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Welcome to the HOW Institute for Society's podcast, HOW Conversations, where we talk with courageous and authentic leaders about how we can build and nurture a culture of moral leadership throughout society.
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What does it mean to be a moral leader today? Who has moral authority in our society? What should we expect of our leaders during a crisis, and what are the moral leadership frameworks our leaders are using to navigate through these challenging times? These are just some of the nuanced questions our hosts cover in their discussions with CEOs, military generals, educators, philanthropists, and other leaders about the importance of moral and ethical decision making. And now here's the HOW Institute for Society founder and chairman, and the host for today's podcast, Dov Seidman.
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Welcome to our latest HOW Conversation. Welcome our 27th Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Welcome, Mark.
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Thanks, Dov. It's great to be with you today, and your audience.
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So, Secretary, you led the largest and most complex organization in the world, our over 3 million service members and defense civilians, you in the midst of doing that, you established the Space Force and Space Command, and if that wasn't hard enough, you were challenged to do all that during COVID, a crisis, a global crisis we've really never lived through until we did, and then here at home, the George Floyd protests all on the run up to the 2020 election. So, I'd say that you were in charge in quite a challenging and unfamiliar moment in our journey. And before that, you were the 20-third secretary of the army, where you were responsible for over 1.5 million active and guard and reserve soldiers and army civilians. What made you the kind of person that would then wind up and distinguish yourself at West Point? Just start just with your personal journey and how you were formed and forged into the kind of person that made character and leadership your life's work.
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Well, thanks, Dov.
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That's a very, very generous introduction. Look, I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a small mining town, coal mining town, which is actually the birthplace also of George Marshall. So it's the only town in the United States of America that is the home, or was the home, of two secretaries of defense, but needless to say, it's, you know, a small conservative town in a midwestern city, arguably midwest, and you know, you first come in, develop your values through your parents, and of course, the community adds to that as well, but you know, importantly, as you mentioned earlier, I went to West Point at age 18, that further shaped not just my professional values, but further shaped my personal values as well. And it was at West Point that really this immersion in terms of duty, honor, and country, and what each of those means in that four year environment is what further shaped me and made me what I was when I became an active duty army officer in 1986 so, so clearly the combination of those two things, my first 18 years back in southwest Pennsylvania, and then the four years at West Point laid the foundation for the remaining 40 years or so after that.
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I have two questions for you. What did you come to understand by going into a cave of sorts, and really writing over 700 pages, and I do want to say that you purvey wisdom, but probably better said practical wisdom. You do it in a way where your intent, it feels, is that we can take it and use it both to form guardrails in our lives that we never cross, but at the same time to have an animating ethos that within the guardrails can can propel us and animate us and guide us towards an elevated way of doing whatever it is we're doing, especially leading. So, the first question to you is, What did you truly come to understand through the process of writing 700 informative and insightful pages.
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Well, let me, let me begin with the genesis of the book, and I would say, you know, I never had any ambition to write a book while I was in office. It wasn't until I, I left in late 2020 that I was approached by a publishing group to do such a thing, and I thought about it, and I know that you know my predecessors had written books, and I had actually read them. Bob Gates had did a very good book called Duty of All Things, and I had learned a lot about that when I was before I entered office, and I thought, you know, the Trump administration, the first administration was such a unique administration. And the impact it had on on society, on government, on the country, on the world, it deserves an insider's tale, all the good, all the bad of what happened. So I thought about the importance to history of doing that, and then secondly, I thought, you know, if I'm going to write a book about this, I also wanted to be instructive, and you chose a good word, instructive to people who work at the Pentagon, people who work in government, people who are in Washington, D.C. to give them a sense of what a secretary of defense goes through on a day-to-day basis, the issues I've wrestled with, the considerations I had to, I had to undertake, and how I thought through those different decisions, because I wanted them to understand again how I approach things and what I saw from my perspective, which may or may not have been different from somebody else's, and also to share with them the method by which I approached the answers or came up with the answers, and so, and I want to be very honest about where I thought I was successful and where I thought I wasn't successful. These jobs are not easy. They're intrinsically very difficult, because you're wrestling every day with complex life and death decisions, or decisions that affect the livelihood of millions of people. And so they aren't easy to begin with. And then they are complicated at times by who you work with, who you work for, who works for you.
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That adds another layer of things, and then there's, you know, the Commander in Chief had a degree of unpredictability, which is well known, and that's his style, and so when it came down to me was instruct instructive in terms of a different type of organization and way of operating, of how I had to find for myself and identify for myself a clear compass going forward, not just a moral compass, which I know we want to talk about, but also a compass with which way to take the organization.
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So many of us, in different dimensions and contexts of our life, have taken some form of oath, and it could be a sacred oath, literally to put country above all, but it could be a professional oath, and it could be even a corporate oath to put a customer first, and I'd like to really explore with you, how do we go about leading when the first premise is to put something transcendent first?
