POWELL: People ask me, Where did your leadership training come from? I am sometimes reluctant to admit that everything I did in 35 years in the service I learned as a brand new second lieutenant.

I was taught to think about mission and people.

Mission. What are you trying to accomplish? Don’t do anything until you know what the mission is. Drilled into our hearts and into our heads.

People. The only way to accomplish a mission is through those troops entrusted to your care. It’s not you. It’s not the organization. It’s not any plan you have. At the end of the day, it’s some soldier who will go up a hill and correct your mistakes and take that hill.

I was still trying to put it all together as this 21-year-old lieutenant, when finally a sergeant said, Let me make it clear for you, lieutenant, so that you never, ever doubt again what leadership is all about. Now, listen carefully. I ain’t gonna repeat it. A good leader is someone whose troops will follow him, if only out of curiosity.

It never got any better than that.

Why would you follow somebody around a corner? Up a hill? Into a dark room? The reason is trust. But how do you achieve trust? By constantly studying. By constantly making sure you know what you’re supposed to accomplish. By constantly training the force and retraining the force and retraining the force as new equipment comes into the military, as new enemies arise, as new opportunities appear, as new risks are discovered. In other words, by constantly showing people that you are worthy of their confidence.

You also get trust when people think you care as much about their well-being as your own. People have to think that you not only care about their problems but will solve them. People should want to bring you their problems.

You have to give people recognition, what Napoleon called those little ribbons that men will die for. People demand recognition to generate feelings of self-worth. Good leaders provide that.

Good leaders also discipline organizations. This is the most difficult thing to teach young officers. If you don’t fire people who are not doing the job—after you have counseled them, after you have brought them along—then you’re hurting the whole organization.

People want leaders they can be proud of, leaders who have high standards, who have great moral courage, who have character.

CONTEXT: How do leaders adapt in times of great change, such as we’re seeing in the world of commerce?

POWELL: For most of my 35-year military career, I had one model of the world. I was to focus on containment—containment of the Soviet Union and of communism. When I received my commission as a second lieutenant, I was told to go to Frankfurt and head east until I ran into the Iron Curtain. I was told: Your mission with your 40 soldiers is not to let the Russian army come through.

I did that for two years, thereby preventing World War III. That was me. I did it.

Over the next 28 years, everything I did in Vietnam, Korea, and anywhere else related to that same contest, East vs. West. When I was promoted to lieutenant general in 1986, I was given 75,000 troops but had the same mission I had as a second lieutenant. Go to the east of Frankfurt, where I’d run into the Iron Curtain, and do not let the Russian army come through.

That was a snap. It was all I had done for 28 years.

And then it all began to change. At the tail end of the Reagan administration, when I was the president’s national security adviser, there was suddenly a new strategic situation. The new president of the Soviet Union, a guy by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev, wasn’t following the script. He said, I’m going to open the Iron Curtain to ideas and information. Watch me.

And we knew that ideas and information are more powerful than armies.

The big change for me came when I went to Moscow with Secretary of State George Schultz to prepare for President Reagan’s first visit ever to the Soviet Union. We sat across the table from President Gorbachev. Gorbachev was mad. He had just been attacked again by the Western press and by the Republican party, so he started ranting at us. Finally, he realized he was on the verge of losing control. He became very silent. The room became very, very still. After a few moments, he looked across the table and said, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary, don’t you understand what I’m saying to you? I’m ending the Cold War. It’s over.

He then looked to his right to get my reaction. He could see in my face an expression of shock and surprise and dismay and disbelief and suspicion all mixed up into one very unpleasant facial expression.

He looked upward, almost as if opening a mental file cabinet. He pulled out my KGB folder. I think what he saw was that Powell is no intellectual, he’s no foreign policy expert, he’s not a diplomat, he’s not a politician. He’s a soldier. That’s all he’s ever been.

Got it. Folder goes back down. File drawer closes. Gorbachev looks back down and waits until my eyes are locked on his. He leans forward ever so slightly, and a big smile comes across his face. He says, General, General, I’m very, very sorry. You’ll have to find a new enemy.

I thought to myself, Wait a minute. Slow down, buddy. I spent 28 years investing in this enemy. But that phase of my career had come to an abrupt end.

CONTEXT: So, your biggest challenge was actually your biggest victory?

POWELL: When we won the Cold War, I was sitting there as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I had lost the mission.

I started to be told by every think tank in Washington what we ought to do. Every member of Congress had an idea. Every contractor had an idea. Everybody had an idea. My colleagues and I came together and said, Look, we either drive the change, or the change is going to drive us.

We knew we still had responsibilities in Asia, in the Middle East, in Europe. So, we decided, let’s deal with those.

We also knew we had to make sure that we took the new mission and drove it down to the last private in the ranks. Whoever came in and emptied the trash can at night had to understand the vision.

