Embracing the Hard Part of the Job

A former vice chair of Fannie Mae and deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, Jamie Gorelick was a 9/11 Commissioner and the blue-ribbon panel's only female member. Over the course of two interviews, including one in the swank Washington D.C. offices at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she is currently a partner, Gorelick spoke with Fast Company about consensus building, leadership, and additional lessons from the Commission's report. Below are excerpts from the two interviews.

Fast Company: One of the topic headings in the report's recommendation chapter was "engage the struggle of ideas." Although it focused more on the issue of America's moral leadership in the world and the way we are viewed in other countries, it's a great phrase, too, for engaging dissident voices and listening to opposing views.

Jamie Gorelick: That's absolutely key. The thrust of that chapter, which is the "what to do" chapter (the "how to do it" chapter has gotten so much more attention) is that while it is important to use our military tool and to use it well, it is critically important that we understand the larger Muslim world. Right now, it is essentially increasing the supply of would-be and aspiring terrorists as opposed to helping fight the battle against terrorism. One of the reasons is that we are perceived as having lost our moral leadership in the world.

FC: So you agree that the "engage the struggle of ideas" concept applies well to the idea of protecting those dissident voices?

Gorelick: Yes, [in terms of] listening to your customers, observing your competitors and listening to regulators. Look at what has happened in Corporate America. The insular focus on short-term earnings per share can have disastrous impacts on the company because it misses significant issues that shareholders, regulators or communities in which the company needs to operate care about a lot.

FC: In the report's discussion on "the wall" - the term that was often used to describe the legal barrier between the CIA and the FBI - there's an applicable idea to business about how regulations and rules are often taken too literally or misunderstood. The report warns about "accumulated institutional beliefs." How did this happen with "the wall"?

Gorelick: The original legal concepts were unassailable. You don't want to use an exceptional investigative authority designed to keep the country more secure against routine criminals who should be protected by the normal warrant requirements. That's obvious. That's obvious to Congress, it's obvious to the courts, and it's obvious to the executive branch. What you see is such risk aversion within the bureaucracy that each entity that had to implement that policy moved further and further away from the line. By 2001, the line that the bureaucracy was drawing was unrecognizable in comparison to what was promulgated through the '80s and the early '90s.

When I started off by saying that it is the obligation of managers to free up the people on the line who understand their jobs the best, that's one of the things I was talking about -- that constant reexamination of what is inhibiting them from doing their job. By the time you get to the summer of 2001, both the internal reports within the Justice Department and more importantly, the independent reporting by the General Accounting Office, were telling the Justice Department, "This is broken. However well intentioned it might have been, it is currently broken because of the way it is being implemented. You have to do something about it." And yet nothing was done.

FC: Yet even as we talk about freeing up the front line to be uninhibited and do their job, there's a lot in the report about too much decentralization. Especially considering the Commission's proposal for a new intelligence head. What do you think the lessons are here for business?

Gorelick: When you have, as every organization has, stovepipes, you have to have a strong consumer who drives cooperation across them. You can see it in a well-run company or a well-run organization of any sort -- someone who forces people to break down those barriers and encourages people to talk to each other, to work together. It's critically important.

Take the example of the CIA office in Kuala Lumpur not being able to encourage the CIA office in Bangkok to pick up Hazmi and Mihdhar [two of the 9/11 hijackers]. The central CIA organization left that completely to those offices and at some point the coordinating function broke down. When you take it to the next level, the CIA didn't tell the FBI that these individuals had visas to travel to the United States. They didn't tell the State Department to put them on the terrorist watch list, and it goes on.