Admiral James Stavridis Of The Carlyle Group On Lessons Learned From One Of America's Darkest Days

On Sept. 11, 2001, Navy Admiral James Stavridis was in his office in what was widely considered the safest, best-protected building in the world.

That morning, like most mornings of his military career up to that point, Stavridis was focused on a world that still seemed to play by the rules and expectations of the Cold War.

But that all changed when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, killing 189 people, including some of Stavridis’ dearest colleagues.

“I glimpsed the aircraft as it hit the Pentagon. I was maybe 150 feet off the impact point,” Stavridis told Willy Walker, host of the Walker Webcast. “And I'm only here talking with you because I was up on the fourth deck of the Pentagon and the aircraft struck the second deck. So I was spared that day.”

Like all Navy personnel, Stavridis was a trained firefighter. But there wasn't much he and his colleagues could do that day except let the better-equipped first responders bring the inferno under control.

Aside from changing the course of history, the attack revealed a couple of painful ironies for Stavridis. For one, he said, “Here I was in the Pentagon, the safest place in the world — I was not safe.”

Another irony was that Stavridis had been part of a mission in 1998 to take out Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan with Tomahawk missiles. The mission failed because the terrorist leader was tipped off about the incoming barrage. 

“Think how different history might have been if those Tomahawks, which were dead on their target, had caught bin Laden,” the retired admiral said to Walker.

But on that late summer day three years later, bin Laden “got his shot in against me,” said Stavridis, who noted it was the closest he came to being killed in his 37-year Navy career.

Stavridis went on to serve as supreme allied commander of NATO and today, now retired from the military, he is vice chairman of global affairs and managing director at the Carlyle Group. He said the trauma of that day had a profound effect on how he viewed leadership, both in the military and later in the private sector.

“It drove home two enormously important things,” he said. “One is that your life can change forever in an instant.” 

Stavridis’ most recent book is called To Risk It All, which he said is about being challenged to make hard choices under intense pressure. 

The second lesson, he said, is that in response to a crisis, you must be ready to “change, fundamentally, how you’re doing business.”

For the U.S. military, it meant completely rethinking how it approached warfare. 

“The U.S. Navy, pre-9/11, was acting like the Cold War was still going on,” Stavridis said. “We were deploying these big carrier battle groups, we were talking about the Russian navy, even though they had little capability left, and we were trying to just keep doing the same thing. But when things really changed on 9/11, we realized we were going to be part of this global war on terror. And that meant [the Navy needed] a very different basket of capabilities.” 

Stavridis was tasked with assembling a “tactical war fighting think tank” called Deep Blue. With the participation of 15 of the brightest minds in the Navy, the group’s mission was to think about how the service needed to redistribute its resources to fight a new kind of enemy.

A couple of factors helped the Deep Blue team in its mission to bring change to the organization. For one, the Navy — like the other branches of the military — was extremely motivated.

“We were angry,” he said. “We were deeply angry.”

For another, it had a champion in Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark. Clark encouraged a free exchange of ideas and was willing to try new things.

“Three times a week, he would gather his most senior admirals and Deep Blue would come in and say, ‘OK, here's another idea.’ And the admirals would kind of tear it apart,” Stavridis said.

But some of those ideas made it through the gauntlet of top brass.

“Like in the business world, innovation is important,” Stavridis said. “But it's like a batting average: If you're hitting 1 in 4, that's a pretty solid season; 1 in 3, and you're headed to the All-Stars. You don't expect anybody to take on all these ideas, but we had a lot of top cover from the chief of naval operations.”

Stavridis said the private sector could take away other lessons from the post-9/11 military. The first is to challenge the workforce to come up with ideas and reward those who come forward. The second is that any business needs its own version of Deep Blue.

“A pretty good idea in any business is to have a small number of people who can energize different parts of the bureaucracy,” he said.

Before signing off on this week’s webcast, Walker reminded the retired admiral that the only thing to survive his office on 9/11 was his letterman’s jacket from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he had been a star athlete.

Stavridis replied that the more than 25 medals he received during his military career from foreign allies perhaps had even more meaning for him. The retired NATO supreme allied commander said he was proud to engage with the international community.

“I'm a believer in America's place in the world,” Stavridis said. “I think that is critical in every way, and that's what means the most to me, the engagement in the international world.”

Next week's guest on the Walker Webcast is Larry J. Sabato, a New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award winner. You can register to watch and listen here.

This article was produced in collaboration between Walker & Dunlop and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

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