Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: General Frank McKenzie

I recently interviewed General Frank McKenzie on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is a retired four-star general who spent more than four decades in the Marines. General Frank McKenzie was the director of the Joint Staff before becoming the Commander of the United States Central Command, where he oversaw military operations in the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia. General McKenzie, thank you for joining us.

Frank: Adam, I'm very happy to be with you here today.

Adam: I’m happy that you're here. You grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and attended the Citadel. You're a big college sports fan, a big fan of Auburn. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

Frank: Sure. So growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in the late ‘60s, mid-70s. I graduated from high school in 1975 in Birmingham from Shades Valley High School, and I grew up working for my father, who was a newspaper distributor for the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post Herald. Post Herald was the morning paper, the news was the afternoon paper, and he owned a branch in one of the quadrants of the city. So I worked for him all through my high school years. And then an appreciation for hard work, I grain and appreciation for guess what my father had to do every day, because it was a seven-day-a-week, 365 days a year business that we were embarked on when you deliver newspapers, and you deliver them twice a day. So you're up in the middle of the night, and you're out again in the afternoon. So it gave me a real sense of what hard work was. And watching my father do that day in and day out, my mother was in the business as well. And my younger sister also. So it was really a family enterprise. And it gave me a sense that you just got to get up every day doesn't matter whether you feel good or bad or anything else, you got to do the job that you've been given. Because if you don't do it, no one else is gonna do it and your family's survival depends on that. So that was a key lesson. I think that I learned from that. And, I'll tell you the other thing that really was important to me in that period, I had the good luck to be chosen to go to a gifted high school my sophomore year. And so I attended the school, during my junior and senior years. And that gave me an opportunity to be exposed to literature and some concepts that were new to me thinking about myself some philosophical concepts. Since I got to that and began to read at a very early age and I read voraciously in high school, I read voraciously now, and that really started during that period of time, I'll tell you how my great fear in this life is being trapped on an airplane, or on a car in a bus without a book to read those early lessons. Although I read widely and wasn't perhaps as focused as I should have been, they stayed with me to this day. So really coming out of Birmingham, it was an appreciation for what hard work is a love of literature, and a love of learning and the written word. That was also very important. And then finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you my love for Auburn football and probably University. I did not go to Auburn, people in my family didn't go to Auburn. As you've noted, I went out of state to the Citadel. But I've stayed very close to Auburn football. And over the many decades since that time in the mid-70s. When I was there in Birmingham, it's been something that my family sort of coalesced around Auburn football games following Auburn football. And it's been a big part of our life.

Adam: We will talk a little bit more about Auburn football and college football later on in the conversation, but I want to hone in a little bit on the second point you made talking about your love of reading and how that speaks to the importance of lifelong learning having a growth mindset. One of the most important things that I've observed in my conversations with hundreds and hundreds of America's top leaders, the most successful leaders aren't those who, despite all their success, think that they know all they need to know. They're the ones who understand that I need to continue to learn I need to continue to grow, I need to continue to consume as much content as I possibly can. That really speaks to what you valued from a very, very early age and continue to value today.

Frank: Well, Adam, you're right. And I would just tell you two things. I think part of my success, whatever success I've had, as a commander throughout my years in the Marine Corps now is I never want to sit down at a table and think I'm the smartest guy in the room. I like to have people smarter than me around me. I hire for that I try to attract those kinds of people because I like to be surrounded by very smart people and so whatever success I've had a large part of it's due to that. And you talked about inflammation. So I'll tell you, Adam, here's what I read every day right now. And what I read this morning, I read The Washington Post, I read The New York Times, I read the Wall Street Journal. And then I read the Tampa Bay Times, because of the local news here in the coverage of the University of South Florida, which I'm affiliated with, and shall read those every day in the Financial Times. And I read them all electronically, but I do actually push through all those journals every day. Every week, I read The New Yorker, I read The Economist, which I would say, you really want to know what's going on in the world. And you had to just pick one document one journal to read, you need to read the Economist, I think it's very good. And I read it online. And I used to get a hard copy. But now I just do it online. So I read that the other thing I'd like to take a look at every month, I read Harper's because I think it gives me a different outlook. I read the Atlantic, and I read Vanity Fair, which people laugh at me when I say that, but Vanity Fair actually has some of the best investigative journalism of any magazine out there. And so it's very easy to read. And until fairly recently, I've had a subscription to Rolling Stone since high school. But I'll tell you, they have drifted so far away from what they once were, that it's hard for me to recognize them. And in because I disagree with their editorial line, or anything else. It's just not very well put together anymore. So I've drifted away from Rolling Stone. But I mean, literally, for decades, I was a religious subscriber to Rolling Stone. So that's kind of what I try to read, in addition to whatever professional materials I've got to take a look at. But I try to do that every day. And I find that gives me a broad sense of what's going on in the world, from a variety of different perspectives. Because I think the key thing is this, you have to read stuff you don't agree with, you have to go to sources of information that are confirming your biases. And I think it's one of the most important things any leader needs to do.

