We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (19 page)

There are four key points for harnessing discipline in any endeavor:

1. Self-discipline leads to self-confidence.
   
2. Disciplined use of technology creates confidence in those tools.
   
3. Disciplined leaders create and foster confidence and trust in themselves by their subordinates.
   
4. Team discipline leads to team confidence.
   

A team with leaders and followers at all levels who strive to achieve these four levels of discipline will be motivated, efficient, and successful.

The second responsibility of a leader,
creating the future
, requires that you be proactive, not reactive. Acuity, insight, seeing the trends, analyzing them correctly, having a vision, and having confidence in that vision are all vital to creating the future. A good leader will inspire and motivate himself and his people to shape and create a positive future even as he deals with today and today’s challenges. Check up to make certain today’s jobs are getting done even as you stack the deck for future success. Keep up the momentum.

Senior leaders who push the power and the decision-making authority down free up talent in their subordinates even as they free up more of their own time to plan ahead. I am convinced that micromanager workaholic leaders who are heavily involved in the minutiae of day-to-day actions run the risk of neglecting the future of their enterprise.

The author and thinker Peter Drucker hit the nail on the head: “Even the mightiest company will be in trouble if it does not work toward the future. It will lose distinction and leadership. All that will be left is big company overhead. By daring not to take the risk of making the new happen, management takes by default the greater risk of being surprised by what will happen.”

There are a number of other principles—some mine, some drawn from men I admire, like Gen. Colin Powell—that will help anyone be a better, more effective leader:

• Be dead honest and totally candid with those above and below you.
  
• There must be total loyalty, up
  and
  down the chain of command.
  
• If you have to take a subordinate to the woodshed do it in private. Praise someone in public; correct or counsel him privately. Never take a subordinate’s pride and self-respect away.
  
• Treat everyone fair and square, without favorites. If you discover subordinates with extraordinary talent give them the toughest jobs, not the easiest ones, and mentor them.
  
• Stay away from higher headquarters or corporate headquarters unless summoned. No good can come of wandering aimlessly around corridors filled with bosses alert for any sign someone is underemployed.
  
• As you push power and decision-making authority down you must also push subsequent praise and recognition for outstanding unit performance down as well. Don’t hog the glory for yourself if you want to build a superb team.
  
• Good leaders don’t wait for official permission to try out a new idea. In any organization if you go looking for permission you will inevitably find the one person who thinks his job is to say “No!” It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.
  
• The leader in the field is always right and the rear echelon wrong, unless proved otherwise. Shift power and accountability to the people who are bringing in the beans, not the ones who are counting or analyzing them.
  

Bookstores are filled with tomes on leadership and management. You can be Attila the Hun, Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch—or a 3-minute manager. All promise to reveal the “secrets” of effective leadership. But there are no secrets; only common sense. I have dozens of well-thumbed books on leadership in my library. I have spent a lifetime involved with leadership—good and bad. Being led, leading myself and others, reading about leaders, learning from my mistakes, successes, and experience of others.

But of all the tips, tenets, and principles I talk about here and list above, the ones about people are the ingredients that make any leadership recipe work. People are the most important part of any organization. This is why leadership is an art; management is a science. Leadership is about getting people to do what you want them to do, and that requires all we’ve said here and more. Above all it demands that you care deeply about those you are leading. You must care about their training, the quality of their lives, about their todays and their tomorrows. Without this love of the people who stand with you in pursuit of success, leadership is doomed to failure sooner or later. As I told the cadets at my farewell lecture at West Point in the spring of 2005, of all the principles and tenets and rules of leadership the greatest of them all is
love
.

Love is not a word military leaders throw around easily but it is the truth as I know it. Especially if you are a military leader. You must love what you are doing, because the rewards are few and the risks and hardships many. You must love the soldiers who serve under you, for you will ask everything of them, up to and including their precious lives. You must put their care and comfort ahead of your own in all matters large and small. As a leader you don’t eat until they have eaten; you don’t see to your own needs until you have met all theirs. Loyalty must flow downward first, then it will be returned tenfold when it is needed. I realize there are differences in military and civilian leadership, but in my opinion these bedrock principles based on love are universal.

M
y experience during military service and afterward in business has shown me that there are at least two categories of what ifs in any endeavor: those that you can do something about, and those you cannot. Either way it is a grave mistake not to plan for them. Be ready.

I never was comfortable with taking on a lot of risk that was out of my control or could have disastrous consequences if a situation went sour. On the battlefield when taking a bold risk, my staff and I carefully calculated it with detailed forethought not only to make it work, but to think through contingency plans on what we would do if we ran into trouble from any direction. It is very important to have a plan to follow through so you can exploit success when you are blessed with it.

A common theme running through books and stories about great leaders is while they made sure they knew what the pitfalls and negatives were, rather than fretting and worrying about them, they dwelled instead on how to avoid or defeat them. As Sun Tzu, the great Chinese scholar, wrote in the fourth century B.C., “Know your enemy and know yourself: and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” On the business battlefields that principle could be paraphrased: “Know your competition, know your capabilities, know your market, and know yourself and you will succeed.”

Despite detailed preparation, when events do not go as planned, when you are sideswiped by adversity, face up to the facts and deal with them. No whining; no “if onlys.” You can’t change the facts—but there’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor. There’s always a way!

On the first afternoon in the LZ X-Ray battle, when I had only 200 or so of my men on the ground, we were strongly attacked by around 1,200 enemy. They were determined to kill us all. I called in maximum air and artillery fire and was determined that we would prevail. I briefly thought about how the back side of our perimeter was wide open, but that was not my major concern. We were being hit by a fierce frontal attack—just as that same enemy army had struck the French positions at Dien Bien Phu. Remembering this from studies of that French battle, I paid little attention to my wide-open rear and it was the right decision.

You can read those leadership and management books till the cows come home or Hell freezes over, but if you want it boiled down, good leadership revolves around
judgment
. That is the defining characteristic of a good leader. Some think that character is the key to leadership, with its implication of strict adherence to a stern code of ethics, integrity, honesty, personal morals, mental strength, and toughness. I disagree. If a leader has good judgment he or she already has the character and integrity to choose the harder right over the easier wrong. Yet you can have character and integrity and still exercise bad judgment. How?

Any of these ills—incomplete or wrong information, stress, a tired mind, a weary body, poor advice, ignoring good advice, personal ego or pride, or a poor analysis of the situation—can push a leader of character and integrity over the line into bad judgment.

Photographic Insert

Capt. Hal Moore on T-Bone Hill during the Korean War.

First Cavalry Division soldiers exercising on board the USMS
Maurice Rose
en route to Vietnam.

Lt. Col. Hal Moore, commander 1/7 Cavalry, Vietnam, 1965.

Moore and his right-hand man, Capt. Greg “Matt” Dillon, and Lt. Col. John Burney, 1966.

Hal Moore and Joe Galloway at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.