The National Academy of Public Administration

Another way this notion is described, in a somewhat more mundane fashion, is think of three things that the organization wouldn't otherwise be doing, make them as radical as you think you can realistically achieve, and go for it.

This idea has a lot of appeal. It is an intuitive sense of your own significance in the scheme of things, and if you're coming in as an outsider, as most political appointees are, to your organization, that you would bring to it something, which rationalized, in effect, your characteristics as an outsider.

It is also a notion that I think roots in much of the management science that we now all live and work with, because so much of that is derived from the business community and our business models are people like Henry Ford or Land and the Polaroid Camera or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, people who had some notion about what they were going to do, the creators of FedEx, the Waltons and Wal-Mart, and built from that a different vision about an organization. When you think about it, the literature on these subjects is not by and large built from government service; it's built from the world of business.

I think this model is actually even more evocative and taps into what Jung would have called a "universal archetype." Jung is a former member of the National Academy. (Laughter.) The notion that archetype really is derived, I think, from the biblical concept of leadership. It is a Moses-like notion. Preach a new vision. Go up on the mountain and see it. Then lead the chosen people, if necessary, through 40 years in the wilderness, to the Promised Land.

That vision I think of leadership really underlies much of what we preach. My trouble with it is that I think it's wrong. I think it's misleading. I think in many situations it's dangerous. It has, I think, some virtues in some unusual situations, but they apply least to transformation of governmental organizations and to transitions, which bring in outsiders to this new organization.

Let me note some of its faults. First of all, it's remarkably arrogant. Look at the notion. It's okay for Moses. He, after all, presumably has some access to God. (Laughter.) He goes up on the mountain and receives some tablets that tell him what to do. But if you look at all of our visions, they are presumably not so divinely inspired, even if we're members of the National Academy. (Laughter.) In fact, there isn't any notion that's more appealing to me from the modern computer industry than the proposition that no one is as smart as everyone, that products of vision and the like need to be
products from large numbers of people, and in my view they need to be inherent in the organization. I'll come back to that in a more positive context.

But you have only to look at how many visions are, in fact, fundamentally wrong to appreciate how potentially misguided this notion of operation is. The business world provides us with an unfortunate set of models in this context, because the premise of the business world, quite a good one for it, is that nine out of ten organizations can fail if the tenth one succeeds; that what Shumpeter called "creative destruction" the constant tumult out there, is healthy for society on net, and in fact, when you look at the business organizations they constantly turn over from decade to decade, and very few of them
survive for long periods of time based on those visions.

But, in fact, the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps, for which I now am honored to have some responsibility, celebrated this last week their 225th birthday. I've got a fundamental problem if I start to bet the organization on some fundamental monotonic kind of conception of the future, because I can't play the odds for it to work out overall in good kinds of ways. I can't let nine out of ten navies fail while the tenth one succeeds because we don't have ten navies.

This second problem, which is you'll notice in the description of Moses, that it takes him 40 years, and you'll notice that all the studies, most recently Paul Light at Brookings, point out that the average government appointee will serve for two years. So a long period of time in the wilderness attempting to convert has fundamental problems inherent to it.

The third component to this is just who was it who Moses brought to the Promised Land? The answer is the chosen people, but not the Egyptians. As Secretary of the Navy, I've got to persuade the Egyptians to do something different. (Laughter.) I can't go create a new Navy, leading out the people who follow me, and leaving the rest behind to suffer ten plagues. (Laughter.)

So that the practical reality is that the problems we're looking at look very different, but I think the model that underlies the way in which so many of these things are approached has the fundamental problems that I'm describing, yet it has at the same time a great evocativeness.

Two years ago the Webb lecturer, it seemed to me, reflected some of this when he quoted the book of Proverbs. "Where vision is lacking," he said, "people perish." The notion was that a leader ought to come in and project this sense.