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Yeah, I think by definition, if you're taking an oath, that means you're automatically putting yourself not first, you're putting something bigger, whether it's an organization, an idea, or some other principle, before yourself. So, by nature, that's the way it is. And you're right, various professions have such oaths, you know. For myself, I taken the first oath to serve that every military member does in as an 18 year old at West Point, when I entered the academy, and I would eventually take, end up taking that oath about a dozen more times through various promotions and transitions through government, so I knew it very well. And, of course, that oath is to the Constitution of the United States, it's not to it's not to the President, it's not to a party, it's not to a political philosophy, it's not to a group of people, but to the Constitution, and embodying that constitution, of course, is our structure of government and in our rights and our privileges as citizens, and so to me that was elevated first and foremost, and you know, second to that, or I should say consistent with that, is of course service to country and the American people, and we know that through our professional studies at West Point and in the army about how you serve, you know, the broader good, and you are a military that takes your oath from the civilians, and you serve the civilian populace. So these things kind of knit together or nest together very well, but it begins with that oath to the Constitution that many of us take, have taken multiple times
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Now, the vicissitudes of life and the political arena, and the partisanship of politics, and the interests of those with maybe more political power than, say, you might have put your relationship with your oath in tension, right? Sometimes in conflict, where does the strength come from to not just intellectually put the oath first, but to live that way, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's unpopular, even if it's dangerous, and so on.
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Well, you know, I would say, first of all, this is the political spaces is unique.
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You have people there in the political space, not everybody, but a lot of people who are seeking their own personal ambitions or trying to implement their own agendas. Now, I served in corporate America too. There are people in those organizations as well who aren't kind of rowing with the team and trying to advance the bottom line. In many cases, again, they're trying to advance their own personal agendas, their own, their own welfare, if you will, but look again. I think if you're as an individual and certainly as a leader, you have to make clear not just through your words but through your actions what motivates you and how you're going to, how you're going to pursue those goals, and to me, in a very, in the very complicated political world, where you're, where you're not just reporting. Up a chain of command, in my case, to the president, but you also have Congress as your board of directors, all 535 members, you have the media out there, you have, you know, think tanks and associations, and you have all these different groups who have an interest in your organization, and you as an individual, you know, it's important that you have some guiding principles, and to me, at the end of the day, it was clear that you have to put again that oath first in that institution.
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What are the guiding principles that you clarified in your life, but really came into sharp focus in these crucible moments you had around 2019 2020 and then the relationship between character and principles, because taken together, I think that's the Mark Esper playbook, and I'd like to really build out the Mark Esper playbook.
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Well, I hope it's not just my playbook, it's many members of what we call the long gray line that preceded me at West Point and the other academies, for that matter. But look, needless to say, the West Point is a four year immersion into duty honor country, and it begins with the crucible of your plebe year, and the dress and stresses, and, and you know, nonstop, you know, supervision that you receive from upperclassmen and faculty that are constantly pressing you and testing you, and, and at times, you know, your, your, your integrity is always on the line, because you live by an honor code, and that is, that says a cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do, and so you live by that code, and failure to do so means you're, you know, likely expulsion, and so you know, four years of emergent immersion in that environment, you understand what it means to live by an honor code, to live in an environment where everybody else is doing so well, and how things can break down if, if you don't, it is this immersion where the hope is that at the end of the four years that you come out with this ingrained in you an unbroken sense of duty, honor, and country and integrity that will serve you as the, as the Academy mission says, through a lifetime of service, not just in the army, but to the country beyond that, and so I think that's what, and I believe that's what many of my classmates and myself have always aspired to do, is to live that life, even when it's not convenient, or it may be work against you.
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Obviously, being an embodiment of everything you just talked about is table stakes, embodying, walking the talk, but part of your responsibility was to nurture it and foster it in the culture of the institutions that you led.
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So, how did you scale these values, these principles? What are some of the approaches and methodologies that you use to scale it, so that others could emulate, and the same principles, so that you were in fact conducting an orchestra and not just a little string quartet, so to speak.
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Well, I think, as many leaders do, and when I first assumed the job as Secretary of the Army, and then later Secretary of Defense, I put out a note to the field about who I am and what I stand for, and it was for me in both circumstances, it was about the importance of war fighting and readiness being our top priorities, and and eventually leading an apolitical organization that would, that, that engendered people of character and expected from our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines integrity and and service to country, and so the, you know, setting that out on day one was I felt an important statement to make. I reinforced that during my hearings before the Senate in both jobs, and eventually what you do is, you know, I would do videos to the field. I thought it always important also to travel around to bases and to meet with service members and to talk to them in smaller groups, and also at the individual level, about what they faced, and try and encourage candor, and as many leaders know, that's that's a hard thing to elicit from folks, is their honest, frank views about what's working and not working, but you do that through a variety of means, both large and small, personal and impersonal, formal and informal, to try and set the tone, and of course it, you know, it's in the closed door meetings as well, where that resonates with the people around the desk, or in the in the briefing room with you, that they know that you're speaking with authenticity, with courage, with honesty, and that you can be trusted, and trust, you know, trust is hard to build and easy to lose, and so it's it's those day in, day out activities, even the smallest things that make a difference and inculcate trust in others or not.
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What are some of the guiding principles for how to wield power when you have enormous power?
