Page 272 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

FELLOWS AT WORK

the First Lady: If he was asked to make copies to speed the completion of
a project, he did it. “There were days when I would simply just run faxes
back and forth. There was no job too small,” Gupta said. “But on the same
day that you’d be running a fax from one office to the next, you’d get a
call from the First Lady’s office specifically to come sit down and talk to
the First Lady about a project that she was working on. It might be an
asthma initiative in an urban setting, or it might be domestic violence in
South America, so you’d sit down and talk to her, and all of a sudden you
become a person who is helping guide that office.”

BUILDING A BETTER PENTAGON, ONE MEMO AT A TIME
Most Fellows, like Gupta, do a fine job on their Fellowships from day one,
but occasionally even the most well-meaning Fellow misses the mark. That
was the case for Alexander S. Friedman (WHF 98–99), a Clinton admin-
istration Fellow assigned to the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense
William Cohen. Friedman, who went on to become the chief financial offi-
cer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said his sincere attempt to
“do something positive” during the early days of his assignment backfired
badly.
“I interviewed all the [service] secretaries through the Joint Chiefs and
tried to get at the things they thought were going right around the build-
ing. I wanted to find out how the Pentagon worked and what wasn’t work-
ing,” Friedman explained. “So I wrote this long memo after a couple of
months of analysis about what I thought were some of the low points and
some ways to improve the Pentagon. Well, you can imagine how that went
over. The secretary was like, ‘Keep this guy away from me—I don’t want
him sending me any memos.’”
Shortly after Friedman completed his deeply unappreciated memo, an
imposing figure strode into his office. It was General Charles “Chuck”
Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps.
“I read your memo,” Krulak growled.
“Oh,” Friedman gulped. “Did you hate it too?”
Krulak shook his head. “I’ve been saying the same things for years.
The difference is I’ve got four stars on my shoulder,” he said. “You’ve got
to know what you’re talking about before you write these memos.”
Friedman looked the general in the eye and declared, “I’m up for it,
sir. What do I do?”

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