Admiral Bill Center’s Navy career began in the Vietnam era. It took him from commanding ships on the high seas to the Pentagon, where he was an advisor and nuclear weapons negotiator.
When he led the Navy Region Northwest, Admiral Center was responsible for more than 40,000 personnel and a budget of over 6 billion dollars.
He also oversaw a dramatic restructuring in the northwest that the Navy would use as a blueprint across that military branch.
Admiral Center shares valuable insights on how to lead a massive organization, the key to getting people to follow you, and how the military builds teams of people willing to fight and die for the person next to them.
Above all, he believes good leadership is essential whether you’re defending the free world on a ship or working at an office or factory.
Resources from the episode:
- Follow Admiral Center on Facebook.
- Admiral Center was awarded the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Veteran Award from the University of Washington in 2020. Read more about it here.
Share Article on Social Media
Transcript
The following transcript is not certified. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. The information contained within this document is for general information purposes only.
[00:00:00] Mark Wright: Admiral Bill Center. Welcome to the BEATS WORKING podcast.
[00:00:02] Mark Wright: It’s so great to have you here.
[00:00:04] Bill Center: Thanks, Mark. I’ve really been looking forward to this.
[00:00:07] Mark Wright: So Bill, looking at your resume, we could really go a lot of different directions, and I hope that we do over the span of the next 45 minutes to an hour. But I’ve been really impressed by not only your ability as a leader, but your ability to teach leadership as a skill set. And when we talked a few weeks ago, you said that, you know, I think a common misperception of people with military experiences that leadership in the military is just barking orders and having somebody carry out what you want them to do.
[00:00:38] Mark Wright: But you said, that’s a misperception. So give me your perspective as someone who’s been in the military for decades.
[00:00:47] Bill Center: Well, I would say that perception, like many perceptions, is founded in some reality. During the days, of the draft and, , World War II, et cetera, back in [00:01:00] the days of patent, if you will, uh, there was a lot of that bark, barking orders and expecting, uh, unquestioning obedience, but in the seventies, we made a huge change when we shifted to the all volunteer force and all of a sudden, , there was a real premium on leadership.
[00:01:17] Bill Center: If you were going to have people stick around your organization, not just for four years, but For a 20 year plus career, they had to be well led. And, uh, we really put a lot of effort into understanding what that meant. And, uh, I think leadership, the best, uh, military leaders have always been leaders per se, not just people that barked orders, but it really puts a premium on a number of things.
[00:01:49] Bill Center: I, would say it could be summed up by one of our admirals, one of our best known admirals, Admiral Grace Hopper, [00:02:00] uh, one of our, our first women admirals. She was famous for helping, was it being a real computer pioneer, a real pioneer in computer software. And she, uh, one of her famous quotes is, uh, you manage stuff, you lead people.
[00:02:16] Bill Center: And, uh, I came up with my own definition of leadership because I studied leadership for quite a while and I never found one I was entirely happy with. Mine is wordy and long and it goes like this. Leadership is the art of successfully encouraging people to willingly do things they would not otherwise do, while unleashing maximum performance and helping them achieve their personal goals in the process.
[00:02:47] Bill Center: So that’s kind of a long sentence and it’s got a lot of big words in it, but I think it’s, they’re all important. And so, I’ll tell you one other thing about your first, your first question there, which is [00:03:00] early on in the process as the military became more and more focused on leadership, the top leadership said, okay, We’re going to put people first.
[00:03:09] Bill Center: Leadership is really important, but what happened was the old culture endured. It was hard to change the culture, and that was best reflected when we looked at the promotion list, the people that were getting promoted were not the best leaders. They were people who achieved the mission, but they achieved the mission by burning up people and, uh, you know, just running roughshod over them.
[00:03:35] Bill Center: Mhm. I remember distinctly the first flag list that came out. Flag list is a promotional list for admirals, where the fleet looked at the list and went, aha, they’re finally promoting the leaders. And that was when the culture started to change. So there are all kinds of things that go into making a cultural change like that.
[00:03:58]
[00:03:58] Mark Wright: I love your [00:04:00] definition of leadership, Bill. That’s really cool. And yeah, talking about You know, organizational change when you were overseeing Navy Region Northwest. That was a major period of transformation for the Navy. We’ll get to that a little bit later in the interview. , as, as well as the roles that you served in the Pentagon, serving the joint chiefs on arms control and non proliferation, environmental affairs, international agreements.
[00:04:25] Mark Wright: , I’d love to go back in time. You’re a kid from Los Angeles, right? Bill, born and raised.
[00:04:29] Bill Center: Yep. I was born in Ohio. I spent the first 10 years of my life there and we emigrated our family to California when I was 10. It was a life changing for me to move from Ohio to California. And, uh, when I was about 13, I first discovered, uh, I was an avid reader and I read a book called Sea Fights and Shipwrecks by Hanen Baldwin, great military editor of the New York Times.
[00:04:57] Bill Center: And I read stories of the US Navy in the Second [00:05:00] World War and for some reason they just resonated with me. I, I was attracted to the idea that one man could make a difference. The captain of a ship. If he was a good captain could make a difference. And somehow I said, that’s me. That’s what I need to do.
[00:05:18] Bill Center: And the first time I set foot aboard ship, which was in 1963, the year after I graduated from high school, the year I graduated from high school, I felt like I was home and, uh, that feeling never changed.
[00:05:32] Mark Wright: Yeah. So take me through the early part of your Navy career, Bill, when, , you fell in love with it, you went to the U S Navy Academy, Naval Academy. Um, so take me back to the early part of your career. What were some of the milestones there?