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Yeah, when,
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When the power, when the power throughout the hierarchy is there for a reason, without the hierarchy and the power, we're going to have disorder and chaos. So we need the hierarchy of power, but once the hierarchy is put in place, how you wield it, it could be quite consequential and set quite a tone and create a lot of realities.
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Well, of course, you have both formal and informal power, and sometimes one can be more impactful than the other.
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You know, the good thing about the military is there are clear lines with the. 40 from commanders all the way up the chain of command and back down, but to your point, you know, there are various kind of models out there in terms of different types of authority, and people over time have endorsed one over the other. I kind of found that in many cases it's situational.
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Now, by nature, by training, I'm one who likes to power down to decentralized power to the appropriate level, so if you're giving somebody responsibility, they need to have commensurate authority to act, and so that was always important to me as well. And you don't want to take arbitrarily power away from people, and my view was I would assume that people are capable of doing the job until they prove to me that they wouldn't weren't, and of course, as a leader, you know, over time, as you experience working with subordinate commanders, people below you, who you can trust, who you can't trust, who needs less oversight, and who needs a little bit more, and that's part of leadership, is figuring out where that barometer is for each and every person, so that you, you can maximize their effectiveness and their ability, and their ability to also maximize the effectiveness of their organization, but generally my view was to assume the best of people until proven otherwise, and decentralize as much as possible, and for me as leader to focus on the things that only I could do or should do best. And so, you know, one thing I used to always say is my job was to look around the corners, to look over the hill, to look into the future, because if I wasn't doing that. Who was doing that?
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You mentioned sports. You're spending a lot of time in business. We're seeing examples of military leaders increasingly finding themselves in business. Tell me about sports, business, and military, what they each teach each other, and what can the private sector truly leverage from the kinds of things that you learn first and foremost by climbing the ranks as you did in the US military.
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Yeah, for me, that you know, as in the private sector, when I would look at resumes and interview people, to me, if you had a sports background, that was always a big discriminator for me. It made a big difference, because you know, I knew from my own experience, from my time in the army, from my years playing sports, that athletes bring something different to the table, and what is that? Right, in many ways, this was an idea I would share with colleagues as well, and most agreed, what you find with people who played on sports teams is they, they know the commitment it takes to win, they know what it means to lose, and they understand that you have to, when you get knocked down, you have to dust yourself off, and and adjust your uniform, and get back in there, and fight again, they know the importance of the team, putting the team first, and everybody playing their respective roles, and, and what victory means for the broader, for the broader effort. So, in my mind, athletes, particularly those who were playing sports from the youngest of age, brought those, those attributes that that focus, that pursuit of of putting the team first and winning, winning is a very important thing, that the spirit of winning, unvarnished honesty.
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Now, that, of course, doesn't mean that you are rude in terms of delivering it, but yeah, I think honesty, I mentioned earlier, candor, that's very important. I think authenticity, which gets to, you know, who you are as a person, what really is important to you, understanding what your, what your purpose is, what your goals are. And I, again, going back to the military, people understood that you're the mission was first.
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We, in fact, we'd say mission first, people always. So I think if people understand that you're that you're being honest back with them, and that you're, you're trying to serve a higher goal, to a shared goal, presumably, or should be. Then I think that builds trust, that people know that in the toughest of times, that you're not going to put yourself first, and they also know by extension you're not maybe not going to put them first, but the mission will come first.
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What's the best way for a very senior leader to inspire and enable somebody in middle management and leadership to live the values, even if short term it might cost and be highly inconvenient, because what you say really resonates, that the only way to live values is to live the values, especially when inconvenient, and the forces that you mentioned are probably putting more pressure on our ability to do that, and giving us more incentive to not some of these guardrails and norms that you talk about are being challenged, if not eroded. We see others who say I don't need to live by the values, because others who don't seem to be getting away with it, increasingly, and some not so those who really, you're speaking to their heart, really want to live the values, because it's the right thing to do, and they probably know that practically over the long term that's the best way to keep your footing. What would you advise them on how to go about. That, when it really isn't their ultimate call.
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Yeah, I think first of all, you have to, you have to know who that middle layer is, who those folks are, whether they're struggling, or you're it's maybe it's your next tier of leadership coming up, your high potential people. You have to get down to that level and make it a routine for them to get to know you and who you are, and and to be able to share with you and talk about the challenges they face, I think, second, you know, most organizations do a good job recognizing people, in some ways it's through bonuses, in other ways it's through, you know, certificates and and thank you notes and things like that.
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Those are all very important, and the more public you can make those things, the better, but I think you also have to highlight failures where people were doing the right thing, but failed, and I tried to do that as Secretary of the Army, where we're trying to, we're trying to get people to think outside the box, and maybe, you know, as they brought along a new weapon system, for example, it failed, and my view is always, look, if you were, if you were doing the right thing, if you're following the prescribed processes, if you were, if your aim was to improve the war fighting ability of our forces. If you're, you know, consistent with everything we were preaching, and yet it still went wrong, because the tech failed, or because something fell through, then we weren't going to kick you while you were down. What we need to do is celebrate you, take account of the lesson learned, and, and, and then make sure you gave it, you were given another chance to get back up on that horse, and so I think I wouldn't say celebrating the failures, but recognizing the failures, but celebrating the process, the approach, the effort that got you there is important, so that way people don't have a fear of failure, because a failure of failure lives to a leads to a very risk-conscious, risk-averse type of organization, which is what you don't need in most cases. You want people to exercise their authority, you want them to take risks.
