Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller was awarded the Medal of Honor on Wednesday.
Sgt. Miller’s unit was ambushed by a group of about 100 insurgents in the Gowardesh Valley of Afghanistan on January 25, 2008. Miller’s unit was pinned down and exposed to devastating fire.
By the way, the award was posthumous; Sgt. Miller was killed in the firefight.
Also the quote of the day:
“…I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.”
—Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Question for you leaders out there: how do your people go home at the end of the day?
But I believe President Obama has done something right.
Back during the Vietnam war, there was a four-star general in the Air Force named John D. Lavelle. In 1972, he was accused of ordering unauthorized bombing missions in North Vietnam, and of trying to cover up those missions. General Lavelle denied the charges, and claimed the missions were authorized; however, he was demoted and forced to resign anyway.
Lavelle died in 1979, but insisted in interviews that the missions were authorized, and that he was acting on the orders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Yesterday, President Obama asked the Senate to restore General Lavelle’s missing star, which would effectively (in my humble opinion, and in the opinion of the WP) restore General Lavelle’s honor.
The president’s decision is based on evidence uncovered by Aloysius Casey, a retired general, and his son, Patrick, who were researching a biography of another Air Force general. In the process of their research, they found documents showing that, yes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew of and authorized the missions.
Even more damning, they found audio recordings showing that President Nixon also ordered and knew of the missions, and actually dithered about whether or not to throw General Lavelle under the bus.
By way of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, we have discovered The American Scholar‘s reprint of a speech given by William Deresiewicz at West Point in October.
Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
…
Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
Go. Read.
One piece of writing that changed the way I thought is Seth Godin’s “Why Are We Willing To Tolerate Bullies?” essay in Fast Company issue number 41. If you have not read that essay, I commend it to your attention.
That essay is the first thing I thought of when I read this entry in the “Diner’s Journal” blog at the NYT: “Why I Got Kicked Out of a Restaurant on Saturday Night” by Ron Lieber. The short version: Mr. Lieber and his party sat down to dine, and were treated to the chef loudly berating one of his staff members. After this went on for a while, Mr. Lieber went into the kitchen and informed the chef that he was disrupting the dining experience, as well as being a bully, and asked the chef to stop. The chef responded by asking Mr. Lieber and his party to leave.
My reaction is that Mr. Lieber did the right and noble thing; he stood up to a bully. I would expect people to be backing him up. Instead, many of the comments at the NYT site seem to take the chef’s side, talking about the kitchen being “sacred” space, or making Gordon Ramsey comparisons.
The kitchen is sacred space, and Mr. Lieber shouldn’t have entered? No, not when I’m paying for the dining experience, and you’re disrupting it. Once what goes on in your “sacred space” overlaps into my space, you’ve lost any right you have to privacy.
Yes, kitchens are rough places to work, as Anthony Bourdain will tell you. But he’s also made it clear that there’s a difference between normal kitchen behavior, where people blow up at each other and get over it in a few minutes, and this kind of pathological yelling at staff.
Gordon Ramsey does it? Maybe he does; all most of us have seen is his TV persona, and I’ve seen damn little of that. I’ll tell you something else about Gordon Ramsey, though. Bourdain tells a story about what happened when Ramsey quit one of the restaurants he was working in; the entire staff quit. Not just the back-of-the-house kitchen staff who were closest to Ramsey, but the entire front of the house staff as well. Can you inspire that kind of loyalty in your staff? Then maybe you can get away with yelling at them like Ramsey.
When we tolerate bullying behavior, even if it’s just putting up with a chef yelling in a restaurant, we’re moving down a slippery slope. One day, it’s just someone yelling at his staff. But tolerate that long enough, and eventually you’re tolerating prosecutors and judges trying to railroad innocent defendants. At some point, we need to draw a line and stand up to the bullies. And we need to backstop each other when we do.
Well done, Mr. Lieber. Shame on you, Marc Forgione.
(Hattip: Mom for the NYT article. Popehat has the best short summary I’ve found of the Tonya Craft trial, with plenty of links to other coverage. Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog has been on the case as well.)
At Half-Price Books not too long ago, I found Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil
There’s a rather striking paragraph in one of the essays, “Some Aspects of Travel”. Kipling’s talking about why some men seem to be able to inspire impossible efforts from people everyone else considers to be no-accounts, while other men couldn’t motivate a hand-picked crew of highly skilled individuals to organize a piss-up in a brewery.
