Cover Copy
Like many companies, the FBI faces an abundance of serious challenges.
It must succeed on a global playing field with limited resources—or face
disastrous consequences. It is a huge, potentially unwieldy organization
filled with over?worked, underpaid employees—yet it must cultivate
loyalty, flexibility, openness, and fierce pride to succeed in its
mission. It's a tall order, but one that the FBI accomplishes on an
unprecedented scale. Now you can learn how to apply the FBI's most
powerful leadership and management principles in your organization to
gain new levels of employee commitment and performance. Packed with
first-person accounts of the bureau's inner workings and detailed
suggestions for emulating its success, From the Bureau to the Boardroom
uncovers practical management lessons, including:
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-How to encourage the acceptance of new roles -
-How to manage failure (and success)
-How to win with the tools you have, not the ones you wish you had
-How to cul?tivate maturity and good judgment
-How to reach out to the next generation and hire well
- Plus many more
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Advance Praise for From the Bureau to the Boardroom:
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"If you think that the challenges faced by the FBI are different from
those confronted by Fortune 500 companies, think again! Dan Carrison
brilliantly reveals the concept of universality of management and
management excellence being grounded in a 'mind-set' rather than a set
of techniques.?? ?????
—???
Nelly Kazman, Executive Director, Senior Adjunct
Professor, University of La Verne
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"There is much that every organization can and should learn from the
FBI. Dan Carrison's book makes it abundantly clear why we need to learn
and the consequences if we fail to do so.??????
— Ian I. Mitroff, University Professor, Marshall Goldsmith School
of Management, visiting Professor, UC Berkeley
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"Mr. Carrison's book is well done.? For
the first time, there is an accurate portrayal of the FBI management
culture for the hardworking men and women of the FBI. The book is easily
read and understood, and he has demonstrated how these sound management
principles are applicable to any corporation.??????????
— Thomas B. Locke, former FBI Senior ????? Executive
and director of the FBI's initial response to 9/11 at FBI Headquarters
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"Carrison does a phenomenal job of capturing the culture and management
philosophy of the FBI and translating it into concepts applicable to the
private sector. I know; I have been in both.??????????
—Joseph W. Koletar, FBI Senior Executive (retired) and independent
consultant
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"Business today is in crisis. Learn about crisis management from the
best—the FBI!?
—???
Thomas J. Pickard, former Deputy Director, FBI, 1975-2001
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"Carrison truly captures the unique attributes of the Bureau's
management style and culture, which he brilliantly dissects into 30
management lessons for the private sector.??
— Craig Dotlo, first President of the FBI Agents Association, 1981-1988
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Excerpt
Chapter 1
Managing the Corporate Mission
Imagine being Robert Mueller on September 11, 2001. He
had been the newly appointed Director of the FBI for all
of one week. Suddenly America was under attack, on his
watch. Three planes had hit their targets, another had reportedly
crashed, and hundreds of planes were still in the
air, any one of which could have been under the control
of suicidal hijackers. Outside his office window in the nation's
capital, he could see the Pentagon, the very symbol
of American military might, in flames. On the television
screen, the landmark twin towers of the World Trade Center
had defied imagination by collapsing upon an untold
number of first responders and the people they had been
trying so valiantly to save.
While the FBI had been taking down the Mafia; thwarting
the attempts of international cocaine cartels to establish
beachheads on American soil; stemming the alarming
proliferation of a whole new breed of vicious, sociopathic
street gangs; and chasing down bank robbers, kidnappers,
software piracy rings, and identity theft gangs, a
deadly adversary in the shadows of Arabia had been planning
an unthinkable outrage.
Imagine the weight of his responsibilities as the smoke
cleared. His job would have been difficult enough, overseeing
the Bureau's fifty-six branch offices, sixty global
offices, ten thousand agents, and eighteen thousand support
personnel. But now the President of the United States
had mandated revolutionary change. Director Mueller not
only had to run the FBI, but he had to immediately reorganize
it to meet the greatest threat to the general population
in American history.
Few executives have ever been so challenged.
Robert Mueller's agency had been given a new directive by
the President of the United States. The FBI's traditional role
as a domestic law enforcement agency had been redefined and
expanded; national security would now become its top priority.
Sweeping changes were about to be implemented, virtually
overnight, in a tradition-rich, global organization with ''bureaucracy''
for its middle name—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Encourage the Acceptance of New Roles
The new paradigm laid down by Director Mueller after 9/11
amounted to a major reorganization of the Bureau and a new
forward strategy. Assistant Director Stephen Tidwell remembers
that day very well.