Now, what is it that alternatively one might do? It seems to me when you set up an alternative model you can see further the flaws of the original one and the other kinds of opportunities that might exist. My view is that there is something better than the Moses example. It's a much more mundane, yet productive model to think about: the monkey who has his eyes covered and his ears covered and gags his mouth. I would suggest to you that in some critical respects thinking about that monkey may remind us of all the things we need to do in reverse when we come into an organization. We need to un-stopper our ears and listen. We need to look very closely. Then, in my view, we need to speak to the organization.

Let me say a little bit about what that means in practice in my experience in the context of the Department of the Navy. At square one when you un-stopper your ears, the single-most useful thing I think a new appointee can do is to listen to what the organization is telling him about what it cares about and
what it values. I would like to say that many of these propositions have the ring of gospel and an elegant and uplifting character, but, in fact, in many respects some of the most interesting and important things that the organization says about itself it says in the form of its clichés. These are the
bromides that appear in every speech, and that far from being radical propositions -- remember the first model notion is think of the most radical things you can conceivably do and preach
them -- these are at the other end of the spectrum, the most conventional thoughts, so conventional they've almost come to be devoid of meaning.

For example, in the Department of the Navy, "People are our most important asset." Everyone will subscribe to that proposition. A second was, "We are a Navy and Marine Corps team," that the Navy and Marine Corps are united together. A third was the notion that "we will in this modern age project power from the sea to the shore and no longer be as engaged as we were historically in the notion of battles in the open seas, blue water battles between mammoth navies." A fourth was "we live in a technological age. We have enormous opportunities in it, particularly from our information systems."

All of these propositions have the characteristic that they're right. They're phenomenally sound in their
significance. I don't quarrel with any of these judgments. They all also have the characteristic they were there long before I ever arrived on the scene. Another characteristic is that they're almost universally shared; everybody can recite them, everybody agrees on them.

The problem with them is that they are reminiscent of -- as I began to speak to the organization I frequently quoted this -- the 19th Century poet and philosopher Bronson Alcott, who was the father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of "Little Women," a text not often cited to the Navy and Marine Corps. (Laughter.) It was said of Bronson Alcott in his reflectiveness that he "soared into the infinite and fathomed the unfathomable, but never paid cash." (Laughter.)

The problem for us as an organization, in my view, was that we soared into the infinite and fathomed the unfathomable in these great propositions, but we didn't pay cash. We didn't translate them into the day-to-day life of the organization; or to come back to biblical metaphors, it's as though we preached
the gospel every Sunday and then lived differently during the weekdays.

The most crucial question for the organization after you listen to it is to look hard at these propositions and see what they mean in practice. When we began to mind that, we started to come up with all kinds of propositions that could fairly be described as radical. Indeed, in the end, in many dimensions
revolutionary, but this had the enormous advantage that these were all derived from premises that everyone accepted and that were in no way personal to me or to the idiosyncrasies of my
vision, and in themselves got beyond controversy.

So the question was how do we translate these propositions into paying cash? For example, "People are our most important asset." Well, early on I began to ask questions about the people and the use of people. Recruits come into boot camp. They graduate from boot camp. If they're skilled and have done
well on their tests, we send them on to advanced training. And, for example, we make them into radar repairmen.

Well, between the boot camp and the radar repairman's school they typically spend one or two weeks waiting. During that time, they're asked to pick up litter. Why is that? Well, I began to realize that the organization was infected by the psychology of conscription, that in 1972 we made the commitment
to transition to a volunteer force, and that with that came the notion that we need to pay people more. We need to advertise. We need to set up a recruiting establishment. But people didn't know how underlying the whole system was the premise that labor was free, because it used to be free, or at any rate very cheap, so cheap you could almost treat it as free; and that, in fact, people would be coming into the organization in great numbers. You could afford to let them stand around and wait, a well-known
military phenomenon, and then you set up schools at times when it was convenient to you to train them because, in fact, they had to be there, and they didn't cost much, and so the critical variable was the time of the instructor.

You may think, "Well, that might be true for the raw recruit out of boot camp," but when we looked at pilots we found that it took us four years on average to train them. When I asked people how long it should take us to train pilots, the answer was two years. The reason that it took us four years was we had all our pilots sitting around and waiting, waiting for aircraft to be available, waiting for classes to form up and the like, and that was down time. The result was that almost any pilot in the Navy, by the time he was certified to go into a squadron to fly, had two characteristics. One was he was frustrated because he'd come into the Navy to learn how to fly, not wait. The other was that he had terrific golf scores.
(Laughter.)

