Of Mutiny and Education

Cover of The Caine Mutiny (Collector’s Edition)

 

Growing up one of my favorite books was The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. He wrote it shortly after the Second World War and it was pretty much his first best-seller.

It tells the story of Willie Keith a pampered young man, and a bit of a momma’s boy, as he joins the Navy during the war, and becomes a pretty good officer. Like everybody coming out of officer’s school he wants to be on a shiny new battleship or aircraft carrier, but he’s assign to the Caine, a rusty old 4 pipe destroyer now converted to a destroyer minesweeper. He’s pretty surly, and has a lot of trouble adapting to serving in a ship that looks like a wreck, and he therefore runs afoul of his CO, Captain de Vriess, usually over silly stuff.

He does notice though, that while it seems to him that a lot of Naval Regulations get ignored the Caine is always where it needs to be to do the job. He credits this to the executive officer, Steve Maryk, who before the war was a fisherman. But he still longs for the spit and polish navy of his dreams. When the Captain is promoted out, he is overjoyed to find that the new captain is a spit and polish and follow all the regulations guy. Funny part is that it doesn’t work all that well, and morale gets very bad. Eventually the ship is caught, along with the rest of the 3d Fleet, in a typhoon off Okinawa, and they are having a great deal of trouble with the ship.

Finally the Exec relieves the captain and turns the bow into the wind, with Keith concurring presumably saving the ship at the cost of a mutiny. Following on this the ship is off the line while Maryk is court-martialed for Mutiny. Keith ends up with a letter of reprimand and command of the ship with orders to return to the east coast after the war so the ship can be scrapped.

It’s a good yarn, and I recommend it highly, and like all good yarns it has a moral.

At some point on of the other officers tells Keith the secret:

“The navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.”

Think about that for a while. Isn’t that pretty much what any large organization is? If it works at all, a large organization doesn’t necessarily have to be efficient but, it cannot be allowed to fail (in the organization’s terms) in any catastrophic way. In the Navy’s case, it must win battles. It doesn’t have to promote the best man, it doesn’t even have to keep everybody alive but, It must win battles and the war. That is it’s whole reason for being.

If you’ve ever been around the military, you know there are at least 4 ways to do anything, 1) The right way; 2) The wrong way; 3) The Navy way; and 4) my way, and that comes from experience. What Capt. de Vriess was doing along with LT Maryk was doing what had to be done to remain operational while ignoring most of the rest, and it worked very well as long as they had people who understood the goals and aspirations of their unit (The Caine).

So what is my point, other than a book review of a book published in about 1948? This is how all large organizations act if they are more concerned about something other than executing their mission. They write all the details down so that a computer can do every job, but nobody has any allowance for common sense.

Sound familiar?

To me it sound a lot like suspending a kindergarten student for eating his Pop-tart into the shape of a gun and saying “bang”. Not to mention a lot of the other stories that come out of American life lately.

Mark Esposito, writing on Jonathon Turley’s blog has thought and written about this as well, and done a better job of researching it than I have, here is some of his thinking

In Maryland, a seven-year-old boy is suspended from his school under its “zero tolerance” policy because he nibbles a pastry into the shape of a handgun and says “Bang!” “Bang!” (Here).  In California,  a high school principal refuses to let an ambulance come onto a football filed to tend to a seriously injured player citing school board rules. (Here). A nurse at a home for the aged ignores the furtive pleas of a 911 dispatcher and refuses to perform CPR on a woman dying of cardiac arrest because she says its policy not to do it.  (Here). She won’t even get someone else to do it.

These grotesque examples of indifference to any form of reason are becoming all too common as we find ourselves governed more by rules than by the judgment of people.  These stories got me thinking about the need for rules in a complicated society and their limitations. It also got me wondering why wisdom and its country cousin, common sense, have been banished from most every discussion of decision making. Here’s John Maynard Keynes in his famous treatise on decision making, Treatise of Probability, discussing how to make the right decision:

If, therefore, the question of right action is under all circumstances a determinate problem, it must be in virtue of an intuitive judgment directed to the situation as a whole, and not in virtue of an arithmetical deduction derived from a series of separate judgments directed to the individual alternatives each treated in isolation.