[00:05:47] Bill Center: Well, uh, I was very fortunate. I was just, uh, so fortunate and my first assignments were in Japan. , my wife and I moved over there when we [00:06:00] were first married and I, it was during the Vietnam War. And I was gone from home about 80 percent of the time. So it was, it helped us build a rock solid foundation for a Navy marriage.
[00:06:13] Bill Center: She wasn’t under any illusions that I was going to be around to take out the trash. And, uh, she was a great partner, made a lot of difference. And my next assignment, I was the chief engineer on the destroyer also in Japan. And I loved being an engineer. Uh, I was trained as an engineer at the Naval Academy along with my training in political science and, uh, economics.
[00:06:36] Bill Center: And I loved working with engineers. Shipboard engineers are just great people to work with. And, uh, then after those two assignments, I was chosen to be the commanding officer of a minesweeper out of Charleston, South Carolina. And I, I was really excited about it and didn’t put a lot of thought into the fact that I was only four years and six months [00:07:00] into my commission service when I took command of that minesweeper.
[00:07:05] Bill Center: And it turned out that my good friend and classmate from the Naval Academy, Admiral Mike Mullen, Was also a captain on a small gasoline tanker in the Atlantic fleet. And we were the two youngest commanding officers in the Atlantic fleet. And it wasn’t until years later when we were reflecting on it, that we decided that the only reason they gave young people command of those shifts, those particular shifts, is that nobody with a lick of sense would take the job. And I, uh, went from there to be executive officer on the destroyer. So I was just kind of moving ahead on the major career milestones for a surface officer in a very rapid fashion. Got promoted early to lieutenant commander. And then I got a call from my detailer, the person that gives you your orders.
[00:07:57] Bill Center: And he said, Bill, you can go to grad school anywhere you want. [00:08:00] I said, great, I want to go to the University of Washington. And there was silence on the other end of the line. He said, no, no, you can go anywhere. You know, Harvard, MIT, Fletcher School, Stanford. I said, yeah, I want to go to the University of Washington.
[00:08:14] Bill Center: More silence. He finally said, you do know that’s in Seattle, right? And I said, well, yes, I do. And that’s kind of the idea. I had come to Seattle, uh, during CFAIR and, uh, would have been, I think, 1971, 70 or 71. And it was so great. I just loved being here and I loved everything about it. And I said, if I can ever pick my own duty station, I’m going to go to Seattle.
[00:08:47] Bill Center: And I had met an officer who went to grad school at UW who loved it. And I thought, well, there’s a perfect fit for me. And so I ended up going to what is now the Evans school, the Daniel J Evans school of public policy and [00:09:00] governance at U Dub, great experience. And I thought, well, that was wonderful, but I’ll never get back to Seattle.
[00:09:07] Bill Center: And, uh, lo and behold, I went back to see, then I went to Washington and I studied national security policy when I was at U Dub and I had a national security policy job on my first job in DC. And then I went back to sea again for eight more years, captain of another ship, chief engineer on the oldest aircraft carrier in the Navy for three years, a job that I never wanted, but I ended up loving.
[00:09:34] Bill Center: And then captain of a cruiser, which was my goal when I joined the Navy was to be captain of a cruiser. And I achieved that. The day I walked off the ship, We were in Diego Garcia, this little atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I got to the bottom of the brow and I literally didn’t know whether to turn left or right.
[00:09:55] Bill Center: I had never thought one minute beyond that, that, because that was my goal. [00:10:00] I had orders back to D. C. to a job that I didn’t particularly want, and those orders got canceled on my way back there. When I arrived there, I discovered I didn’t even have orders or a job. And luckily I was hired by an admiral, Admiral Paul David Miller.
[00:10:17] Bill Center: Who, uh, knew me from my work, uh, on Midway and on Reeves. Those ships were also based in Japan and he was the seventh fleet commander. And he called me in his office one day to work on something. And in the course of the conversation, he said, you know, you could be an admiral. And I just kind of shook my head and said, well, you know, I’m just a humble surface warfare officer.
[00:10:39] Bill Center: And, I don’t think so. And he said, no, you could be an admiral. And he encouraged me and lo and behold, a year later I was one. So that’s how it happened.
[00:10:49] Mark Wright: So Bill, for those of us who don’t know, what does an engineer do on a ship?
[00:10:54] Bill Center: Oh, wow. It’s a great job. I mean, on, on Navy [00:11:00] warships, uh, there are three primary departments. Back in, in my day, when I was young, we called them operations, or four departments, operations, uh, weapons, supply, and engineering. And nowadays it’s operations combat systems. We don’t call it the weapons department.
[00:11:19] Bill Center: We call it the combat systems department now and the supply department and the engineering department. The engineer is responsible for not just making the propellers go around, which is what most people tend to think of, but, uh, the electricity, we make the fresh water, we have the air conditioning, we run the laundry, you know, take care of the laundry equipment, the galley equipment.
[00:11:43] Bill Center: Uh, the whole electrical system on the ship, the distribution system. So, it’s a, uh, very broad, complex job, requires knowledge of, , a lot of basic engineering principles. And it requires a [00:12:00] lot of good people with a lot of initiative doing great work every day.
[00:12:05] Mark Wright: So you were chief engineer on the USS Midway. , and you told me when you first set foot on that, you were, you were just really amazed at , the level of, of just, you Sort of competency without leadership, apparently. I mean, in, in the absence of leadership, take me back to that first day on the midway,
[00:12:24] Bill Center: Not, I don’t think of it as an absence of leadership, it’s without direction. It was that the people were empowered to do what needed to be done. , and there is, there are no simple evolutions onboarding an aircraft carrier. I mean, all of us have seen, uh, probably now Top Gun enough to, uh, See some shots on the flight deck and get an idea what kind of chaos is going on up there and how loud it is.