So then you graduated after your course in radar repair and you went out to the ship, and what happened to you? For your first three months on the job you painted or you chipped
paint or you cooked.

Now, imagine if Microsoft hired you, and they said, "Congratulations, you're going to be among our best software engineers. Welcome. You're going to cook for the first three months." (Laughter.) What happened to the proposition here that people were our most important asset? We lost track of how
much we valued these people, how much they cost, how scarce they were, how important it was to retain them, and how training them we were now undercutting the message of the training by what we
were doing in practice.

Well, by a series of activities with pilots and so forth, we began to emphasize different kinds of potential inherent in the proposition, and we began to apply it to the personnel system. One of the ideas that emerged from the organization was the Navy College Program, which was giving college credits for
Navy training. We went out and got our training institutions accredited by the America College of Education. We got every bit of Navy training translated into college credits. We began giving an electronic transcript to recruits when they came into boot camp that showed them how many college credits they were getting, and we could take them halfway to an AA degree just by their normal Navy training in the course of their first term of enlistment.

Many other things associated with the personnel system developed. You would think, well, "I can sort of see how mining that vein would change the personnel system in important dimensions," but in fact it also changed the research and development system, and the acquisition system. Now, why is
that? Well, after a little bit we began to ask ourselves, "Why is it, in fact, that an organization that can send a missile a thousand miles and hit the target can't design paint that doesn't have to be repainted all the time?" (Laughter.) The answer was "because nobody had ever asked it to," since the
implicit assumption was people are free and even though all the time we were offering the rhetoric of "people are our most valued asset," we treated them differently and didn't invest in labor saving devices.

In fact, when you looked at automation on Navy ships, we were stunningly under-invested in it, and we began to develop a program called "Smart Ship," which changed the automation systems on Navy ships.

When we looked at the carriers, we realized that there were 3,000 people manning a carrier, and that, in fact, we could take 500 people off the ship in the next carrier, and 500 more people in the carrier after that, and 500 more people in the carrier after that to the point where we would send 1,500 people
to sea manning that carrier instead of 3,000, by using automation and things like that in redesign.

So the acquisition system itself began to look different, and we began to ask questions like, "Why is it that since we know that flat surfaces are harder to maintain than curved surfaces, that we design ships with flat surfaces?" In fact, if people are our most important asset, why is it we have among the
lowest habitability standards in NATO? Why do we put our people in enormous berthing areas dozens of other Sailors? In fact, why is it we give the typical sailor less to clean his ship with by way of tools than a typical homemaker has to clean a house with?

My point is that from very basic propositions that everybody agreed with, very radical things began to develop. Why, in fact, don't we use civilians to paint ships? How can we use civilians in other ways? What opportunities do we have to give people relief in terms of the number of hours they work, to open up more professional training for them and the like?

Now, the same story can be told in the context of the other propositions, for instance with respect to "We are a Navy-Marine Corps team." Well, when I began work as an under secretary at the Pentagon the Navy-Marine Corps Team was represented in the Pentagon by the Chief of the Naval Operations, but the Commandant of the Marine Corps had an office a mile away. Why don't we co-locate if we're, in fact, a team? Why don't we have offices subordinate within this organization that are doing similar things together? For that matter, why is it that we have two separate communication organizations if the
aim is, in fact, to cause them to communicate with each other? (Laughter.) Why is it that we run two separate aviation programs? What are our opportunities for cross-assignment between the two different organizations?

The banal cliché carries within it the seeds of revolution, the seeds of a dramatically different kind of
organization.