Armed with that little tidbit, I searched the entire work and found exactly zero uses of the word “wisdom” in Professor Keynes’ detailed analysis of doing the right thing. How can that be?

Wisdom is a an old-fashioned word. It hearkens back to Solomon and Solon. To Plato and Socrates. Aristotle explained that practical wisdom is one part moral will and one part moral skill. It means a human action premised on experience or intuition that achieves the best possible moral result.  Not efficient. Not effective. Not even the most profitable. But the most moral result.

At its core, it is about the time and thought necessary to achieve deep understanding.  Both are in short supply these days as we measure our progress by how far we’ve gotten or by how much we have obtained and how fast we did it. The process by which we achieved these things is less important that the result. And it is this philosophy that has laid waste to ethics, judgment, and most importantly wisdom. In this race to “Just Win Baby,” we have ossified our capacity for wisdom under a steady stream of rules, regulations, guidelines, and protocols. But why?

Speaking at a TED conference in 2009, Professor Barry Schwartz examined the problem and offered an explanation in the context of a study done of hospital janitors. Schwartz looked at the job descriptions of  the janitors.  The explanations of employment were big on such rudimentary tasks as cleaning, restocking, and sanitation, but not one mention of anything involving human interaction. As professor Schwartz remarked “the job could just as easily have been done in a mortuary as in a hospital.” But that assessment did not match what the janitors considered the most important aspect of their jobs. In responses to questioning from researchers, one janitor, Mike,  explained the most important thing about his job was caring for patients. Like the time he stopped mopping a floor because Mr. Jones was finally up and around from surgery and had just left his bed to get some exercise.  Another custodian,  Charlene, told of ignoring the orders of a supervisor to vacuum the visitors lounge because family members of a patient who dutifully arrived every day to be with their loved one were finally getting a chance to take a nap.  And, Luke, who scrubbed the floor of a comatose patient’s room twice because the emotionally drained father at the bedside didn’t see it the first time and insisted it be done. No argument. No rebuttal. No peevishness of any sort. Just compassion. [..]

Continue reading Shackling Our Wisdom With Rules

Do you see his point? It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Or is it?

Let’s take the schools for an example. What is the mission of a public school?

Is it:

1. To educate our young in the basics they need to survive?
2. To indoctrinate our young to be dependent on government all their life?
3. To provide jobs for teachers
4.  To provide jobs for administrators
5. To provide union dues for union leadership
6. To provide union dues for political lobbying

Or some combination.

Maybe that is part (maybe even a large part) of the problems we see in our society, is the mission of the organization what we think it is, or has it mutated into something that was not anticipated.

How do we, if this is the problem, get these organizations back to their original mission?

Related articles

 

• Shackling Our Wisdom With Rules (jonathanturley.org)
• Herman Wouk Bucks Literary Trends to Produce Best-Selling Novels (wnyc.org)
• His Queeg Moment (redneckmormon.wordpress.com)

 

Pearl Harbor Day

71 years ago today, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor. We were thus thrust onto center stage of the 20th Century’s biggest conflict and the most clear-cut war for liberty in the history of the world. It’s a day to remember the sacrifices made by that generation, who are now leaving us at a very rapid pace. They saved the world for freedom, this would be a very good day to thank them. In this video, I want you to listen to resolve of Franklin Roosevelt, in it you will learn much about leadership in a free country.

This is how an American President responds to an attack on the homeland.

The Arizona at Pearl Harbor: Image via Wikipedia

We all know (or should) that behind them the Japanese attackers left 2,403 dead, 188 destroyed planes and a crippled Pacific Fleet that included 8 damaged or destroyed battleships. One of them the USS Arizona is still there, minus her hull, still to this day leaking oil, and designated as both an American Military Cemetery and the Pearl Harbor Memorial.

