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efforts as director to reach out to lower-ranking employees at the CIA included eating lunch most of the time in the cafeteria and inviting myself to join several of them at their tables. On one occasion, this led to an embarrassing situation. I had engaged a group of young spies in a lengthy conversation, and during the course of it I dismissed my security detail, telling them I would just return to the office on my own. I had forgotten that there was a security guard post between the cafeteria and the main building and, as director, I had no identification badge. The young guard on duty properly refused to let me pass. He did agree to let me use his phone, and I called my office to arrange a rescue. The senior officers on my detail rushed to the guard station and escorted me through. As they did so, I overheard one of them talking about reporting the guard to his superiors for treating me disrespectfully. I turned on the man, telling him in no uncertain terms the guard had done exactly the right thing, and if anybody called his superior, it would be me to commend him for doing his duty.
    The thinking behind the steps I took to meet and cultivate support among employees at every level is universally applicable, even if my exact steps aren’t. Other organizations offer different opportunities to gain the support of the people in them. These gestures are all a part of leadership, a means of connecting with those you seek—and need—as partners.
    The wise leader’s strategy for change must include a concentrated campaign to make as many friends and allies as possible as early as possible before he starts taking actions that will inevitably make enemies. To be an effective leader, one must demonstrate from the start an understanding of and respect for the role and views of the career employees in an organization and be clear that the new boss intends to make them participants and partners in reforming the place. This is the best possible preparation of the bureaucratic battlefield.
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    As mundane as it might seem, another important aspect of a new leader’s strategy from her first days should be to quickly seize control of her calendar. No matter the size of an organization, a boss’s time is her most precious commodity. It is her “capital,” and she only has a finite amount to spend. Every day there will be innumerable demands on a leader’s time that have nothing to do with her agenda for change. Indeed, be warned: the most effective defense of every bureaucracy to keep the boss from meddling, interfering, or changing the status quo is to fill up her calendar with meetings.
    A leader must make time to think and to plan—to strategize.
    Leading reform of bureaucracies requires constant attention and effort. A leader attempting transformational change must dedicate herself to the endeavor wholeheartedly. During the waking hours, a leader must always be thinking about what she is trying to do and how to do it. Nothing must be left to chance, and hardly anything is unimportant. For every problem and every challenge that arises, the leader needs to formulate a strategy on how to deal with it, eliminate it, or use it. Before any meeting, press conference or public presentation, I was always calculating how I could advance the reform agenda. Reforming bureaucracies is so complex and support for change often so tentative that loose ends have the potential to unravel the entire effort.
    All this strategizing takes time, and it is a common failing of leaders of big institutions that they get so trapped in day-to-day issues, meetings, and travel, they neglect their own agenda—change. I always tried to set aside an hour or so every day to work on
my
agenda. In the normal course of affairs, the demands of others filled up most of my day. If I wasn’t careful, routine matters would consume the entire day. But during that daily “quiet time,” I could think about what progress was being made, what the problems were and how