Now, to get there you had to hear first what the organization was saying, and then second you had to look hard at these propositions and see where they led you, and follow their logic relentlessly; and the third part of the monkey's activities, you needed to speak to each other. From my standpoint, an opportunity to speak to the organization is an opportunity to say what it is that it ought to care about and to begin to push the propositions about where the radicalism in the institution leads, where we ought to be going. It is also an opportunity for encouraging other people. A retirement ceremony is an opportunity for highlighting the things a person has done by way of pushing these propositions. A meeting or a conference is an occasion for talking about real things, not just the cliché, but the avocation of the cliché, not just fathoming the unfathomable and soaring into the infinite, but figuring out how to pay cash.

We're going to project power from sea to shore, a fundamental transformative kind of notion that was brought into prominence largely due to the good work of Sean O'Keefe, another NAPA member, a decade ago. But what does it mean practically? What does it mean for the kinds of ships we buy, the kinds of investments we make? Different kinds of radars operate better over shore than over the sea. You begin to acquire different kinds of missilery. Your concern for mine warfare ought to be
greater, a traditional area of Navy neglect, because you're going to be in close to the shore.

The personnel system changes. Why does the personnel system need to change in response to a war fighting doctrine? Well, if you're not essentially fighting battles at sea so much as trying to influence events ashore, then the career pattern that leads logically to the higher ranks of the Navy should be,
for at least some people, not simply from the engine room of the ship up to the bridge, but ought to encompass understanding something about the cultures of those countries and experiences
with non-governmental organizations and other entities that are outside the traditional orbit of interest.

Different kinds of people ought to be promoted to admiral and general. So you're now preaching the most revolutionary kinds of activity with respect to the very heartland of the organization -- who gets promoted, what's a good career. But this follows from premises that everybody accepts, and from
premises that people have sworn they're going to live by. It leads, I think, to quite a different kind of result.

We live in an information age. Fine, what are we doing about it? Well, we just managed, I'm delighted to say, in record time -- in only 18 months -- to create the largest information management project in the government and I think in the world, a Navy-Marine Corps intranet. Note, by the way, we
had a lot of resistance. The same intranet. To create one single uniform information system, for the Navy and Marine Corps, there were lots of good reason to object to that, but I thought we were a Navy-Marine Corps team? In the end, that proposition prevailed, and we are now creating -- we let the
contract 18 months after we conceived it -- a $1.2 billion a year method of acquiring connectivity and creating a common information base throughout the whole organization that will transform the character of the organization by virtue of decentralizing decision-making, letting people who need a spare
part see where the spare parts are through the whole system and order through a Web-enabled system instead of having to play "Mother, may I," sending e-mails to other parts of the organization and the like.

There are lots of possibilities there. We live in a technological age. Everybody accepts it. We can transform the Navy because of it. But when I came into office I found that we
were spending $5 million a year on ship research and development. We are now spending a billion dollars a year in that account for transforming our new carrier by taking people off it, and for a new generation of destroyers.

When you begin to cumulate these things, their individual aspects have a synergy between them that produces something dramatically different. Our new destroyer will be manned with 95 people, while historically destroyers have been manned with over 300 people. That changes fundamentally the kinds of Sailors you want. Put it together with the College Program, and you have Sailors who are more educated, capable of more substantial responsibilities, and better valued in our retention efforts.

Put that together with the fact that when we change the technology of the ship -- its architecture and its maintenance – we're going to save enormous amounts of money. We figure to save a billion a ship over the course of each vessel's lifetime, but also, we've created a different living and working environment for Sailors. With only 95 people on the ship, we can virtually give every Sailor a stateroom.

Now with college degrees, valued citizens, staterooms, professional responsibility, and a more senior Navy, we've created a very different kind of institution. When we revisit
our core propositions, they all look different.

So my suggestion to you is that there is a method of approach here that's generalizable; that we have a concrete example over the last couple of years in the Navy, during the two years I've been privileged to be Secretary, of how to go about this in another way. It is intrinsically not at all something, which is borne of the genius of a leader. Virtually none of these ideas are my ideas. The organization is generating them because the organization, seeing clearly the themes and what we care about, has within it a large number of people who are very creative. No one is as smart as everyone. They are generating these possibilities and seeing them. They see the unity of effort because that unity of effort begins in things they all believe in, not in some outsider preaching some radical new proposition.

