Admiral why do you refer to yourself as the accidental admiral . [laughter] what a great question. You can choose to hear a particular course you will lose ultimately in a different direction. And then to be in charge of all activity and with the commander of us Pacific Command position for senior admiral. My boss, a wonderful boss, secretary gates called to say forget about the pacific we will send you to nato i bk the first and only admiral to be the supreme allied commander and it was an accidenthe. That the navy was an accident as a career . Soet somewhat. That my father had kernel of marines growing up in that environment and going to Quantico High School thinking it would be them marine corps everybody goes out on a cruise going on a cruise are in san diego. Late in the day on the peer and the sun was setting looking out on all that ocean and i just wanted to be a sailor. I told my dad and mom they were hoping it would be a marine that years later my dad said that came out okay. Host but you almost left the navy after five years. I did. Nt tnt to see for five years in the early 1980s. Host as Supreme Commander of nato, 2009 to 2013, you say in the accidental admiral you wrote 250,000 words, mainly to teach yourself, not others. Guest indeed. I felt as though a big part of my job as the supreme allied commander of nato is to take ideas and move them across this enormous command. At the time there were 28 nation with three on a destroyer and then to florida where i come to you from today. At the end of the fiveyear period like a bunch of missile. I was very capable but i couldnt launch and idea to save my life. The navy offered me to go to Tufts University which is a graduate school of International Relations and i learned how to launch an idea. Exclusively focusing maritime operations. As Supreme Commander you say in the accidental admiral, he wrote 250,000 words to teach yourself, not others. Indeed. My job is to take ideas and move them across this enormous command at the time there was 20 nations. Almost all volunteers on active duty. R aircraft, 800 oceangoing ships, a very big command. You get the idea. I thought it was communication oftr the strategy i spent a lot of time writing for myar own benefit because i learned for the benefit of those in the command. Host what is about the chateau what is that . The official residence it is a beautiful french chat show on 26 acres and maintained and financed by the belgian government and just south of brussels. Not a great place to live on not only a great place to live but where we can host ads dinner for all heads of state and the senior military officers. , partners, allieses, friends and opponents one of the most memorable dinners was the Supreme Commander of the allied commander we are both 5foot 5 inches tall and i used to joke to secretary gates to meet with the general and how did the meeting go i would say its great we saw everything i to i which we did at our towering 5foot 5inch height but it is an example that we need to engage with those on the team all that occurred in the shed to. As a time as a nato Strategic Commander i was often asked what kept me awake was a simple one word answer to what really kept me awake may surprise you which is convergence. Im particularly concerned that i looked around and those years and i was concerned about afghanistan, cybersecurity but the potential of convergence with groups to the United States and terrorist otroheorganizations in the proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and it is like ghostbusters dont let the streams cross. I learned a lot of al qaeda finding its way to a Nuclear Device we have to be concerned not only al qaeda but the Islamic State of boko haram and l shabbat in these groups try to obtain to obtain weapons of mass distraction on destruction and over the last ten years my view that has added to that concern is cyberand cybersecurity because they are becoming more adept at using the tools of cybercapability for infrastructure with the context of ten years ago when i was focused on extremist organizations i am concerned. Any be isolated as the Supreme Commander . Of of course. You haveve to fight in a job like that every day to break out of the cocoon your staff will put you in. This is true for any leader of organization. Your staff once you take contro control, dictate that tempo of your day, schedule your trip trips, control the information coming in and your Communications Going out. They do that because it creates order where chaos might exist its a function of a staff but as a commander you have to fight against that isolation you have to fight to get out of that sources of information to find ways to communicate to your organization or demand you have a voice in your schedule with your priorities if you are the ceo and the leader of an organization the most preciousos asset is your time. And one thing i a would do a more practical point is we can think our priorities are xyz and a good exercise is to get your calendar and look back at the previous six months and say to yourself am i prioritizing my time with my priorities . And occasionally i would find i am prioritizing abc instead of xyz. It is i crucial to use your own view of what your time should be and how it should be spent and what that means to get out of that isolation. Host was it easier to do when you are on a ship to Wander Around on your own . It was. I wrote the book about that years ago when i was in my thirties called the destroyer captain. Its a very sharp book. A series of excerpts from the journals i kept to be the commander at sea. A beautiful brandnew guided missile destroyer. I wanted desperately to connect with my crew and on the ship like that, 500 feet long, longer than a football field with the crew of 350 but its a small especially out at sea and the captain you get to decide and will you spend the time and your cabin were to get out on foot patrol to know their backd all of this contribo the accomplishment. Host what does r. Lee burke class mean . Guest for every type of ship, destroyers, cruisers, Aircraft Carriers, submarines, the first check of that type is called a class. Its the first ship in a class leader of every destroyer of the particular type built exactly the same as the first one is called a class destroyer. For example, i commanded 52. My wife, laura, is the proud sponsor who got to break the champagne bottle and is the sponsor of 113. 