The Japanese fleet also left behind it the most implacable foe there is, the determined and united people of the United States. ADM Halsey’s comment is an indicator: “When this war is over, Japanese will be spoken only in Hell”. It nearly came to that. The casualty projections for the invasion of Japan ran to over 1 Million American casualties only, the only other alternatives were for the Navy to starve the entire country while the Air Force burned it down. Every American (and Japanese) should thank their God for the Atom Bomb for this was the future it prevented. And as the Confederate Air Force has said: “There would have been no Hiroshima without Pearl Harbor”.

It probably should be noted that nearly the entire Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, and Royal Australian Navy, as well as the US Atlantic Fleet were in the process of joining the US Pacific fleet, which had long since become (by far) the most powerful fleet in the history of the world. Also transhipping were the Allied armies that had defeated Nazi Germany. Götterdämmerung had come for the Japanese as it had for the Germans before them. The implacable free people of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, the Philippine Islands, and even Soviet Russia had made the world (mostly) free, again.

We live in a world shaped by tragedies inflicted on the United States, 9/11 has been very influential in our lives but, Pearl Harbor is even more so. It taught us again that freedom is never free, if we don’t defend it, it will pass as it did, for a time, for many of our allies. It also taught us that when America leads anything is possible.

The Surrender in Tokyo Bay: Image via Wikipedia

The Pacific Campaign was marked by a series of terrible battles in some of the most inhospitable of climates. Who can forget the battles that followed Pearl Harbor: Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea, The Mitchell raid, Corregidor and the Bataan Death march, Midway, the Marianas, Tarawa, the Liberation of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and the flag, Okinawa, and that final scene in Tokyo Bay, where MacArthur and Wainwright accepted the Japanese surrender on the deck of one of the most powerful battleships ever built: The USS Missouri.  All of this happened in only 44 Months.

Image via Wikipedia

People my age knew the men who fought all those battles, they were our heroes. Combat may not have been realistic but it fired our admiration. Ensign George Gay, the sole survivor of Torpron 8 at Midway, grew up about 10 miles from where I did. They deserve our memories today, because 71 years ago they started the counterattack that built the free (and mostly peaceful) world we have known all our life. We seldom remember that the Pax Americana has mostly held since 1945, we owe a debt to those men (and women), our parents (and mostly grandparents now) that we will never be able to repay except by keeping the peace and freedom they won.

Related articles

• National WWII Museum Observes 70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor with Special Line-up of Events (prnewswire.com)
• Remember (pacificislandparks.com)
• Archival photos reveal horror of the Pearl Harbor on 70th anniversary of the attack (news.nationalpost.com)
• Pearl Harbor survivor helps identify unknown dead (news.yahoo.com)
• Remembering Pearl Harbor (givemeliberty01.com)
• Photos: Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 (photos.denverpost.com)
• A Pearl Harbor veteran remembers the horror (miamiherald.com)

 

A Global Force for Good

“It follows then as certain as that night succeeds the day, that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.”

General George Washington

237 Years ago a great tradition started. As always, it started with men. Men like :Dudley Saltonstall, Abraham Whipple, Nicholas Biddle and John Burrows Hopkins, the first captains in the service. Men like First Lieutenant John Paul Jones whom Catherine the Great would later call the “Greatest Admiral of the Russian Navy“. Men like Stephan Decatur, who won praise from no less than Lord Nelson. Men like Farragut, Dewey, Sims, Byrd, Halsey, Nimitz and many others not as well known.

Then there are the firsts:

• First attack by a submerged submarine in 1776
• First successful attack by a submerged submarine
• First major amphibious opposed landing in modern history
• First battle between Ironclad ships firing rifled guns.
• First overflight of the North Pole
• First overflight of the South Pole
• First naval combat where the ships never sighted each other
• First nuclear propelled ship
• First submerged circumnavigation of the world.

Then there are the battle honors

• Bonhommie Richard v Serapis
• Constitution v HMS Guerriere, Java, Pictou, Cyane and Levant.
• Monitor v Merrimack (or Virginia)
• Valcour Island
• Mobile Bay
• Manila Bay
• Santiago
• Pearl Harbor
• Coral Sea
• Midway
• Marianas
• Operation Neptune
• Battle of the Atlantic (1917-18 and 1941-45)
• Operation Torch
• Vietnam
• Iraq (twice)
• And many, many more.

