The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 7 L ETTERS Thanks for the Books I want to join what I’m sure will be a host of Journal readers in celebrat- ing your October cover story, “In Their Own Write: Books by Foreign Service Authors.” I know this is an an- nual event, but the number and the quality of the books this year surely make this edition remarkable. Like other former diplomats, I’m often asked by Foreign Service aspi- rants to suggest a book or two that might help equip them in their career hopes. Now I’ve got the answer: al- most anywhere in that terrific collec- tion, be it in the colonels of Greek lore, the wars of Afghanistan, the U.S. annexation of Hawaii, how Pakistan negotiates with the U.S., or — best of all — AFSA’s own Inside a U.S. Em- bassy: Diplomacy at Work. Still looking? It would be hard to find a better can-do book than Ray Smith’s The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats (2011, Potomac Books). It’s all there. Bruce Laingen Ambassador, retired Bethesda, Md. Organizational Personality and Management As the Foreign Service continues to emphasize training for management, particularly now that so much overseas service is done cheek by jowl with the military, it might be useful to remind ourselves of differences in organiza- tional culture that are reflected in the personalities of the individuals who choose those organizations. During the Senior (Executive) Seminar (discontinued several years ago, we were told for budgetary rea- sons), one management game that we played stands out in my memory for its highly educative results. Many of us are familiar with the questionnaires that divide a class into personality types such as “lions,” “Saint Bernards,” etc. On this particular occasion, one of the two main groups in our class con- sisted almost entirely of members of the military and paramilitary (e.g., Coast Guard), and most of the FSOs were in the other. When the seminar leader assigned the first set of questions, we in the largely FS group pondered and ar- gued various options. Meanwhile, the mainly military group finished the ex- ercise and started to laugh and rib us on our indecisiveness and worse. That round over, we were given a second set of problems. As I recall, these included such puzzles as: What was the meaning of a drawing Victor Hugo had left behind? How could a dwarf who lived on the top floor of his apartment building reach the top ele- vator button? (Years earlier, during my interview for entrance into USIA and assignment to Indochina, I had been asked a similar type of question: How would I get the U.S. message over to people who were largely illit- erate?) As our group delighted in speculat- ing on possible answers, moans were heard from the military group. One of them even shouted that these were ridiculous questions, and he refused to bother with them. The (hired professional) seminar leader then told us that the majority of people in government who had played this game responded like the military group, while two-thirds of State De- partment FSOs fell into the second category. Maybe this is something to re- member as we think about annual rat- ing reports, with rating and rated officers perhaps falling into different personality groups —particularly now that so many FSOs come to State from the military. Promotion panels, as well as rating and reviewing officers, could be explicitly alerted to the possibility of such differences and their potential effects on performance. At the same time, we should recall such differences when trying to man- age missions abroad with large num- bers of personnel from the military and domestic U.S. government de- partments. Senior FSOs assigned to various war colleges and senior mili- tary officers assigned to university in- ternational relations programs are