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What are some of the guidance you give to individuals and leaders, just about the seas are rough, but you gotta sail them nonetheless, and that there's a lot to be gained in getting good at going up and down, always always forward, but up and down, and not to quit when the going gets tough, and that there are lessons and meaning to be found in the struggle, in the downs, and any thoughts you have on how to lead in an up and down context and world,
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yeah, of course, we always say the ups and downs, particularly the downs, build character, and it is truth, true that you know you have to have that, the downs can really shape you, it can teach you the importance of perseverance, perseverance and resilience and grit, and all those things that are important, you got to be able to motivate your team to get back up, and so that's the important thing, is you know every day is a chance to build those skills, to build that character, to educate others, and show others, and you know, when you bring young men and women into the military, that's what basic training is about, it's about building toughness and grit, and showing them that you, you may have had a bad day yesterday, but today is a new day, the sun's going to come up, and you have a chance to test yourself once again, and adopt the lessons learned, and have a better day, and that's that's life as well. You have good days and bad days, and teaching people to persevere, and how to deal with that is important, particularly in today's society, which is far more complicated by tech and social media, and everything else going on out there
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as we wrap up, Secretary Esper, I want to just maybe distill this into a final framing. I'm fond of saying that the world has gone from connected to interconnected, hyper connected to interdependent globally.
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Increasingly, we rise or fall together, and that our interdependence is not a choice, it's now a condition. We live in an interdependent world. I think the pandemic illuminated and revealed that to us. A tiny pathogen started to encircle the world, and we saw how interdependent we are. I think geopolitical dynamics show us how interdependent we are. So, if interdependence is our condition, our only choice is to forge healthy interdependencies, so we rise together and not fall. If that resonates with you, as a framing, summarize just the kind of leadership that helps us forge healthy interdependencies in our communities, in our institutions, with our allies, and around the world, so that increasingly we rise together and avoid the falling that will happen if we don't do it, do whatever it is we do together.
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I think first of all, you have to recognize and embrace that, that is indeed the world we live in, that's very interdependent, right. Then, secondly, I think you know the approach we always talked about in the military was, you have to, you have to approach all the other stakeholders and all the interested players in that interdependent circle that you live, you have to approach them all with dignity and respect, knowing that that you want to resist. Lucicate that you're trying to build a positive bond, a positive relationship with them, knowing that you know if you're successful, that tide will lift all boats, and so I think you have to, that gets back into the kind of the emotional, not just the mental, but the emotional part of it, where you have empathy and understanding, and you can put yourself in the other person's shoes, and then it's leadership, where you may insist on some things like honesty, but you can inspire a reciprocation of what you're trying to extend to that individual or that group, because they know you're coming at it from a good faith position of recognizing that interdependence and trying to lift
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I came of age in business where you would constantly hear hope is not a strategy. Through planning, budgeting, and control, we're going to superimpose a linear future on the world, and we're going to go be number one, and we're going to somehow just control our way towards being number one. And I always felt that it's a just an emotionally and philosophically misguided way to understand hope, because while hope technically is not a strategy, without hope there can be no strategy. People don't even see possibility, they might not see that this doing something hard is worthy of their loyalty and dedication.
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What is your relationship as a leader toward to hope, and how and putting hope to hope and how to inspire hope and where does hope fit in to your world and your playbook of leadership.
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Well, people need hope. I mean, without hope you know you wither, and so they have to have that promise that that something positive can be achieved. And so hope is important, but you have to operationalize it, and I think you operationalize that by certainly doing the planning and the preparation and the resourcing and stuff like that, but, but that to me, that's more the mental dynamic that you were talking about earlier, you have to, you have to attack the emotional dynamic as well by inspiring people to do extraordinary things, things that they didn't think they could do, or wouldn't do, you know. I'm reminded right here on the spot, you know, Eisenhower Plan D Day, D-Day, and we knew that we were gonna do landings on Omaha Beach, but something inspired those, those young men, those 1819, 20 year olds to get off those landing craft and fight their way across the beach under withering German machine gun fire, and to see their buddies fall, but they kept going forward. They didn't do that because the plan said so.
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They did that because they were motivated by something bigger.
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They want to, you know, rid Europe of fascism. They want to protect the homeland. They want to make sure they lived up to the expectations of their buddies on that beach as well.
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Most importantly, and so that's what you can't calculate is that emotional dynamic inspires other people to do extraordinary things, and so that's the factor that I think you have to tap into at the end of the day, in addition to the mental attributes that we discussed earlier.
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Thank you for just this conversation and sharing so much, frankly, your hard-earned wisdom.
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Thanks, Dov. I appreciate it. Enjoyed speaking with you and your audience today.