A man was asked some time ago why he invariably followed a well-known man into most uncomfortable situations. He replied: ‘All the years I have known So-and-so, I’ve never known him to say whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well; but I’ve never known him forget a man who was.’ Here is another reply to a similar question about another leader, who was notoriously a little difficult to get on with. One of his followers wrote: ‘So-and-so is all you say and more; and he grows worse as he grows older; but he will take the blame of any mistake any man of his makes, and he doesn’t care what lie he tells to save him.’ And when I wrote to find out why a man I knew preferred not to go out with another man whom I also knew, I got this illuminating diagnosis: ‘So-and-so is not afraid of anything on earth except the newspapers. So I have a previous engagement.’ In the face of these documents, it looks as though self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robust view of moral obligations go far to make a leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted.
You tend to attract what you put into the world, and every second you spend being a dick is a second wasted. I’m 37, and while I’ve looked back on times I was a dick with great regret, I’ve never thought to myself, “You know, I really wish I’d spent more time being a dick to people.”
Gregory Powell was denied parole for the 11th time a few weeks ago.
That name doesn’t ring a bell, does it?
In 1963, Powell and his buddy Jimmy Lee Smith kidnapped LAPD Officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and murdered Officer Campbell. Officer Hettinger died in 1994. Smith died a few years ago.
Sound a little more familiar now? Maybe you’ve read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field
At some point in the not-too-distant future, I want to write a longer post about Wambaugh’s book and what it means to me. I’ll say for now that, at the time I read it, I was deeply moved; I still think that it is Wambaugh’s best work of non-fiction to date.
There’s a section of the book that takes place after Officer Campbell’s murder that I want to call out here. The background is that, after the murder, LAPD issued a new set of policies; among other things, cops were told never to surrender their weapons under any circumstances. Wambaugh tells us (in the third person) how he reacted to these policies. Then he cuts away to another roll call in Central Division, where
a twenty-five year policeman who preferred the one-man beat, a virtuosic beat cop, one of those who fades into police myth and legend, who rules his beat, and is frequently the very best or very worst police work has to offer
stands up and says one word:
(Language after the jump.)
Today’s example is also taken from Clear and Present Danger.
Jack Ryan is visiting his dying mentor, Admiral Greer, in the hospital for the last time.
“But what about—”
“Politics? All that shit?” Greer almost laughed. “Jack, you know, when you lay here like this, you know what you think about? You think about all the things you’d like another chance at, all the mistakes, all the people you might have treated better, and you thank God that it wasn’t worse. Jack, you will never regret honesty, even if it hurts people. When they made you a Marine lieutenant you swore an oath before God. I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.”
That quote’s heavy-handed enough that I think the lesson is obvious. But I find the simplicity of those last few words deeply moving.
Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.
I think American business would be vastly improved if everyone, before they took on any sort of leadership position, was required to swear an oath before God. Maybe something like this:
I’m drawing my text today from Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger.
I know that it’s trendy to sneer at Clancy. I haven’t read any of his fiction except Clear and Present Danger and The Hunt for Red October, both of which I thought were pretty spiffy thrillers. For all I know, his more recent works of fiction could be steaming piles. I have read a fair amount of his recent non-fiction military history interview books (Shadow Warriors, Every Man a Tiger, and Into the Storm) and I admire what I think Clancy is trying to do with those books; basically, he wants to be the S.L.A. Marshall of our generation.
This is getting slightly off-topic. What I’m getting at is, I’m not a blind admirer of Clancy, but Clear and Present Danger is a book that made a strong impression on me.
Here’s the background for this exchange. It comes from Chapter 1 of the book, “The King of SAR”. Clancy is drawing a character portrait of his heroic Coast Guard commander, “Red” Wegener. He’s already given us some of the character’s background, and how he came to command the Panache. The Panache is a pretty screwed-up new ship; the shipyard workers are on strike, the shipyard is bankrupt, and the process of commissioning the ship was badly botched. One of the first things Wegener’s told after taking command is that they can’t get more than 50% power out of the ship’s engines without them overheating.
Wegener manages to sneak the ship out of dock and out to sea, and puts his men to work fixing what’s been screwed up.
Wegener had been on the bridge, napping in his leather chair during the forenoon watch when the growler phone rang, and Chief Owens invited him to the engine room. Wegener arrived to find the only worktable covered with plans, and an engineman-apprentice hovering over them, with his engineering officer standing behind him.
“You ain’t gonna believe it,” Owens announced. “Tell him, sonny.”
“Seaman Obrecki, sir. The engine isn’t installed right,” the youngster said.
“What makes you think that?” Wegener asked.
The big marine diesels were of a new sort, perversely designed to be very easy to operate and maintain. To aid in this, small how-to manuals were provided for each engine-room crewman, and in each manual was a plastic-coated diagram that was far easier to use than the builder’s plans. A blow-up of the manual schematic, also plastic-coated, had been provided by the drafting company, and was the laminated top of the worktable.
“Sir, this engine is a lot like the one on my dad’s tractor, bigger, but-”
“I’ll take your word for it, Obrecki.”