Adam: You're giving listeners a window into one of the most important parts of your daily routine. Can you talk a little bit more about what your day looks like as you're rising within your career in the military, and what your day looks like when you are leading in the military?

Frank: Sure. So I'll start sort of the middle part, when I was a four-star Commander in charge of US Central Command, one of the United States has 11 combatant commands. First of all, your chain of command is very short, you work for the President of the United States, and you work for the Secretary of Defense. So not a lot of people are going to tell you what to do. So you know who your boss is, which really helps when you're sort of in that position. So my day I read what I just talked about, it's what I read. I also had a variety of intelligence reports and other things that would be brought to me early in the morning. And I plow through those often with the help of a briefer someone there who is able to answer detailed questions if I have those. So what I try to do is knock those out early in the morning, which I would always try to do if you want to get some physical fitness training in. So you got to try to block time for that. And I found in the world I was in, the only way to get that training was to do it very early in the morning, when I was the director of the Joint Staff, I'd be at PT and at four o'clock in the morning. The problem with that is as you get older, that has an effect on the end of your day, and I tend to get tired. When I became a four-star officer, I tried to do a little bit lighter six, or seven, or actually 5:30 or six, but have to get physical training. And you've got to get something in there because the whole body moving. I'm a marathoner, and I've run a couple of ultra marathons. So I actually enjoy long-distance running. I'm not very fast and slow, but I can actually get out there and run for quite a while. So I would tend to do that. But I found that in those jobs, you need enough meetings and enough interaction with your team to know what's going on. But you don't want to crush him with meetings. So I found as a central command commander, I'd have a little meeting early in the morning with my immediate staff, the people that ran my office, that I talked to my when in business, you'd call direct reports. And the military would call on my subordinate commanders, eight or nine lieutenant generals. And because of the pace at CENTCOM, I try to talk to them about four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and those will be short meetings, they might only go 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, but they're held at a very high level of classification. And in those meetings, we're talking about what's going on. What do you see? what's changed? Because the essence of the business for a general and commander is you've got to be able to discern patterns. First of all, you've got to be able to determine what you want to look at, then you've got to be able to see the patterns change, what's changing, what's not changing? Why isn't it changing? Should it be changing? So I had a dialogue with my direct reports, four days a week, and we talked about that and we also got intelligence briefings, operational briefings, all of the things that you would expect. Typically on Fridays, I would sit down and devote two hours to my planners. These are the young men and women, typically Lieutenant Colonel's colonels. They were in their 30s, bright, bright, bright people, the brightest people in the organization. And so what we did at Central Command is every combat command does, you build plans that were tasked to come up with plans to do certain things. So I feel it's important that anybody in charge needs to spend a lot of time with his or her planners, you can't go into a room and say, hey, look, I want to do this, run down a list of 10 things, then walk out of the room and not engage with them. Again, the plan needs to be when it's ultimately developed, it needs to be a narrative. And it needs to match the personality of the commander. And, of course, the capabilities, the headquarters, and a variety of other technical things. But first of all, the commanders got to own it. And the way that the commander owns that is by giving planners the most precious thing you have. And the most precious thing you have as a senior leader is your time. So you give them your time. And I'd go in there for two hours, we go around the horn, I grew up as a planner, that's my background when I was a much younger officer. So I enjoy the dialogue with the planners, I enjoy being challenged, and I enjoy the dialectic. But here's the thing, if you're gonna do that, you've actually got to listen to what they're saying. And you've got to be ready to take information that you don't agree with not only from your planners but as a commander at large, because here's the thing if you react negatively when people bring you bad information, people aren't going to stop bringing you bad information, because they got to do it, they have to report to you. But they'll shade that information, maybe not even consciously. But in a way, that means you don't get the full picture because nobody likes figuratively or literally to get shot in the head. When you bring the boss bad news. Here the one thing I would say I've learned across my career is you can't tell somebody that they've got to see it. For example, at them, I've worked with people who said, I'm a great boss, you're gonna like working for me almost infallibly, they turn out to be jerks. So I never say that when I'm onboarding somebody, I say, look, you know, we're gonna accomplish the mission, this unit, this is what we're gonna do. These are the parameters and have a straightforward discussion with them like that. But I think it is very important that you work on being you got to be level when you get information because you're gonna get at central command. To go back to my daily routine, there were nights when my phone would ring seven or eight times in the middle of the night, there will be that I might go three or four days without bringing it all often all work, you're working all weekends because the weekends in the theater in the Middle East are different for our weekends. So you never get away from it. So you're always absorbing information. And you've got to have such an approach that people don't mind giving you that information, even if it's bad information. I emphasize that that took me a while to learn that I gotta be honest with you. My approach to that, when I was a mid-grade officer, is very different than when I was a senior officer. Because you have the opportunity to interact with subordinate commanders a little bit more as you grow older wisdom and maturity. And not everybody is born with it at the moment they enter the Armed Forces I certainly was not is something that I learned by having over the arc of a long career by watching other people good and bad. And by observation, and then you fashion your own style. And that's sort of what I arrived at by the end.

