Aggie Legends Podcast S2E2: John Sherman ’92

John Sherman:
We never forget. As we sit here and talk right now, there are men and women in harm’s way. They are out there on patrol, standing watch. They’re missing time with family. They’re missing time at home. They are committed. And we never forget those who have made an ultimate sacrifice.

Ben Wiggins:
Welcome to Aggie Legends, where we talk with founders, CEOs and other successful Aggies about the lessons in leadership they’ve experienced throughout their careers. I’m your host, Ben Wiggins Mays, MBA, class of 2018. And today we’re talking to John Sherman, dean of Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and the former Chief Information Officer of the Department of Defense and the U.S Intelligence Community. Dean Sherman graduated from Texas A&M in 1992 with a degree in history. He was a member of the Corps of Cadets and served as commander his senior year. He spent 30 years in senior national security roles before becoming dean of the Bush School in 2024. Dean Sherman, thank you so much for joining us.

John Sherman:
It’s an honor to be here, Ben. Thank you for having me.

Ben Wiggins:
It’s our pleasure. What drew you to Texas A&M and the Corps?

John Sherman:
Well, coming out of a small town, a little 2A high school south of here, and having some step-siblings and others who had gone here coming to the football games. And really, what really got me here too, though, was my dad, who was not an Aggie. We were out in Odessa on one of his sales calls for the oil field out there and over at a Steak and Ale, he said, John, you need to think about serving your country. Why don’t you go to the military for a few years? And then I got an Army scholarship, and then I thought, if I’m going to do this and be an officer and a Texan, what better place to go than Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets? And yeah, I loved Aggie football. And yes, I love this place, but it was really a chance to serve, which would define the rest of my life there. But that’s what brought me here. And the Agricultural & Mechanical University of Texas, it just is so much about where I grew up and who I am, and that’s what brought me here, was a chance to serve and get in the Corps.

Ben Wiggins:
Well, thank you for your service, for one thing. And I certainly echo the love for this great institution. But what was your experience like as a student here, and how did it subvert your expectations?

John Sherman:
Well, coming here from a small 2A high school, I graduated with 60 people. My first semester I didn’t do that well. Too much Corps, too many, too much football, too much whatever. And I had a 2.3 GPA my first semester, and I had a really come-to-Jesus moment at that point, said, I better get my act together. That second semester my freshman year, all I did was study, focus on my Corps duties, etc. I got a 3.89 GPA Dean’s List. I got, I was one of only three freshmen to get picked up for a US Army Airborne school that summer, and the rest was kind of history after that. No pun intended to keep me rolling. And on that too, when I had doubled down on my studies, I had erroneously registered for a senior history class that semester. And the professor, who would later become a mentor of mine, told me, hey, you need to get out of this class at the start of the semester. And I said, sir, please let me stay in this. He said, all right, you’ve been warned. And I come to find out the end of the semester I got the highest grade in there. And that was maybe the Lord telling me, or faith that, hey, you need to be a… you’re on the right thing in history here. So I did that, and that really set me on the path and then really just focused on what I need to do to work hard, get organized, get serious, and not be that country boy from the La Ward, Texas, but be the man I’m going to become here in College Station and get ready to get out into the world.

Ben Wiggins:
That took you then on a path to becoming the corps commander. As corps commander, you faced a significant leadership challenge involving serious allegations, heavy media scrutiny. How did you navigate that, and what did it teach you?