[00:12:49] Bill Center: You can’t really communicate. You see the people using hand signals up there. But, you know, the flight deck is a good example. The whole thing starts with an airplane. They put out a plan that says, [00:13:00] okay, these are the flights we have scheduled for today and when they’re going to take off and land, which planes are going to go.
[00:13:06] Bill Center: And for a lot of people throughout the ship, that’s the only guidance they get is that flight plan. And based on that, they know that what they have to do. I’ll take the engineers. We know the engineers know, okay, we’ve got to have the. HP and LP air compressors on the line. We have to have different electrical systems up and running.
[00:13:26] Bill Center: We have to have steam to the catapults so that they can operate. We have to have the O2N2 plant topped off so that the liquid oxygen and the liquid nitrogen can go to the aircraft, uh, that, that they use in the aircraft. And up on the flight deck, there are so many individuals doing so many different things without anybody telling them, okay, you need to do this now.
[00:13:51] Bill Center: If you had to stand around and wait for somebody to say, okay, now we’re going to launch the next flight. You go over there, you go over there. It would take [00:14:00] forever. Everybody just knows what to do and they do it and it’s, um, there’s an amazing amount of initiative, responsibility, training that goes into that, teamwork, , they don’t even have like a pro football team has the benefit of a quarterback to call the play and to call the signals.
[00:14:18] Bill Center: That’s not even there. I mean, it’s happening and, uh, the train is moving. You’ve got to be on board.
[00:14:25] Mark Wright: So let’s drill down a little bit deeper on, on leadership, Bill. I’d love to know what, you know, you talked about your philosophy statement on leadership, but as it played out from a practical level during your career, what did you really learn that leadership? What are the underpinnings of leadership specifically in a military context?
[00:14:45] Bill Center: Well, I don’t, I don’t think they’re specific to the military. I think that they’re universal. I think the principles of leadership are universal. You know, I thought a lot about your mission here at BEATS WORKING, the idea of redeeming work, the [00:15:00] word, the place, the way, all of that. And it really resonated with me.
[00:15:05] Bill Center: I think, you know, that work does get a bad name sometimes, and it really is, most, A lot of us find our identity in our work. I know I did. And, uh, I thought that military leadership was something special. Leadership is the core expertise of a military officer. I firmly believe that just like medicine is the core expertise of a doctor or law is the core expertise of a lawyer.
[00:15:30] Bill Center: And we were fond of saying, you know, there’s no job in the world like being the captain of a ship, uh, complete and total responsibility. And I believe that. After I got out of the Navy, in fact, I started to notice it when I was first came here to Seattle in the, in the mid nineties, that’s not true.
[00:15:49] Bill Center: That leadership is needed everywhere. And the first job I found outside the Navy that I said, boy, that’s just like being captain of a ship was being principal of a high [00:16:00] school. I mean, the principal of a high school is responsible for everything. They’re responsible for the plant. For the curriculum, for the staff, and not just the professional staff, but you know, the custodial staff, the school nurse, everything.
[00:16:15] Bill Center: The students, and they have to deal with the parents. And I thought the only thing that makes this different from a ship is, That the high school never gets underway and goes to sea, and I don’t know whether that makes it easier or harder because going to sea is easy in one way, and that is you sever yourself from those worries of shore.
[00:16:37] Bill Center: You’re out to sea. You can focus totally on one part of the problem. And, then I started looking around and I discovered, you know, being principal of a university. Well, that makes sense. I mean, being president of a university, uh, being the head of a hospital, uh, even being, you know, the CEO of Boeing or Microsoft, same thing, [00:17:00] leadership, leadership, leadership.
[00:17:02] Bill Center: The problem is, culturally, that I observed, and I think it really is a problem, is, uh, we tend to promote people into positions, uh, like that because they’re good at what they do, uh, not because they’re good leaders. We make people principals of high schools because they’re good teachers, and we make CEOs of hospitals because they’re good doctors, and we make somebody the CEO of Boeing because they’re a good engineer.
[00:17:30] Bill Center: Or a good salesman. Those are leadership jobs, uh, and we don’t spend enough time evaluating the leadership, uh, of the candidates and training them and making sure that they’re going to be good leaders. So, I don’t think the principles of leadership are unique to the Navy. I would start, you know, I’d answer your question after that big digression there by saying, number one thing is total integrity.[00:18:00]
[00:18:00] Bill Center: Leaders Leadership is built first and foremost on integrity. We will not follow people we don’t trust and we don’t trust people who aren’t honest and forthright and full of integrity. I would say that also means that you have to be authentic. You have to be yourself. Some people get the idea that, you know, if I’m going to be a good leader, I need to be like coach Pete Carroll, or I need to be like some other leader, you know, John Wooden, greatest of all time, basketball coach.
[00:18:33] Bill Center: And I got to see John, John Wooden when I was a young student and I admired the heck out of him, but I could never be him. And if I tried to be him, I wouldn’t be successful because that’s not who I am. He was successful because he was John Wooden. The other thing is, and this should go without saying, but I’m afraid it doesn’t, which is you have to treat everyone with respect and dignity [00:19:00] if you’re going to be an effective leader.
[00:19:02] Bill Center: You have to respect everybody. Communicate, communicate, communicate. I say that three times because we under communicate terribly. I say that three times because we under communicate terribly. Leaders get tired of saying the same thing over and over again, and we quit saying it before people have even started to hear it.
[00:19:22] Bill Center: If you’re going to be an effective leader, you have to believe what you’re saying, and you have to repeat it often enough that people are repeating it back to you without prompting. And the other flip side of that is you have to really be a good listener.
[00:19:37] Bill Center: You have to make it easy for people to express their opinions and ideas, and especially to tell you when you’re making a mistake. I was listening to one of your earlier podcasts with Howard Behar, who’s a guy I really admire, and he was talking to the story of the Frappuccino, and you know, that’s a good example.