One of the things that's most striking to me is that part of the seduction of the new proposition is the theory that it's difficult to get organizations to adopt new ideas. That's not right. It's very easy to get organizations to adopt new ideas. The thing that's really hard is to get them to give up the old ones. (Laughter.) It's a question of freeing the energy from one area to move to another. I can tell you based on my experience first, as a lawyer and as a teacher, that in many respects the most critical variable for persuading any group of people is to start where they are, not where you are. It's to listen first to what they care about and what they're thinking and what they're organizing around and then if you want to move them, starting from that premise, try and show them how the logic leads elsewhere than they may have thought it led. That seems to me to be a fundamental technique in government that may be under-represented or underutilized.

In sum, I would suggest to you none of us is a Moses. None of us are going to make it work that way. If we could, all we would do is recreate the business model of creating new companies and new entities while leaving the old to die, and the effects for government would be disastrous.

There are very few private companies that have, in fact -- just to come back to the title of this talk -- transformed themselves as organizations. The semiconductor industry, for example, existed in embryo in old-line companies, Fairchild Camera, Xerox, Bell Labs, but it never rose there. Those organizations weren't led by people who could transform their companies. Instead, following the first model I described, people who were zealously committed to new ideas led the migration to the Promised Land -- in that case California -- (laughter) -- and set up a whole new industry. We have a vastly harder job, a bigger challenge, one that requires us truly to convert the Egyptians. But there are possibilities here and they adhere, in the respect we all have for these organizations to begin with, in the fact that we are talking about people who are committed to begin with to visions of their own.

It's just that so often our rhetoric has become so stale that it's dried up, and in fact, the organization becomes a kind of fossil record of what it once cared about. It used to be the case that our labor was free and we were sensibly organized, or that we fought battles on the open ocean, or that we didn't have these technology opportunities. Often we're still mired in that older way of doing things.

I think there's a new world of opportunity nascent in all these organizations, and my suggestion to you is we don't get there by preaching our vision; we get there by opening our eyes < to what's going on around us.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

QUESTION: My experience as a recruit for the Army -- (laughter) -- was based on somewhat different principles. And while what you said was really terrific, and I agree with it, on the other hand when I was there nobody was saying that the Marine Corps and the Navy were a team. And nobody -- certainly nobody was saying "People are our most important product." People were our disposable product. (Laughter.)

So my question to you is from the time I was there to now how did these new consensuses arrive? Where did they come from? Where did the principles that you were listening to and then transferring into radical policies; what was their origin?

SECRETARY RICHARD DANZIG: It's a nice question. I can give you part of an answer, and maybe then others can offer other parts in answer. First of all, I think the organization is responsive to changes in the world in a kind of intuitive way. What happens is that the rhetoric changes before the reality changes. That is not a bad thing. I mean it would be a very strange circumstance if our rhetoric lagged behind the reality. You want it in some ways to pull the whole organization forward.

So, for example, people in the Navy and Marine Corps, the Navy is historically probably the most technological of our services, they're very sensitive to the fact that the world has changed, that the information age is upon us and the like.

But having offered that, it's very hard to translate that notion into the underlying reality, but the changed circumstances of the world as a whole does indeed induce this kind of change in tone. I think the fact that people realized that in the 1970s we had moved to a volunteer force, yet so many problems with drugs and Vietnam and racial tensions and the like, people really did come to realize that getting the people part of the equation right was fundamentally important to the well-being of the organization.

There was also a kind of stunning transition as people came to deal with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and there's an account, which I think is emblematic when Marshall Akhromeyev, the Soviet equivalent of our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to an aircraft carrier with Admiral Crowe. As Admiral Crowe relates it, Akhromeyev, after meeting a number of enlisted men, was persuaded that they were officers dressed up as enlisted men. When he finally became convinced that they were, in fact, enlisted men, it had a much greater impact on making him realize that they couldn't sustain this competition than all the missilery and the fancy airplanes that we had to offer on board the aircraft carrier.

So I think people began to sense that, in fact, America's great strength, the strength of our military, derived from our strength as a society in the relatively educated, independent minded, relatively literate people we were taking in.