John Sherman:
So in the fall of 1991, when I was starting my tenure as corps commander, about a month into the semester, there was an allegation of a sexual assault of a female cadet at the Fiddler’s Green, where Parsons Mounted Cavalry is. Now, we would find out later that the incident had not occurred, but we didn’t know that at the time, and it brought out a flood of allegations, some very old or historic and some more recent, that about the Corps, integration of female cadets, and problems there in. And we knew this was going to be coming, but the level of scrutiny we were going to be getting. I was on CNN, local news, New York Times, Texas Monthly, and often without a lot of public affairs support and so on. And it taught me, one, to think about what you’re going to say in a public setting and also to navigate a tough bureaucratic situation, because, frankly, at the time we were getting support from the corps commandant, but up the chain, not so much. And I ended up going over to the Association of Former Students and saying, we need help here. And by goodness, they came to our assistance. And it really put an end to this. And I must say, my now-wife, who was a journalist at The Battalion, the student newspaper, helped uncover what was frankly, some misinformation coming out at great expense to herself. She held a press conference that ended a lot of the false allegations towards the Corps, but it cost her professionally and towards the end of her student experience here. But now, when she meets former students and others, they know what she did to help the Corps. But it was the two of us going over to the former student association and really rallying the cavalry. And I’ll tell you, Ben, there was a moment the morning after we had talked to them, leadership from the Association of Former Students came to Duncan Dining Hall, and we put them on the PA system, and they said, we’re here to help. And I kid you not, the Corps stood up and started singing a cappella The Spirit of Aggieland. It sounds cinematic but it happened. And you can ask cadets who were there. That’s really what being an Aggies about. And that’s what that incident taught me about. Don’t quit, just keep leaning in.

Ben Wiggins:
Brilliant. I’m very curious about meeting your wife in this way, what that relationship was like at first. She’s coming into a potentially adversarial situation. What were the early hours of that like?

John Sherman:
So when the story was first breaking on this, she came to the Corps of Cadets guard room, which is the reception headquarters area at the front of the quad there. And it was right after evening formation. I still had my boots on and my uniform and this, this very determined battalion reporter wearing a T-shirt, hair pulled back, notepad, was demanding a comment from the corps commander. I’ve been told not to talk about it and I said, ma’am, I can’t comment. She was very determined, dogged in getting after this and I just wouldn’t answer it. And then I said, ma’am, you have to leave. And I had the sergeant of the guard with the Smokey the Bear hat on escort her out very nicely. But then about three days later, the president of the university is holding a student leader luncheon at Rudder Tower. And I see this individual walk in and she has done up to the nines, hair done up full early 90s Texan suit and I walk over and I shake her and I said, hi, I’m John Sherman. I’m the core commander. And she said, I know we’ve met. And then that was that piece of that. But it was about a month later where she came to me and we met at the eating area of the MSC. Where Chick-fil-A and everything is now. And she said, John, I’ve got to tell you, there’s some bad stuff going on. Yeah, there’s some incidents that have happened historically, but there are elements that are trying to bring down the Corps of Cadets to injure funding and thinking the Corps holds too much sway over this university. And they’re trying to take you down and they’re making some of this stuff up. And that’s when I took her to go see the commandant and then others, and then finally walking across what is now Aggie Park. Now it was Spence Field back in the day, to the Clayton Williams Association of Former Students Building, and sitting down with Bill Youngkin, Randy Matson and Porter Garner and saying, we need help. And they brought that help. So that’s, and then that was our official interaction. I fell for her. And it was I knew she was getting death threats because of what she had done. And she graduated. She was a fifth-year senior. And it took me a while to get her attention. And I sent her flowers several months later. And just a heartfelt thank-you note wasn’t looking to take her out or whatever. I just said on behalf of The Texas Aggie Corps of Cadets, thank you. And then we went out after that and we got married a few months later.

Ben Wiggins:
Okay, so you send the flowers. And what was her response? How did how did that end up with you two going out?

John Sherman:
She was in such a tough place. And to have somebody thank her. And then, yeah, I had fallen for her. And then our first date was right over here off University, at one of the restaurants there. And then we fell for each other. And I knew because she had already graduated, she was a year ahead of me. And she’ll kick me if I say that when she’s around here. But no, she, I knew she was going to go off to the world. So I had my buddies help, my Corps buddies. When the Corps of Cadets Center was first opened, it didn’t have any displays in there, and I had her kind of tricked to coming in there. And we had a saber arch, and I escorted her down there and got engaged to her at Military Weekend.

Ben Wiggins:
That’s so cool.

John Sherman:
In March of 1992, and then in August, we were married. And that was 34 years ago, coming up in August this year.

Ben Wiggins:
Love that, love that. How did a history major end up with a career in intelligence and national security?