Adam: So much great stuff there. And I want to highlight just a few of the things you shared, we could spend the rest of the conversation unpacking each of the points of your point by point, something you shared, which stood out is that bosses aren’t the ones who say, I'm going to be the best boss. Let your actions speak for you. Walk the walk. Don't worry about talking to talk. Surround yourself with the best people you possibly can. Your time is your most precious commodity. As a leader, if you're investing your time, in the right people, it's going to pay dividends it's going to pay off in spades. And finally, listen. Listen to those around you. Especially when they're telling you something that you don't want to hear. It's going to be uncomfortable. But that uncomfortable information can be the most important information you could possibly listen to. So don't ignore it. Listen to it.

Frank: You're exactly right. I'll give you another example. One of the things that I think is very helpful to do is you've got to be able to reach down in the organization and see the young people down there that are working on three or four echelons before the top, I think is a very important thing to do. When I was a two-star general, and I was working at U.S. Central Command, Jim Mattis, who was the commander and one of the great leaders that I've ever known in the Marine Corps. And beyond the Marine Corps. He was the four-star Commander, the job I later had, what he would do occasionally is he had reached down inside my organization and bring up a lieutenant colonel or Colonel to his office just to have a conversation with him. And that used to infuriate me then because I felt I was the planner, I was the lead planner in the organization, the chief strategist, and he should have come to me, but like most things that Jim Mattis did, there was a point to it. And I found that when I became the commander of Central Command, I would do the same thing. If I wanted to know something very specific. I'd reached down to get a subject matter expert to come up and have a chat with me about it. First, it allows a subordinate to see the big boss and they have very little contact with second I get exposure to unfiltered critical information that's just very important. So then when I expect from generals, it took me a while to see this, what you expect from your subordinate flag officers when you're forced to our general is, I don't expect for them to have total mastery of all the arcana of whatever they're talking about what I want from them as context, I want them to see relationships, I go to them for the connectedness of these things. The Lieutenant Colonel can tell me, it's on the north side of the river, it's on the south side of the river, there are three, there were four there under the trees that are out under the trees, he's going to have that information. And it's good for him to be able to tell me that. And also, it's good for him, for me to get that information from him in a positive way that it actually boosts him up. So it's good for the whole organization. But when I went from the senior leader, that is, what does it mean? So when we have a discussion about context, that's where I want my direct reports, my three stars, and the staff by two stars, to tell me what they think and what it actually means.