[00:19:59] Bill Center: You know, [00:20:00] he listened to the district manager when she said, hey, this is this really good idea, and we need to do this. And he persisted in telling the marketing, head marketing guy that we needed to do it. The marketing guy wasn’t listening. And as a result, if he’d had his way, they would have passed up a billion dollar product.
[00:20:23] Bill Center: And uh, listening is so important. And especially making it easy for people to tell you when you’re making a mistake. I will say, A lot of the accidents we see in any, any line of work, but my line of work, I go back, I like to use the story of the Costa Concordia, you might remember in 2012, the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Italy
[00:20:51] Mark Wright: That was that cruise ship, right?
[00:20:52] Bill Center: at cruise ship.
[00:20:53] Bill Center: The 35 people lost their lives needlessly. I say needlessly, and we call it an accident. It wasn’t [00:21:00] an accident. In this day and age, it is impossible that there were not at least a half a dozen people within earshot of the captain who knew that the ship was going to run aground and none of them said anything.
[00:21:16] Bill Center: And my conclusion from that is they were either too afraid to say something or they were happy the ship was going to run aground because the captain would get fired. You cannot let yourself get in that situation. You have to make people tell you comfortable say, captain, that is really a dumb idea or captain.
[00:21:37] Bill Center: Don’t you mean turn left? Not right. And if you’re the captain that people cannot approach and say you’re making a mistake, you’re gonna make a mistake. And there are people around you that want you to succeed if you give them the opportunity. And then finally, And with these two things, number one, you got to know your business.
[00:21:59] Bill Center: [00:22:00] I mean, when I was chief engineer on the carrier, I had 750 engineers. Now I was not capable or competent to go down and repair a main feed pump, but I understood the basics of how the main feed pump was. supposed to be fixed. I understood enough to know when I went down there to see if the people that were there were capable and competent and doing a good job.
[00:22:28] Bill Center: And I could make good decisions with regard to who ought to be doing the job, that kind of thing. So you have to know yourself. And then the last thing, and I think this is really foundational right along with the first one of integrity is good leaders take care of their people. They focus on their people.
[00:22:47] Bill Center: That principle came from Douglas Southall Freeman, who is a great Civil War historian, who was particularly focused on General Robert E. Lee and Lee’s lieutenants. And he wrote a lot of history [00:23:00] relating to him and to other leaders in the Civil War. And he distilled principles of leadership from that.
[00:23:08] Bill Center: And his three principles that he distilled in modern vernacular are Number one, know your stuff. Number two, be a person of high character. And number three, take care of your people. He said, that’s, that’s what he viewed military leadership as being built on. And, uh, that’s where my leadership training started.
[00:23:28] Bill Center: So that was a really long answer to that question, but it’s, it’s not an easy question.
[00:23:33] Mark Wright: That was a great answer. And, you know, one of our recent guests on the show, Bob Donegan, president of Ivers, that kind of surprised me when he said that. He said, our goal at Ivers is to first and foremost, take care of our people. He said, because if you, if you don’t do that, how do you expect those people to then care in a genuine way for the public, if they don’t feel supported by their leadership?
[00:23:57] Bill Center: Amen. You know, if you [00:24:00] want people to care about your mission and what you’re trying to accomplish, you have to show that you care about them and you that you care not just about them helping you achieve your goals, but you’re willing to work hard to help them achieve their goals. And for some people, that’s a big stumbling block because you know, right now the job market is pretty tight.
[00:24:23] Bill Center: And so you don’t want to lose a valued employee. And if you have a really top notch, somebody that, you know, wants to be an astronaut, that’s working at IVARs, you’re going to, if you help them achieve that goal in that direction, they’re eventually going to move on and go to the flight training or, you know, something someplace else.
[00:24:41] Bill Center: And, you know, some people see that as, oh, no, that means I’m going to hire, have to hire somebody else. They miss some key things that are really good about it. When you help people move on to a better job and toward their goal. Number one, you send an ambassador out into the [00:25:00] workplace. And so when they go to work somewhere else and somebody says, what was it like working at Ivar’s?
[00:25:06] Bill Center: They’re going to say, wow, it was great. It was a great place to work. I’d recommend that to anybody. Okay. Do you want people saying that? Yeah. You know, would you take your family there to eat? Yeah, that’s good. Number two, it gives you an opportunity to promote with from within and promoting from within is one of the best things you can do.
[00:25:27] Bill Center: You have to be able to recognize your best performing people. You have to be able to recognize people and one of the best ways you can recognize them is by giving them a promotion. You know, if all you do every time there’s a vacancy is go out and try to hire somebody from off the street that has the right qualifications.
[00:25:49] Bill Center: You’re missing a huge opportunity. And number three is if you have a big enough organization and Ivar’s is a big enough organization, it’s always [00:26:00] good to have at least one extra person to fill the vacancy when it occurs, you know, so that you don’t end up like when you, when somebody does leave for a good reason to go out and achieve their goal, you don’t find yourself suddenly shorthanded.
[00:26:14] Bill Center: A lot of organizations like to say, we only hire the best people. And whenever I hear somebody say that, I said, Oh, then you must hire the best people anytime one of them walks through the door because they don’t walk through the door any day, every day. Every time you interview somebody and say, boy, I’d really like to have them on my team.
[00:26:32] Bill Center: You need to hire them then. You need to find a way to hire them. Whether you have an opening or not, because you will have an opening sooner or later. Get them on board. Get them up to speed. And they will, they will pay you back. You know, if you want the best people, you have to hire them when they come through the door.