John Sherman:
So I went to the Army. And I became an Army officer. And I was actually back here at a football game. I’d been in the Army a couple of years at President, then President Bill Mobley’s house. The president’s house used to be where Aggie Park is now. And then there was a gentleman there who said, hey, did you ever think about working at the CIA? And I actually had and he said, you need to get a master’s degree and go to the reserves, and that’s a route to do this. And then I had always been one of my first books I really got into in high school was The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, and I had read about intelligence and not the glitzy James Bond stuff, but really what it’s about, and it really appealed to me. And then I got out of the service, did get a master’s degree, and I went to University of Houston at the time because there wasn’t a Bush School, and I got a master’s of public administration and got on with CIA. And then as what was called and is called an imagery analyst. Looking at satellite and other types of photos, aerial satellite photos, and looking at areas of the Mideast, when Saddam Hussein was still around, looking at armored formations in the desert and surface-to-air missile sites. But then the arc of my career, over time, I volunteered for things. On task forces dealing with budget, with cloud technologies, cybersecurity, working on satellite technologies. And I didn’t. I wasn’t an engineer, I didn’t have a STEM background, but I knew the right questions to ask and how to advocate and get things done. And that’s how I ended up as a technologist leading the largest IT enterprise in the world at the Department of Defense.

Ben Wiggins:
Along the way, you were serving in the Situation Room on 9/11, right? What do you remember about that day, and what were the days that followed like?

John Sherman:
Every moment, it was a Tuesday, it was crystal clear azure blue sky. It was almost a little crisp up in the Beltway. Got there on a normal Tuesday. I even remember the previous two nights Band of Brothers started on HBO. It’s funny what you remember on these things, and got in for our normal turnover at 6 a.m., and I was one of several duty officers. So, the night crew was coming off. We were the day crew. We do our turnover. What’s going on in the world overnight? We’re taking the day shift. And I was actually looking at Iraqi air defenses because my boss, Condoleezza Rice, knew that I knew about that. And asked me to look at some things. And I was actually when the first plane hit, I was getting a, we still used fax machines back then, a fax of what was going on on some targeting of Iraqi air defenses, in southern Iraq as part of the no-fly zone. And then what do I remember? And this is probably a much longer discussion. Everything. I remember Vice President Cheney being, his feet almost weren’t touching the ground. Secret Service rushing him into the bunker under the White House. Condoleezza Rice right behind him, the White House photographer, a tall man with his long-lens camera and my not knowing where to go, and my colleague almost grabbing him and helping him through the portal to the underground bunker before they sealed it, and then the White House being evacuated. And then us being told, get out, get out. There’s a plane headed for the Pentagon. And we looked around and realized if we had left, there would be communications lost between the White House and where the folks were in the bunker, and where President Bush was down in Sarasota, Florida. And we said, we’re not leaving. And they said, you all have to get out right now. And we said, no, we’re holding our post here. So the rest of the West Wing ladies’ shoes were on the floor, papers were on the floor, but we held our posts there. And then one of the senior officials who did stay behind Franklin Miller, he passed around a yellow notepad. He said hurry up and put your name on this. And we didn’t know what he was doing. We had folks on the phone. I was talking to Rudy Giuliani’s aide. I had him on one ear, and I had the military commanders on the other, and we put our name on this yellow notepad. And what we didn’t realize was he was faxing it over to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, so they would know who’s still above ground if the West Wing were hit. And it became known as the Dead List. And for time in memorial now, we’ve been known as the Dead List crew. And what we didn’t realize, the log from that day that we kept, they’ve kept in the Sit Room almost consistently in a drawer there, and they show new duty officers at about what a really bad day can look like. And that was one of many things we did. It was terrible. It was hectic. But I’ve never been prouder to be an American to see how we reacted afterwards. All of us were up early the next morning coming in and at CIA, and I think it’s still there at the Counterterrorism Center. There’s a sign that still hangs. It says every day is September 12th, and September 12th was the day we came together as a country. We cut through the red tape, the procurement nonsense, the hey, we’re not sharing with you. We’re coming together as a nation. And it was, it was tragic. It was terrible. But I’ve also been proud to see how we locked arms and also with our allies, with our whether they’re in the UK or Europe or Asia. We locked arms and proceeded. And that’s what I remember about that time. And it taught me about keep your head in a crisis and be resilient. Keep your head up, because body blows like that are tough to get through. But you can.

Ben Wiggins:
Thank you for sharing that. What were the other repercussions and outcomes of 9/11 for you and your family?