Adam: If you had to boil it down, what are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Frank: Sure, so I’ve kind of had the opportunity to think a lot about this. And I would put it like this. And I think of three things. First of all, you got to be competent, you have to know what you're doing. And that varies by level. For example, if you're going to be where I started out a rifle platoon commander in the United States Marine Corps, you got to know all your weapon systems as good or better than anybody in that full time, you got to be physically fit as good or better than anybody in Appleton, and you've got to be able to show physical courage. So those are the technical competencies that you really need as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, by the time you become a general officer, you're no longer gonna be the most physically fit person in the unit, you're not going to be able to employ the individual weapons systems as well as the young men or women that are down there. But what you now know how to do is you know how to employ him on a larger level. So at whatever level you're at, you've got to be able to demonstrate competence, competence at what you're doing. In the military, people can see it, they can sense it, that you know what you're doing, or you don't know what you're doing. That's a very, very, very important thing. Because if you don't have that young men and women of the military, they get to vote actually, whether or not they're going to follow, you know, people think the military is a completely hierarchical organization. And it is, but you still have to sell your product. And so you do that, first of all, through technical competence. I think the second thing that's very important is that people want to know that you care about them. People want to know that they're not just a cipher out there, but that you actually know who they are, to the best ability that you can do that, and that you're going to take care of them to the best of your ability to do so. And I think that's actually a very, very important thing. And so that means Marine Corps officers eat last, all kinds of things that are drummed into you at a very early age. So by the time you get more seniors, it's easy to develop those things. But also the requirement gets harder. You've got people now living in base housing, how do you deal with problems, systemic problems with a vendor in base housing, the base housing isn't very good. Now you got to go out and do other things that are very far away from your core skills as an infantry commander in the Marine Corps. So they want to see that manifest. And the third thing is, you got to be able to do the right thing. And that really is because we've already talked a little bit about physical courage. But physical courage is actually far easier than moral courage. And moral courage is sort of that third thing, you got to be willing to make the hard choice. And people know when you don't make the hard choice when you don't make the correct hard choice. It's never clear. It's never easy. It never comes to you. First thing in the morning, after you've had a cup of coffee and are feeling good. It always comes to you when you're tired when you're sweating, under adverse conditions. And you gotta make those hard decisions. And often, they're not physical courage decisions. They can be ethical questions, they can be decisions about people's careers, they can be things like that. So to learn effectively, you got to really work on those three things. And I'll tell you the last thing that I think this is very important, this is not my concept, but I've embraced it. A lot of other people have had it. But typically, in the military, we think of when you look at a military organization, you think about a pyramid. It's very clear. One guy is at the top one man or woman is at the top, they have the legal moral authority to execute a command in that organization. There's more the next year, then all the way down to where you got all the people at the very bottom, they're actually doing the work facing the enemy. Well, I gave an order at CENTCOM. I tried in my own mind to turn that pyramid Over, because at the very top, actually, there are a lot of people around to help me make decisions. But at every Echelon that goes down, it gets narrower and narrower, you get to that final point, which is one man or one woman who confronts the enemy. And that's a very lonely place to be, even if you're gonna find a position with somebody else. Even if you're in a crewed aircraft, a warship submarine, it's a very lonely place to be, and they don't have a lot of help down there. But we've got a lot of help above. So you make a decision, you need to think about what it's going to mean to that individual soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardsman, coast guardsman, who's out there actually, in contact with whoever we're fighting. And I find that won't necessarily change the decision. But I certainly allow you to own that decision a little bit more, and maybe just give it one more appreciation before you can make it. And I find that, for me, at least, that's a useful analytic tool that I tried to apply whenever I could.

Adam: What was the toughest decision that you had to make during your time in the Marines? And how do you make it?

Frank: I've had to make a lot of tough decisions in the Marine Corps. At one point, I would tell you, though, it's interesting because I get asked this a lot. I'll turn it a little bit on its head for you. A tough decision I never made I never considered making was resigning over the President's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. And a lot of people asked me about that. And I say, look, in this country, civilian leadership gets to make decisions, they may be decisions that as a senior military leader, in a very short chain of command that I might disagree with. But once the President makes that decision, we are obligated to carry out his orders. In fact, the Uniform Code of Military Justice is quite clear on this point. You can only say no, resign or refuse to follow an order if it's illegal or not, if it's an order you disagree with not if it's more you morally disagree with, unless it's illegal, you got to carry out that order. So when I've gotten orders, I've never actually thought about, never thought about resigning. I know that that's a popular topic these days and a lot of circles. But that's not actually in the U.S. military tradition. Going back to the Second World War, when General Marshall often did not get what he wanted, his conversations with President Roosevelt about decisions that the President was making. General Marshall have never thought about resigning as a result of that said he saluted and followed his orders. And so I've always found that a very useful thing for me at least, I believe strongly in the concept of civilian control of the military, where Republic, civilians get the final vote elected public officials. And it's best if the military doesn't dabble in that, because a four-star officer who resigns because he doesn't agree with something is actually creating a political act. And I think that's not good for the country.