[00:26:52] Bill Center: And I’ll make one more big digression here. Heads up. About half the best people on the planet turn out to [00:27:00] be women. And, you know, lately there’s been a lot of discussion about diversity, equity, inclusion, and it just really tightens my jaws because I will tell you my whole career, I’ve been in a highly diverse workforce.
[00:27:13] Bill Center: And it wasn’t something that somebody forced on me because it was the right thing to do. It was because we need a military that looks like our country. And when I first started, we didn’t have women there. I mean, we had all people from all walks of life. And we had people from all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds that worked together like a heck of a team.
[00:27:35] Bill Center: And I learned to respect everybody. But we didn’t have women. And there were women in certain jobs ashore, but not on board ship. Well, we started bringing women on board ship and it was difficult because it was a big cultural change. It took me about a year to recognize that the women were really doing us a great favor, they were smarter, they were [00:28:00] better, they were making the Navy better.
[00:28:02] Bill Center: Now we have a woman who is the senior officer in the whole Navy. And, uh, that shouldn’t surprise anybody and I’ve had people say to me, well, you know, they, she certainly didn’t earn that job. And I say, that’s crazy. She joined the Navy 35 years ago. Can you imagine what the Navy was like when she joined it?
[00:28:24] Bill Center: Women weren’t allowed to go to sea on combat ships when she came into the Navy. And when the first opportunities opened up, she jumped at the opportunity. She went out there. She excelled. She fought her way up in a community that was very male dominated until, , and proved that she was excellent at every level.
[00:28:43] Bill Center: My first introduction to women aboard ship was when I was an admiral and I had women that were on my ships that I was the commander of, including as captains of the ships. And, uh, they were extraordinary. They were extraordinary. key [00:29:00] thing I want to emphasize here is having a diverse workforce gets you better results. The more different points of view and ways of looking at problems you have, the better solutions you’re going to come up with. And women look at things differently than men. And I’m not being quantitative or qualitative about that. We just have different experiences in our life. And that’s a strength, it’s not a weakness.
[00:29:27] Bill Center: And, um, I think people that are out there at war with diversity, equity, and inclusion on the assumption that anytime somebody who is in one of the less favored groups, women, uh, people of color, is put in a position of responsibility, it has to be done. That means that some better qualified person didn’t get the job.
[00:29:53] Bill Center: That’s crazy. That is crazy. We don’t put unqualified people in important [00:30:00] jobs. Doesn’t happen. Anyway, other than that, I have no opinion.
[00:30:04] [00:31:00]
[00:31:40] Mark Wright: Bill, let’s talk about your time at the Pentagon. You took pretty significant role there and, and really rolled up your sleeves and jumped into things like nuclear arms control and, and things like that. How, how did that happen? And tell me, tell me when that started.
[00:31:59] Bill Center: Well, you [00:32:00] know, I, I had some education. I studied actually, uh, nuclear deterrence was the focus of my master’s paper when I was at the University of Washington. And I had a pretty strong background in the philosophical underpinnings of it. Although I didn’t know the day to day nuts and bolts of, uh, negotiations, but.
[00:32:21] Bill Center: At the University of Washington, at the Evans School, we studied, public policy, as policy. We didn’t, we didn’t distinguish and say, well, national security policy or foreign policy is this special one over here. We said we make national security policy and foreign policy pretty much the same way we make education policy and law and justice policy or transportation policy.
[00:32:46] Bill Center: It starts with what plays in Peoria, what’s politically feasible. And I learned how, when I was at school to go and testify to Congress, congressional committees worked, uh, how the policy process worked. And when I got to [00:33:00] Washington DC, guess what? That was the way it was. And, uh, I ended up my first week on the job, you know, okay, you’re going over to the white house for a meeting, you know, suit up and, uh, I got there and I was treated like a colleague and welcome to board.
[00:33:17] Bill Center: And, uh, I just, I love being part of the process. I got to work with some incredible people, uh, Dr. Ash Carter, who, uh, went on to become the secretary of defense was my counterpart in the office of the secretary of defense at the time. Strobe Talbot was the special ambassador to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.
[00:33:38] Bill Center: He was my counterpart at the State Department. And I could go through a long list of just really amazing people. I worked with some great leaders on, in the joint staff, General Barry McCaffrey, Admiral Bill Owens, General Powell, of course, our chairman and followed by General John Shelley Cushfeely.
[00:33:59] Bill Center: [00:34:00] Incredible, incredible leaders. And none of them Had the attitude that leadership was something you did when you were out in the field. They felt like you had to be a leader wherever you were in the military. You didn’t just leave it. You know, I’ll tell you this one story about General McCaffrey. I was in working on something on a Saturday morning, which wasn’t unusual, but I got home and Carla told me, you know, General McCaffrey called me.
[00:34:25] Bill Center: I said, already. Was he looking for me? And she said no. He called to tell me that you were in there working because you were working on something that was really important and, uh, he wouldn’t have expected you to be there if it wasn’t important and he wanted me to know how much he appreciated that. Now that, I get choked up even thinking about it.
[00:34:48] Bill Center: The fact that a senior general like that would take the time to call my wife and say, hey, thanks. And I, you know, I know this is Saturday, but we need [00:35:00] them. And that’s a leader, you know, that’s a leader thinking about little details of stuff like that. But, it was, it was a great experience and, uh, it helped me for my post career job, I worked on some very complex, uh, things.
[00:35:18] Bill Center: I worked on the nuclear, non proliferation treaty, the, the, uh, nuclear test ban treaty, which had all kinds of really arcane physics and stuff involved in the treaty itself in terms of the way that we determined whether or not there had been a nuclear test and things like that. And I thought, well, I’ll never work on anything this complicated again.