John Sherman:
One of the things that sticks out in my mind. So I’m in the White House. It’s planes have hit the trade towers. The Pentagon flight 93 has not yet crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. My wife is at a CIA intelligence facility in southeast Washington, and her boss comes in and says, all right, here’s what we know. The trade towers have been hit, the Pentagon has been hit, and the White House has been struck. And she forgot that Liz’s husband, me, was at the White House. Liz collapsed in tears and her boss forgot that, oh my God, her husband’s over there. And of course that was not the case, but she was terribly struck by that and she had to catch a ride home hours later. Neither of us could get home that day on time. The preschool teacher had to take our kids home, and we had to pick them up at her townhome in Manassas, Virginia. And after that, 9/11 truly changed our life. After that, my wife committed herself and she had already been working intelligence issues, but to counterterrorism and things like that. And I’ll tell you that a couple days after 9/11, we would collaborate on the classified systems, and she was working some things in Africa, and I can’t go into details, but she had a satellite image of something stunning. And I was looking at my computer and the head of counter-terrorism for President Bush looked over my shoulder and said, is that from your wife? Because he knew what she did. He said, send that to me immediately. And that night, I’m told after we came off shift, there was a poster-size picture of it being taken into the Situation Room to show President Bush. And so I was proud of my wife. And then years later, she would deploy with special forces to Iraq. She has done all kinds of things. She’s helped with hostage rescue, supporting that in Colombia. She has been all over Africa. She’s avoided suicide bombings in Africa, she’s been under artillery fire and rocket fire in Iraq. And I’m proud of her. And I just want that to be on the record here, that we’ve been a team on this throughout since 9/11.

Ben Wiggins:
Without a doubt yes. Thank you for sharing that on your wife. With that experience, with the things that you had learned on that day and many, many others you continued to rise to. You know, as you noted earlier, senior positions in the intelligence community. What did that path look like? Was it more linear for you or were there? Did there continue to be twists and turns?

John Sherman:
It was incredibly non-linear. If there, I’m trying to think of another metaphor or another synonym for non-linear. I’m one of the few people I’ve held senior rank in just about every way you can in the intelligence community. CIA defense intelligence officer, director of national intelligence. I go down the list there, and maybe part of it is because I would get bored is the wrong word, but I’m ready for another challenge. They would ask me to be on different task forces, and some people would be like, I don’t want to be on that cloud task force. I’d be like, all right, I’ll do it. I’ll learn about this cloud technology. But when you get that tap on the shoulder, when you when someone says, hey, we need your help putting the budget together. I’m not a budget person. I’m an intelligence person. Yeah, but that’s the most important thing we’re doing here, is getting this budget ready for submission to Congress and learning how that works and the intricacies of government budget processes. Learning about technology, testifying to Capitol Hill. And maybe one of the biggest was when I did get the call in the first Trump administration to go see Senator Dan Coats, who was the newly appointed director of national intelligence, and him interviewing me to be the intelligence community chief information officer over all, at the time, 17 agencies. There’s 18 now. And me telling him, sir, I’ve been an operational user of technology and yes, I’ve led some very big projects by that time in my career, but I’ve never been a CIO. And he says, John, that’s why we need you. And then I got the call, and next thing I know, I’m overseeing it’s classified, but hundreds of millions of dollars of budget. And then a few years later, it would be $60 billion when I would go to the Department of Defense, now, Department of War. And some of the biggest things I learned there, starting things is a big deal. When you start a new program, you get to advertise it or talk about a new cybersecurity initiative or new hiring initiative. Some of the biggest things I had to do were stopping things that had outlived their usefulness or becoming, as they say in the business schools, a Road to Abilene. Everybody thought everybody else wanted to do it, but no one actually wanted to do it. First thing I had to do was cancel a $500 million program and explain it to Capitol Hill and the constituencies I had to call the prime vendors. They were mad. The next biggest thing I had to do three years later, I canceled a $10 billion contract. And for a kid from La Ward, Texas when I would hear people talk about $1 million being a rounding number in the Beltway, I would get personally offended because I have high school and college colleagues whose families are on John Deere tractors. They’re working double tours at the DuPont plant outside Port Lavaca. They’re working in the oil field, million dollars is a lot of money, and we better be good stewards of it. So that’s a long arc of how I got from being a history major to a technologist.

