Page 128 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE GREAT COMMUNICATORS

how smart you are—everyone in Washington is smart. What matters is how
you make people feel. And that’s really key when you’re a leader. You don’t
have to prove anything to anyone. You’ve just got to communicate with
them, inspire them, take care of them, and give them the chance to be part
of something larger than themselves.”
Former White House Fellows Conde and O’Neill consider themselves
incredibly fortunate to have worked so closely with Colin Powell, one of
the nation’s great communicators and a leader who knew the value of talk-
ing with and learning from everyone in his organization regardless of a per-
son’s position. In contrast, Mel Copen (WHF 70–71) saw quite a different
leadership style in his White House Fellow principal. Copen, who was asso-
ciate dean of the University of Houston’s School of Business when he was
selected for a Fellowship, worked with Secretary of Agriculture Cliff
Hardin, a man he described as “an academic . . . one who would sit back
in his chair and puff on his pipe as he thought through ideas. He was a
very private individual.”
Copen had not wanted to go to the Department of Agriculture at first,
but after meeting Hardin and learning more about the assignment, he
enthusiastically accepted it. “I had no background in agriculture. As far as
I knew, the Agriculture Department was only some place that paid farm-
ers not to grow things,” said Copen. “But I went in and met with Cliff
Hardin, and I was fascinated. I learned that the Agriculture Department
had the largest financial institution in the world—at that time the com-
modities exchange was part of Agriculture—and it had the largest welfare
program and the largest home lending department. It was so much more
than I thought. I used to joke we even had our own army, navy, and air
force. The ‘army’ was armed with recoilless rifles to knock the snow off
the side of the mountains. The ‘navy’ had 200 ships to do river basin sur-
veys, and we had an ‘air force’ that used heavy bombers and dropped para-
troopers to fight forest fires. It was an exciting place. But the thing that
sealed the deal for me was Cliff Hardin and the reason he picked me.
Hardin had been chancellor of the University of Nebraska system. He went
into an Agriculture Department that had thirty-six separate agencies and
116,000 employees in 16,000 offices in roughly 3,000 counties in the
United States, and he was wrestling with the task of how to get control of
it. He saw my academic background and the business part of it, along with
some other things I had done, and he was comfortable with all that. When

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