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Welcome to the HOW Institute for Society's podcast, HOW Conversations, where we talk with courageous and authentic leaders about how we can build and nurture a culture of moral leadership throughout society.
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What does it mean to be a moral leader today? Who has moral authority in our society? What should we expect of our leaders during a crisis, and what are the moral leadership frameworks our leaders are using to navigate through these challenging times? These are just some of the nuanced questions our hosts cover in their discussions with CEOs, military generals, educators, philanthropists, and other leaders about the importance of moral and ethical decision making. And now here's the HOW Institute for Society founder and chairman, and the host for today's podcast, Dov Seidman.
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Welcome to our latest HOW Conversation. Welcome our 27th Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Welcome, Mark.
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Thanks, Dov. It's great to be with you today, and your audience.
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So, Secretary, you led the largest and most complex organization in the world, our over 3 million service members and defense civilians, you in the midst of doing that, you established the Space Force and Space Command, and if that wasn't hard enough, you were challenged to do all that during COVID, a crisis, a global crisis we've really never lived through until we did, and then here at home, the George Floyd protests all on the run up to the 2020 election. So, I'd say that you were in charge in quite a challenging and unfamiliar moment in our journey. And before that, you were the 20-third secretary of the army, where you were responsible for over 1.5 million active and guard and reserve soldiers and army civilians. What made you the kind of person that would then wind up and distinguish yourself at West Point? Just start just with your personal journey and how you were formed and forged into the kind of person that made character and leadership your life's work.
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Well, thanks, Dov.
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That's a very, very generous introduction. Look, I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a small mining town, coal mining town, which is actually the birthplace also of George Marshall. So it's the only town in the United States of America that is the home, or was the home, of two secretaries of defense, but needless to say, it's, you know, a small conservative town in a midwestern city, arguably midwest, and you know, you first come in, develop your values through your parents, and of course, the community adds to that as well, but you know, importantly, as you mentioned earlier, I went to West Point at age 18, that further shaped not just my professional values, but further shaped my personal values as well. And it was at West Point that really this immersion in terms of duty, honor, and country, and what each of those means in that four year environment is what further shaped me and made me what I was when I became an active duty army officer in 1986 so, so clearly the combination of those two things, my first 18 years back in southwest Pennsylvania, and then the four years at West Point laid the foundation for the remaining 40 years or so after that.
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I have two questions for you. What did you come to understand by going into a cave of sorts, and really writing over 700 pages, and I do want to say that you purvey wisdom, but probably better said practical wisdom. You do it in a way where your intent, it feels, is that we can take it and use it both to form guardrails in our lives that we never cross, but at the same time to have an animating ethos that within the guardrails can can propel us and animate us and guide us towards an elevated way of doing whatever it is we're doing, especially leading. So, the first question to you is, What did you truly come to understand through the process of writing 700 informative and insightful pages.
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Well, let me, let me begin with the genesis of the book, and I would say, you know, I never had any ambition to write a book while I was in office. It wasn't until I, I left in late 2020 that I was approached by a publishing group to do such a thing, and I thought about it, and I know that you know my predecessors had written books, and I had actually read them. Bob Gates had did a very good book called Duty of All Things, and I had learned a lot about that when I was before I entered office, and I thought, you know, the Trump administration, the first administration was such a unique administration. And the impact it had on on society, on government, on the country, on the world, it deserves an insider's tale, all the good, all the bad of what happened. So I thought about the importance to history of doing that, and then secondly, I thought, you know, if I'm going to write a book about this, I also wanted to be instructive, and you chose a good word, instructive to people who work at the Pentagon, people who work in government, people who are in Washington, D.C. to give them a sense of what a secretary of defense goes through on a day-to-day basis, the issues I've wrestled with, the considerations I had to, I had to undertake, and how I thought through those different decisions, because I wanted them to understand again how I approach things and what I saw from my perspective, which may or may not have been different from somebody else's, and also to share with them the method by which I approached the answers or came up with the answers, and so, and I want to be very honest about where I thought I was successful and where I thought I wasn't successful. These jobs are not easy. They're intrinsically very difficult, because you're wrestling every day with complex life and death decisions, or decisions that affect the livelihood of millions of people. And so they aren't easy to begin with. And then they are complicated at times by who you work with, who you work for, who works for you.
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That adds another layer of things, and then there's, you know, the Commander in Chief had a degree of unpredictability, which is well known, and that's his style, and so when it came down to me was instruct instructive in terms of a different type of organization and way of operating, of how I had to find for myself and identify for myself a clear compass going forward, not just a moral compass, which I know we want to talk about, but also a compass with which way to take the organization.
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So many of us, in different dimensions and contexts of our life, have taken some form of oath, and it could be a sacred oath, literally to put country above all, but it could be a professional oath, and it could be even a corporate oath to put a customer first, and I'd like to really explore with you, how do we go about leading when the first premise is to put something transcendent first?
