Leadership for Intelligence Professionals   

                    Leading Change; Bringing "A Vision" to the CIA

When George Tenet took over as DCI in 1997, he said that at CIA:

…morale was in the basement….

…the dot-com revolution was passing us by….

Organizationally the Agency was a mess as well….

Overriding all these specific shortcomings, and most damaging, was the lack of a well articulated and well-understood strategy for the Agency.

Change was certainly a necessity, but CIA’s history and heritage would provide the foundation on which to build….

The first thing I did was build a leadership team that all these people [the varied specialists in CIA].could trust.  I brought in few outsiders.  The message I wanted to send to the workforce was that the talent that was needed to help us get where we wanted to go was among us….

With the leadership team in place in August 1997….someone said we were standing on a ‘burning platform’….

So we set out to learn how other organizations in disarray had transformed themselves. By the Spring of 1998, we had a plan in place—a document we called the ‘Strategic Direction’ [i.e., A Vision].

It took us nearly eight months of soul-searching to develop this plan for the future….In May 1998, I stood up in front of five hundred Agency employees in our igloo shaped auditorium known as ‘the Bubble’ to talk about the ‘burning platform’ and what we were going to do about it.  Thousands of other employees watched me on closed-circuit television.  Many of them were justifiably skeptical of what they were hearing.  After all they had seen so many other leadership teams come and go.  How did they know I was just not the flavor of the month?

If you would ask me how far we came in the effort to transform CIA [by 9/11], I would say we built the foundation and the first four floors of a seven storey building.  We were far from perfect and the world never stood still for a moment.

…We made progress , but looming international crises would nor wait for us to complete the task. 

Throughout this process, Tenet maintained that:

The cornerstone of our business is people—analysts, field officers, technicians, managers and, yes, spies.

But, he also believed that:

…’one man, one vote’ guarantees lowest-common-denominator solutions.  No one will be truly uncomfortable or unhappy about outcomes.  Good leadership, by contrast, demands that some segments of your organization occasionally have to swallow bitter but needed medicine.  Organizations such as CIA exist to defend democracy, not practice it.