Page 107 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

had a hand in planning the 1986 air raid over Libya, which was staged in
response to Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi’s support of groups blamed
for carrying out terrorist attacks in Rome, Vienna, and Berlin. The Berlin
bombing, which destroyed a nightclub, had killed two American service-
men. The U.S. government carried out the air strikes to send a strong
message to Ghaddafi and other potential or actual backers of international
terrorist groups that America would not tolerate radical violence against
innocent people.
By then it was obvious that Coy was great at putting out fires and
tackling tough problems. Thus, in 1987, when Attorney General Ed Meese
needed an assistant to help him carry out his duties as chairman of
President Reagan’s newly formed National Drug Policy Board, he tapped
his former White House Fellow Craig Coy. Levelheaded and extremely
bright—he had earned an MBA from Harvard Business School—Coy was
charged with creating an implementation plan to support the National
Drug Control Strategy. Since the early 1970s, cocaine use had increased
dramatically among Americans, and stemming the tide of drugs entering
and moving throughout the United States and being used by the populace
was of the utmost importance to President Reagan.
“The strategy included getting all the agencies involved in interdiction,
investigation, intelligence, prosecution, and incarceration as well as educa-
tion, treatment, and rehabilitation to identify the resources they had at their
disposal and to identify the initiatives they already had under way,” Coy
explained. “In addition, we wanted to know how these agencies were going
to measure whether their initiatives were effective, and that is something
the government typically has the toughest time with. Given the inherent
slow pace of government activity and the strong reluctance to be held
accountable for results, we needed to create a sense of urgency to cooper-
ate. So with Chairman Meese’s strong support and his close relationship
with President Reagan, we decided to use what I called ‘action-forcing
events’ to generate the impetus for urgency.”

Coy knew that people facing a long-term complicated job tend to
procrastinate because the task seems insurmountable and the deadline for
completion appears to be miles away. To keep all the agencies on track and
all the personnel focused on their roles in implementing a coordinated and
successful strategy to deal with illicit drug use, Coy and Meese scheduled

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