“The turbocharger ain’t installed right. It matches with these plans here, but the oil pump pushes the oil through the turbo-charger backwards. The plans are wrong, sir. Some draftsman screwed up. See here, sir? The oil line’s supposed to come in here, but the draftsman put it on the wrong side of this fitting, and nobody caught it, and-”
Wegener just laughed. He looked at Chief Owens: “How long to fix?”
“Obrecki says he can have it up and running this time tomorrow, Cap’n.”
“Sir.” It was Lieutenant Michelson, the engineering officer. “This is all my fault. I should have-” The lieutenant was waiting for the sky to fall.
“The lesson from this, Mr. Michelson, is that you can’t even trust the manual. Have you learned that lesson, Mister?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Fair enough. Obrecki, you’re a seaman-first, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wrong. You’re a machinist-mate third.”
“Sir, I have to pass a written exam…”
“You think Obrecki’s passed that exam, Mr. Michelson?”
“You bet, sir.”
“Well done, people. This time tomorrow I want to do twenty-three knots.”
And it had all been downhill from there. The engines are the mechanical heart of any ship, and there is no seaman in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. When Panache had made twenty-five knots and held that speed for three hours, the painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened their bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower – all the more so because one of their own had figured it out.
Here’s what I take away from this:
(Side note: I have at least one, and possibly two, more posts in this series planned out, plus one post that doesn’t involve a fictional character. If any of my loyal readers has suggestions for additional works of fiction that illuminate good points about leadership, I’d welcome hearing from you; either in comments or via email to stainles [at] mac.com.)
Some of the best lessons in leadership I’ve learned have come from works of fiction. I’ve been thinking a lot more about leadership recently, for various reasons, and decided it was time to kick off this irregular series of posts.
My mind was made up by something a person (who shall remain nameless for the moment) said to me yesterday in conversation (in case it isn’t clear, they were being sarcastic):
Management is a priestly caste. You can’t possibly expect them to soil their hands doing the same work as their underlings. That would make them unclean. That would be like expecting Pelosi’s brood to fly commercial rather than take Air Force planes.
I thought for my first post I’d draw from one of my favorite books and movies, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs.
Here’s the background for this exchange: Jack Crawford, head of the FBI Behavioral Science Section, took Clarice Starling, the trainee agent, with him to West Virgina to do forensics on one of Buffalo Bill’s (the serial killer Crawford and Starling are hunting) victims. While they were there, Crawford did a sort of shuck and jive routine about “giving the little woman some privacy” to clear the room so Starling could work. Now they’re coming home from the trip; Crawford is being dropped off at FBI headquarters for the night.
She realized then that he’d gotten her out of the car so he could speak with her privately.
“When I told that deputy he and I shouldn’t talk in front of a woman, that burned you, didn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“It was just smoke. I wanted to get him by himself.”
“I know that.”
“Okay.” Crawford slammed the trunk and turned away.
Starling couldn’t let it go.
“It matters, Mr. Crawford.”
He was turning back to her, laden with his fax machine and briefcase, and she had his full attention.
“Those cops know who you are,” she said, “They look at you to see how to act.” She stood steady, shrugged her shoulders, opened her palms. There it was, it was true.
Crawford performed a measurement on his cold scales.
“Duly noted, Starling. Now get on with the bug.”
“Yes sir.”
She watched him walk away, a middle-aged man laden with cases and rumpled from flying, his cuffs muddy from the riverbank, going home to what he did at home.
She would have killed for him then. That was one of Crawford’s great talents.
What do I take away from this?
The movie does include this exchange; Demme’s direction of it is pitch-perfect. If I could find it on YouTube, I’d link to it.
Speaking of fighter aces, someone needs to do a full-blown biography of Brigadier General Robin Olds (USAF, ret.).
The first chapter of John Darrell Sherwood’s Fast Movers
Two quotes from Sherwood’s book stand out for me:
Olds’ tremendous success as a combat leader stemmed from three elements in his personality; his loyalty to his men, his desire to share danger with his men, and his willingness to socialize and interact casually with his troops. Olds never asked someone else to do something that he wouldn’t do himself. He also did his utmost to shield his men from policies and orders that he considered nonsensical or downright dangerous.
and
Unlike many other leaders during the war, Robin Olds’ loyalty extended down to the lowest-ranking man in his outfit. Even if one were only a slick-wing captain, if one had a hot idea Olds would listen, and if one could sell him on that idea, Robin Olds would put his career on the line to see it implemented. Moreover, Olds did not come into the outfit thinking he knew everything. He was willing to learn from others. More significantly, he was willing to share danger with others. That he occasionally made mistakes is evident in this narrative. That his men forgave him when he did had everything to do with his willingness to share risk. Not once in his entire career did Robin Olds ever ask a pilot to do something that he would not do himself.