113. So, every one of those destroyers is a class destroyer and they were all built along the lines of the very first one so it is wonderful to have a ship named after anyone that is a particular honor to be the lead class and that was bestowed on admiral burke who was the greatest and most impactful chief of naval operations. He was the cnn over six years. Hes an iconic naval figure this thats all the ships in that class. I will close by saying the second of the class was named after john kerry who was a revolutionary war navy captain contemporary roughly of John Paul Jones and was a superb naval officer. Those of us who served are very proud of that, but we are proud of, just like my wife is proud to bepo the sponsor of 113 named for a middle of the honor of pearl harbor. All of us that served in any of those destroyers are proud to be destroyer men or women and to serve in the early class destroyer. Host all of your books contain leadership lessons. One of those are a combination of lessons are bold organizational fidelity. Guest another way to put this, theres always in tension for a leader in the traditions and culture of his or her organization that can provide innovation. And a good leader knows coming and youll hear me say this again i expect in the course of a twohour conversation, life is not an on and off switch. Its not a binary choice between simply accepting tradition or innovating constantly. That is a false choice. Instead of thinking of it as an on and off switch, we need to think of it as a doyle like the dinner in your dining room that you adjust to find that once between respect for thens traditions in the heritage of the organization against keeping the organization moving forward. I think that is one of the keys to leadership and i will give you a practical example from one of my heroes, Winston Churchill who was the equivalent of the secretary of the navy of the British Royal navy in the early part of the 20th century. And he was constantly wanting to innovate and drive change and therefore he was constantly in conflict with the admiral and at one point, he simply heard too many times well, we cant do that. Its against the traditions of the navy and he exploded and said i will give you the traditions of the navy. In other words, there is time when we have to move forward he found someone in early 20th century and the two of them formed a partnership that helped to move the royal navy along. Host your most recent book is called failing true north. What is true north . Guest adherence to what we broadly conceived of the as moral and ethical behavior. So, in my mind, that means you are trustworthy, you were honest and care about others. You are kind to others. You have empathy to try to put yourself in the shoes of the other and not just your friends and family, but the shoes ofop your opponents and those with whom you disagree. You believe in things like democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of education, gender equality, racial and quality. What, we execute those values imperfectly, but they are the tright values and then taken together, the value set plus the personal qualities i mentioned, that is what it means to say of true north. Host and you write them also motivated by the growing sense that we are witnessing the slow death of character. Guest er. I also say in the book i think we over share publicly and we underperform in thinking about our character. Heres the important point about failing true north. Its not a book about leadership. Its a book about character. Those are two very different things. Leadership isip a big thing her. Its a big door that swings in the world of influenza sufferers and the door of leadership swings for good or for ill. Think of franklin ddelta roosevelt one of our great president s certainly in the top five, perhaps in the top two or three along with washington and lincoln. That door of leadership he exerted to get us through the great depression, to get us through the second world war, that door of leadership was enormous, and it is one for good. On the other hand, think about eight leader like paul parts of cambodia. Ruthless,ut but he was an effective leader. He could mobilize the society. His big door of leadership led to an awful genocide in the killing fields of cambodia. Leadership isoo that door. Big doors swing on small hinges, and that small hinges character, its the human heart. And it determines where your door of leadership is goingng to swing. So i wanted to write a book that talkedut about character. We are awash in books of leadership. Just walked i in airport and youll see dozens of them in every bookstore. We are underweight and books about character and ideas of failing true north and south i chose to write about the topic and in the category of what do you actually know about the concept, i decided to write a character in the context of admirals and i chose ten admirals from history that went back 2500 years ago all the way through the late 20th century. A brilliant woman who dragged the navy kicking and screaming. Their stories are stories of character and the title of the books failing true north, ten admirals and the voyage of character. Host we will get into some of those in a minute. Got to go back to your quote about character, like you said, we over share and our Attention Spans have shortened. Are those comments are that at e in particular . [laughter] guest co. No. They are directed at all of us. But i think we can all point to public figures today who would benefit from doing a little more reading and doing a little more thinking and a little more internal contemplation. To take the example into the twitter sphere, recently twitter expanded from a maximum of 140 characters to 270 characters, and it created a firestorm among twitter users who said its going to make them just too long. Think about that for a minute. 