Chapter 1 Introduction: The Power of Reframing

      Donald Trump's presidency was distinctive for his outsized personality, raucous rallies, fearsome Twitterstorms, and stunning iconoclasm. It was also unorthodox from a management perspective, a feature that generated less media attention but affected everything the Trump administration tried to do. From his experience of running a family business, Trump brought a deeply ingrained preference for patriarchy rather than bureaucracy, for entrepreneurial flexibility rather than structural constraint, and for lieutenants whose loyalty mattered more than their experience or expertise (Blair, 2018). He created a structure much like that of a boisterous family, with Trump as a dominant father figure whose attention and favor everyone else fought to get.

      Traditionally, presidents have relied on their chiefs of staff to bring a modicum of order and discipline to operations that are chronically hectic and complex. Trump's first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, lasted only six months, during which he struggled to control both his boss and his staff. He was “widely viewed as weak and ineffective,” but “hardly got the chance to operate as an effective chief of staff” (Prokop, 2017), because he was hobbled by more powerful informal players like Trump consigliere Steve Bannon and Trump's son‐in‐law Jared Kushner.

Trump tried to rein in the chaos and infighting of the Priebus era by appointing a retired marine general, John Kelly, as his next chief of staff, but the buttoned‐down general and the mercurial president were not a match made in heaven. Kelly set out to bring coherence and a semblance of military discipline to the cacophony of voices that vied for the president's attention. He announced a hierarchical system requiring all staff to go through him before seeing the president, but that was alien to the president's free‐wheeling style. As a former official in the Bush administration noted, “The notion of a chain of command is gone” (Baker, 2017).

      Kelly lasted 18 months in the job, longer than many skeptics expected, before leaving in the wake of media reports that he and the president were no longer on speaking terms. After his departure, Trump's subsequent chiefs (Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows) were loyalists with limited inclination or ability to contain the president's impulses.

      White House turmoil reached a new high after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Some of Trump's most committed supporters found that he was eager to listen to any conspiracy theory that reinforced his preferred narrative that he had “won by a landslide” (Barry and Frenkel, 2021). Trump ignored advisors who encouraged him to acknowledge Biden's victory. Instead, he devoted almost all his attention to a quixotic battle to overturn the election results. A tragic climax came on January 6, 2021, when Trump's “Rally for America” triggered a mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and to invade the halls of Congress, producing terror, vandalism, and five deaths.

      A few weeks before the rally, Trump had tweeted to his supporters, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” At the event, he gave an hour‐long, barn‐burner of a speech that extolled his achievements, insisted that the election had been stolen, and told his audience they needed to be strong to “stop the steal.” Near the end of the address, he exhorted the crowd, “And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore” (Jacobo, 2021). The crowd apparently took him at his word and became a pugnacious mob, armed and looking for trouble. The only thing in their way was an undermanned Capitol Police Force.

      The federal government has the capacity to deploy massive security forces in the District of Columbia, but it takes substantial planning and coordination. Security assets in the region are widely dispersed across the District of Columbia's metropolitan police force, the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, and multiple federal departments, including Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. That was a problem in the run‐up to the president's “Save America” rally:

Two days before Congress was set to formalize President‐elect Joe Biden's victory, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was growing increasingly worried about the size of the pro‐Trump crowds expected to stream into Washington in protest. To be on the safe side, Sund asked House and Senate security officials for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup. But, Sund said, they turned him down. During the invasion, the chief “pleaded for help five more times as a scene far more dire than he had ever imagined unfolded on the historic Capitol grounds.” (Leonnig, Davis, Hermann, and Demirjian, 2021)

      The Capitol police chief as well as Washington's mayor and the governors of Maryland and Virginia all ran into the same roadblock: they needed approval from the Defense Department or the president to deploy National Guard units. That approval was slow to come, despite their pleading that the situation was desperate. As we write, why that happened is lost in a fog of finger pointing. Ultimate authority lay with the president, but he chose not to use it. He was busy watching the event on television, “and the message from those around him—that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost—was one to which he was not initially receptive” (Parker, Dawsey, and Rucker, 2021).

      In any event, it took three hours before the first Guard units arrived. In the meantime, four people died as thousands of rioters assaulted police officers, vandalized the historic building, and forced the vice president and members of Congress hurriedly to seek refuge. In the aftermath of another day that would live in infamy, all the major players defended their own actions and looked for someone else to blame, confirming the adage that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. One thing was clear: “Poor planning and communication among a constellation of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies hamstrung the response to the rioting” (Mazzetti, Cooper, Steinhauer, Kanno‐Youngs, and Broadwater, 2021).

      So much talent and experience, yet key decision makers were at sea. They misread available information and failed to act or did the wrong thing. The technical term is cluelessness, a pervasive affliction for leaders everywhere. Being clueless simply means that you don't really know what's going on and don't see better options even if they are close at hand. So, you continue down the wrong thoroughfare, hoping in vain that it will get you where you want to go. Your efforts to make things better make them worse, which is often obvious to those around you even if not to you.

How do leaders become clueless? That is what we explore next. Then we introduce reframing—the conceptual core of the book and our basic prescription for escaping the common and debilitating curse of being at sea without any landmarks to indicate whether you are on course. Reframing requires an ability to think about situations from more than one angle so that you can develop alternative diagnoses and strategies. We introduce four distinct lenses for sizing things up—structural, human resource, political, and symbolic—each logical and powerful in capturing a detailed snapshot. Together, they help to paint a more comprehensive picture of what's going on and what to do.

VIRTUES AND DRAWBACKS OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITY

      There was little need for professional managers when individuals mostly managed their own affairs, drawing goods and services from family farms and small local businesses. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago, explosive technological and social changes have