It’s graduation time at a lot of colleges and universities, and students are collecting their diplomas and heading off to begin their professional lives. Families are kvelling about the graduates’ achievements and heaving sighs of relief as tuition payments come to an end. My master’s students have been dropping by in recent weeks to ask my advice on how to succeed in the next phase of their careers. Although I’d like to give them an edge over students from other schools, it is fairer to share what I told them with the rest of you.
But first, a caveat. I never had the opportunity to serve in government myself and it’s been decades since I spent a year as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and another at the Brookings Institution. You are therefore free to discount my suggestions, or rely instead on advice from experienced insiders. That said, I have spent a fair bit of time interacting with current and former government officials and fellows at assorted think tanks, and I’ve sent a lot of students off to careers in the Blob (or its foreign counterparts). I also spent a fair bit of time over the past few years researching its folkways and habits of mind. Here’s what I think I’ve learned about succeeding in the Blob.
1. Develop a genuine area of expertise. Academics who complete a Ph.D. tend to specialize in a particular area, but master’s students and undergraduates usually don’t have time to master a specific policy issue. Once you start working, however, you should try to develop deep expertise in some critical policy domain. You don’t have to become the world’s foremost authority on it (although that’s obviously desirable if you can pull it off), but you do want to be someone whose views on some important issue(s) are respected and sought out by others. It can be a broad topic (e.g., “economic sanctions”) or a narrower one (e.g., “nuclear forensics,” “human rights conditions in the Horn of Africa”), but ideally it will be an area that some number of people think is important and one in which you become a go-to person.
Developing real expertise serves two purposes. First, it will give you greater confidence: Weighing in on how to address a problem is easier when you have a deep knowledge of the subject matter and aren’t simply winging it. Second, and equally important, it will establish you as a serious policy professional, not just as somebody who managed to earn a degree. And you certainly don’t want to get a reputation for being a clever bullshitter who doesn’t really know what you’re talking about. For all these reasons, work hard at mastering at least one important policy domain.
Relatedly, you also need to learn the policy machinery that guides actions in the domain in which you are working so that you can develop “actionable items” that have some chance of being adopted. Is your subject one in which Congress is critical and legislative action is required, or can it be addressed primarily through the executive branch? Are there interest groups whose support will be critical to success? Who are the likely opponents and how can their influence be negated? It’s easy to offer lofty prescriptions about “what needs to be done” (I do it all the time in this column), but you’ll be more effective (and valuable) if you learn how the machinery of government really works and can translate your good ideas into concrete actions.
2. Be reliable. Raw talent is valuable, but it is even more valuable to develop a reputation for getting things done well and on time. The world is full of people who never seem to meet a deadline and whose work is error-prone and has to be checked by others. People who aren’t like that—the folks who keep their heads down and get the job done—invariably stand out. If you’re asked to produce a report, an op-ed, some talking points, a cost-benefit analysis, a set of PowerPoint slides, or whatever, and it has to be done by Friday, then do your damnedest to meet that deadline. Over the course of a career, doors keep opening to people who don’t fumble the ball, who show up on time, and who deliver a quality product more or less on schedule. Your superiors will keep coming back to you if you’re reliable; if you’re not, they’ll go elsewhere. Or as Sherlock Holmes advised, “Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.”
There’s a corollary to this piece of advice: Learning to set priorities and manage your schedule is also a valuable skill. One reason otherwise smart and hardworking people get a reputation for sloppiness or chronic lateness is an inability to keep their own workload within reasonable bounds. This goal can be hard to achieve if your boss keeps piling it on, but learning to say no to some things and doing the remaining things well can be a key to success.
3. Be a mensch, not a jerk. I know, there are lots of successful foreign-policy VIPs who are difficult, vain, demanding, self-absorbed, and narcissistic—and you may be tempted to think you have to be an egocentric jerk to rise to the top. But I’d argue that most of these arrogant and abusive individuals succeeded in spite of their character flaws and not because of them. To take but one example, the late Richard Holbrooke was an immensely talented, idealistic, ambitious, and energetic statesman, but his abrasive personality probably cost him as many opportunities as it created. By contrast, people like Brent Scowcroft or William Perry rose to the top and are now revered because they managed to be both effective leaders and decent human beings.