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Yeah, I think by definition, if you're taking an oath, that means you're automatically putting yourself not first, you're putting something bigger, whether it's an organization, an idea, or some other principle, before yourself. So, by nature, that's the way it is. And you're right, various professions have such oaths, you know. For myself, I taken the first oath to serve that every military member does in as an 18 year old at West Point, when I entered the academy, and I would eventually take, end up taking that oath about a dozen more times through various promotions and transitions through government, so I knew it very well. And, of course, that oath is to the Constitution of the United States, it's not to it's not to the President, it's not to a party, it's not to a political philosophy, it's not to a group of people, but to the Constitution, and embodying that constitution, of course, is our structure of government and in our rights and our privileges as citizens, and so to me that was elevated first and foremost, and you know, second to that, or I should say consistent with that, is of course service to country and the American people, and we know that through our professional studies at West Point and in the army about how you serve, you know, the broader good, and you are a military that takes your oath from the civilians, and you serve the civilian populace. So these things kind of knit together or nest together very well, but it begins with that oath to the Constitution that many of us take, have taken multiple times
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Now, the vicissitudes of life and the political arena, and the partisanship of politics, and the interests of those with maybe more political power than, say, you might have put your relationship with your oath in tension, right? Sometimes in conflict, where does the strength come from to not just intellectually put the oath first, but to live that way, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's unpopular, even if it's dangerous, and so on.
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Well, you know, I would say, first of all, this is the political spaces is unique.
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You have people there in the political space, not everybody, but a lot of people who are seeking their own personal ambitions or trying to implement their own agendas. Now, I served in corporate America too. There are people in those organizations as well who aren't kind of rowing with the team and trying to advance the bottom line. In many cases, again, they're trying to advance their own personal agendas, their own, their own welfare, if you will, but look again. I think if you're as an individual and certainly as a leader, you have to make clear not just through your words but through your actions what motivates you and how you're going to, how you're going to pursue those goals, and to me, in a very, in the very complicated political world, where you're, where you're not just reporting. Up a chain of command, in my case, to the president, but you also have Congress as your board of directors, all 535 members, you have the media out there, you have, you know, think tanks and associations, and you have all these different groups who have an interest in your organization, and you as an individual, you know, it's important that you have some guiding principles, and to me, at the end of the day, it was clear that you have to put again that oath first in that institution.
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What are the guiding principles that you clarified in your life, but really came into sharp focus in these crucible moments you had around 2019 2020 and then the relationship between character and principles, because taken together, I think that's the Mark Esper playbook, and I'd like to really build out the Mark Esper playbook.
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Well, I hope it's not just my playbook, it's many members of what we call the long gray line that preceded me at West Point and the other academies, for that matter. But look, needless to say, the West Point is a four year immersion into duty honor country, and it begins with the crucible of your plebe year, and the dress and stresses, and, and you know, nonstop, you know, supervision that you receive from upperclassmen and faculty that are constantly pressing you and testing you, and, and at times, you know, your, your, your integrity is always on the line, because you live by an honor code, and that is, that says a cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do, and so you live by that code, and failure to do so means you're, you know, likely expulsion, and so you know, four years of emergent immersion in that environment, you understand what it means to live by an honor code, to live in an environment where everybody else is doing so well, and how things can break down if, if you don't, it is this immersion where the hope is that at the end of the four years that you come out with this ingrained in you an unbroken sense of duty, honor, and country and integrity that will serve you as the, as the Academy mission says, through a lifetime of service, not just in the army, but to the country beyond that, and so I think that's what, and I believe that's what many of my classmates and myself have always aspired to do, is to live that life, even when it's not convenient, or it may be work against you.
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Obviously, being an embodiment of everything you just talked about is table stakes, embodying, walking the talk, but part of your responsibility was to nurture it and foster it in the culture of the institutions that you led.
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So, how did you scale these values, these principles? What are some of the approaches and methodologies that you use to scale it, so that others could emulate, and the same principles, so that you were in fact conducting an orchestra and not just a little string quartet, so to speak.
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Well, I think, as many leaders do, and when I first assumed the job as Secretary of the Army, and then later Secretary of Defense, I put out a note to the field about who I am and what I stand for, and it was for me in both circumstances, it was about the importance of war fighting and readiness being our top priorities, and and eventually leading an apolitical organization that would, that, that engendered people of character and expected from our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines integrity and and service to country, and so the, you know, setting that out on day one was I felt an important statement to make. I reinforced that during my hearings before the Senate in both jobs, and eventually what you do is, you know, I would do videos to the field. I thought it always important also to travel around to bases and to meet with service members and to talk to them in smaller groups, and also at the individual level, about what they faced, and try and encourage candor, and as many leaders know, that's that's a hard thing to elicit from folks, is their honest, frank views about what's working and not working, but you do that through a variety of means, both large and small, personal and impersonal, formal and informal, to try and set the tone, and of course it, you know, it's in the closed door meetings as well, where that resonates with the people around the desk, or in the in the briefing room with you, that they know that you're speaking with authenticity, with courage, with honesty, and that you can be trusted, and trust, you know, trust is hard to build and easy to lose, and so it's it's those day in, day out activities, even the smallest things that make a difference and inculcate trust in others or not.
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What are some of the guiding principles for how to wield power when you have enormous power?