We had to preserve the culture that made us successful, too. People kept saying, You’re peacekeepers. We want you to become humanitarian folks. My response was: No! We’re warriors. The day we stop being warriors, go hire cops. You don’t need us anymore. Every organization has to have an essence, something that everybody is proud of being, something that drives the mission. For us, the essence was, "I am a warrior for the nation." And yes, warriors can perform humanitarian missions.

When the Cold War ended, and we had to get rid of 500,000, 600,000 troops, it was awful. The nation was so proud of us after the Persian Gulf War. Parades everywhere. And now this. The troops didn’t want to go, and they knew we didn’t want them to leave, but we communicated well enough that they understood why we had to cut back. And we preserved the culture well enough that people wanted to stay. Those who were left behind said to us, Well, gosh, if you got rid of those guys, maybe you’re going to get rid of us, too. But they stayed with us because they trusted us. They were willing to follow us if only out of curiosity.

CONTEXT: How do you make decisions amid so much uncertainty?

POWELL: When I visited a training exercise once, I went into a command center late at night and saw that a corps commander had gone to sleep thinking that everything was fine. He had laid out his digital matrices. If the enemy did this, he’d do that. It looked great. Except the enemy didn’t cooperate. The commander was asleep when the enemy did the most important thing it could do to affect his plan. He lost the battle.

You can’t just sit back and let all the data flow in. Take all the data you have, and then go with your gut. Go with the decision that’s in your brain and in your heart.

CONTEXT: As companies wrestle with e-commerce, some people want to do something revolutionary, some want to do nothing, and some are in between. As a leader, how do you get everyone headed in the same direction?

POWELL: First, make sure everybody understands the mission as you see it. Quick war story: One of my officers told me, Hey, chairman, great day. I just saved $400 million.

That’s a pretty good day. I asked: How’d you do it?

He said he had discovered that there was one little cell down in the logistics department that was still computing petroleum reserves based on a Cold War assumption. The assumption was that, no matter where war broke out, it would become a world war. Therefore, there would be no supplies of petroleum available anywhere. But, with the Cold War over, world war was highly unlikely. You might be fighting in the Persian Gulf, but there would be oil coming out of Africa and South America. So, we could cut our oil inventories and save $400 million a year.

There was some little old guy down there in the basement who never got the word that the war was over. I’ll bet you right now that there’s no established organization where you won’t find somebody who says, Don’t confuse me with e-commerce. I know what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years, and you’re not going to screw me up.

Change isn’t something that happens at the top. That’s just the beginning of it.

Good leaders are those who really can smell what’s happening throughout the organization. You know, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I had a personal staff of 90 people—bodyguards, pilots. I had my own 707, my own Gulfstream. I had 15 people just to handle my daily correspondence. I had four aides. I had six guys taking care of the house. It was great. I had another 1,500 people who were on the Joint staff. They worked for me, and their sole purpose in life was to keep as much information away from me as possible. They’d think: Let’s just give him what we want him to have, not what he needs. The challenge for me was to have informal contacts and to get information from outside the organization that had been set up to provide me information.

I did that beginning at 6:30 every morning, when I’d hit my office having read all the newspapers. I would get the CIA to come in for 20 minutes with no other staff members present and tell me what they told the president that morning. So I was getting information outside my organization. I would check Roll Call, the newspaper from Capitol Hill, to see what my Hill buddies were doing.

Then I would call my friends. I had a stable of about eight friends, and I had a phone line that came into my office. If it rang three times and I didn’t pick up, they were to hang up. My secretary was instructed never to answer that phone. Never. If I’m not there, do not pick that phone up. It was a direct line to eight trusted agents, who had nets out everywhere. They told me what was going on inside my organization, outside my organization, everywhere. They told me who was sleeping with whom. They told me the bad news. They told me the good news. They told me when I was really screwed up, and when I was in big trouble and the Washington Post was about to do a job on me. It was that source of information that really gave me power within my organization. You have to have informal networks that are constantly sensing the outside environment and not just be trapped to the formal network that’s within your walls.

When a good leader smells that something isn’t right, he has to do something. Very often, that "do something" in an environment that’s changing as rapidly as the one we’re in means getting rid of people. I’m not a great fan of reorganization. Reorganizations tend to be something you do to people, not for people. Most reorganizations that I’ve seen really were for the purpose of getting around people, solving problems that should have been addressed directly by getting rid of them. You give me the right people, and I don’t much care what organization you give me. Good things will happen. Give me the wrong people, and it doesn’t matter what you do with the organization. Bad things will happen.