It’s a story written in heroism and blood for 237 years. But you know I want to talk about something else for a bit. We know they are always out there protecting America, and our trade. I’ve talked about it here and here as well as here. That’s all well and good, and it’s the mission as well.

But let’s talk about the real world for a minute here. Let’s say your an Indonesian villager or a Haitian, or a hundred other nationalities, who makes almost enough to feed your family. It’s hard for us to realize how common that is in our world still. Now an earthquake, flood, tsunami, or some other disaster strikes, and you lose effectively everything, maybe your family survives but all you have left is the shirt on your back. You’re obviously sitting around in shock, but maybe you can see the ocean, and you notice some bumps on the horizon. “Now what?” you’d undoubtedly think. What comes over that horizon is one of the greatest battle fleets in the history of the world, able to defeat almost any country all by themselves. What calamity is this you think, as you watch those ships drop anchor and all of a sudden helicopters and landing craft start issuing from that fleet. Think you’d be scared? I sure would be.

So the landing party lands, and you stand around gawking, as American sailors and Marines start giving away food, taking care of the injured, helping to find the missing, setting up tents, hauling in clean water, and everything else you could dream of. Yep, those imperialistic, war mongering Americans sent a whole battle fleet, halfway around the world to help your village get through your troubles, all of it courtesy of the US Taxpayers, who whine as we might about our taxes, never complain about this, because deep down this is who we are.

We do this mission because its who we are, we want to help, but in truth, it’s also good global politics. You think there might be legends in some of those countries about the way the Americans showed up, often even before their own government, to help in time of disaster, I do, and I’m very proud that we do it without thinking about that. We do it because it’s the right thing to do.

So, for the 237th time: Happy Birthday, Navy

Related articles

• USS Constitution to sail under own power for second time in over a century – CBS News (xbradtc.wordpress.com)
• World’s oldest commissioned warship to sail again (kfwbam.com)
• ‘Old Ironsides’ sails again to commemorate battle (foxnews.com)
• How USS Constitution Became ‘Old Ironsides’ 200 Years Ago (history.com)

Welcome Home, Captain.

I mentioned earlier this week that two friends were dealing with returning soldiers this week. One was LTCOL Dan Bohmer, who is safely home. Huzzah! I talked about him and his blog a bit here. Now it’s time to talk about the other.

The other returnee is a British captain, like Dan returning from Afghanistan, in one of the stranger twists of life, I know a bit about him and am sure he knows a bit about me but, we’ve never met. So why him? There’s a story in that.

I’ve been blogging for a bit over a year and I’ve met some wonderful people because of it. The Captain’s wife is one of them. A year ago I hadn’t met a British subject since I was in college but, several are friends now. But even in that select company, the captain’s wife is very special. In the course of the last few months, she has become my dearest friend, period. On or off the internet. In fact I have been known to refer to her as my niece, because that’s how much I love her. Who is this paragon? If you read here at all, you already know. She is none other than Jessica Hoff of All along the Watchtower, my second home on the internet.

Her husband, who I am very much looking forward to meeting, at least for now, at a distance, is a captain in the British army. One of those brave souls who had enough guts to go to Afghanistan (for the fourth time in 150 years)for no better reason than we were going. Friends like these don’t grow on trees, and whatever we did to earn their friendship wasn’t nearly enough.

Our countries have been working together, for the betterment of the world since the Anti-Slavery patrols off Africa in the 19th century and like all relatives we have our spats. but this Yank has always been glad that you are there, the original home of the brave and land of the free.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892).  Leaves of Grass.  1900.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack,
      the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
      While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart!
      O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
      O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up- for you the flag is flung- for
      you the bugle trills, 

         For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths- for you the shores
             a-crowding,
          For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
             Here Captain! dear father!
               This arm beneath your head!
                 It is some dream that on the deck,
                   You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
          My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
          The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
          From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
               Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
                 But I with mournful tread,
                   Walk the deck my Captain lies,
                    Fallen cold and dead.

