It's back to school for an evolving FBI

Agents and supervisors are taught how businesses adapt to changing times.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
EVANSTON, Ill. -- At a class on leadership, a professor at Northwestern University's business school asks his students to ponder a landmark on the Chicago skyline 10 miles south.
"Walk along the lake and look downtown. You see the Sears Tower," Ranjay Gulati says. "Sears Roebuck & amp; Co. owned retailing. They defined retailing."
That they no longer do, he says, shows "what happens when the world changes around you ... and you don't."
Some of the 30 senior FBI managers and executives stir at their desks.
They're here because their employer is looking for ways to manage a still wrenching transition: In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, a newly urgent mission -- disrupting terrorism before it hits the United States -- was thrust upon the bureau.
Change
In an effort to change the famously insular and hidebound organization, the FBI has sent more than 2,000 of its top agents and supervisors to management school at Northwestern.
This is new training for a new FBI, or at least that is the hope.
Traditionally, FBI agents and supervisors are schooled in the nuts and bolts of law enforcement. Agents learn how to become expert marksmen or cultivate informants. Supervisors learn how to mentor new agents or follow proper procedures.
Here, they explore how large corporations have shifted their missions. If Toyota can adapt its car lines to the baby-boom generation, then why can't the FBI adapt its role to the changing security needs of the country?
They practice role-playing exercises aimed at instilling teamwork. They study business experiences that might help them present the FBI in the best light. They learn how Starbucks developed a strong identity and how Exxon botched its handling of the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
Mueller's role
The program was started three years ago by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Most of the senior headquarters staff and top agents from the 56 field offices have taken the weeklong courses, which cost the bureau about 3 million a year.
Mueller himself is an ardent student of management science. He has sought the views of successful chief executives, including former IBM Corp. CEO Louis Gerstner Jr., and has looked to outsiders to fill high positions.
The training has been one of Mueller's main efforts to bring fresh thinking into the bureau.
Some FBI officials at first found the idea puzzling.
"The initial response was, 'We are going to go where?'" recalls Kevin Brock, a counterterrorism official who attended the program. "A lot of us did not know what we were getting into," he said. "So we were wondering, 'How does this connect with putting bad guys in jail, hunting terrorists and all that stuff?'"
Management experts say there are limits to what a government agency can learn from studying the ups and downs of companies. And there are questions about how readily the FBI has embraced the lessons.
Doing two things well
But in being asked to fight terrorism while still solving crimes, the bureau faces a quandary that is fairly common in the business world.
"How can one organization arrange itself to do two things well? This is hardly a challenge that is unique to the FBI," said Michael Roberto, a professor of management at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., who is co-writing a case study of the FBI that Harvard Business School plans to use.
"We have no monopoly on good ideas," Mueller said in an interview, adding that he and others found the training "tremendously educating."
The professors tell the class that, even in an organization as regimented as the FBI, innovation is essential.
"Every organization that operates efficiently and effectively has people who are exploring better ways to do things," said Joseph Hannigan, a Mueller confidant who heads the FBI program at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. "In the bureau, that has been kind of random."