Roger B Porter
I came into Washington particularly interested in the role that big business plays. One particular speaker, Roger Porter was of particular interest to me since he was an economic policy adviser to the White House during the Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations.
As a professor at Harvard University, Mr. Porter was one of the most interesting speakers during the entire week. He used personal anecdotes of his experiences in Washington as a young man when he was just figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. One of the stories was how Mr. Porter received his job working with Gerald Ford during the start of the Watergate crisis. Speaking with Ford on the phone, who was Vice President at the time, Porter was offered a job in the White House, but didn’t know where to report or when he could actually start. Porter tells the story of actually walking straight into the White House undetected and walking past the security guards, a feat that would now be close to impossible in a post 9-11 environment. Walking into the White House, Porter actually decided to go towards the elevator, where he saw Gerald Ford, who told him, “its about time that you’ve made it!”. These humorous stories help to show the human side to Washington and provide a deeper color on how “the rubber meets the road”. Mr. Porter not only gave me a sense of all the accomplishments that each President achieved, but he also discussed the different types of leadership styles that each one had. I particularly paid close attention to this part of Mr. Porter’s lecture, because of the emphasis that GE puts on leadership.
Porter described what Presidents really must focus on. Presidents must view the organization as a whole. When new policies are made, they must make sure that they are comprehensive, and that key issues are not falling through the cracks. Presidents also must ensure that the policies pursued are coherent and that they do not undercut one another. While these goals are common for every president, the styles in which these presidents go about achieving these goals are each quite different.
In Mr. Porter’s lecture, he suggested that there were really three main leadership styles that presidents have used since the inception of the US. Some presidents have just stuck to one style throughout their presidency, and others have adjusted leadership styles as they have found out what has worked and what has not. These styles are “Adhocracy”, “Centralized Management”, and “Multiple Advocacy”.
Adhocracy is when a president determines what issues they want to get involved with, the people they want to work with on these issues, and the timing of when to execute decisions made based upon these issues. This view believes that the White House should be viewed as a problem solving entity. Presidents who prefer this method of leadership tend to like to feel as though they are in charge. Franklin D. Roosevelt was cited as an example of a President that preferred “competitive adhocracy”, which is a type of adhocracy. Porter claimed that Roosevelt was known for his “one-on-one” meetings with handpicked personnel in which he would bring them into a room and discuss a potential problem that he felt passionate about. Roosevelt had the distinct talent of making each individual person believe that they were the only person in the world that had the ability to solve the problem, and that they should go out and do independent research on a solution, and then present back their best recommendation to the President. What these individuals did not know is that Roosevelt had these meetings with several other individuals, told them similar stories, and then he would gather all of the best recommendations in order to make a final decision. George W. Bush also prefers the leadership style of adhocracy. Bush tends to work with only people that he trusts on key issues. Some of Bush’s political appointees, including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfield and Harriet Myers have all known the Bush family for many years. Porter also stated that Bush preferred adhocracy, evidenced by the administrations recent unilateral policies towards the war in Iraq.
Centralized Management is another style of leadership in which a leader gives out power to individual agents to frame issues, structure options, and evaluate choices. One example of this was Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. JFK gave McNamara a certain amount of power to run his department as he saw fit. One potential problem with this style of leadership is that there is a tendency to promote leaks within the system. During JFK’s presidency, there was a problem of leaks as it was difficult for one person to try to control an entire agency.
Multiple Advocacy is perhaps the most inclusive type of leadership style. Multiple Advocacy is basically a leadership style that promotes a competition of ideas. The President serves as “the honest broker” and dispenses due process. Every party that has a stake in the potential decision is given a voice and has an opportunity to be heard. The President’s job is to make sure that the process is fair. Gerald Ford was the president that Porter said was one of the best examples of this leadership style. There was one time that Porter talked about going into a closed committee meeting with Gerald Ford and some of us his key economic advisers. Gerald Ford had entered into a tough economic environment in which inflation was spiraling out of control and unemployment had also risen to concerning levels (“stagflation”). Many economic scholars differed in their views in terms of what actions should be taken to help the economy. Each economist got up to passionately presented their opinion on how the economy could be better. After one closed door session in which many of the advisers got in a heated debate, a dinner at the White House followed. Porter found himself going through the food buffet line only to have the option of sitting in one open chair in the entire room – the seat right next to the President. Reluctantly and nervously, the young Porter went to go sit down next to the President. He asked the President what he thought of all the heated discussions that had taken place during the day. The President smiled and responded by saying, “well, I enjoyed the debate. The reason is that tomorrow when I make a decision, everyone will be happy with it because their voice was heard today”. This story is a strong example of how the Multiple Advocacy style of leadership works.
While the leadership development program at GE does not share many similarities to the role of the President of the United States, there are still some lessons from the lecture that I took as being important as I aspire to lead my own business one day. Porter claimed that there are two main objectives that any leader (President, CEO, etc) must focus on. The first is to make an informed decision. To do this, the leader must have available information that he or she can really analyze and understand. This information must be both digestible and exhaustive. The other objective for the leader is that once a decision has been made, that the decision made gets effectively implemented and executed. At my role with General Electric, I will have to work with multiple parties and coordinate resources to make decisions and to execute. I now know a couple more different styles of Presidential leadership that I may be able to draw from.
The other key point that Porter tried to emphasize was the importance of advocacy within a White House administration. Washington D.C. is already known as an inefficient mess in which socially elite people come to get re-elected instead of actually getting to work and making changes for our country. The process is set up to take time and to make sure every issue is beat to death before something actually takes place. For a President to really bring about change, they have to work across both parties on issues and find common ground among people that don’t typically agree. There are many levels of presidential appointees in the White House, including cabinet secretary, deputy secretary, under secretary, assistant secretary and general counsel. The political appointees aren’t there for that long, typically from a time range varying from 22 to 37 months. It is absolutely crucial that these appointees be able to “win friends and influence people” both in their party and in the opposing party in order to effectively do anything during their tenure working with the administration.
Mr. Porter cites Bill Gates as an example of poor governmental relations with his approach to Washington, D.C. Evidently, Bill Gates only makes one trip a year to Washington D.C. and typically meets with just a few key members of the government to ask for just one or two things that are high on his priority list. According to Porter, a man such as Gates should be making more frequent visits and working with a host of different groups in order to build goodwill that could eventually lead to him successfully fulfilling all the goals on his agenda. Should I ever have the opportunity to lead a company that depends significantly on the policies decided in Washington, I will have a much better understanding of what type of governmental relations strategy I should have.
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01-28-2008, 08:13 PM
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