Just a few weeks before he became the nation’s highest diplomat, Tillerson was CEO of ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies on Earth. It was a position he had held for more than a decade, one that required him to supervise a highly complex organization with nearly 70,000 employees and an annual budget that routinely topped $40 billion, all while successfully conducting business the world over. In other words, by the time he accepted the offer to join the Trump Administration, the Fortune 10 CEO had already enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the private sector, a track record that had endowed him with the experience, expertise, and administrative excellence that one could assume would make him a highly capable, even accomplished, secretary of state.

Tillerson certainly seemed to think so, notwithstanding the fact that he hadn’t spent any time in diplomacy or, for that matter, government affairs. He had barely introduced himself to the career civil servants at Foggy Bottom before he concluded that the agency they staffed was a portrait of bureaucratic mismanagement. “We had very long-standing disciplined processes and decision-making, I mean highly structured, that allows you to accomplish a lot,” he told reporters in July of his time at ExxonMobil. “Those are not the characteristics of the United States government.”

Initially, career diplomats were not unreceptive to the idea that a successful CEO might draw on his experience in the private sector to help renovate the bureaucracy at State. “To a person, we felt the department was in need of reform,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year veteran diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told Bloomberg in the fall. They withdrew their welcome, however, when, in Thomas-Greenfield’s words, they came to “understand” that the goal of the new secretary of state “was not to improve the organization but to deconstruct it.”

Or “redesign” it, the term Tillerson favored and one he used interchangeably as a noun and verb. “We’re going to redesign,” he told State Department staff during a town-hall meeting in December. “We’re not going to reorg. Reorg is taking boxes and pushing some of them together this way and pushing some of them together that way and then say we’re done. But what I’ve learned over 41 and a half years is when you do that, if you look behind the box, nothing’s changed about the way the work gets done. People are still dealing with the same inefficiencies; they’re still dealing with the same frustrations, complexities. You didn’t address the work. You just addressed the boxes.”

Tillerson’s delight for the eye-glazing jargon of management consulting was a hallmark of his “redesign.” In a report submitted to Congress in August, he rhapsodically outlined “an evidence-based and data-driven process to enhance policy formulation and execution, as well as optimize and realign our global footprint.” Less attention was lavished on the fact that, in his relish for optimization and realignment, Tillerson was also making a virtue of budgetary necessity. Indeed, even before he had had a chance to evaluate the institution with which he was now entrusted, Tillerson had largely acceded to the White House’s stated goal of slashing the State Department’s budget by nearly a third, this notwithstanding the objections of Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Bob Corker, as well as the more than 120 retired admirals and generals who wrote a letter to Congress last February objecting to the cuts.