Ben Wiggins:
During that time, you’ve mentioned a falling out with a boss, a confidant, a friend. Tell us about that.

John Sherman:
So I rose pretty quickly, I was a senior executive by my late 30s, and by age 41, I was assigned to be a deputy director of what’s called a directorate at one of the major intelligence agencies. Had about 4,000 analysts working for us there. My boss was the director at HIT, and we had known each other for years. We had served together on different special activities. She, I always got along well with her. We both kind of had similar sense of humor, but then being her deputy was a whole other sort of issue. And I found, and I’ve reflected on this different personality traits. I am an extroverted introvert. I can be very on during the workday, but I need to relax at night. And I didn’t realize how much she was an introvert introvert. Forgot what that is on the Myers-Briggs. But whereas I wanted to engage and collaborate and brainstorm, that made her uncomfortable, I think. And I think at the time to she may have been struggling with some personal things as well, but it created distrust, and I owned a lot of it too, to the point where she wasn’t talking much to me and I wasn’t talking much to her, and it just got to a point where I could tell that this wasn’t working, and I had to go to the agency director to ask to be reassigned. And I’ve reflected on that a lot. Now that reassignment actually set me back a bit, but I learned a lot. That’s when I did the budget activities, which turned out to be a godsend. But I’ve reflected that I could have handled that better. I could have been more thoughtful about her needs and how she acted or needed to perform, I should say. And it made me… Then later I was deputy several other times, and knowing how to be supportive, to be a leader when they’re not there, but not trying to usurp them and understanding that they’re the boss, and to stay in formation with them. Because being a deputy or a vice or a VP or whatever, it could be one of the hardest things to do. Being the boss is tough too, but being the number two or number three is pretty darn tricky as well. And that’s what I learned from that, and some really serious self-reflection.

Ben Wiggins:
Regarding canceling a half-billion-dollar and then a $10 billion contract. How do you find clarity and confidence in those moments when CEOs are giving, you’re getting angry phone calls from some of the most powerful people in the world. What do you do to stay the course?

John Sherman:
Do your homework. Make sure you get the key stakeholders on board. The first big cancellation when I had become the intelligence community CIO was already showing major cracks in the foundation. It was just having the moral courage. And also from my bosses to say this, we’ve lost altitude on this thing. It was a great idea when it was started, but we can’t do it. But in that one, even though half-billion-dollars is a heck of a lot of money, the ripple on that one didn’t reach out as far as I thought it would. There were some key prime contractors on that one and some others. It was tough though. I lost some personal friends on it. One of my mentors, who had become a consultant. Tried to talk to me at church about it, and I wouldn’t, and he never talked to me again for years. That was tough because people were losing money on that. But you’ve got to think back to the whole issue about you’re stewards of taxpayers’ money. And if it’s not going to help our men and women in uniform and the intelligence community and those who are putting their lives at risk and so on. Don’t do it. And it’s hard to cancel things in the government, not only intelligence, it could be other fields of anything that have major constituencies. The bigger one, the $10 billion one, did require me to call CEOs of major tech companies, names you would recognize, and to include the prime who had won it. I’ll just say it. It’s Microsoft calling Satya Nadella there. And he’s a good American. And to say this is for the good of the nation, that we have to do this and we’re going to have a new contract that’s going to be enjoined by all four of the hyperscalers Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. We’re going to get this thing out of litigation. It’s something that we don’t, we’re fighting on a hill we don’t need to fight on. It is something that we need to move past. And getting these CEOs then to work together and then move forward. And that took some. That’s something they don’t teach you. Maybe they do over here at Mays. I don’t have the privilege of having an MBA from the great school here. But these are unstructured problems. And you just have to reach down and figure out how to navigate it. And this is why EQ and learning maybe back to that falling out I had with that boss, maybe help me a little bit to work on my own approach my own EQ on how I would work on things like that. So that’s what I did. But a lot of homework went into it. I had to brief the secretary of defense on that one to get his buy in.

Ben Wiggins:
As a Mays MBA, I can say we are taught a lot of things. It’s an incredible education. There is not a course on how to cancel a contract with Microsoft. You’ve been appointed to positions by both a Democrat and a Republican president. What does that mean to you?