I also note that like the good officer he is, he brought his men home with him and I’m very glad they are home as well. My buddies in the Navy have a flag hoist that I suspect you know, in writing we tend to put it.

Bravo Zulu

Now, I’m quite sure you two kids have better things to do than read an old Yank’s drivel, so get to it

It’s also Saturday so here’s some music for the day.

Welcome Home, Sir, and God Bless you both, The first toast tonight will be to you. Have a wonderful weekend.

A repeat , just for you, Jess, Have fun, my dearest friend

Leadership and Management in America; What’s the Problem Here? Part 3

The Military Heritage

On March 28, 2102, Senator McCain gave the Forrestal lecture at the Naval Academy and talked a good bit about the difference between leadership and management. Note that neither Sen McCain nor I am disparaging management, it’s essential but, leadership is far harder to learn and every bit essential. Note that if you follow the link, Dale at Command Performance Leadership has the entire speech as well as his commentary, I recommend it highly.

In a little over two months, we’ll commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, when barely six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, we faced an enemy supremely confident in their ability – not just to defeat, but to annihilate – the battered remnants of Halsey’s Pacific Fleet.  We were overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned.  The Japanese brought 8 carriers, we had barely three; they had 11 battleships, we had none.  And the Japanese had the best fighter aircraft in the Pacific – the Mitsubishi Zero – that easily dominated the slower, less agile TBDs, SBDs, F4Fs, and Marine F2As.

Making matters worse, our forces were plagued by faulty equipment. The Mk 13 torpedo was notoriously unreliable. In fact, not a single torpedo dropped at Midway by Torpedo 3, Torpedo 6 or Torpedo 8 even detonated. And the new electrical arming system on the SBD’s had the annoying habit of randomly releasing the bomb when the Master Arm switch was selected. 

But in the end, the battle turned not on numbers or equipment – but rather on the actions – and the leadership – of some truly extraordinary men. What they did at Midway has become the stuff of legend.

Men like LCDR John Waldron, skipper of Torpedo 8, who led his 15 TBD Devastators against one of the enemy carriers at wave-top height and barely 100 knots, while trying to fend off the far more capable – and deadlier – Zeros.  With no fighter cover of his own, Waldron’s fate was sealed.  His last transmission to his squadron-mates was simple: ‘We will go in. We won’t turn back. We will attack. Good luck.’

And men like Marine Major ‘Joe’ Henderson, who led his mixed squadron of F4Fs and F2As against the carrier Hiryu.  Struck by anti-aircraft fire, his aircraft in flames, Henderson pressed the attack – on what would be his last flight.

And LCDR Wade McClusky, who, despite being dangerously low on fuel, kept searching for the Japanese carriers until he found them, and whose extraordinary leadership – according to Admiral Nimitz – ‘decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway.’The Battle of Midway was won not by superior equipment, and certainly not because we outnumbered the Japanese. We won because of the stout hearts and uncommon leadership that for one hundred years has been the hallmark of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. 

My grandfather commanded a carrier task force in the Pacific during WWII. He made it a point to talk with pilots after they returned from a strike, asking them, ‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’ He knew that if you ever stopped learning from your men, then you stopped leading.

Today, we hear a lot about ‘management,’ and not nearly enough about leadership.  That worries me.  One thing of which I am certain – there is a great difference between managers and leaders. Competent managers are useful in any endeavor.  But they are plentiful. Our nation graduates over 150,000 MBAs every year. But leaders … true leaders … are rare. And they are a far more important asset than managers.¹

This strikes me as the old John McCain, the Naval Aviator who overflew Hanoi, who kept his head in the midst of exploding ordnance on the USS Forestal in 1967, and above all keeping the faith in the Hanoi Hilton.

But his points are just as valid for us as they are for the Navy. We need leaders in all areas of business, to train, to innovate and to develop our people. Where are we to find them?

Maybe a better question is, “What makes a leader?” Those of us in the civilian sector have coasted for years with what we can pick up from the military. We don’t teach it, and lately we rarely practice it either.