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Yeah, when,
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When the power, when the power throughout the hierarchy is there for a reason, without the hierarchy and the power, we're going to have disorder and chaos. So we need the hierarchy of power, but once the hierarchy is put in place, how you wield it, it could be quite consequential and set quite a tone and create a lot of realities.
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Well, of course, you have both formal and informal power, and sometimes one can be more impactful than the other.
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You know, the good thing about the military is there are clear lines with the. 40 from commanders all the way up the chain of command and back down, but to your point, you know, there are various kind of models out there in terms of different types of authority, and people over time have endorsed one over the other. I kind of found that in many cases it's situational.
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Now, by nature, by training, I'm one who likes to power down to decentralized power to the appropriate level, so if you're giving somebody responsibility, they need to have commensurate authority to act, and so that was always important to me as well. And you don't want to take arbitrarily power away from people, and my view was I would assume that people are capable of doing the job until they prove to me that they wouldn't weren't, and of course, as a leader, you know, over time, as you experience working with subordinate commanders, people below you, who you can trust, who you can't trust, who needs less oversight, and who needs a little bit more, and that's part of leadership, is figuring out where that barometer is for each and every person, so that you, you can maximize their effectiveness and their ability, and their ability to also maximize the effectiveness of their organization, but generally my view was to assume the best of people until proven otherwise, and decentralize as much as possible, and for me as leader to focus on the things that only I could do or should do best. And so, you know, one thing I used to always say is my job was to look around the corners, to look over the hill, to look into the future, because if I wasn't doing that. Who was doing that?
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You mentioned sports. You're spending a lot of time in business. We're seeing examples of military leaders increasingly finding themselves in business. Tell me about sports, business, and military, what they each teach each other, and what can the private sector truly leverage from the kinds of things that you learn first and foremost by climbing the ranks as you did in the US military.
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Yeah, for me, that you know, as in the private sector, when I would look at resumes and interview people, to me, if you had a sports background, that was always a big discriminator for me. It made a big difference, because you know, I knew from my own experience, from my time in the army, from my years playing sports, that athletes bring something different to the table, and what is that? Right, in many ways, this was an idea I would share with colleagues as well, and most agreed, what you find with people who played on sports teams is they, they know the commitment it takes to win, they know what it means to lose, and they understand that you have to, when you get knocked down, you have to dust yourself off, and and adjust your uniform, and get back in there, and fight again, they know the importance of the team, putting the team first, and everybody playing their respective roles, and, and what victory means for the broader, for the broader effort. So, in my mind, athletes, particularly those who were playing sports from the youngest of age, brought those, those attributes that that focus, that pursuit of of putting the team first and winning, winning is a very important thing, that the spirit of winning, unvarnished honesty.
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Now, that, of course, doesn't mean that you are rude in terms of delivering it, but yeah, I think honesty, I mentioned earlier, candor, that's very important. I think authenticity, which gets to, you know, who you are as a person, what really is important to you, understanding what your, what your purpose is, what your goals are. And I, again, going back to the military, people understood that you're the mission was first.
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We, in fact, we'd say mission first, people always. So I think if people understand that you're that you're being honest back with them, and that you're, you're trying to serve a higher goal, to a shared goal, presumably, or should be. Then I think that builds trust, that people know that in the toughest of times, that you're not going to put yourself first, and they also know by extension you're not maybe not going to put them first, but the mission will come first.
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What's the best way for a very senior leader to inspire and enable somebody in middle management and leadership to live the values, even if short term it might cost and be highly inconvenient, because what you say really resonates, that the only way to live values is to live the values, especially when inconvenient, and the forces that you mentioned are probably putting more pressure on our ability to do that, and giving us more incentive to not some of these guardrails and norms that you talk about are being challenged, if not eroded. We see others who say I don't need to live by the values, because others who don't seem to be getting away with it, increasingly, and some not so those who really, you're speaking to their heart, really want to live the values, because it's the right thing to do, and they probably know that practically over the long term that's the best way to keep your footing. What would you advise them on how to go about. That, when it really isn't their ultimate call.
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Yeah, I think first of all, you have to, you have to know who that middle layer is, who those folks are, whether they're struggling, or you're it's maybe it's your next tier of leadership coming up, your high potential people. You have to get down to that level and make it a routine for them to get to know you and who you are, and and to be able to share with you and talk about the challenges they face, I think, second, you know, most organizations do a good job recognizing people, in some ways it's through bonuses, in other ways it's through, you know, certificates and and thank you notes and things like that.
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Those are all very important, and the more public you can make those things, the better, but I think you also have to highlight failures where people were doing the right thing, but failed, and I tried to do that as Secretary of the Army, where we're trying to, we're trying to get people to think outside the box, and maybe, you know, as they brought along a new weapon system, for example, it failed, and my view is always, look, if you were, if you were doing the right thing, if you're following the prescribed processes, if you were, if your aim was to improve the war fighting ability of our forces. If you're, you know, consistent with everything we were preaching, and yet it still went wrong, because the tech failed, or because something fell through, then we weren't going to kick you while you were down. What we need to do is celebrate you, take account of the lesson learned, and, and, and then make sure you gave it, you were given another chance to get back up on that horse, and so I think I wouldn't say celebrating the failures, but recognizing the failures, but celebrating the process, the approach, the effort that got you there is important, so that way people don't have a fear of failure, because a failure of failure lives to a leads to a very risk-conscious, risk-averse type of organization, which is what you don't need in most cases. You want people to exercise their authority, you want them to take risks.