[00:35:39] Bill Center: And then when I retired, I ended up being hired as president of the Washington council on international trade to work on trade policy. And I discovered that trade policy makes nuclear arms control look relatively easy.
[00:35:53] Mark Wright: Oh, I’d love to ask Bill. When we talked a few weeks ago, you said one of the things you learned during your time at the [00:36:00] Pentagon is that negotiations within our government are oftentimes more difficult and protracted than negotiations with the United States. Other countries, even adversaries.
[00:36:11] Bill Center: Abso, absolutely. Because when you’re a negotiator, like we would go off to Moscow to work on something. We would go, we were working on trying to make some modifications of the A BM treaty, uh, and ballistic missile treaty. Uh, we take a set of instructions which are guardrails.
[00:36:29] Bill Center: Okay, you can go this way or that way. Same thing’s true in trade negotiations. I get a very detailed set of instructions. Limitations of what you can and can’t do. Well, putting those instructions together involves all of the people in the government that have a dog in the fight, if you will. Everybody that’s interested, and of course, when you get something like trade policy, everybody’s interested.
[00:36:52] Bill Center: But even in the ABM Treaty, the CIA, the State Department, the [00:37:00] Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Treasury Department, the Attorney General, And the Department of Defense and the joint staff are all over there at the White House working together to come up with, uh, and the National Security Council staff, which are, are really the leaders of that process.
[00:37:21] Bill Center: And most of the time, the process yields a good result without having to kick it all the way up to the president. But there are occasions. We, we have basically, , three levels. You have the working level, which was my level. Then you have the deputies level, which are the deputies in each. So like it would be the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, the deputy, , secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, that’s called the deputies committee.
[00:37:50] Bill Center: And then you have, what’s called the principals committee, which are the secretaries themselves, the chairman himself. And that’s led by the National Security Advisor. [00:38:00] And then finally you have the National Security Council itself. And, , I’ve actually sat at all four of those levels for one reason or another, because the issue being discussed was the issue that I was the subject matter expert, if you will, on.
[00:38:18] Bill Center: And either my senior couldn’t go and I had to go fill the chair or I went along with General Powell to sit behind him at the, uh, table. And a C meeting. , so I got to see the process work. And so there’s a lot of pressure to try to resolve the problems at the lowest possible level, because you don’t have to go back to the resolve the issues.
[00:38:38] Bill Center: I won’t call them problems. You don’t have to go back to your boss and say, okay, admiral or general, you’ve got to go to another meeting at the white house and, uh, fight over this thing because we couldn’t get it worked out. And, uh, so it, it’s a really good process and I think it produces really good policy and, [00:39:00] uh, it was, it was an education experience for me and it gave me the opportunity to, uh, teach that at the university of Washington while I was at.
[00:39:09] Bill Center: The Trade Council, I started teaching at the University of Washington when my professor, Brewster Denny, who was the founding dean of the Evans School, retired. He asked me if I would take over the class and teach the graduate seminar on U. S. foreign policy and, uh, it was my privilege to do that for a number of years.
[00:39:29] Mark Wright: As you were winding down your Navy career, Bill, you were asked to take over Navy region Northwest and, and really oversee a major restructuring, that was taking place there. Um, we can’t spend a ton of time on this, but I really think this is worth, covering because a lot of organizations go through periods where they realize we need to restructure.
[00:39:49] Mark Wright: And good leadership, I’m guessing is absolutely key to making that successful. What do you think was key? I mean, give, , first of all, an idea of what the restructuring [00:40:00] was that you oversaw and, and what, how did you do that so successfully? Oh my
[00:40:05] Bill Center: Well, we had 13 major, units here. Things that people are familiar with the Naval Air Station would be the sub base of Bangor, , The shipyard at Bremerton, uh, we have a naval magazine and supply Center to hospitals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, all these different organizations reported to bosses outside our region and had budget lines that flowed in via those bosses and on the day I took over in May of 1996, all of them now work for me and the budget lines went through me.
[00:40:39] Bill Center: We had 25, 000 active duty sailors. More than, 13, 000. I, I think at the time it might’ve been as many as 17, 000 civilian employees in 13 different bargaining units. We had thousands of Naval reservists. We had all the families and our annual budget outlays were, uh, about 6. 3 [00:41:00] billion. it was a big organization.
[00:41:02] Bill Center: And I was lucky enough, uh, over the course of my career to work. I worked for Admiral Miller, as I mentioned, when he was the fleet commander in the Atlantic fleet. And, uh, when I was on the carrier to work in big organizations and realize that one person can lead a big organization and have a leadership impact all the way down to what we call the deck plate levels in the surface Navy and, , and make a difference.
[00:41:29] Bill Center: And so I just put those principles into practice. I had a really big, what most people would say is a much too big span of control. I had 114 direct reports. Which seems impossible, but, uh, it is an impossible. You have to delegate, delegate, delegate. You have to make sure people understand what the mission is, what the goals are, what the vision is, what the guiding principles.
[00:41:55] Bill Center: So we spent the first, uh, we were in a lot [00:42:00] of budgetary pressure. Also, they were cutting our budget 5 percent every year for the next, uh, three years, uh, that we can see. And they, uh, they told us they were going to do it for five years. So that budgetary pressure helped create a sense of urgency and we got everybody together and we set on developing a vision, a mission, some guiding principles on how we would go about the process.
[00:42:24] Bill Center: And what we wanted the ultimate product to look like. And we were the first region in the Navy to do this. Uh, and ultimately the pattern that we developed or the framework that we developed became the template for the whole Navy of how they would do these regional organizations. I’m very proud of that, but it was done by the people that had to do the job.
