46
PREVIOUS PAGE: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE: BENNETT RAGLIN/GETTY IMAGES
really feel his biggest job was optimizing managerial
efficiencies? “Regrettably that’s the way it got con-
strued,” Tillerson says in the interview.
Few would argue the State Department is a model
of operational excellence. Its technology is anti-
quated. Its priorities appear to reflect a different
age—it has more consulates in France than in China.
Along with old-fashioned diplomacy, it has its hands
in a grab bag of issues, from humanitarian aid to
democracy development to drug interdiction to pro-
tecting the oceans and managing energy resources.
And its reach includes almost 300 embassies, con-
sulates, and diplomatic missions around the world.
Tillerson’s predecessors also tried tinkering
with the ever- growing agency, which has doubled
in size since 1995. Colin Powell sought to overhaul
the department’s aging IT system, and Clinton
launched the grandly titled Quadrennial Diplomacy
and Development Review, intended to modernize
the department. Modest changes resulted.
But for Tillerson, applying the methods of corpo-
rate downsizing to the federal government is more
than just a side job, it’s the job—one he considers
essential to the nation’s ability to conduct foreign
policy. “There’s a widespread American belief that
if you can just bring business practices to govern-
ment, it would work better. And with that, there’s a
widespread belief that this is easy to do,” says Ronald
Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who
now runs the American Academy of Diplomacy. “I
suspect that he marched in with a businessman’s ‘I
know how to reorganize things and make them run
better,’ and then he finds he’s walked into quicksand.”
Tillerson’s approach has put him at odds with
Congress and the staff he leads. His hot and cold rela-
tionship with Trump hasn’t helped, as rumors persist
that Tillerson is already plotting his exit and that
United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is eagerly
waiting in the wings. In the interview, he says his rela-
tionship with Trump is “good” and that he intends
to stay in the job “as long as the president lets me.”
Coming off 11 years as the unquestioned boss
of America’s biggest oil company, Tillerson was
always going to have to change to fit his new role.
The question was whether he could. “I think Rex’s
background has led him to keep an arm’s length,
and I think it’s hurt him,” says John Hamre, the head
of the Center for Strategic & International Studies,
who’s known Tillerson for more than a decade.
Usually cautious and taciturn, Tillerson gets
excited discussing his reorg plan. “When you do
organizational redesign, it has a number of elements
to it. There’s the organization chart itself, the boxes,
and who reports to whom, but the most important
aspect is always the process by which the work gets
done,” he says. A successful structure is one where
people are “interfacing with others” without obsta-
cles. Tillerson’s redesign is expected to cut spending
by $5 billion to $10 billion and slash about 8 percent
of career staff. The department has studied closing
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn’t know what
to make of news reports that morale is low at his
agency and that he’s not doing a good job running it.
“I walk the halls, people smile,” he says in a recent
interview in his spacious office in Washington. “If
it’s as bad as it seems to be described, I’m not seeing
it, I’m not getting it.”
That’s exactly the complaint many Department
of State employees have about Tillerson: He’s not
getting it. Early on, many career diplomats were opti-
mistic when the former chairman and chief executive
of Exxon Mobil Corp. took over the 75,000-person
agency. He knew his way around the world and had
decades of experience running a large, sprawling
organization. He’d negotiated deals with heads of
state in some of the toughest places in the world to
do business, and he understood the delicate balance
between using soft and hard power. Those skills
would be put to the test by the array of urgent global
issues awaiting him—including Iran, North Korea, and
increasing tensions with China and Russia—when he
arrived for his first day on the job in February.
Instead of focusing all his attention outward,
though, Tillerson has indicated that some of his
top priorities are more inward-looking. He wants
to cut costs and reorganize the department, in part
to meet a White House goal of reducing the agen-
cy’s budget by 30 percent. In the eight months
since he took over, Tillerson has spent consider-
able time immersed in the minutiae of head counts
and organizational charts while ensconced in his
executive suite on the seventh floor of the Harry S
Truman Building, where he sat for an interview with
Bloomberg Businessweek on Oct. 19. So far he’s trav-
eled less than half as much as John Kerry and Hillary
Clinton had at this point in their terms.
In Tillerson’s view, the State Department needs a
dramatic private-sector-style makeover—a “redesign,”
as he calls it. An outline of his plan sent to Congress in
September is written in the opaque jargon of corpo-
rate management consultants: Tillerson envisions “an
evidence-based and data-driven process to enhance
policy formulation and execution, as well as optimize
and realign our global footprint.”
In a speech to the staff in September at the U.S.
Embassy in London, Tillerson acknowledged the five-
alarm fires in the world—North Korea, a soured rela-
tionship with Russia, the war in Syria, and the lasting
violence of Libya’s civil war. But those problems,
he said, weren’t as crucial as getting State’s house
in order. “The most important thing I can do is to
enable this organization to be more effective, more
efficient, and for all of you to take greater satisfaction
in what you do day in and day out,” he said. “Because
if I accomplish that, that will go on forever, and you
will create the State Department of the future.”
The comments stunned many department
employees who already felt besieged by proposed
budget cuts and a president whose tweets frequently
contradict Tillerson’s diplomacy. Did the secretary
“There was
initially a kind
of buzz of
excitement,
that we
finally had a
secretary who
was willing to
look at how the
organization
functions”
○ Thomas-Greenfield
POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017
