 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Knowledge 16, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. It's our pleasure to have Dr. Robert Gates here, American Statesman, scholar, author, and the 22nd U.S. Secretary of Defense, Dr. Gates, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure. So we just came over, with a nice walk over from the CIO event here at Knowledge. You were speaking on leadership. You booked a passion for leadership, which I could not get on Amazon, so I have to carry it around with me. It's nice, it comes in handy when we're on theCUBE. First question, are leaders born or they made? I think that they are not necessarily born, but there are certain aspects of leaders that, of leadership that I think cannot be taught. If your empathy with other people, character and honor, courage, sincerity, a liking for people, a vision, I think these are things that are very personal. You're not necessarily born with them. They develop during the course of your life, but I also believe that they can't be taught in a university. Now, we were talking on the way over. I mentioned, there's no co-author on this book. You told me, you write all the books yourself, do all the research yourself, and you said one of the things you're proud of is, on duty, I'll let you explain it. There's been no factual claims of factual error, and you do all your own research, is that right? Well, it's one of the benefits of the IT revolution, is access to a lot of databases and things that even a non-technical person like me can use. So how much time does it take you to write a book, like Passion for Leadership? I would say that that book probably took about 18 months, two years. The previous book, Duty, the memoir of my time as Secretary of Defense under President Bush and Obama, took longer, but it's got a lot more factual information and a lot more synthesis of information, and this really was more kind of all out of my head in terms of my experiences over 50 years in public service. So you've served eight presidents, six of whom had a great sense of humor. Why is it important for leaders to have a sense of humor? Well, I think a sense of humor reflects balance. It reflects a perspective on the world that is healthy and people who don't have, well, as to be specific as I often joke, I mean the two presidents that, as far as I was concerned, had no discernible sense of humor, were Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and I believe people to draw their own conclusions in terms of the outcome for those presidents. Now, in thinking about some of the concepts that you've put forth in your work on leadership, one of the things that struck me is when you came in as the head of the CIA, there was obviously a tumultuous time, Soviet Union was splitting apart. You're an expert in that field. You had to have intense focus and the same thing when President W. Bush asked you to come back as Secretary of Defense, the focus was on Iraq. So you had intense focus on the Soviet Union in the first example and then Iraq in the second, yet you had so many other tasks that you had to do. Help us understand how you balance that need for focus, which many of us in the startup community have to have with all the other tasks that you have to do. How did you adjudicate? Well, I said, as I write in the book, you have to, sometimes you're faced with a situation where you need to make immediate changes and take immediate steps to deal with a crisis situation that's in front of you. But sometimes, simultaneously, you have to be making decisions about the long-term future. So for example, when I became CIA director in 1991, we were literally five weeks from the collapse of the Soviet Union. So it was not only how do I provide intelligence support for the president in terms of what's going to happen when the Soviet Union collapses, what happens to 40,000 nuclear weapons, will there be famine, will there be riots, et cetera, et cetera? But also the longer-term task was how do I reorient the entire American intelligence community away from this singular focus on the Soviet Union that we'd had for 45 years to deal with a world where there were many more and different kinds of challenges. So I was dealing with both the short-term crisis and the longer-term issue. When I became Secretary of Defense, we were, for all practical purposes, losing two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So my focus entirely as Secretary of Defense was on how do we turn those wars around. The president had made what I thought was a very courageous decision to surge troops into Iraq, so how do I get them there? The decision is one thing, getting 30,000 troops there with their equipment and getting them into the fight and providing them the support was quite another. And then we also had the conflict, the war in Afghanistan, so there was a singular focus there. And as I write in the book, it was only when President Obama asked me to stay on that I then broadened the aperture dramatically in terms of how do we change the way the Department of Defense gets managed and how we manage big weapons systems, how do we wring overhead out of our costs and take the longer-term view of repositioning the Defense Department? So when you think back to 1991, you had to make a lot of predictions, you and your colleagues, about what would happen with the Soviet Union. And while I'm sure there was a lot of data, we talk a lot in the Cube about big data and big data analytics. How has data changed the decision-making process in government at that level? I think when it comes to intelligence, data provides you more information about capability, but big data and technology still cannot help you when it comes to intentions. I always like to say that in the intelligence world, all the information we wanna know can be divided into two categories, secrets and mysteries. And unfortunately, the mysteries are the big things. Will the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia? Will they invade Afghanistan? Is China prepared to go to war over the South China Sea? And there is no data that can help you answer those questions. The data can help you identify the capabilities they can bring to the problem or to the issue. But in essence, when it comes to figuring out what other leaders will do, sometimes figuring out what our own leaders will do, there is no data that can help you solve that problem. I wanna change the subject, ask you about term limits. And specifically my question is, do you think corporations should have term limits on their executives? I think these kinds of broad rules are a mistake. I think that there may be certain companies where that has value, but on the other hand, you've got leaders, and I write about them in the book, who have been leading institutions, whether it's a university or a company for 20 years, and they are still the most restless, the most innovative, the most entrepreneurial people in the