One of the key characteristics of the leader is honor (you can maybe substitute ethics here, although it’s at best a subset of honor). I have gone into mid 5 figure deals on a handshake and a promise to work it out. It was fine because I knew I was dealing with an honorable client who didn’t yet know what he wanted/needed to do but understood that I would help him define as well as implement his goals. While certainly we were both in the deal to make a profit I and he understood that if the project blew up in everybody’s face, none of us would remain unscathed, including the principal. And that is key, if the people you are dealing with have no skin in the game, except the glory they think they can get from screwing everyone concerned, run like hell. I’ve also dealt with clients that I wouldn’t rust to buy me a cup of coffee with a 60 page contract specifying it.

As I said above, much of our honor code comes from the military, dating back to Greece and Rome. Why? Because it has proven to be the best way to order the business of war. There is a huge caveat here though because while there is law and rules of engagement involved in the military and warfighting, there is much more involved. In truth, western armies have known for centuries that if they want a well-ordered army they need very good non-commissioned officers (NCOs). This is where the tradition is, this is the first line supervisor who will catch you is, this is where your buddies are. Few men actually think about the slogans that motivated them to go to war in battle, they are far more concerned with not letting down their buddies. Part of what seems to be happening in our military right now, appears to be that our senior NCO’s are retiring and their replacements have been so busy in the last ten years fighting battles without enough time to study, that some of that heritage is being lost. Armed Forces Journal ran a very good article lately on the problems the military is having.

The Problem

The problem of battlefield discipline predates the modern law of armed conflict. The problem is raised, if somewhat obliquely, in Homer’s “Iliad,” in which the erratic and uncontrollable rage of Achilles culminates in his abuse of Hector’s corpse — an outrage even by the standards of that violent time. In 1066, William the Conqueror is said to have expelled a knight from his assembly for mutilating the body of the conquered King Harold II.

Under the modern conception, war is violence for a purpose, organized and sanctioned by the nation-state. Acts of violence that would otherwise be unlawful take on a gloss of legitimacy — and sometimes even honor — because they are committed under the authority of the state. There is a difference between the civilian ethos of violence and the warrior ethos of violence. Warriors are given a special privilege of legitimate violence, but this violence retains its legitimacy only so long as warriors adhere to the warrior ethos. So the very nature of war raises the problem of battlefield discipline.

Indeed, war demands discipline. War is not violence for its own sake or for the personal gain of the people committing it. Without discipline, the violence cannot be directed to serve the pragmatic political purpose for which it is called forth. This is especially true in a counterinsurgency, in which the berserker approach often works to defeat rather than advance the aims of the campaign. Also, in the absence of discipline, the violence occurs outside the authority of the nation-state, thus stripping it of its legal justification. Combat without discipline is not war.

The problem, then, is to unleash a brutal, destructive force while containing and directing it to achieve limited objectives. There is a very small margin of acceptable error because the misdeeds of just a few undisciplined soldiers can undo the work of many thousands of their more disciplined comrades. (Former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak’s concept of the “strategic corporal” gets at this reality.) To this end, a military commander must not be a mere manager of violence, but rather a leader of individuals whose job it is to commit violence.

Though not specifically talking about the military, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” addresses the problem facing leaders who are responsible for training others in ethics. Though Aristotle believes in universal standards of virtue, he recognizes that the process of becoming virtuous may vary from person to person. Aristotle uses the analogy of a doctor who learns what is theoretically good for everyone and then applies that knowledge to the practical details of an individual patient. The process of training others in virtue begins with an understanding of the general principles of the law, but it does not end there. Rather, it is a matter of continued training and habituation over time that must, to a certain extent, be tailored to the individual.

The law is a blunt instrument, a generally applicable set of rules that does not and cannot deal in such fine distinctions. The saying goes that “hard cases make bad law,” which means that judges should focus on the general principles of the law instead of the specific facts of outlier cases.

