November 11; The Mature Manager Nurtures Dissent?
MANAGEMENT BY THE BOOK:
365 Daily Bible Verse &
One-Minute Management Lessons For The Busy Faithful

MANAGEMENT BY THE BOOK:

365 Daily Bible Verse & One-Minute Management Lessons For The Busy Faithful

11 November

This is the testimony of John [the Baptist], when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” And he confessed and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” They asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you, so that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am A VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS, ‘MAKE STRAIGHT THE WAY OF THELORD,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” John 1:19-23

Contrary

The leadership got it wrong in the Great War and then got it wrong in the Great War Redux. It was a failure to listen and learn.

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) was President of France from 1959 to 69 who had the gift of governance. A tall man at 6 foot 5 inches he looked over the heads of others and had vision to see over the horizon. He was proved prescient in understanding evolving events and technologies.

But that was in the distant future when he wrote The Army of the Future a young lieutenant colonel in the 1930’s. Like Patton, he well understood that static defensive lines seen in the trenches of World War I would be surpassed by fast moving motorized equipment. “The machine controls our destiny.” He was right.

These would be German war machines.

After World War I the French learned the lesson that a static defensive line was nearly impossible to breach. France built an impregnable position along the Franco-German border, the Maginot Line.

de Gaulle argued that static defenses were obsolete in modern mobile warfare. He stood alone; his younger voice was ignored by decision makers.

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In business, war and politics, good managers must make decisions based from available options and recommendations. The best managers are thinking two moves down the chessboard of their field of play. Few tasks are harder than staffing backup plans; a Plan B. Because things change.

German Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (the Elder) (1800-1891) wrote, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.”

This is translated from German. The translation into English can better fit a bumper sticker, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Germany gave us –warfare; USA is known for –Madison Avenue: Blitzkrieg and Ad Blitz. No wonder we make such good allies nowadays.)

Here’s what this looks like in politics. Dan Balz is the Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post and Peggy Noonan wrote a review on his book Collision 2012. Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal, that politicians,

…should remember the colorful but not at all high-minded approach of Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. “My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson, ” he told Mr. Balz. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore.” Obama’s people punched first, and hard.

And, as professor Peter Drucker writes, “If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time.” (Drucker 1973) p. 681.

Stuff can go wrong and disaster can come from any direction. My old sales manager once said, “there are a thousand ways you can get bit in the [backside].”

Moltke (the Elder) was the forerunner to Murphy (the Laws) as we learned in the Vietnam war management.

“To technologists and managers, the end of WWII marked a clear triumph of both American technology and managerial methods,” writes Professor Andrea Gabor at Baruch College/CUNY. (Gabor 2000) p 153 . If management won the Second World War, then management lost Vietnam.

Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense advising Lyndon Johnson on the war in Southeast Asia,

As Vietnam would show, neither new management technologies, such as systems analysis, nor an avalanche of reports, nor centralization of power could make up for poor human judgment.

What was missing, acknowledges McNamara, was debate. “I clearly erred by not forcing—then or later, in Saigon or in Washington—a knock-down-drag-out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analyses underlying our military strategy in Vietnam.

I had spent twenty years as a manager, forcing organizations to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences.

I doubt if I will ever fully understand why I did not do so there.” (Gabor 2000) p 149 citing McNamara Argument Without End p 352.

He did not have discretionary management time, or a stand-up deputy, I would venture.

Long after the Vietnam War had ended, McNamara made this stunning admission: “We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.

For one whose life has been dedicated to the belief and practice of problem solving, this is particularly hard to admit. But, at times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.” (Gabor 2000) p 149 quoting McNamara Argument Without End p 323

The SecDef did not get good recommendations and had nothing good to sell LBJ. What does it take to persuade and to win?

It requires the highest degree of self-discipline on the part of managers and willingness to take upward responsibility to keep higher management, and especially the corporate top management, informed, knowledgeable, and educated. It also requires the “executive secretariat” or “business research staff.” (Drucker 1973) p. 763

Find that contrary voice on your team. He might see something you don’t. (David Gergen 2001) page 44

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France was over-run in the German Blitzkrieg, The Lightning War. Hitler’s motorized army simply maneuvered around the impregnable Maginot Line on the northern flank going through neutral Belgium.

France fell in a month in 1940.

And so de Gaulle was a voice in the wilderness about the lessons to be learned from World War I. The start of WWII could have been different if the counsel of the future president of France was adopted.

This is the testimony of John [the Baptist], when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” And he confessed and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” They asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you, so that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am A VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS, ‘MAKE STRAIGHT THE WAY OF THELORD,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” John 1:19-23

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