company, even at 75 or 80 years old. So to have some kind of a general rule that says everybody has to leave, I think is a serious mistake. I first joined corporate boards when I was 50 years old after I retired as CIA director. I thought age limits on boards then were crazy, and I was the youngest person on virtually every board I was on. But I would see somebody forced to rotate off at 70, who at 70 was making a bigger contribution than a lot of members of the board at 50 or 55. So I think these general rules are a mistake. I think it has to be very company specific and personality specific. Well, in the technology industry, obviously you have some big names like Dell still around and the other Gates who did quite a good job and so forth. So what about at lower levels within the organization? Still senior, but what's your philosophy in terms of mixing things up, putting executives in different roles, giving them a flavor for whatever, running finance or information technology or logistics, et cetera? Well, let me frame it a different way. I would tell rising military officers that they were not, as secretary of defense in my view, they were not competitive for senior command if artillery was all they'd ever done or if flying helicopters was all they had done or supervising people who flew helicopters. I wanted people who had a breadth of experience who knew different aspects of the defense establishment. So they had a broader perspective of the various challenges that we faced. So I think for someone who is going to aspire to the most senior positions, having some exposure to the other parts of the organization is valuable. By the same token, I mean, it seems to me it doesn't make any sense to take somebody who is a CFO and who has a particular skill and then put them in charge of the production line or something. I don't know, I've never run a private company, but it seems to me you have to be pretty careful about that of taking somebody who is in a technical specialty and then trying to get them to do something else. But once you rise to a certain level in an organization, if you want to have the big job, it seems to me you have to have had a variety of experiences that give you a broader perspective. I feel like I want to talk a little bit about cybersecurity. You mentioned in the CIO event that you were just at, the threat of cyber, I feel like in our industry, it's trivial compared to some of the cyber threats that you've had to deal with. But nonetheless, there seems to be a recognition within the executive community that it's not about just keeping people out anymore, it's about recognizing that you have been hacked, you will continue to be hacked. It's about the response. What should be on board of directors checklist, if you will, with regard to cyber security? Well, I think cyber and the risks associated with cyber and IT need to be a regular part of every board's agenda. I think there is value in having it an integral part of risk management. And so whether you focus specific attention in the audit committee, for example, and then have briefings for the broader board, probably is up to each company, but there is no question in my mind that when it comes to risk, for most companies today, cyber is right up there with natural disasters and business continuity and so on, and needs to be a responsibility in terms of oversight for a board. With regard to the boards you sit on, you feel like there's an honest and frank conversation about cyber and has that changed? No, I do. For the better? I do. I think it's, well, it's very different. I mean, I think people really take it seriously. Yeah, sometimes I get concerned that this fail equals fire mentality has led a lot of organizations to sandbag the risks. Is that a fair criticism? Well, what do you mean by that? By essentially say, I've got it covered. The risk of us getting hacked is low. We have it under control versus an open and frank conversation of no, we're getting infiltrated. We have to think about the response versus, you know, we can't keep the bad guys out. We can try, but. Anytime anybody in an organization tells me he's got everything under control, I am automatically skeptical. Okay, fair enough. I gotta ask you, I know you're tight on time and you've been gracious with your time, but I have to ask you about the current sort of tone of the campaigns, your reaction to that. It's kind of comedic. There's not a lot of comedy, comedy in the narrative. What's your take as now an independent observer? Well, I don't think it's funny at all. I think it's very serious. I worry about the fact that there's no real discussion of specific, of the many challenges that we face, except in the broadest possible terms, foreign policy is being discussed in almost primitive terms, and not very intelligently in my view. So in terms of the challenges that the country faces, which are quite extraordinary, it seems to me, the campaigns at this point across the board politically seem to me to be pretty superficial. So I want to end with, you've come back to the passion for leadership. I have to say the brilliant part of this book, don't hate me for this, but you basically laid out a lot of common sense ideas, but the brilliance of the book was the way in which you weaved it together and gave examples. If I may, I mean, it was listen, respect, reward people, delegate, empower, have fun, care from your heart, check your ego at the tour, hire smart people, honesty, integrity. I mean, these are very common sense things, but you brought them all together in a way that had meaning. I felt like some of the classics, Dale Carnegie's, How to Win Friends and Influence People, I feel like there's a lot of timeless things in here. Was that your objective, or did you just sort of write from your heart? Well, both, it seems to me that what, as I looked back and realized that I had led these three very large institutions, the American Intelligence Community, the fifth largest university in the country and the Department of Defense, that I actually had been able to change a lot. And in environments where people said that was impossible. And so it seemed to me worth sharing, here's how I got it done. It can be done, I guess one of the most important messages I wanted to convey was that institutions can be reformed, they can be transformed and made more efficient, more cost-effective and more user-friendly and better serve both customers and citizens at a time when most people just throw up their hands and say this is all impossible. And the theme of the book is it's not impossible, it can be done, it has been done, it can be done in the future. Dr. Gates, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, taking your time and really appreciate you having at this event and really welcome to feedback. Thank you very much. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our wrap right after this. Thanks for watching. Service management is helping GE connect.