LSW#28 š”Soldiers, leaders, and asymmetry of consequences
This week Iām deviating from the usual melange of frameworks and models. My thoughts are not as developed as other posts, so please bear with me.
Honoring vs. celebrating
Yesterday it was Memorial Day in the US when we remember our fallen soldiers. Many countries have some version of it. Itās a sombre day, but one that often gets forgotten as another ālong weekendā and searching for deals in stores. Myself included.
Outside a restaurant, the sign said: āHappy Memorial Dayā. Honoring is one thing, but I am not sure if I would call it ācelebratingā.
In that spirit, below is something I thought worth sharing in the context of sacrifice and leadership. The excerpt is from The Thing You Think You Cannot Do by Gordon Livingston.
Heads up: The tone is sober, and some of his points might irk you. If you find yourself disagreeing or angered, use it as an exercise in patience, and to understand a differing viewpoint. If possible stay with the discomfort, instead of avoiding it. Use it to practice the ladder of inference that we discussed in a previous edition.
Every year when Memorial Day rolls around, I listen to the predictable statements of appreciation for the sacrifices of those who have died in our nationās wars. They relinquished their futures at our behest, and we are obligated to be grateful.
When I was in Vietnam (1968ā69), the first thing I noticed was that the actual fighting was done by the less than 20 percent of soldiers (āgruntsā) unfortunate enough to be assigned to the infantry or Marine rifle companies. There was, as I recall, little talk of freedom or democracy among them. The other 80 percent of our troops (REMFs) were busied driving trucks, maintaining PX facilities, sitting around some headquarters, or working as lifeguards at the Long Binh swimming pool. Now they are all Vietnam veterans whom we are expected to honor.
Another important discovery I made at war was that, in a combat unit, what separates the dead from the survivors is not courage but luck. The person who took the AK-47 round, stepped on the mine, bled to death before the medevac arrived was random. So when I look for a familiar name on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, I do so with an appreciation for the power of chance. When I stand back far enough that I can see the entire black granite wall with its fifty-eight thousand names, the following questions cross my mind: What the hell was that for? What is here for the families of these men, the parents with fading memories, the grown children with no memories at all? Is my freedom more secure because of these sacrifices to the god of unintended consequences? How big a wall would it take to list the two million Vietnamese, north and south, killed while we were there?
What we owe our veterans, living and dead, is the truth. For their losses (and our own) cannot be redeemed with sanctification or hyperbolic remembrance. It is easy to wax sentimental each Memorial Day about our unforgotten heroes. But if all we do is put on American Legion hats and lay wreaths and enshrine the memories of our unlucky countrymen, we miss the opportunity to learn something from their fates. Something about what happens when patriotism is equated to support for the latest military adventureāand who pays the price.
Since Vietnam, we have had Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic, Beirut, Somalia, the 100-hour walkover in the Persian Gulf, the twenty-first-century adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the families of the men (and now women) lost in these places find themselves grateful and at peace with their sacrifices? I wish it were so, but I doubt it.
Sentimentality is a popular form of untruth. One example is the creation of heroes. Who better to nominate than those who have died defending the nation and its values? To bring out the flags and remember them once or twice a year seems little enough to ask of ourselves in the face of what they have lost.
The problem with this ceremonial remembrance for me is that it seems self-indulgent. We cannot repay the families of our lost soldiers, families who must find consolation apart from the ceremonial remembrance of those who do not share their sacrifices. Rather than simply honoring the men and women we have lost, we are celebrating the notion that we live in a world in which we resolve conflicting ideas about how to live only by force. We tell ourselves that each military undertaking is required because some valueāliberty, democracyāis threatened and must be defended. The instruments of such defense are the sons and daughters who are willing to hazard their lives if their country asks them to.
Next Memorial Day, before you join in romantic reverence for the dead with its implied willingness to add to that number, I ask you to think again about the cost, not of liberty, but of misjudgment. I would not wish on you my own memories of young men who, at the end, could only call for their mothers as their lives leaked away far from home.
ā Gordon Livingston
My takeaways
While they donāt necessarily map one-to-one, below are some themes that stood out to me, and how they play out in the ānormalā world of companies and careers.
Consequences
When leaders make decisions, it has consequences. It could be as āsmallā as laying off one person, or as consequential as an entire nation going to war. There is no escaping this dynamic in leadership.
You cannot not communicate, and you cannot not act. Even inaction ā maintaining the status quo ā is a decision in itself, that has consequences.
In the world of corporate training programs and LinkedIn infographics, leadership often turns into a hallowed term which we all aspire for. The reality is that it can be grinding, one that comes with choices you have to live with. Especially when things donāt go per plan.
Many of the thorniest issues that clients struggle with in my coaching, often have to do with an unwillingness to accept their own role in, or the associated consequences of, an impending decision. Aka choice. The sooner you acknowledge and exercise it, the more effective you become.
Luck and chance
We like to celebrate success, frequently forgetting the role that chance played in it, both good and bad. In corporate setups, itās easy to think of higher-ups as smarter or intelligent than others. This is a clear case of the halo effect, fundamental attribution error, survivorship bias, and a whole host of mistaken thinking.
In short, donāt give too much credence to workplace achievement. Itās not as logical and causal as we are taught to believe. But paradoxically, this also means, you have an equal shot.
Grappling with truth
Reality is hard to face, especially in direct face-to-face contact with human beings. Ask the manager whoās had to lay off people in person. Itās why companies these days lay you off by email, not extending even basic human courtesy.
Corporate environments are often designed to hide the basic realities of human nature.
Itās done through skillful use of language which we donāt even realize, or question. Layoffs are āre-languagedā as streamlining for efficiency for example. You can find a whole host of these terms that repackage the nature of unvarnished truth.
Sentimentality as untruth
Politicians are guilty of this all the time. But so are company leaders.
It reminded me of the tech CEO who posted a video of himself crying after a round of layoffs. If he was, in fact, genuinely shaken up, why was he recording it? He clearly had the presence of mind to time it, record it, and then post it online. And to what end?
It would have been much harder for him to genuinely confront and admit his own role in having to lay off hundreds.
Cost of misjudgment, & asymmetry of loss
Politiciansā rhetoric masks the fact that many wars are fought purely due to misjudgment, or worse, fragile egos, rather than ādefending libertyā as they are prone to claim.
The corporate version of this is upholding āshareholder interestsā. A common pattern is of CEOs taking credit when things are going well, but blaming it on external conditions when it goes south. Study any annual report, and you can see this pattern.
What gets masked in all the rhetoric is the lack of prudence in executive decision-making, and more importantly the asymmetry of loss.
The soldier gives his life, while the leaders back home get to āpivotā their agenda. In the corporate world, someone lost their living and often identity, while the CEO takes a ācutā in their bonus.
People as resources
The notion of human beings as resources and instruments is much more prevalent in standard corporate thinking ā think resources, overhead, fixed costs etc. In the armed forces, at least this is acknowledged and recognized up front. But in the corporate world, itās often disguised.
The worst offenders are the ones who call themselves āfamilyā. Families donāt cut you off when things get rough. Corporations are not families, and pretending it as otherwise misleads everyone. If they do make that claim, they need to act like one.
Leaderās Library
The āleadershipā genre is the last place you should look to learn about leadership. What are some better alternatives? History is a good place to start.
šBooks: The Guns of August, and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman.
Tuchmanās books are required reading in the US Armed Forces for a reason. For example, many of the events leading up to World War I look petty in hindsight. But more than a century later, things more or less are the same, and probably worse.
Thatās it for this edition. Have a great week!