Similarly, I think you began to get the evolution of doctrine about a Navy and Marine Corps Team and about the movement from sea to shore, because people realized that we couldn't any longer justify a Navy by reference to blue water battles in the open ocean. We were going to the shore, that was the way in the 1990s of influencing events, and it required a closer combination between the Navy and Marine Corps.

But having signed up to it all as notions, I think it's much, much harder for people to live by it, and that's part of the point.

But Sean [O'Keefe] and Bernie [Rotsker] and Bob [Hale], you're all at least as expert on this, if you want to speak to it. You're more expert…

Secretary Rotsker: Well, I would say, Richard, you need to fess up to one other thing, and that is the depth of knowledge of the institution that you have, and it gets to the issue of transition and bringing in people who don't have that depth. You could identify not only the clichés, but you had a sense of the meaning in the clichés and the reality of the institution. I think it may be more difficult for somebody both to recognize the clichés, who comes in from the outside as a new political appointee, and have the understanding of the institution that can then guide it to be all it can be in terms of those clichés. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICHARD DANZIG: A former Under Secretary in the Army…

A couple of things here. First, I wouldn't overestimate how much I knew when I came in. I think a lot of people would have been appalled at how little I knew. I think a lot of it comes from learning the organization and being open to learning it. A very practical suggestion I'd make is I mentioned the datum, very familiar to you all, that the typical tenure of a political appointee is two years. Another thing we bemoan is that it typically takes five to six months for new appointees to get into office after they've been designated.

I came to realize when I went through that period waiting to be Under Secretary of the Navy, that suddenly I had a phenomenal opportunity, that I, by virtue of this, was one of the first people to ever undertake this job who actually had time to prepare for it. I began, having no opportunity or responsibility -- it would have been illegal for me to do anything actually involved in the day-to-day decision-making in the organization -- I began to systematically talk to people in the organization about what they cared about, about what they thought they were doing in their jobs, about where the opportunities were. People would say, "This is amazing. Nobody's ever spent two hours with me talking about this kind of basic stuff. You won't have time to do this when you're Under Secretary of the Navy, or Secretary of the Navy." Well, all the more reason to do it then.

So I think there are opportunities for learning the organization for all of us that are phenomenally rich. I would also turn it on its head the other way. If the proposition is you don't know enough about the organization to distinguish the clichés from the reality, where would you possibly get the notion from that you should come to it with a vision about how it should be transformed? (Laughter.)

Bob [Hale]?

QUESTION: You made a nice point about --

SECRETARY RICHARD DANZIG: Stand up, Bob. You're a new member. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: What were your techniques for trying to do that? That is for trying to get the old ideas to go away or are those Navy people you save going to be somewhere else in reserve in case we have a war? I mean, do you think you were successful, and if so, how'd you do it?

SECRETARY RICHARD DANZIG: Well, a lot of it is just, if you will, the logic of it. For example, I mean, it seems to be my day for biblical propositions, but one of my favorites is "the truth shall set you free." In the end, if you can show people a reality there, they are going to get moved to some degree. For example, we realized we could take 44 enlisted people off of our cruisers if we automated them. People said, "You can't do that; it's bad. If you take these 44 off and then you're involved in a fire at sea or damage control when you've been hit, you're going to need those 44 people," even though you didn't need them to begin with."

So one of the first things I said was, "Look, when I came into this organization here two years ago, we had 18,000 empty billets at sea, jobs that weren't filled by people." So I can understand an argument that says, "You're taking 44 people away and now we're going to have more risk fighting fires," but I'm taking away 44 empty billets. I'm putting these 44 people into jobs that weren't otherwise being done. I'm not reducing the number of people; I'm automating to accomplish things here. In fact, that argument is phenomenally powerful.

Then also, when you look at fires at sea, it turns out that the determinative effect is not the number of people you throw at a fire, but what happens in the first five to ten seconds. An automated sprinkler systems saves more lives.

Also, I might add, if I can take 1,500 people off a carrier, and not have 3,000 people aboard but 1,500, not only do I save enormous amounts of money, not only can I re-allocate those 1,500 people to other tasks, but 1,500 fewer souls are at risk when we send that carrier out.