John Sherman:
To me, what I learned here at A&M is service is country first. And we’re in a very political environment right now. But maybe we have for our republic’s history too going back to the founding. But there’s a lot of politics. But when you’re asked to serve, you serve when you’re asked to step up, you put the partisanship aside. And I was privileged. What I was doing was technical, the cloud technology, the satellite communications, the nuclear command and control either worked or it didn’t. It was not a Republican or Democratic or Green Party or Independent way to do it. It either worked or it doesn’t. Now there are different priorities, different certainly personalities, different major policies. I had concerns on each side. I was never all in on either. But I also appreciated what each side did on some key things and not getting pulled into the politics of it, but to the extent, you can avoid it. But there were times on both that I had to hold a hard line on some things, but it was interesting. And as first being a Trump appointee and perhaps being an Aggie and maybe being, you know, driving a red Ford F-150 with Aggie stickers on it, and maybe seeming to fit in in that Republican administration, but then being asked by the Biden administration just to be at the undersecretary level, almost there and then standing out a little bit, maybe not being in that mold took me some getting used to, because in the Trump administration, I was maybe a little more typical of of appointees, the Biden side, maybe not so much, and getting used to making sure that they didn’t see me as someone trying to carry over politics from the previous side or whatever, but just getting the job done. And that’s successful. I’ll tell you a cancellation that $10 billion contract, major cloud contract called Jedi, and transitioning to a new contract that would later have a multi-billion dollar ceiling on it. But with all four of the vendors, I’ll tell you a little story on that one where we knew that this had been so contentious up in the Beltway, and I saw a news clip of my boss, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin being introduced at a luncheon or dinner. And the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob O. Work, introduced him and said, Lloyd, Austin, Lloyd, you finally got that Jedi cloud mess fixed and him getting a standing ovation in the luncheon or dinner. And I said, whoa. And that’s when I knew they were going to want to keep me around on that, among other things. So it took some getting used to. And just staying out of the most contentious culture war type issues is what I tried to avoid.

Ben Wiggins:
Sure. So on the subject of culture, you’ve gone through the Pentagon, the West Wing, the CIA. What are the cultures like in each of those places? And what might surprise our viewers, our listeners, about those things?

John Sherman:
The White House, regardless of administration, is, I don’t want to say workaholic center but it is, the hours people put in there, the intensity with which they come at their job. And this could be I was there at the end of the Clinton administration in a non-political capacity. Bush 43’s administration and the Situation Room. Of course, I’ve served in other capacities. It is intense. People are there to change the world. They’re working for the president. I’ll never forget the first day of the Bush 43 administration, when Condoleezza Rice gets in a small little auditorium and tells people something to the effect of, you work for the president now, you can rest later. I’m like, well, you better lace up your shoes and buckle your chin strap kind of thing. It’s going to be like that. But it’s intense. There’s intense emotion. There’s a lot of political as it would be. You know, there’s an administration that’s been elected by the American people in there. Intelligence is behind the scenes. People don’t claim credit. You’ll hear about things that maybe don’t go right or do or don’t go right. Just own it here. Whether it’s Iraq, WMD, weapons of mass destruction, or God forbid, a 9/11. But the victories, the capture of a terrorist, the stop of a weapons transshipment, the saving of an American embassy. You don’t hear about those things. There’s a mural at CIA when you walk in, in addition to where all the blue stars for the CIA officers who have lost their lives since 1947. But on the wall it says we go where others cannot go, and we do what others cannot do for the good of, for the safety of this nation. And wow, talk about a mission statement right there. And DOD, now Department of War, it’s about war fighting. It’s about making sure we can protect this country. There’s a lot of other things the Department of Defense does disaster support and Army military reserves, and National Guard, all these kind of things. But at the end of the day, it’s about keeping this country safe. And making sure that if challenged, if we have to do something, that we’re ready to do that in both in the intelligence community and the military. We never forget as we sit here and talk right now, there are men and women in harm’s way. They are out there on patrol, standing watch on 24/7 ready, readiness to go. They’re missing time with family. They’re missing time at home. They are committed. And we never forget those who have made an ultimate sacrifice and or lost limbs, lost sight or suffering silent injuries. So I tell you all this. It’s a culture. It’s a culture of service. And people that step up, they’re not doing it to make money. It’s not about that. It’s about this nation. And that’s what I’ve learned about being in those three places.