[00:42:49] Bill Center: And I learned most important lesson learned. It’s all printed on my now printed on my business card. Nothing is impossible to the person who doesn’t actually have [00:43:00] to do it. And so I start or pay for it. I started really focusing on making sure that the people that were going to have to do the job in the new organization and put the new organization together and make the new organization work were the ones that were building the new organization.
[00:43:19] Bill Center: Another, Thing that I learned along the way in my career is people try to drop organizational charts because they want the organization to work a certain way. And what I learned is any organizational work, if the people in it want it to work, and no matter how well you drop the organization chart, if the people don’t want it to work, it’s not going to work.
[00:43:42] Bill Center: So it’s the people that make the difference. And, um, I was just lucky to have some really outstanding people in leadership positions. All the way down the chain of command. And I was, that’s where I learned that business about, you have to say it over and over and over. I got tired of [00:44:00] saying the same phrases over and over and over again, but it took me a full three years of saying it over and over and over again before I started hearing it coming back to me from the deck plate levels of people that are really bought into the idea.
[00:44:15] Bill Center: And, uh, you know, I can tell a lot of stories about it, but, uh, all the credit goes to the people that did it. Which wasn’t me. I, all I did was empower them and encourage them, you know, in my leadership definition I have starts off with the art of successfully encouraging and encouraging is an interesting word.
[00:44:40] Bill Center: We don’t think about often what it means. What it means literally is to give somebody courage. is the bedrock virtue. Courage is where everything starts. Without courage, there is no truth. There is no justice. There is no equity. There is no progress. It takes courage. [00:45:00] And that’s why encouragement is so important.
[00:45:03] Bill Center: And good leaders, that’s what they do is they give people courage. They give people courage to go for their goals. They give people courage to speak up, they give people courage to do the right thing, which is so important, doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences themselves. And, uh, so I give those people the credit.
[00:45:26] Mark Wright: Bill, I don’t think a lot of people, we, we civilians really don’t have a true understanding of the sacrifice that is made by every Navy family. , typically you were at sea 80 percent of the time during your career or what, what was that? Or like for a typical person in the Navy now?
[00:45:45] Bill Center: I used to say, well, you know, it’s not as bad now. Yeah, it is. It’s still, it’s really bad because The number of ships has really declined. When I came in the Navy, there were a thousand ships and now we have less than 300, I think we have like 285 or [00:46:00] something like that, and we’re down to, uh, 11 carriers, not enough carriers, uh, maybe even on a given day, it might be 10.
[00:46:10] Bill Center: The, the new ships we have are so incredibly powerful. They have far more combat capability than any ship that was in the Navy. When I had, when we had a thousand ships and they’re incredibly lethal. Uh, they hit everything they shoot at. These ships that are over in the Red Sea right now, uh, defending against the missile attacks by the Houthi rebels over there, just doing an amazing job.
[00:46:32] Bill Center: Maintaining a level of alertness, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and hitting everything they shoot at. It’s just unbelievable.
[00:46:42] Bill Center: Back then, Vietnam, we were underway, gone from home 80 percent of the time, probably underway 75 percent of the time. 5 percent of the time we were gone from home, we were having to endure a liberty cull in Hong Kong or something like that. So it wasn’t all terrible, but yeah, there was a lot of separation [00:47:00] from home.
[00:47:00] Bill Center: Uh, and it’s true now. Things are better in the sense that, uh, they have more communication because of email and cell phones and things like that. But I’m not sure that that’s 100 percent better because it means that, yeah, you get to share the burdens and share the problems. And, um, you know, whoever’s left behind at home, like when I left, Carla, my wife, she was on her own.
[00:47:29] Bill Center: And so she couldn’t call me if the washer broke, she had to figure it out and get it done. And, I’m not sure if she did call me that I’d be able to give her any useful advice. So that’s why I’m not sure things are actually better now that you can communicate because when you’re not there, there’s not a lot you can do, except encourage, encourage, encourage, give them courage.
[00:47:51] Bill Center: And, uh, now the Navy families are, all the military families are incredibly tough, um, and I get, [00:48:00] I’ll tell you one story, one more story. When I, you probably remember the story, Black Hawk Down, uh, you know, in Mogadishu. We had our special forces in there and they lost one of their Black Hawks. And a warrant officer that was a pilot, warrant officer Durant, I think his name was, was captured.
[00:48:22] Bill Center: I heard the Chief of Staff of the Army tell this. So I went down to visit his wife. I get choked up telling the story. To assure that we were going to do everything we could to get him back, and they successfully got him back. And, He said when I was giving her this assurance, I got choked up and I teared up and his wife put her hand on his shoulder and said, don’t worry, general, night fighters don’t quit.
[00:48:51] Bill Center: That’s the kind of families that are out there. They’re so strong. They’re incredible.
[00:48:58] Mark Wright: It’s a family commitment. It’s an[00:49:00]
[00:49:00] Bill Center: it is.
[00:49:01] Mark Wright: And you look at extended family and God bless those military families who stand up and rise to the occasion. Wow, that’s that’s an amazing story. Bill.
[00:49:12] Bill Center: Well, it’s, you know, now less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military and some people think that’s. Unfortunate, there are unintended consequences of the all volunteer force, and one of the unintended consequences is growing gap between military culture and civilian culture. We have to do everything we can to bridge that gap.
[00:49:37] Bill Center: Neither side fully understands the other the way we should, and I don’t think that’s good for our democracy or health. And some people say, well, we need to go back to the draft, but it’s, it’s not feasible. Uh, there’s no fair and equitable way to do it. And number two, and most importantly, we just don’t need that many people.
[00:49:56] Bill Center: We need, uh, to fill all the slots we [00:50:00] have with the best people we can get. And right now in the competitive job market, that’s proven a little tougher than before, but, uh, we’ll get over this and, uh, we’ll figure out a way ahead that doesn’t, we’re, we’re definitely not going to be going back to the draft regardless of how many people bring that up.
