TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1045316
"I was not a miracle worker. I was just an average person who liked the chal- lenge and felt it was workable. In each instance, it was not trying to jam some philosophy down anybody's throat. It was about tr ying to see what they be- lieved they could do to make the organ- isation work better: the people who were actually doing the work, whose support we needed, whether it was a horse breeder or a trooper on the road. You could not do that by sending out memos and PRs. You had to reach out to them, make it feel like they had a voice." And all this started with the boot camps, and then the combat experience. "I'm a little hesitant about trying to be a flag-waver for the Marine Corps," Bassett says. "But it did change my life. Totally. Because that same philosophy, tweaked, applied to all these different situations. Really I had no major plan for any of these things I did. I wasn't smart enough to have a plan. But what I did have was the Marine Corps thing: 'How do you connect with your men?' "In each of these cases, I wasn't wel- comed. Here's a new guy coming in, what the heck is his idea? But in each case change was needed because of signs of the times. With the police, for instance, there was the racial divide. "And the goal was always 100 percent. Even though that's probably unachiev- able. You're always going to have some hardheads. But if you end up with 75, 80 percent, you're winning. The secret of good management is having as many people as possible feeling they share a common goal. Because if the organisation is successful, you will be successful as individuals. If we're moving the boulder together, we'll get the pressure off us in- dividually."