Ben Wiggins:
Thank you for sharing that. And thank you to each and every one of those people for keeping the darkness from the door, so to speak. What then inspired you to make perhaps your biggest pivot and lead the Bush School at Texas A&M?

John Sherman:
Being an Aggie and knowing what we’re about, as we say here, a force for good. And our core values of Respect, Excellence, Loyalty, Leadership, Integrity and Selfless Service. And everything that makes us who we are. Liz and I always knew we wanted to give back after we wrapped up our government careers. And then when I heard General Mark Welsh was becoming Texas A&M president, and then some friends called me and said, you ought to think about throwing your name in the hat, because we thought about coming back and maybe trying to help teach or do something, maybe help us center at RELLIS or something out at the facility. But this was perfect because one, President George H.W. Bush to me, exemplifies the sort of core value leadership of selfless service and patriotism and country over self. And then we had seen the graduates of the Bush School. Bush School was built after we graduated here, but running into Bush School graduates at CIA and Department of Defense and elsewhere and knowing the qualities of what they bring, and then being able to work with our great mix of faculty and staff. And we do have practitioners and career academics and amazing staff. We said that’s what we want to do. And I got to tell you, as you know, it’s been a pivot. I’ve used what I’ve learned in government, but academia is a bit different. But, you know, what’s not different is being an Aggie. And that connective tissue that goes back to when you were here, when I was here, the spirit. And yes, it’s standing all four quarters. And what’s going on in Kyle Field and Reed Arena. Silver Taps is still Silver Taps. Aggie Muster is still Aggie Muster. The Corps of Cadets still who we are. You walk up to the MSC and you see the hive of activity with students working at MSC or Student Government. That’s why we want to come back is to be part of that. And people can get cynical about what’s going on in the news and on social media. If you want to be rejuvenated, come to this campus. And I would say the Bush School. But for my friend Nate Sharp here and other deans, come to the Mays School here, go over to the engineering building, go to vet med across the street over here, see the young men and women who got to stand up and serve in industry and government, in business, in nonprofits, in medicine and law. And you will be motivated. So to do my little piece of the Bush School, that’s why I came back for that.

Ben Wiggins:
Well, thank you for doing so. You call yourself a lifelong learner. What does that actually look like for you in practice, as you’ve gone through all of these various and sundry experiences?

John Sherman:
One, getting over the issue of everybody has imposter syndrome, there’s something we’re all hopefully good at. I have to think I was a pretty decent satellite imagery analyst. I was good at finding things. Maybe it’s a good memory pattern analysis. I made some pretty decent finds in the 1990s in Iraq of things that have been missed for a while. That’s my happy place. But then learning how to be a Situation Room duty officer, how to then be a manager of intelligence analysts, then how to work on areas of different regions. Mideast was my area. Then learn about Latin America or Europe or North Korea and other areas that we need to look at. Then getting into other disciplines within the intelligence business, supporting homeland security, doing things like international partnerships, going over and working with allies and setting up new agreements and learning the cultural nuances of that and then going between agencies and organizations. I was on something called the National Intelligence Council, which is a senior-most analytical body doing what are called national intelligence estimates. I had to write and help lead one of the intelligence estimates on the Iraq insurgency that helped drive the surge in 2006 and 2007, when General Petraeus went in there and learning about all these different things. And then, all along being a lifelong learner is asking questions. A lot of people don’t know the answer in the room, but they’re too scared to raise their hand or be in a meeting going, hey, I don’t know what this acronym is. It takes courage and you can look foolish. But we see this on LinkedIn and elsewhere. It’s not the person who’s the smartest in the room. It’s the one who’s willing to learn or some variation there at hand. And for me, on STEM areas, I’ve worked with people. I had a partner of mine on satellite stuff who was a trained astronaut, and he would use terms like Molniya orbits and different modules on satellites. And I said, buddy, draw it out. Here’s an ink board. Draw me where a picture where this thing is on the satellite. And is the thing going to work the next time it comes around the Earth or not? I had to get a whiteboard in my office for a very smart engineer to help understand basically how a cloud works, how you move data between two clouds, how zero trust cybersecurity works, and then me being able to explain it to folks on Capitol Hill who are not cloud people, who are not cyber engineers and not software coders, and ask the questions and don’t be afraid. Courage. You know, there’s of course, physical courage. Police officers, soldiers, firefighters, other there’s moral courage holding your integrity, but there’s courage to be able to look, put it out there and look a little foolish, but it’s going to do better for you. And that’s the key to being a lifelong learner.

