Dear Prospective Chairman of the World Bank,
Congratulations on your appointment to this lofty position. It is one of some prominence and power, and while you aren’t going to get seriously rich on it, a salary of $400,000 after tax isn’t chickenfeed.
Here is some unsolicited advice, which you may not need, as I suspect you have more managerial experience than your predecessor. The President went for a safer choice this time. However, for what it is worth, here are my thoughts:
Don’t arrive with your own lieutenants. Your predecessor brought in two White House staffers, Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems (at high salaries), and according to reports gave them extensive influence. These people were closely associated with Wolfowitz’s previous role as cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, which probably didn’t help. However, arriving in a new position with a ready-made staff in tow is almost always a bad idea. You are sending the message that you don’t expect to find good people within the organization, and that you don’t expect to be able to form an effective team from within, or you don’t intend to bother making the attempt. Your co-arrivals will become your window into the organization and will be seen as a barrier and a filter between you and everyone else. By all means, if a genuine vacancy arises some time after your appointment, put forward the name of someone you know and trust. This name will be given a lot of weight, but let other people interview your candidate and have a say.
If you have issues to address before you take the position, make sure that this is concluded before you take the job. If the bank has a policy that anyone you are in a relationship with must be outside your cone of influence, which is a sensible one you should respect, then make sure the bank makes adequate alternative arrangements that are satisfactory to that person before you take office. Above all, keep out of the discussions yourself. Certainly don’t demand that professional relations be allowed to continue between you and your partner.
Remember that you are an outsider, and your very presence is making the statement that the board that appointed you, (or in this case the individual), didn’t see anyone in the organization capable of doing the job. You are going to have to convince people that this is genuinely the case. That doesn’t mean ingratiating yourself with people, in fact they are looking for strong leadership, but you definitely are on probation.
Never use a lawyer to negotiate your contract. An outside negotiator will get absolutely the best deal possible under the circumstances, but he or she doesn’t have to live and work with the people who approved that deal, whereas you do. In fact, you can’t afford to get the best deal possible, as doing so consumes large amounts of the goodwill you need to be successful. Also, employing a lawyer suggests that you don’t have much confidence in your own powers of negotiation.
Now I am sure there are probably plenty of things that are wrong with the Bank, but don’t make blanket statements until you understand how the organization operates. Corruption, to take an example at random, is a huge obstacle to the effective delivery of aid, but it is unlikely that the bank is completely oblivious to the issue. More likely there have been serious attempts to deliver aid more effectively and reduce governmental corruption over the years. Some of these may even have been successful. At the least there is institutional knowledge and data you can use. You may reasonably conclude that these attempts have not been adequate, but any campaign against corruption is complex and will likely bring about unintended consequences, so it needs reflection and analysis. Simply arriving at the Bank and declaring immediately that corruption is a personal priority suggests at best that you think that the organization is made up of fools, and at worst that you consider the bank employees to be complicit in the problem you are trying to address.
Finally, avoid publicity. Not only is it a huge distraction to you personally, but it pretty much guarantees that you will be ineffective. Quickly, name Carly Fiorina’s successor at Hewlett Packard. Keeps a low profile doesn’t he? Look how the share price has done since he arrived. (By the way, he was also an outsider).
May 4, 2007 at 12:53 pm
All excellent advice and dead on for the rebuilding effort that will now be needed. WE have an agenda, and now we need a leader. Build on the core values–professionalism, candor and passion–that you’ve seen helped get rid of Wolfowitz, and move with, not against, your staff and their managers. Figure out what will give the greatest short-term traction, and acknowledge there’s a lot of grieving. Not for Wolfowitz, but for the damage he’s caused to the Bank’s good name.
May 4, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Great tips. Keep writing!
The right style of leadership anywhere in the UN is a really vexed issue.
From a UNDP vantage point and frequent agency visitor (Bank and IMF included) I observed some of the new director-generals of UN agencies arriving for work and creating their space in the early days.
Only two really went the full heady way of Wolfowitz: MBow of UNESCO, and Souma of FAO. While both of them built constituencies and won re-election, the damage their shoot-from-the-hip “initiatives” and nepotism did was considerable both in the agency and the field, and each left their agency strapped for cash.
Someone really should dust off the MBow and US boycott of UNESCO story, right now, for all the great parallels and ironies.
In contrast, I would encounter Kofi Annan out walking here in NYC, in the northern part of Central Park, and he would nod back in what seemed a rather shy way.
Here’s an issue you probably have some thoughts on: whether ministers of finance and ministries of finance are the best locus for WB governance and the running of development programs in the field.
Competent guys all, the finance ministers I met… but I never thought even one was a natural for development.