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What are some of the guidance you give to individuals and leaders, just about the seas are rough, but you gotta sail them nonetheless, and that there's a lot to be gained in getting good at going up and down, always always forward, but up and down, and not to quit when the going gets tough, and that there are lessons and meaning to be found in the struggle, in the downs, and any thoughts you have on how to lead in an up and down context and world,
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yeah, of course, we always say the ups and downs, particularly the downs, build character, and it is truth, true that you know you have to have that, the downs can really shape you, it can teach you the importance of perseverance, perseverance and resilience and grit, and all those things that are important, you got to be able to motivate your team to get back up, and so that's the important thing, is you know every day is a chance to build those skills, to build that character, to educate others, and show others, and you know, when you bring young men and women into the military, that's what basic training is about, it's about building toughness and grit, and showing them that you, you may have had a bad day yesterday, but today is a new day, the sun's going to come up, and you have a chance to test yourself once again, and adopt the lessons learned, and have a better day, and that's that's life as well. You have good days and bad days, and teaching people to persevere, and how to deal with that is important, particularly in today's society, which is far more complicated by tech and social media, and everything else going on out there
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as we wrap up, Secretary Esper, I want to just maybe distill this into a final framing. I'm fond of saying that the world has gone from connected to interconnected, hyper connected to interdependent globally.
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Increasingly, we rise or fall together, and that our interdependence is not a choice, it's now a condition. We live in an interdependent world. I think the pandemic illuminated and revealed that to us. A tiny pathogen started to encircle the world, and we saw how interdependent we are. I think geopolitical dynamics show us how interdependent we are. So, if interdependence is our condition, our only choice is to forge healthy interdependencies, so we rise together and not fall. If that resonates with you, as a framing, summarize just the kind of leadership that helps us forge healthy interdependencies in our communities, in our institutions, with our allies, and around the world, so that increasingly we rise together and avoid the falling that will happen if we don't do it, do whatever it is we do together.
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I think first of all, you have to recognize and embrace that, that is indeed the world we live in, that's very interdependent, right. Then, secondly, I think you know the approach we always talked about in the military was, you have to, you have to approach all the other stakeholders and all the interested players in that interdependent circle that you live, you have to approach them all with dignity and respect, knowing that that you want to resist. Lucicate that you're trying to build a positive bond, a positive relationship with them, knowing that you know if you're successful, that tide will lift all boats, and so I think you have to, that gets back into the kind of the emotional, not just the mental, but the emotional part of it, where you have empathy and understanding, and you can put yourself in the other person's shoes, and then it's leadership, where you may insist on some things like honesty, but you can inspire a reciprocation of what you're trying to extend to that individual or that group, because they know you're coming at it from a good faith position of recognizing that interdependence and trying to lift
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I came of age in business where you would constantly hear hope is not a strategy. Through planning, budgeting, and control, we're going to superimpose a linear future on the world, and we're going to go be number one, and we're going to somehow just control our way towards being number one. And I always felt that it's a just an emotionally and philosophically misguided way to understand hope, because while hope technically is not a strategy, without hope there can be no strategy. People don't even see possibility, they might not see that this doing something hard is worthy of their loyalty and dedication.
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What is your relationship as a leader toward to hope, and how and putting hope to hope and how to inspire hope and where does hope fit in to your world and your playbook of leadership.
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Well, people need hope. I mean, without hope you know you wither, and so they have to have that promise that that something positive can be achieved. And so hope is important, but you have to operationalize it, and I think you operationalize that by certainly doing the planning and the preparation and the resourcing and stuff like that, but, but that to me, that's more the mental dynamic that you were talking about earlier, you have to, you have to attack the emotional dynamic as well by inspiring people to do extraordinary things, things that they didn't think they could do, or wouldn't do, you know. I'm reminded right here on the spot, you know, Eisenhower Plan D Day, D-Day, and we knew that we were gonna do landings on Omaha Beach, but something inspired those, those young men, those 1819, 20 year olds to get off those landing craft and fight their way across the beach under withering German machine gun fire, and to see their buddies fall, but they kept going forward. They didn't do that because the plan said so.
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They did that because they were motivated by something bigger.
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They want to, you know, rid Europe of fascism. They want to protect the homeland. They want to make sure they lived up to the expectations of their buddies on that beach as well.
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Most importantly, and so that's what you can't calculate is that emotional dynamic inspires other people to do extraordinary things, and so that's the factor that I think you have to tap into at the end of the day, in addition to the mental attributes that we discussed earlier.
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Thank you for just this conversation and sharing so much, frankly, your hard-earned wisdom.
00:28:01.839 --> 00:28:13.289
Thanks, Dov. I appreciate it. Enjoyed speaking with you and your audience today.