Military commanders, though, must be concerned with the hard cases — their business is people, not principles. Battlefield discipline, then, stems not from the law of war but from the ethos of the warrior.²

While our problems in the private sector are not the same, they bear some resemblance. It’s hard to be loyal to a huge corporation or even a big factory, in truth if it’s not led well, it’s nearly impossible to be loyal to your team. I’ve seen it forever where you have a brown-nosing supervisor, he always has trouble with his people. This is often a problem when a large company is run by the quarterly bottom line, especially when it is proud of its degrees in accounting and its MBAs. I wrote about this some in relation to the meat-packing industry where supervisors are being squeezed for output while being denied enough authority to do anything good, there’s not even enough money to properly maintain the plants.³ I depend absolutely on my journeymen to keep things going, and going right. They’ve been around (either with me or other companies) long enough to know how to do almost everything right, and I make sure that they know I’ll back them up.

Interesting enough, I learned long ago and far away that if I wanted good people in my group, the things I needed to do was, praise in public; criticize in private, never blame them to my superior, certainly I require good performance from them, but I do it, not my boss, and to help them be better. This is what Michael O. Douglas was referring to as “remove the blocker”. There is nothing new here, it’s been known for hundreds of years, you just have to do it.

1http://commandperformanceleadership.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/senator-john-mccains-speech-at-the-naval-academy-the-forrestal-lecture-series/

2http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/03/9563756

3http://nebraskaenergyobserver.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/the-jungle/

Related articles

• Fay Vincent: Joseph Rochefort not as famous as Chester Nimitz, but Rochefort’s intelligence played critical role in U.S. victory in the Pacific during World War II (tcpalm.com)
• April 11 – Aviation History (crufc.ca)

Last Patrol for a Legend

Yesterday the USS Enterprise CVN 65 set off on its last mission. The Enterprise has been doing this since 1961 when she became the first Nuclear power aircraft carrier. She served in the Cuban Missile Crises,Vietnam, the Evacuation of Saigon, several tours in the Middle East and is now heading there again on her final mission. From CNN:

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=us/2012/03/12/dnt-va-enterprise-last-voyage.wvec

Enterprise is, of course, one of the most hallowed names in the United States Navy.

The first was a sloop of war captured from the British by Benedict Arnold which fought at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain.

The 3d ship of the name served starting in the quasi war with France and in the First Tripolitan War capturing the brig Tripoli and helping USS Constitution capture the ketch Mastico which was used by Decatur to burn the Philadelphia in Tripoli Harbor. During the War of 1812 Enterprise captured 4 ships including the HMS Boxer. After the war Enterprise was on patrol in the Caribbean against slavers, pirates, and smugglers of whom she captured 13.

USS Enterprise

The 6th USS Enterprise is , of course, the most famous. This is CV6 the most decorated ship of World War 2, commissioned in 1938 and serving till 1947, the Big E served all through the Pacific campaign from before Pearl harbor and through Tokyo Bay.

Enterprise at SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB

It probably wouldn’t hurt to note that another famous Enterprise, NCC-1701 was most probably named after CV-6. You probably remember her Captain, James Kirk. And that still another Enterprise, OV-101, the very first Space shuttle was named after NCC-1701.

And that brings us back to the Current USS Enterprise, CVN 61, which is probably the most distinctive aircraft carrier in the world. Oh, did I mention that the Enterprise also starred in Top Gun.

The aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN 65) departs on its final deployment from Naval Station Norfolk, Va., on March 11. Enterprise is deploying to support maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 5th and 6th Fleet areas of responsibility. Courtesy, US Navy

While this is not an exhaustive account of these ships, it is enough for you to understand why there are several active online petitions to get hull number CVN-80, the third in the Navy’s new Gerald Ford class of carriers, named the Enterprise. That ship is planned to be commissioned in 2021.

Related articles

• Navy’s legendary carrier USS Enterprise on final voyage (news.blogs.cnn.com)
• USS Enterprise, United States’ Longest And Oldest Aircraft Carrier, Sets Sail On Final Voyage (ibtimes.com)
• USS Enterprise Makes Final Deployment (myfoxphoenix.com)