[00:50:18] Bill Center: It’s just not, not in the cards.
[00:50:21] Mark Wright: You mentioned earlier, Bill, that we get so much of our identity through our work, who we are as human beings. And, you know, we’re on a mission, as you mentioned, to redeem work, to make work better, to really create an ecosystem in which people can flourish. Really, when you think about work transformative.
[00:50:43] Mark Wright: Agent and work as something that can be redeemed. I, I just love some, some thoughts from you.
[00:50:50] Bill Center: Well, the reason I put this focus on leadership. You know, at the beginning I said, Grace Hopper’s quote, you manage stuff, you lead people, you know, when [00:51:00] you come home and you think, oh, wow, I had a good day at work. It’s not because we made a lot of stuff, you know, it’s because your team accomplished something together and you took satisfaction out of it as a team.
[00:51:15] Bill Center: It’s because you help one of your team members achieve their personal goal. And you felt, uh, excited by that, and you shared that excitement with the other members of the team. It’s the relationships with your co workers and everything that make work rewarding and fun. In the Navy we have an expression, and I’m sure they have it other places, which is, If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right. We even say that, you know, and people find it unrealistic when you see some of these war movies, combat movies, or I like in the, in the Martian, you know, that great movie, The Martian, where Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars up there. [00:52:00] And they’re in the middle of this terrible storm that ultimately results in him being stranded up there and they’re cracking jokes with each other.
[00:52:07] Bill Center: It’s a life and death situation and they’re joking. And people think, Oh, that’s, that is exactly the way the military is, you know, as stressful as the situation might be, you know, you’re still cracking jokes. People think that people in the military fight for mom and apple pie and the flag.
[00:52:27] Bill Center: No, we, fight for each other. We fight for the person next to us. And that’s the person that we’re willing to fight and die for. So it’s the team, the team is what makes work great. I think, I don’t know what it would be like to have a job where I worked by myself. I mean, I did have a job where I was quote, my own boss of you all.
[00:52:49] Bill Center: And I was teaching at the university, but it was the students that made the job fun. I mean, I really looked forward to going into class and people would ask me, when are you going to retire? I said, the day I [00:53:00] walked off the campus in a bad mood, I’ll retire. Well, that never happened. Uh, you know, you come home from work happy because of what happened there and, you know, it’s your job to make it fun.
[00:53:13] Mark Wright: We’ve been friends for about, I don’t know, more than 20 years. Uh, first met in the Rotary Club of Seattle. And one of the things that I loved about your presidency in that organization is you came up with a list every week of what was it, a list of bills? 50,
[00:53:32] Bill Center: Pretty good rules. I call them pretty good rules. Bill Senators, 50 pretty good rules for life. And, uh, I called it that because, you know, we’ve got the Ten Commandments, which I think are the really good rules. We’ve got other really good rules out there. So these are the pretty good rules. My, my rules were like a notch below that and, uh, so
[00:53:53] Mark Wright: any off the top of your head, Bill? I, I mean, I literally looked forward to rotary every week during your year because at the [00:54:00] end you would give us one of Bill’s 50 pretty good
[00:54:04] Bill Center: off the top of my head, geez, I should be able to reach up and pull down a copy of the whole thing. But, you know, vote or keep quiet. That was one of my rules. Never get in an argument with somebody who buys ink by the barrel. Newsprint by the ton. The, uh, you know, the press always has the last word. They’re just common sense rules.
[00:54:29] Bill Center: The first rule was always follow the rules. And the last rule was sometimes you have to break the rules. And when you have to break the rules, ask for forgiveness and press on.
[00:54:44] Bill Center: And that’s because, uh, we as human beings, we’ve made some pretty dumb rules.
[00:54:52] Mark Wright: well, Bill, this has been so rewarding to spend time with you. And I’ve, I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I’ve, I’ve just [00:55:00] really admired you as a leader and also as a friend over the years, and you’re the kind of leader that just creates an atmosphere and environment. That people want to follow and people want to support because it’s not like you ordered people around.
[00:55:15] Mark Wright: You set an example, just in the way that you treated people, the way that you showed up in a room. And it made, it made all of us want to be better human beings just to be around you. So I really appreciate you as a leader. I appreciate your service to our country and, uh, and thank you for sharing it in so many different ways.
[00:55:35] Mark Wright: In so many different iterations of your career. So it’s, it’s just been such an honor to talk with you.
[00:55:42] Bill Center: Well, you’re very kind. You made, you made me laugh because, when I was becoming president of the Rotary Club, we had a meeting down at the World Trade Center with all of the other leaders in the club to sort of set the agenda for the year. And we went on a coffee break and, uh, as [00:56:00] those things tend to do, it got a little bit disorderly with a lot of chatter and it was time to resume the meeting.
[00:56:06] Bill Center: And, uh, I restored order very quickly. And our executive director at the time was a wonderful woman named Val Elliott. And she said to me afterwards, wow. She said, I’ve never actually seen you actually be the admiral before. So sometimes you have to. restore order, but, , it’s a lot better when people are out there doing what needs to be done because they, they know what needs to be done and they know how to do it better than you do.
[00:56:39] Bill Center: So if they’re, if they’re waiting on you to tell them what to do, you’re not going to get the best result.
[00:56:44] Mark Wright: Well, Admiral Bill Senter, thanks for what you’ve done over an amazing career to redeem work and, and just for who you are in the world. This has been a pleasure, my friend.
[00:56:54] Bill Center: Well, you’re a leader too, Mark, and thanks for doing this and, look forward to, , hearing future [00:57:00] podcasts from you.
[00:57:00] Mark Wright: All right. We’ll see you soon.