''Director Mueller flopped my world,'' he says with understated
simplicity.
''Our responsibilities used to be essentially domestic;
now they were global. We used to be all about law enforcement;
now we're about national security and law enforcement.
We used to be case-driven; now we're threatdriven.
Our inclination used to be 'Restrict, and share
what we must'; and now it's 'Share, and restrict what we
must.' Budget used to drive the strategy; now strategy
drives the budget. Our priorities had changed as well.
Number one was now counterterrorism. Number two:
counterintelligence. Number three: cyber. You didn't get
to 'crime,' per se, until number four—and even that had
changed into a focus on public corruption.''
Sitting across the polished mahogany boardroom
table, attired in a suit, with a pleasant smile on his face,
Tidwell looked every bit the consummate senior executive.
I interviewed him on his last day as head of the
Los Angeles field office. He was flying back to Washington,
D.C., to assume the duties of executive assistant director
of the FBI's criminal, cyber, response, and services
branch. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Presidential
Rank Award for Meritorious Executive. When he mentioned
to me that his assigned street role during his early
days with the Bureau had been that of a ''hit man and
thug,'' I naturally tried to imagine this award-winning
executive in the role of a hit man during a sting operation,
or as a thug—coldly menacing in a three-piece suit, or unshaven
and brutish in a leather jacket. And yes, suddenly
I could see it! It was in his eyes, mainly, but just for a
fleeting instant.
''The organizational changes,'' he continued, ''were
major. But we adjusted quickly.''
Stephen Tidwell, in his twenty-fourth year with the Bureau,
has seen major shifts in strategy before. ''At various
points in our history we've been given a new mission, and
we've adapted. I can give you two examples that I've experienced
personally. I joined the FBI in 1983, when the
Bureau was given concurrent jurisdiction with the Drug
Enforcement Agency. That was a big change for the FBI.
We suddenly went from wearing suits to getting down
and dirty and doing jump-outs in the street, arresting
crack cocaine dealers. Then the FBI's role was expanded
again in the early 90s, when we were told to take out the
gangs. That was another big change, infiltrating the street
gangs.
''We did it with drugs, we did it with gangs, and now
we're being asked to do it with terrorism.''
In field offices all across the nation, special agents in
charge—the FBI's equivalent of a branch executive—assembled
the troops and explained Director Mueller's new paradigm.
Going after the terrorists, of course, was not a hard sell to dedicated
agents who had taken the attacks on the homeland personally.
But even so, there must have been those for whom the
announcement was unsettling. After all, taking down a criminal
enterprise so that not one brick is left standing can take years,
and thousands of agents were heavily invested in their life's
work. It had taken them a chunk of their career just to develop
their network of informants and contacts. It had taken years just
to identify who was who in the secretive criminal families they
had patiently infiltrated, at the risk of their lives. What was to
become of all of their hard work? Would their casebooks be
turned over to a stranger who would waltz in from another
agency?Would that stranger be as good as they were? Would the
drug dealer, or the pedophile, or the vicious leader of a gang
walk free because the last few steps of a long-term investigation
were mishandled by a newcomer?
These questions were handled with sensitivity by FBI managers,
who were, after all, on the street themselves not so many
years ago. Many agents were allowed to see their ''pet'' investigations
through to conclusion and even to remain in their particular
area of investigations; others were asked to hand off their
cases and transition to the antiterror squads. One thing was
made clear to all: The priorities may have changed, but not the
need for FBI core expertise. ''It's not as if the traditional FBI
training was suddenly rendered irrelevant by the new priorities,''
explains Tidwell. ''We could, in fact, fall back on that
training and on that core expertise, because terrorist cells have
much in common with criminal enterprises. They have trainers,
finance people, transportation people, facilitators, suppliers,
bomb makers, recruiters, etc. We just had to recalibrate, not
reinvent the wheel. But this is an extraordinarily resilient
organization.
It doesn't take long before the adjustment becomes
'core.' And of course part of that is generational: we have people
in the Bureau today that weren't here before 9/11.''
How well have the FBI agents adapted to their new role?
''When the public asks us, 'What have you been doing in the war
against terror?' '' concludes Tidwell, ''we can't really answer that
in specifics. What we can tell the public is this: 'We haven't been
hit again in six years.' ''
I left the interview thinking that of all the unintended consequences
of the terrorist attack on 9/11—the patriotic response,
the national solidarity, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
the war in Iraq—the one the terrorists may most regret
will be the shift in the priorities of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
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