Bob Woodward was all over the talk shows a few weeks ago. Woodward is the indefatigible Washington Post reporter and author of many “insider” books about presidents; his newest is “Obama’s War,” about President Obama and the Afghanistan war.
According to Woodward’s account, President Obama didn’t want his presidency to be about this war. He wanted to focus on other things, primarily domestic issues like health and education. Too bad. He got a war.
There are many lessons in this story for leaders at all levels — governors, business leaders and everyone else in a position of power or authority. One lesson: leaders don’t always get to choose their agenda.
You may remember when President George W. Bush was going to be the “education president.” The September 11 attacks happened in the first year of his presidency and drove his priorities right off the rails. America was basking in peaceful prosperity following the end of the Cold War and suddenly we were at war in Afghanistan, then Iraq. Eventually the education agenda got back on track, sort of — whether you like the results is a separate conversation — but America had become a different country. Then came Hurricane Katrina.
Nobody campaigns on being the best qualified to manage unanticipated disasters. But unanticipated disasters happen.
The Santa Fe prison riot of 1980 was probably the most horrifying event in modern New Mexico history. I remember vividly (I was in the Roundhouse) when news of the riot was delivered by a stunned Governor Bruce King to an equally stunned legislature. The condition of the state’s prisons, we learned later, was deplorable, and warnings had been issued of an imminent crisis, but those warnings had not received serious attention by our state’s leaders. They were simmering in the background, gathering momentum for the explosion of the riot.
Response to the prison riot wasn’t limited to stopping the riot or cleaning up the aftermath. The riot forced the Governor and Legislature to deal squarely with a major issue of governmental responsibility that they had previously neglected. Suddenly New Mexico had to get serious about the qualifications of corrections professionals, and a major new budget priority developed.
The prison issue resulted in the Duran Consent Decree, which would place New Mexico prisons under federal supervision for years into the future. A woman I knew remarked to me, “My husband has become a prison warden.” Her husband was the federal judge who supervised the consent decree. That had not been his plan, either.
Many more stories could be told on the same theme. We never know when a pipe will burst, when a bridge will collapse, or when a problem in an agency will explode into crisis and force the state to change its priorities.
New Mexico and every other state has already had a major priority change with the shift in the economy. Serious as this is, it’s no surprise. But we don’t know what else might be out there. We learned too late that the prison riot could have been prevented.
For our next governor and new legislators, one lesson is that leaders must sometimes force themselves to listen to the bad news they don’t want to hear and respond to it before the dam breaks or the feds rush in and take over your agency. Another lesson is that no matter how determined you are about how you want to change the world, one true test of your leadership will be your capacity to respond when the universe hands you a big nasty surprise.
Triple Spaced Again, © New Mexico News Services 2010; posted in 2011