Embracing the Hard Part of the Job

To the extent that I had success as deputy attorney general, it was because I was in everybody's pants all the time. That is not pleasant for people except when they know you're doing it with everyone and you're not picking on them. I wanted to know about problems before they happened and I had in mind the urgent issues that needed to be addressed.

I think those were important lessons for business. You have to know your stuff. You have to be deep, you have to have breadth -- that is, you have to see across the horizon so you understand the context in which you're operating. You have to have sources of information that can alert you to [when] you're getting a one sided story and you have to have sources of information that help you see around corners.

FC: You've used that phrase often, "defining away the hard part of the job."

Gorelick: That's the phrase I used in the FAA hearing. The intelligence and security units in the FAA decided that they would only utilize intelligence with regard to threats to US aviation. Well, if you don't do anything unless you have a very specific threat against an airplane, and intelligence about that, then you're defining away the hard part of the job. What you should be doing is looking at all the intelligence and thinking, "How might that play out in a domain for which I'm responsible," and not just wait for someone to feed it to you.

FC: Taking responsibility for other people's actions was another leadership lesson from the questioning. What's a time that you've done that in your career?

Gorelick: I have dozens of examples in business which I can't describe in detail, but where there's somebody working with me or for me who did something essentially in my name that I wouldn't have done if I'd had the full facts. Still, I took responsibility for them. It's not right to let others hang out when you are the leader, but as a practical matter, if you don't take responsibility, than people are not going to act with initiative. In general, institutions are going to run very badly if everyone thinks they need to check up the line to do everything. I would rather take responsibility and then go back and tell people to try and exercise better judgment in the future. Whole institutions shut down when there's endless checking.

FC: Some people talk about an early experience where they began to have some comprehension of what it takes to lead effectively. What was yours?

Gorelick: [After getting out of law school], I purposely sought out a very small firm with deeply talented people, all of whom wanted to work in a less institutional setting than you might otherwise have gotten in a larger firm at that time. And as a consequence, I got much more responsibility than I would have had. There were so few associates that there was a partner and me on pretty much every case that I worked on.

One of my early cases was one in which we represented the head of a nursing home company that was charged with all kinds of financial malfeasance. ... This company and this person were just reviled in New York, where the case was set. I learned very early on the need to be calm under pressure, the need to understand one's role in a battle like that. That's a particularly important role when you're a lawyer, because obviously, when you're a defense lawyer, you don't sign on to be the person you're representing but you are playing the role of defending them to the best of your ability.

That's a good lesson in other roles in life, because in each job you have you are playing a role. You are yourself and you have your values, but you also have certain institutional responsibilities. When I was general counsel of the Defense Department I had to help implement the "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays in the military. That would not have been my policy, but I was the general counsel of the Department of Defense. We had 1.5 million people in uniform and the leadership of the department had reached an agreement with the leadership of Capital Hill that these policies were going to be in place. It was my job to try and figure out how best to implement them and I played that role, I thought, as an honest broker. I tried to carry out the sometimes conflicting intentions of people in that process, and I learned very early on that you have to understand both yourself and the larger institutional interests that you are serving.

FC: Did the implementation of "don't ask, don't tell" teach you anything about leading with courage?

Gorelick: I think honestly the example [I'd give] of learning about courage would be Janet Reno. There were articles of impeachment filed on her on almost any given question and she had a sort of equanimity in the face of that onslaught that was really admirable. She had a quote from Lincoln on her wall which just suggested that you put your head down and you do your job. She took responsibility where others often would try to avoid responsibility for decisions or actions. She was a very values-based leader; she spoke often and kept harkening back to the wonderful statements that are etched, literally etched, into the walls of the Department of Justice about what justice is about and what role it has to play in our society. It had an enormously calming effect on her, which had a calming effect on everyone else.