It Worked For Me Read Free

course and made him my Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs.
    4. IT CAN BE DONE.
    This familiar quotation is on a desk plaque given to me by the great humorist Art Buchwald. Once again, it is more about attitude than reality. Maybe it can’t be done, but always start out believing you can get it done until facts and analysis pile up against it. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Don’t surround yourself with instant skeptics. At the same time, don’t shut out skeptics and colleagues who give you solid counterviews. “It can be done” should not metamorphose into a blindly can-do approach, which leaves you running into brick walls. I try to be an optimist, but I try not to be stupid.
    5. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CHOOSE: YOU MAY GET IT.
    Nothing original in this one. Don’t rush into things. Yes, there are occasions when time and circumstances force you to make fast decisions. Usually there is time to examine the choices, turn them over, look at them in the light of day and the darkness of night, and think through the consequences. You will have to live with your choices. Some bad choices can be corrected. Some you’ll be stuck with.
    6. DON’T LET ADVERSE FACTS STAND IN THE WAY OF A GOOD DECISION.
    Superior leadership is often a matter of superb instinct. When faced with a tough decision, use the time available to gather information that will inform your instinct. Learn all you can about the situation, your opponent, your assets and liabilities, your strengths and weaknesses, the threats and risks. Select several possible courses of action, then test the information you have gathered against them and analyze one against the other. Often, the factual analysis alone will indicate the right choice. More often, your judgment will be needed to select from the best courses of action. This is the moment when you apply your instinct to smell the right answer. This is where you apply your education, experience, and knowledge of external considerations unfamiliar to your staff. This is when you look deep into your own fears, anxiety, and self-confidence. This is where you earn your pay and position. Your instinct at this point is not a wild guess or a hunch. It is an informed instinct that knows from long experience which facts are the most important and which adverse facts, however adverse, can be set aside. As the saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
    On the eve of D-Day, General Eisenhower faced one of the most difficult decisions any military commander has ever had to make. The weather was dicey; launching the invasion into bad weather could doom it, but his weathermen predicted a possible opening on June 6, 1944. He had been gathering information and planning this operation for months. He knew it in his fingertips. In the loneliness that only commanders know, he made his decision. He wrote a statement taking all the blame if the invasion failed. Yet his informed instinct said, “Go!” He was right.
    In the final weeks of the Civil War, General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was besieging Petersburg and slowly squeezing General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to death. One night Grant was awakened by a staff officer. “We’ve received information that Lee’s army is on the move and massing to attack our flank,” he told Grant urgently. Grant rubbed the sleep from his eyes, thought for a moment, and said, “That’s not possible,” and went back to sleep.
    Both generals could have been wrong, and history would have treated them differently. Eisenhower was a masterful staff officer and a gifted manager, but also a great leader. He knew when to trust his instinct. Grant did not make a snap judgment that night. He knew Lee, he had studied him as a man and soldier, and he knew the strengths and increasing weakness of the Army of Northern Virginia. His instinct was well informed, and it took only a minute for his instinct to