Let me make one other point on people. Once a group is promoted to brigadier general in the Army, it is a given that within three years half of you will be retired. Only 50% go higher. It’s up or out because we have to bring new guys in. The day I was promoted to three stars, a letter arrived from the chief of staff of the Army, the chairman of my corporation. The letter said, "Dear Colin: Congratulations. You’re three stars, and you are going to be a corps commander in Germany. You will hold that position for two years. If in two years, you have not heard from me offering you a second position or promoting you to four stars, I expect you to have your resignation on my desk." He expected me to retire if he couldn’t use me anymore. One job. If I did well and got another job, fine. If not, I had to keep things moving and make way for youngsters.

CONTEXT: What if you’re a leader of a piece of an organization, and you have a radically different vision than that of your superiors?

POWELL: Unless you reconcile your views at some point, the situation becomes dysfunctional, and you should move on. But every organization should tolerate rebels who will tell the emperor he has no clothes.

In the military, when you become a four-star general, people will do anything you even suggest you want. If you say a wall looks a little dirty, by sundown it’s painted. You have to be very careful what you say. I had to work at breaking down that deference to hear from my people. All the tables in my office and conference rooms were round so that there was never a head. I would always try not to wear my full uniform—what I called my suit of lights, my matador suit. I would always have my jacket and blouse with all the fruit salad on it thrown in the corner. I would try to slouch.

When a captain came in to see me, I would tell the youngster to sit down. I’d say, Talk to me, son. What have you got? And then I’d let him argue with me. I would do everything I could to let him think he was arguing with an equal, because he knew more about the subject than I did. I got the benefit of his knowledge, which was superior to mine. I also knew that, when he got back to his office, he’d tell his friends that he had argued with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that I had agreed with him. Word would spread. People would understand that when they came into my office I really wanted to hear what they thought.

Now, everyone knew that, at the end of the day, a decision had to be made, and it involved a lot of factors. That captain may have been the smartest I’d ever seen, but he was only telling me about a little part of the issue. If I decided against him, then that was just too bad. I was the chairman, and he wasn’t. And, you do it my way, because I expect loyalty. I will give my people my loyalty as part of this trust equation, but they have to give me theirs, too. If somebody has new data, fine. But if the environment hasn’t changed, you do it my way.

CONTEXT: With America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth, you don’t just think about motivating young people in the workplace. You have to motivate kids who are struggling with poverty in gang-ridden environments. How do you help these kids break through the walls that seem to surround them?

POWELL: That’s the $64,000 question. What I’ve found is that you should take them over the wall and show them the other side so they know it’s not all that mysterious and unachievable. You show them that the barriers can be reduced by education, by doing the right things in life, by starting to behave, by disciplining yourself.

We run a summer program in Washington, D.C., where we send 30 kids to the lawyers and lobbyists to work. We warn these companies that the kids, 13 years old, don’t speak terribly well and that the companies have to have someone work with them. But what is so refreshing is that, once these kids go there, they’re immediately taken over the wall.

One kid went to a law firm, and they said, Here’s what we want you to do. We want you to look up cases that have these features to them. We’re looking for precedents for this kind of a case. The kid looked at them like they were from outer space. They showed him just enough to get him started, and the kid went to work. He worked for two weeks, got turned on by the project, and his life was changed.

He is now in private high school. When he was interviewed by the school- mistress, who wasn’t sure she wanted to take this thug, she said, Where did you work over the summer? He told her. She said, Really? And what did you do there? He said, Well, I used a computer to look up cases to establish a precedent. She said to this kid in his baggy pants, What’s a precedent? And he explained it to her. She took him right away.

Now, when I go to Boys and Girls Clubs, the kids don’t have a clue who I am. They’re about 10 years old. Desert Storm was eight years ago. What I do have is my book. In the front of the book is a beautiful picture, I think, of me in my uniform done by Annie Leibowitz, the world-famous photographer. I show the kids my stars, tell them that I was a general, that I had four million people in my command. I say, That’s why they have me here talking to you. You got it? The kids say, We got it.

Then I throw the book up, and it comes down reversed. There’s a picture on the back of the book that’s me at age 10. All of us have one of these horrible pictures, at least in my generation, when your immigrant parents dragged you to the photographer for one of these ‘there’s my boy’ pictures. I say, Now, there I am at your age, in this silly suit that my mama made me wear for the photographer. I didn’t have any money. I was black. I couldn’t go to any school I wanted to. I couldn’t go to restaurants. I had to live in my own community because white people didn’t like me.

I say, Now, how did I get from there to here? How did I get around the wall? I say, Let me tell you how to take that wall apart. My parents didn’t let me fail. I had an education. I learned to speak well. I learned the English language. Don’t ever do drugs. That’s how you get around the wall.

I also bring kids out to my house. People have told me, Don’t do that. You live in a very expensive house. But as soon as these kids get to my house, they’re all over it. All the girls say to Alma, Can we go upstairs and see the bedrooms? When the kids leave at the end of the day, they’re not thinking, Oh my gosh. They’re thinking, How can I get that?

However frustrating it may be, you just keep taking the kids around the wall and then see what you can do to help them figure out how to take the wall down.