Adam: Your time leading the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was one of many very high profile, very high-pressure experiences that you had during your time leading in the Marines. In your experience, what are the keys so leading under pressure and leading in times of crisis?

Frank: Before you get into the crisis, you need to plan. You need to plan relentlessly because you almost always see it coming. Very few crises, sneak up on you completely out of the blue. So your plan, go back to what we talked about with planners. So you develop a series of plans, because here's the thing, when you plan in advance what we call deliberate planning, you have one luxury that you don't have an execution, and that luxury is time, a little bit earlier, actually in a personal sense, but what you've got when you're planning to do deliberate planning is you have lots of time to talk about alternatives. And so there's a famous saying, it's attributed to Hellmouth. Mon Mulkey, the elder, says, no plan survives contact with the enemy. That's a popular phrase. That's actually a misquote what Mulkey said was, “No plan survives contact with the enemy's main body”. And that's a fundamental difference. Because what it means is a well-built plan will provide an analytic structure to help decision-making under conditions of extreme stress, or both. What you won't have the opportunity to do when you're not under stress is consider what if this happens, what are we going to do, because once you get to that point in execution, the one thing you don't have is time. Because now suddenly, you have all the resources in the world, except for one time and you can't get time back. So when you can think about contingencies, think about possibilities with a bunch of smart people, before you get started. Once you develop, you try to scope out all the things that might happen, recognizing that you're gonna get further and further away from that concept every day as you go into the plan. General Eisenhower once said, “It's not the plan is planning” and he's right. So I think the way to handle extremely difficult situations is you really invest in the beginning with a smart group of people to develop those plans, you update the plans, then as you get into them, thanks, you're gonna change. And there's a whole lot of technical underpinning that goes into how we plan that isn't important to us now. But the basic point is this, it gives you a structure. When you confront these challenges, where you have the opportunity, while prep, you're not down to minutes to make decisions, rather, you've got days to consider the possibilities. And I find that a great aid under times of extreme stress because it all comes down to general stress as a function of time.

Adam: Can you take listeners back to the moment in time, a very, very high profile mission, you are in charge of the mission to capture or kill Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi, the then leader of ISIS, a highly successful mission. But the outcome was anything but certain when you were given the order. And when you were in the room to decide to go forward with it, what were the best lessons you learned from that experience?

Frank: So I learned that was really my first opportunity as a theater commander to actually participate and drive it at the highest levels. And what I learned was this, the job of the theater commander is to allow the tactical echelon, and by this we mean the raid force, the Americans that went out their only objective, tried to capture him, and he ended up blowing himself up. So they're very good at what they do. They're the best in the world, Special Operations Forces hours are magnificent, and they have briefed me thoroughly on their plan. But my role in that was twofold. It was to manage the theater so that they could get in and out and conduct the operation, which I knew wouldn't have a high chance of success at their level. And so managing the theater, my level meant looking at what the Syrians were doing, looking at what the Russians were doing, looking at what our Turkish allies were doing, and making sure that none of those larger entities interfered with this raid operation. It also meant interfacing with the other elements of our government, the interagency process, and our good partners at Central Intelligence, then tucking it up to the next guy in the chain of command, who was the Secretary and the President. And they were both very much invested in this operation. So I'm the buffer. I'm the guy that allows the tactical Echelon to execute the mission, and all credit to those guys who flew in those helicopters who went in and did it because they're the people that actually made it happen. But my value-added, the value added of the theater staff is you create the conditions that allow that to happen. And there were a number of things like what are the Russians going to do, we want to make sure they don't interfere with this because they had a capability to do it. We don't want the Syrians to interfere with it, we want to make sure we talked to our Turkish allies about it as the raid force goes in. So you get very busy doing that at the same time. One of the key things you do as a theater commander, an operation like this is you're looking to what's next. First of all, what happens if things go bad? What are we going to do? And we have a variety of plans for that. But then you get and you get out the missions over what's next, what's going to happen as a result of that? And that's what I get paid to think about is the theater commander, what's the next hill the next objective that we got to take a look at from a theater perspective? And so you'd look at what's ISIS going to do to name a new leader point about the possibility of Russian action after we've flown in and out? What if the Syrians go nuts on us, that's the interlevel business. So the rain forces in and out, they do that very exquisitely difficult mission on the ground. But the larger picture is my responsibility. So that's how I spent my time during that operation, looking at those factors.