Ben Wiggins:
How has understanding your own personality, the way you’re wired, the way you learn, the things that you immediately understand well, and the things that you might not immediately understand well changed the, aside from bringing in the whiteboard, how has that changed the way you lead and work with others?

John Sherman:
Be prepared to grow, but also lean into your strengths as well and don’t feel like you have to do it just the way other people have to do it. I’m a discursive learner. I do not like long read-aheads for example. I like to sit down with an expert on quantum cybersecurity who may be far smarter than me, but sit and have an hour-long conversation with them and be able to have a Socratic dialog with them back and forth. Don’t be afraid of that. And even though in the Pentagon everything is read-aheads and PowerPoints say no, I want to sit around. I call them get smart sessions. And some other people do that too. But don’t demur from that type of learning and be willing to embrace that, because a lot of the time you’re going to go with what you think is the cultural pattern. And maybe you have to do that when you’re younger or earlier in your career. Another thing, like when I speak, now I don’t use notes. And when I became a CIO, I had to do a lot of public engagements because of the amounts of money we were dealing with and large conventions. And I would read my speech and say, according to whatever, we’re going to use a $2 billion, it was too button down, too whatever. Now I just walk around and talk, and if I can’t talk from the heart, then I’m not going to give a speech. I better be able to internalize it. And maybe I’ll have a little note card if there’s a fact or figure or something I need to make sure I nail. But embrace who you are. And here’s another big thing too and really about embracing who you are. One of the things if I could talk to a younger version of myself, I used to fear, oh my God, am I going to really misstep on something? Am I going to get fired from the Trump administration or the Biden administration or whatever? I should be looking, and I do now. Every day is an opportunity to do better. Not to oh I’m going to get boxed in or I’m going to get in trouble or a bad news story or whatever that may happen. But look to tomorrow. And that’s a whole paradigm shift that took me years to be able to embrace.

Ben Wiggins:
For that younger version of yourself or any student about to walk across the stage without a clear sense of what comes next, what one thing would you want them to hear?

John Sherman:
Well, there’s many, but I think the main thing is whatever you think you’re going to be doing when you walk across that stage at Reed Arena, I bet you in the course of one’s 30-plus-year career, when I hopefully am still around and I were to bump into him again. They may be in a completely different field or area, so be ready. That tap on the shoulder, that opportunity to do something different, to learn to be that lifelong learner. Be ready. And you may have mapped it out in your head that you’re going to be CEO of name the company ExxonMobil, or you’re going to be the CIA director. You’re going to be running United Way. Whatever you think you’re going to be doing, you may be doing something completely different, but you better be ready for that opportunity. That’s the main thing I’d get in their head, because when I walked across the stage at G. Rollie White Arena, I thought I’d be an Army officer and we’d be staring down what’s left of the Russian Federation and continuing to, you know, fight in the desert. I took a completely different career course, and here I am, and I’m glad I did.

Ben Wiggins:
Wonderfully stated. To sum it all up, what are your top lessons in leadership?

John Sherman:
My top lessons of leadership are. Be empathetic. Be kind if you can. You don’t know what somebody else is going through. Do be a lifelong learner. Get over imposter syndrome, hold true to your core values, and be yourself. Those would be my main leadership lessons.

Ben Wiggins:
Thank you for that.

John Sherman:
Thank you

Ben Wiggins:
Thank you Dean Sherman for sharing your lessons in leadership with us today on Aggie Legends. On behalf of Mays Business School, I’m Ben Wiggins. We hope you’ll subscribe to Aggie Legends and leave a review or a comment. It really helps others find the show. Here at Mays Business School, we’re building a better future through business and we thank you for being a part of it. And thank you, Dean Sherman, for joining us on Aggie Legends.

John Sherman:
Thanks so much. It’s been an honor to be here.

Ben Wiggins:
Our pleasure.