270 letters. So my argument is sure, we need tweets they are like espresso but you dont want a diet that consists of 50 shots of espresso before lunch. You need a diet that has some tweets, some short, punchy reading. N you need to be reading come in my view, newspapers and understanding the daily cycle of news. You need to understand events through things like reading the economistt magazine, for exampl, which is, i think, one of the great magazines in the world. Its almostrs 200yearsold. It has no bylines in it, hence no reporter he go involved in it. It is resolutely journalistic, and its detached from that daily news cycle, and in addition to all of that, we need to find a time, all of us, to read some books, both nonfiction which weve talked about but i would also argue great novels to help us understand the world. The coming your reading diet is like your physical fitness by it. You dont just want to do one exercise all the time. You want to have a pretty broadbased diet. Host what does the back of your Business Card say . Guest the back of my Business Card is blank. Perhaps i should think about putting something clever. I will tell you a quote i like a lot that i think about putting on the back of my Business Card, which is from arguably the greatest modern greek writers. On his tombstone indeed, he visits the following idea, which he would put the same as the quote on his gravestone which is i want nothing, i fear nothing, i am free. And i want it there because i think we need to be fearless in our lives. We need to do what we think is right without favor or fear, and we also need the perspective that whatever we do, we are only here for a brief moment or two in this world. So if i were going to put something on the back of my Business Card i think i would put a quote from a modern writer. Host in the bookshelf you write that a Thomas Jefferson quote is on the back of your personal Business Card. Guest its actually on the front. [laughter]ar is a famous quote by our second president , someone we should all admire. Jefferson said i cannot live without books and so on the front of my Business Card is back, right down there on the bottom. Host we are going to play a little video. This is from 2015 from a cspan program. Its from a retired admiral. You mentioned her in your most recent book, s failing true north. Lets see if you can recognize the voice. Voice. And ive been in command i w would say is when you get your yeatest sense of satisfaction. Some of that when you are in command you are with sailors and marines. There are people who make miracles happen in every mission, and you just can only be delighted as a leader of to help work people through to Mission Success and to be an observer of that and then to congratulate every single individual on the team to help you win the day somewhere. Host admiral, did you recognize as margo howards voice . Guest of course, how dare you give it away without allowing me to come up with it. That is my very good friend, admiral Michelle Howard of the first africanamerican to be a fourstar woman admiral and United States. I like being around her. Im taller than she is. She is heard in that clip awful, kind, someone who absolutely sales true north. I first met her, believe it or not, when she was a shift in at the Naval Academy and i was a few years out of annapolis and i went back to see in the midsummer nights dream she was part of the cast and midsummer nights dream. Sheem is really quite a remarkae person. Just retired as a fourstar navy admiral. She is someone i have enormous respect for and hence the reason shes part of the profile in sailing true north. Host and you write that, quote, love of country despite the manifest flaws and mistakes we often make as a nation, is a quality that leads to service for others and improved businesy lucky enough to develop true patriots. Guest its so true. And i want to make a point here since you raised this idea of service, which is the following. People say to me all the time, and i appreciated, thank you for your service, thank you for your 37 years in the u. S. Navy, and i appreciate that a lot. Heresre my point there are so many ways to serve this country, certainly the military is one, but how about our firefighters, how about our emergency room technicians, how about our police, how aboutur our doctors and nurses on the front line of fighting covid. My sister came up to her career working in the Charleston School district. The teacher starts there is a he2,000 that year teaching a packed classroom. You think shes serving the country, i do. I think we need to talk and think a lot more about service. That is inextricably tied to character guy and i believe we ought to think people in the military but we ought to thank all of the people he mentioned and i will throw in a few more. How about our diplomat and police corps volunteers and cia officers . We have so c many different ways you can serve this country. And i will throw in another one. How about our media . I will tell you when i went into afghanistan as a supreme allied commander surrounded by my personal security detail, wearing bulletproof attire, steel helmet, i would look over to the side and i would see a journalist, someone like my friend, Richard Engel was our Foreign Correspondent and nbc news. He was standing there within ill fitting very small not bulletproof vest and hes got a flip phone. I am armed with a 45 caliber weapon i will never use because i am surrounded by special forces who are going to use there is a very capable they push comes to shove as the saying goes. All of those people se