From the Bureau to the Boardroom: 30 Management Lessons from the FBI By Dan Carrison

A Book Corner Review

By Leo Mallette, EdD

From the Bureau to the Boardroom: 30 Management Lessons from the FBI

By Dan Carrison
AMACOM, 2009

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Each page of Dan Carrison’s From the Bureau to the Boardroom presents lesson from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and its application in the business world. The 30 lessons are distributed over the book’s eight chapters and they range from corporate mission and branding to motivation, teamwork, and planning for the future.

While the author was never a member of the FBI, you would never know it from reading the book (except when he tells you). Rather, he incorporates first-person narratives from agents with his own very readable accounts based on extensive interviews with current and former FBI employees. Some of the stories we may remember as front-page news, and the ones about funerals or kidnappings will likely evoke strong emotions. I was surprised to learn several facts about the FBI:

1. The Bureau’s policy is to move agents every two years.
2. Agents are usually not the primary breadwinners in their families.
3. The mandatory retirement age is 57.

This book is far from the Machiavellian manifesto that I expected it provides useful lessons and applications from years of FBI experience and it expresses them in terms of business situations. Carrison includes the expected lessons about training, communicating, and anticipating situations (visualization) that apply nicely to both FBI and corporate scenarios. However, it also contains some surprising notions, such as not second-guessing your decisions, winning with the tools you have not the ones you wish you had and utilizing flying squads (you will have to get the book to learn more about these quickly mobilized, problem-solving teams!).

Management tools such as business strategies, leadership practices, situational analyses, forecasts, and judgments span the FBI and the corporate worlds. As such, many of us civilians would benefit from the lessons in From the Bureau to the Boardroom. I would recommend this very readable book to anyone who conducts business.

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About the Author(s)

Leo Mallette, EdD, provides technical and programmatic support at The Aerospace Corporation to a national security spacecraft program with the communications subsystem as his primary area of responsibility. Previously, he worked in system engineering and project management of satellite systems at the Boeing Company for 30 years. He is nationally known for his expertise in quartz and atomic clocks and his strengths are building relationships with aerospace contractors and gathering the best resources to apply to technical issues. He received the BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida and the MBA and Ed.D. (in organizational leadership) degrees from Pepperdine University. He is co-author of the book Writing for Conferences (Greenwood, 2011), co-editor of The SPELIT Power Matrix (CreateSpace, 2007), and author of Images of America: Rancho Mirage (Arcadia Publishing, 2011). Dr. Mallette is a supporting business faculty at Pepperdine University and the University of Phoenix’s doctoral program, and was an Instructor of Engineering at the University of Central Florida. He is a member of the Board of Visitors for Pepperdine University, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a member of the advisory board for the Precise Time and Time Interval Conference, and a board member of the Society of Educators and Scholars.