence. Powell is quoted in the book admitting frankly, “You cannot slay the dragon every day. Some days the dragon wins.” This is as frank and honest an admission as possible of the inbuilt limitations on the leadership of an individual, no matter how accomplished or outstanding.

Powell’s style of leadership does not allow personal ego to stand in the way of accomplishing a target. There is no room for the ego trap in a good leader. Harari illustrates this with an anecdote from living memory. In 1988, Powell went to Moscow as President Reagan’s national security advisor, along with the then secretary of state, George Schultz, for a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, then on the threshold of dismantling the Soviet Union. Gorbachev peered into Powell’s eyes and said: “General, I’m ending the cold war, and you’re going to have to find yourself a new enemy.”

Powell was quite taken aback by Gorbachev’s disarming candour. All his life work against Reagan’s “evil empire” enemy seemed evaporating instantly. Powell’s first reaction — more a gut feeling — was that he did not want to find a new enemy. But saner sense later convinced him that the disappearance of an enemy did not mean that he was also disappearing.

With so much transparency and integrity at the bedrock of his character, it is a conundrum to many how Colin Powell could have chosen to serve a man like George W. Bush so palpably lacking in these essential attributes. If he has done so out of a soldier’s sense of loyalty to Bush Sr then it would be a different matter.

Otherwise, Powell and Bush Jr are like water and oil that can never mix. Powell is a model of integrity, honesty and uprightness. He believes, in his own words that “untidy truth is better than smooth lies”. He should have known, therefore, that the man calling upon him to join his team had literally stolen his way into the White House with a surfeit of under-hand practices which shall, forever, hang over his name like a big question mark.

Powell says, “A good leader surrounds himself with people who complement his skills.” His skills and those of his White House boss clearly do not complement each other. How, then, could Powell add to the skills of George W. Bush? Alternatively, does Bush need a man straight as an arrow, like Powell, and lilly-white clean in a key position? Obviously not. Which explains frequent inside accounts from Washington’s well-informed mafia that Powell is the odd man out in the Bush team; that he has been practically sidelined; that he is not in the kitchen cabinet of Bush which is teeming with hawks and ultra-right Christian crusaders like Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.

Many predict that Powell, an unhappy man, may not last the remaining years of the Bush administration and resign. If that happens, and whenever it happens, Powell will have done justice to himself and his style of morally robust, transparent leadership whose rubric, throughout his illustrious career, has been integrity, decency and honesty. Or is it that for the sake of power, he has, temporarily, taken leave of his own principles? Power, after all, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, even for a Mr Clean like Powell.

The leadership secrets of Colin Powell
By Oren Harari
McGraw-Hill, New York
Distributed in Pakistan by Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400
Tel: 021-4310030
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0-07-138859-1. 278pp. Rs795

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