Donald Rumsfeld

Enjoy your time in public service. It may well be one of the most interesting and challenging times of your life.

If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Don't automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn't considered key aspects of the issue.

Remember where you came from.

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

When asked for your views, by the press or others, remember that what they really want to know is the President's views.

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don't tell him the truth. Others won't do it.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.

Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

If a prospective Presidential approach can't be explained clearly enough to be understood well, it probably hasn't been thought through well enough. If not well understood by the American people, it probably won't 'sail' anyway. Send it back for further thought.