Embracing the Hard Part of the Job

FC:The report really shows how slow the FBI and CIA cultures were to change.

Gorelick: Here's just an example. As recently as when we were finishing up the writing of our report, we were being told that the FBI got it now and that it was putting an emphasis on the hiring and training of intelligence officers and analysts. But when we asked the question of what is the test that new agents take for admission into the FBI, it was the same test. It was the same law enforcement test in the spring of 2004 as it had been for, well, decades.

FC: And what about in the CIA?

Gorelick: At the CIA, there grew up these two cultures, one of intelligence, the other operations. There was not enough was done to broach the two.

FC: The concept described in the report, "institutionalizing imagination," was very interesting to us. It's a provocative idea. How did imagination fail in the case of 9/11?

Gorelick: The people above those who had the imagination because they were on the ground were sort of imposing their own views on what mattered. Therefore, the information didn't break through. That happened in the case of the Phoenix memo, in the case of Moussaoui or in the frustrations that were felt in the Bin Laden unit. For example, when FBI headquarters received the Phoenix memo, they simply sent it off to the other office, because they felt it wasn't relevant to the case. Yet when an urgent request came in to help find Hazmi and Midhar, nothing was done at headquarters to try and excite the field, to get it going more than in the very most routine way.

The fact is that in business, you innovate because you are responding to a felt need on the ground. How do you understand what your next product needs to look like or how your service could be tendered better? By interacting better with the consumers of them. And if the organization can't develop mechanisms for taking those learnings in the field and using them to become more agile, they're going to die. That's what we saw. We literally saw deaths of organizations from ossification. If you have an entrepreneurial and agile enemy or if you're in an entrepreneurial or agile industry, the solutions are the same.

FC: That gets at the book's idea of "cultural asymmetry," the idea that companies get so large or powerful that they ignore upstarts.

Gorelick: Look at the steel industry. It repeatedly seeded chunks of its business to upstarts who were in their view entering the business in the lower margin area. They thought, "We don't need to do that. We don't need to compete there because it's a low margin threat." But gradually those smaller producers ate the lunch of the larger producers. There are hundreds of examples I could give you in business and it's the exact same thing that happened here.

FC: Much has been said about how the 9/11 Commission members worked together, about how much of a consensus there was between Republicans and Democrats. What was done to achieve that?

Gorelick: Listening is big, and understanding what the different points of view are, too. Being graceful, exercising judgment -- a lot of the principles of leadership [that I believe in] can help you reach consensus. Often you find that you have to peel back the ideology that surrounds the dispute to get to what the actual dispute is, and that's where you can find the middle ground. I think that's why I ended up working so well with Slade [Gorton, a Republican on the Commission], because he does the same thing.

FC: There were some great leadership lessons in your questioning to key witnesses during the 9/11 hearings. When you were speaking to Condoleezza Rice, you talked about how there's a greater degree of intensity when direction comes from the top.

Gorelick: If you look at the great leaders that I've worked with - Colin Powell, Tom Kean, Janet Reno, just to name a few - they brought and bring an enormous intensity to the heart of issues and the things they think really need to be dealt with.

One of the themes I think you can see running throughout the story of 9/11, and this is not focused on the White House even though your question is, is passivity. Dozens of times, very senior leaders said "This wasn't brought to me," or "I assumed this was a given." I believe that there is a tendency that has to be resisted to define away the hard part of the job. In ordinary terms you can think of it as whether you define your job by the contents of your inbox or whether you know that inbox is there but you come in in the morning and you sit there with a blank piece of paper and you say, "What is the most important set of things for me to get done? What are the urgent matters before us?" Now if you do that and you persistently don't address your inbox, you will create as many problems as you address, so you have to do both. You have to be reactive and proactive. You have to cycle short and cycle long at the same time.