So why do you want all those other people? What have you got against Sailors? (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Richard, I want to just ask your reaction to this wonderful movie that just came out, "Men of Honor"? I think the Navy had a special recognition for Carl Brashear, who the movie is about. For those who haven't seen it, this is [the movie starring] Robert DeNiro and Cuba Gooding, Jr., and the story of a young African American who aspires to be a Navy diver and how the Navy does everything possible to make sure that that doesn't happen, and it's the unfolding of that story.

I just wondered in the context of the vision of leadership, how you see a Carl Brashear and his struggle within the Navy and how that fits into sort of where we come from that management/ leadership model as opposed to the individual who's just an ordinary person, but has a vision and has passion and completely transforms the organization?

SECRETARY RICHARD DANZIG: Yeah. It's a very nice comment. It raises a whole lot of rich issues. Let me just comment on a couple and we can talk more separately about others, if you'd like.

First of all, I think it's well worth seeing as a movie both in terms of its own enjoyment -- this is the normal Webb lecture plug for a movie -- (laughter) -- and also in terms of a sense of the kind of significance of the movement of minorities within the Navy.

It also makes a number of people in the Navy very unhappy because it really does stereotype senior Navy officers in a way that I think is regrettable and unfair, although the prejudices are I think accurately described in the historical context.

But having said all that, let me just take one aspect of this, which is the issue about minorities, and apply it in the < context that we're talking about. Early on – Bernie [Rotsker] is well aware of this -- I began pressing the notion that we need in the Navy and Marine Corps to recruit more minorities. Now, question, how do you make that argument, if you will, to the leadership of the organization? If you make it in terms of fairness, affirmative action, et cetera, it seems to me you do not move the organization, because the organization's goals and priorities are in other places. If the organization's goals and priorities were towards affirmative action or rights of minorities or whatever, they would, in fact, have already accomplished more.

It seems to me you make it by pointing out that these organizations are in danger by their failure to recruit minorities, that, in fact, in 2050 a majority of America will be what is now minority, that it takes us 30 years to grow the admirals and generals of the future, and that if we're not recruiting minorities now, what we're going to find is that sometime in the future, 30 years from now, a very sizable proportion of Congress and the American public will regard this organization as alien. When it has some problems with budget or accidents or an attack on the COLE or whatever, there's going to be vastly less sympathy and support. If we get behind, further behind the power curve here in recruiting, it's going to be harder and harder, because we're going to be viewed as anti- black or anti-Hispanic or whatever. In fact, as minorities become a larger part of our enlisted force, we have real risks if our officer corps doesn't have substantial representation in that context.

In the end we went through a whole big discussion, because speaking to the organization and having it speak to you is really important. There were periods when I would have 50 people in my office, as Under Secretary of the Navy, talking about Marine Corps minority recruitment efforts, and a whole lot of big debate about it: Are we going for quotas? No, it's not quotas. But do we agree it's worth doing this? People would say, "Oh, yeah, we agree it's worth doing, but we don't really need to do anything different than we are now."

Well, if we've all agreed we need to make more of an effort in this, let's move from soaring in the infinite to paying cash. The Marine Corps recruiting theme, many of you may remember it; wonderful, very effective, was a white knight on a chessboard. A great way to recruit some people, but maybe not a real good way to recruit blacks. (Laughter.) And where are we making special efforts? Where are our ROTC programs? Are we really reaching out in Spanish language advertising, et cetera, et cetera?

The point is if you can get enough discussion in the organization about the underlying principle in terms of what the organization cares about, then, in fact, you can change it in these kinds of ways.

Now, in the movie you described you get this phenomenal, wonderful example of a leader unto himself, and I think that's a very important contribution and it's just terrific as an achievement and it's terrific for the Navy to be reminded both of the achievement and of the prejudice.

But in the end, figuring out how to go with the grain of the organization to bring it to where it needs to be because it's for the good of the organization is the trick, and individuals going against the grain, heroic and helpful as they are, don't get you nearly as far as fast to where you need to be. That's my view.