Among other things, it’s a good idea to treat your peers as respectfully as you treat your superiors. Early in one’s career, there is a natural inclination to suck up to people who are higher up the food chain and to view people at your level as rivals who need to be elbowed aside. Resist this urge. People who are beginning their careers at the same time that you are will be part of your world for as long as you both stay in the business, and getting ahead at someone else’s expense will just solidify your reputation as someone who’s not a team player and cannot be trusted. If you act this way, over time more and more people will be looking for a chance to knife you in return.
You want to be one of those people who others are eager to work with, because they know you’ll tell the truth, make everyone else on the team work better, and won’t double-cross them or try to hog all the credit. This principle doesn’t mean you can’t defend your own views vigorously and disagree with others—indeed, there’s something wrong if you never take a position that angers anyone—but there’s a difference between a respectful but serious policy disagreement and behaving in an underhanded and assaholic way. Being a jerk won’t necessarily derail your career (alas, proof of that sad fact is all around us), but it will make it more of an uphill fight.
One more thing: Being part of a professional network is a real asset, and you’ll want to develop your own set of (mostly) like-minded professional colleagues. Ideally, your network will include people who will tell you when you’re wrong, when your work is slipping, or when they think you’re headed in the wrong direction. You don’t necessarily have to take their advice, of course, but sometimes the best thing a friend can do is tell us when we’re heading off a nearby precipice. In my own case, I’ve benefited enormously from colleagues who pushed me to rethink what I was doing and helped me avoid a misstep.
4. Manage your personal life intelligently. I can’t begin to tell you who (or if) you should marry, how you should raise your kids (if you have them), where you ought to live, or all those other nonprofessional things that will have a profound impact on your life. Plus, life sometimes springs unhappy surprises on us: accidents, serious illness, or personal tragedies of different sorts. Experience and observation have taught me that what is going on in our personal lives inevitably affects our ability to succeed professionally, not to mention one’s overall level of satisfaction and contentment. My advice, therefore, is that you should devote at least as much attention to managing your personal life as you devote to your work. For example, having a partner and friends who believe in what you are doing and think your work is important is a huge asset, even if they aren’t in the business themselves or if they sometimes disagree with your views on some policy issues. I wish I could provide a foolproof formula for a successful personal life; the best I can do is urge you not to neglect it.
5. Know what lines you won’t cross. The foreign-policy community is a loose network of people and organizations with lots of overlapping connections. Because success depends a lot on who you know and what they think of you, there’s enormous pressure for conformity and some risk if you challenge taboos or stray outside the lines of the prevailing consensus. The good news is that some of the orthodoxies that have crippled U.S. foreign policy in recent decades are now being questioned more openly, and there’s a bit more latitude to question these shibboleths today. The Blob is not quite as uniform as it used to be, and that’s a positive development in general and an opportunity for those who are entering it.
Even so, you’re eventually going to find yourself in situations where you’re uncomfortable with the arguments being offered, the conclusions being reached, the policies being adopted, and the results being obtained, but where you lack the power or authority to change things. Sometimes it will make sense to compromise, or even to grit one’s teeth and go along, but you do need to decide what things you won’t do and what actions you will not support under any circumstances.
This advice may sound quaint in an era where moral principle is in short supply, political integrity is a rare virtue, and naked hypocrisy is the main currency of political life. But there is nothing inevitable about this condition, and those of you who are now entering into public service have the power to change these norms over time. Remember that public service is ultimately not about adding lines to your resume but about trying to make the world a better place. If you ever begin to feel that what you are doing is part of the problem and not part of the solution, it’s time to get out and do something different.
Congratulations, class of 2023! You have achieved much, but the real challenges lie ahead of you. The bad news is that my generation has left you a vast array of problems with few easy solutions and with confidence in public institutions at an all-time low. The good news, such as it is, is that it won’t be hard to do better than we did. As you begin (or resume) your professional careers, one of your missions is to make your task easier. My generation has left ample room for improvement. Good luck!
#Class #Succeed #ForeignPolicy #Blob