Adam: And that team, that mission, one example of one of the many high-performing teams that you've led over the course of your career, you've led the teams that took on the most challenging assignments out there. In your experience, what are the keys to building winning teams and building winning cultures?

Frank: I think it's important that, first of all, the commander, the person in charge has got to have a vision, you got to know where you want to go, you got to be able to look, here's where I want to be in two years with this plan. And if you're tactical here, I want to be in the next hour or two with this plan. So the commander has got to have a vision, he or she has got to know what the organization needs to do. And you've got to understand that you've got to internalize that. And then you've got to be able to explain it to your subordinates in terms that are digestible to them. Communication is at the very heart of what a good commander does. You got to be able to articulate goals and objectives and the phrase, transactional leadership has a negative connotation, but I think it has a place as one of the things my approach to being a leader was looking for, I'm gonna give you a good plan. I'm gonna give you the best possible solution to get in and out. Here's what I'm gonna need you to do in order to execute that plan. So here's what I'm doing. Here's what you're doing. We agree with that. And you have to sell people on that because people actually don't follow orders blindly, not in the U.S. military, they don't. They're far too smart, they got to know what's going on. And they will actually accept a very, very high level of risk. And in fact, one of the tasks of command is to make sure the level of risk is manageable because young men and women will take their lives in their hands and hold off like quicksort. and run with it. And you don't want him to do that unless there's a very good reason for it. So you try very hard to reduce those opportunities you communicate. And the other thing is this, it's trust, people have got to trust you, you go into an organization, I take the positive, you people want to trust you. But you've got to demonstrate that they can. Again, that is not something you can talk about, I go back to the discussion we've already had about people who say, I'm a great leader, you're gonna love me? Well, you build trust through repeated repetition of processes that give people the opportunity to evaluate you. And that's how you do it, people go into trust, it's a nonlinear process, you go a long time, and suddenly a huge event will occur, well, you'll build a great amount of trust, or you can give it away, it is much easier to give it away than to build it, you give it away at the exponential rate, you build up the additive, right. And so you got to be very much aware of that all the time. But I go back to what I said at the beginning, you got to communicate. That's why I like to talk to my commanders four times a week. And if we were in a tactical city, a high-stress situation, it would be two or three times a day, seven days a week, we were in looking at a war situation where something could erupt, we would talk very, very frequently, those channels between commanders is very important between leaders and organizations. Because you see, the staffs and other subordinates see that the leaders get along. The staff will tend to get along better too.

Adam: Have you ever had any problems getting along with Alabama football fans?

Frank: Actually, I live amongst them now. Here in Tampa, and I find they're very good people. And I try to keep that within limits, I was probably a lot more unbalanced as a young man.

Adam: General McKenzie, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Frank: I think it helps if you like what you're doing. For 42 years and 10 months, I loved what I was doing. It was a passion for me. I never felt that it was a hardship going to work. I enjoyed the people that I was around. And it really is the people. I mean, look, the Marine Corps is an organization and we don't have a lot of bright and shiny things, we got our people. And that's the product we give the nation young men and wanted to go out and do the nation's bidding. And sometimes our conditions are great, great risk and danger. And then the joint force where I spent a lot of time as a general, it's a different animal, but it has many of the same features, people from disparate backgrounds that you got to bring together, I really enjoy the quality of the people. So I would tell someone, look, if you want to follow the path that followed, you gotta like to be around people got to enjoy talking to him. And not everybody's a perfect leader. I have not been a perfect leader. But I've learned and you've got to be willing to learn. And as we talked about earlier in the conversation, you got to have an open mind and you need to be omnivorous, and have a pursuit of knowledge. Wherever you find it, however, you find it and never give up that answer. It's, I mean, I'll tell you, I read right now, three or four different books. I try to stay on top of a variety of things. And I've tried to read disparate books as well. And because I think it's very important to do that you need to get outside of your shell, if you will. And I think that's very important as you grow up. I think it's extremely useful.

Adam: General McKenzie, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Frank: It was a pleasure to be with you here today. Thanks so much.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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