The Twenty-Seventh Charles L. Decker Lecture in Leadership

• Author: The Honorable Donna E. Shalala
• Pages: 08

2008] TWENTY-SEVENTH DECKER LECTURE 145

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CHARLES L. DECKER LECTURE IN LEADERSHIP*

THE HONORABLE DONNA E. SHALALA1

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and to be joining all of you, particularly my old friend, Secretary Eagleburger,2 who is one of the great public servants-a fellow Wisconsinite, who is totally supportive of my own long career. But we're lucky to have him here with us. He knows a lot more about the subject than I do.

You thought I've been invited really to talk about the President's commission on Wounded Warriors, which I co-chaired with Senator Bob Dole, whose long distinguished history with the military is well known,3

but I want to put it into context because I'm a political scientist, not a lawyer. And all of you, while you can study the law, you have to wonder every once in a while, how did we get this crazy law or this crazy regulation that you're trying to implement at one time or another? And usually the explanation is not as rational as sometimes the literature would suggest, nor is the process of getting there. And it's very important that you understand that because if you don't understand the context in which we make laws in this country, even though you know the role of government, the role of the Supreme Court, what the Congress does, it's hard to either administer those laws or, in fact, understand what's underlying the law or the regulation that you're trying to implement when you're trying to help an individual client or, in fact, help an agency to get where they need to get.

Let me start-and I'm going to tell you a number of stories because the way in which I teach I actually tell stories-my first government

assignment I was living in a mud village in southern Iran. There was very little government regulation when I was a Peace Corps volunteer; they sort of threw us in the mud villages and said, "Do something." And two years later they came and picked us up. This was probably the most defining experience in my career because I was literally living in a mud village in southern Iran for two years trying to get some things done. And we got a lot done. But we got it done because we were very respectful of the local religion and the local culture. Many of the things that our military is doing now in Iraq and Afghanistan were lessons that the Peace Corps and our own development agency learned years ago in terms of understanding how you get things done in other cultures and in complex situations. My first experience of that actually was in that mud village. My family did not want me to go into the Peace Corps. They thought it was the craziest-every generation of my family has served in the military. Actually, my father would have been more comfortable if I had joined the military at that time. But I had wanted to go to the Peace Corps. And my grandmother-my family is Lebanese-said to my father, "You know, she's going to the Old Country, it's okay." I'm not sure my grandmother knew exactly where I was going in the old country, but she thought I was going to the old country.

So as I was leaving Cleveland, my grandmother gave me this letter, and she said give it to the head man of the village. My grandmother was highly educated and wrote classical Arabic. And when I arrived at my little village, I took my little note out and handed it to the head man. And it actually was written in classical Arabic. And it said, "This is to introduce Donna Shalala, the daughter of a great sheik in Cleveland, Ohio. Please put her under your protection."

And actually that worked out very well because I developed a relationship with the mullah of the village. One of our assignments was, in fact, to build a school; we were a bunch of liberal arts kids-there were five. Three of them were Aggies, and they were straightening out southern Iran at the time. We lived right next to the Marsh Arabs-very close to them. So I went to the head of the village and said, "You know, we're here to build a school." And he said, "We don't need a school." He said, "We need a mosque." And for six months we went back and forth with the head of the village. And we got into a very philosophical debate among ourselves: Did the Constitution allow government authorities to build mosques? And, you know, we sent letters and never got a response. Sent letters up to Tehran to the people that were running

us-at the time it was USAID.4 And we sent letters to them. And they usually said, "Well, we don't want to give you the answer to that question, but it's not a good idea for government employees to build mosques," even though they were only paying us $100 a month. I mean it wasn't like we were highly paid government employees. And finally I said, "You know, we're not going to get anything done. We're not going to sit around,"-we were doing some teaching-"so we'd better build this mosque." So we all got together and we helped the villagers build a mosque. In fact, the Aggie guys had actually invented a new brick in which they mixed some straw with a brick, and would make it much stronger. We built the mosque. And we were at the dedication of the mosque, and the mullah turned to me and said, "It's time we had a school." A very important lesson, and I got that lesson at twenty-one. A very important lesson.

It's an important lesson in management. It's also an important lesson in terms of listening to the population that you're working with, and understanding the context that you're in.

The second story I want to tell you is about being with HUD in the 1970s. In the Carter Administration, I was appointed Assistant Secretary of HUD.5 The first secretary was Pat Harris. And Pat Harris actually was a very distinguished African-American secretary-the first African-American woman ever to be secretary-to be a member of the President's cabinet. [Pat Harris was] a Washington lawyer and saw the world through Washington. And because she had been part of the civil rights movement, she believed in a strong Washington presence; she didn't trust the states, she didn't trust the city. She wanted-she believed in-government regulations. And everything she wanted was to see whether we got more control over the world out there so that we could get accountability in the programs we were managing. She was sent over to what became HHS.6 [She] asked me whether I wanted to go along and I actually remember saying to her, "No, I'm at the end of my tour here and I really don't want to learn about healthcare."

So she went off to HHS and I stayed with the next secretary, Moon Landrieu, another liberal democrat, who came from the city of New Orleans; [he] was the first man actually ever to bring black [employees] into government. He had been a great state legislator. His daughter, Mary Landrieu, is a senator now from Louisiana. And Moon Landrieu saw the world completely differently. He asked the question, is this something the federal government should be doing? So you had two liberal democrats who saw the world in a different way. And for those who think federalism is kind of locked-in depending on the ideology of the party, those were two completely different liberal democrats-, who saw the world differently because of their background and because of where they sat.

And so Moon was constantly saying, should the federal government be doing this? Where Pat Harris said the exact opposite to it; the federal government should be doing it and we're not going to get equality or justice unless there's a strong federal government. Those lessons of those two were very important, but Moon taught me another lesson. He called me up one day and said, "I just got the new set of regulations on public housing." He said, "I've got to tell you something about these regs-I was in charge of regs and policy in the department-I was like thirty-one or something." And so he said to me, "Donna, the problem with you is you hire people that are too brilliant." And I said, "I beg your pardon?" He said, "You have to get rid of some of those Harvard people." He said, "You've got to write regulations for the people that are administering them in the field. And you've got to understand who your clients are and who you're writing these regulations for." He said, "They may be very clear to your Harvard educated people, including the people in the General Counsel's office, but we're writing for people of average or higher intelligence, that are of good heart, that have to administer these regulations. And before you write a subject regulation under my watch, you're going to understand your client, but, more importantly, you're going to understand who has to interpret and administer these regulations."

That was an important experience. It meant that we were going to think about and bring in those people who were going to administer the regulations, and those people that were going to have to interpret them for the clients we were serving.

Now why do I tell you those two stories? They come out of my government experience, but they actually deepened my understanding of

how government actually worked. And, in fact, the reason our laws and our regulations are so complex is because we rarely think about the client and who's going to get the services. But more importantly, we rarely think about those who have to interpret them or administer them. And if you're going to make changes in government, particularly if you want to make more than incremental changes-and even incremental changes, which I consider major steps when you're dealing with large complex bureaucracies-you had better understand the system in which you're going to have to interpret and administer the regulations or the laws in which you're going to write them. And more importantly, you'd better understand the Congress and who's going to interact with those people.

So I start out with that because before talking about the healthcare system or trying to understand what happened to our Wounded Warriors or the Walter...