Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Career Ambassador: Thomas R. Pickering, page 5

SK: Now let’s turn to the new world you’ve entered, the world of business. The announcement about your appointment as the senior vice president for international relations at Boeing said that you would be working to strengthen relationships with governments around the world. What is the difference in culture between the business world and the diplomatic world?

TP: The differences are that people evaluate progress on simpler standards in the business world. Are you adding value? Are you making money? Are you adding to the stockholders’ success? In the governmental world the question is, are your policies successful? There are a lot of ways to gauge that, but there isn’t a single number at the end of the day that makes the results easy to count.

I happen to be in a small group inside a very large company that provides services to the company. What that means is that I don’t make anything, so I am equally challenged, in the governmental sense, to demonstrate the success of my activities since there is not a bottom-line number to point to in order to make that clear. In that way, some of my governmental experience in measuring success and value is transferable.

Much of what I do involves analyzing what’s happening around the world. Another piece is finding the right people to represent Boeing overseas and who, in a sense, can become our ambassadors, helping our folks to sell products and pioneering new business activities abroad, whether it’s in manufacturing or engineering or research and development or information technology. And we’re very much determined to globalize and become better known and more effective and more present in local scenes around the world. Local economies in critical countries of interest are important to a company like Boeing as part of the process of globalizing. Whoever said becoming more effective globally was becoming more effective locally, in my view was right. So that’s one salient aspect of what I’m doing.

Another part of my job is to try to help the 160,000-some employees of Boeing understand a little bit more about what’s going on in the world, what makes the world tick, what makes other countries a potential marketplace for us, because 70 percent of our commercial airplanes—and a significant percentage of our space, military and communications activities—are outside the U.S. Therefore, it’s clear to us that we have to be in the global marketplace and have to be very much a part of the global scene.

SK: So it wasn’t that much of a culture shift for you.

TP: No, it was not, in many ways. And of course, in the diplomatic service,
I had the wonderful advantage of almost automatically moving every three years or so to a new job. So at Boeing, I have been able to apply much of what I had learned about
rapidly adapting to new responsibilities and new circumstances.

SK: One last question. You were born in Orange, New Jersey.

TP: And grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey.

SK: I don’t think of those as places where people grow up dreaming of careers in pin-striped diplomacy, or of the world of ambassadorships and international relations. What drew you to a career in diplomacy and international relations?

TP: A number of things. First I had an opportunity, growing up in a small town in suburban New Jersey, to get a good education. I received a lot of my education during and after the Second World War, which was a very international time. So as a matter of hard reality, I was very aware of what was happening in the world. We went from the Depression to the Second World War to the Cold War in the space of a few decades. All of those things affected my consciousness.

Early on, I loved to read and developed an abiding interest in history, which became one of the areas on which I focused my education. But I gave only passing thought to the foreign service until, in my second
year at university, a professor I very much respected said, “Why don’t you take the foreign service exam?” With his encouragement, that’s what I did.

SK: Many people think government careers don’t offer a great deal of opportunity, but you’ve certainly seen the world in your foreign service career.

TP: The American Foreign Service is far from a dead-end career. It’s one of the most exciting careers a person can have. For me, it provided a unique opportunity to make a major contribution to the development of significant American foreign policy in the countries I served in and, on a personal basis, to help Americans who were confused and in trouble overseas. These were exciting and interesting challenges and they were difficult; there were complex problems to overcome all the time. But situations like that help to hone your skills, give you a sense that when you make the right decisions and carry them out, you can make a real change in where a particular country is going and how it will achieve its goals.

SK: So as a student you loved history but your career enabled you to be a real participant in writing current American history.

TP: It’s been interesting. I think that all of us who have been engaged at this level have some humility, because almost no single policy is one person’s success. Everybody contributes to it in a way and those, I think, who believe that they invented, sold and developed a policy all by themselves forget all the other people who helped them, asked the right questions, raised the difficult issues or sometimes committed themselves and participated in solutions.

Failure, on the other hand is an individual sport. And often, a single individual does have to bear a lot of the responsibility for failure. So service in government is not without risk. It is, in some ways, very risky! But it is also quite rewarding and I think that it’s as interesting and exciting as anything you can ever do.

My first week at Boeing, I attended a meeting of 400 Boeing executives where they participated in a survey to determine which incentives for their work and performance they found most compelling. As someone who had just come from a comparatively low-paid government job, I found it very interesting that, according to personnel experts, most American executives put compensation and benefits much lower down on the list of what they expect out of their job than they do a whole series of other kinds
of interesting rewards. That’s what my Boeing colleagues also did in rating job satisfaction.

SK: So in fact, the world of business is not that different from the foreign service life of incentives!

TP: It’s not that different. Private executives may get more money and as a result have to think less about it, but I believe that as long as government service is reasonably responsible in rewarding and taking care of the hardships that individuals face when they go overseas, it will attract the best people. But, as I said before, public service—particularly in the foreign service—is risky. We’ve lost more ambassadors than we have generals in the last decade. And yet, the number of people who are interested in taking the foreign service exam has expanded exponentially.

SK: Do you like the title “career ambassador”?

TP: Well, I think that it connotes a lot. It connotes professionalism. It connotes the fact that the career is a demanding one because there’s a lot of preparation required. And I think that, given the fact that there are people who accept political appointments as ambassadors from time to time, some of them extremely good but some of them lamentably bad, the career adjective is a plus. I’m very pleased to have received it.

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