L
ieutenant General Dan Christman, West Point’s Superintendent, is a big, florid-faced man with a wide smile, an overpowering charm, and a very specific vision for the United States Military Academy. West Point, he will tell anyone who will listen, is “America’s premier leadership school.”

In 1998 I heard Christman use this phrase repeatedly during a three-day meeting with the presidents of West Point’s regional alumni organizations. In that room, at least, Christman was preaching to the choir, and the choir already believed. Graduates know the names of the West Pointers who have shaped American history: Eisenhower and MacArthur, Grant and Lee, Pershing and Schwarzkopf and Patton. They also know of the scores of leaders who serve the nation in the military and, after their service, in a wide array of civilian professions.

At the twentieth reunion of the Class of 1980, for instance, a visitor could meet: a member of Congress, four people who have worked at the White House, the military attachés to Vietnam and Jordan, a
shuttle astronaut (and space walk veteran), a heart surgeon, an eye surgeon, an FBI special agent, CEOs, physicians, university professors, ministers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, airline pilots. This would also be the place to get firsthand accounts of what it’s like to command five hundred peacekeepers in the Balkans, or a battalion of Green Berets, or half a hundred attack helicopters on the DMZ between North and South Korea.

West Point may or may not be, in Christman’s words,
the
school for leaders, but it is arguably among the best. If the successes of its graduates are any indicator, the Academy’s approach offers a template for leader development in and out of the military. There certainly is a need for leadership. Most American institutions are, in the words of Harvard’s John P. Kotter, overmanaged and under-led. Businesses spend millions on consultants who wheel in checklists and decision-matrices. Then the consultants go home and we find, to our constant surprise, that employees are still not inspired.

For two hundred years West Point has taken talented young Americans and put them through an intense four-year program to build leaders of character. On graduation day the Superintendent sends them out with a rolled-up diploma and an astonishing set of experiences. How do those experiences help mold leaders? I’d spent four years as a cadet and another four on the faculty (out of eleven years’ service), and still wasn’t sure I could put my finger on exactly how it happened. So in 1998 I started looking for an answer, and I began my search in the office of a leadership professor at USMA.

“If you ask five people around here how leaders are made, you’re going to get five different answers.”

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Snook delivers this not-quite-what-I-was-looking-for answer in his windowless office deep inside Thayer Hall, the Academy’s largest academic building. Unlike the stereotypical professor’s office, this one is neat: The books are arranged by subject, there are no piles of student papers or coffee-stained journals. One large bulletin board shows a military map of Grenada and a
photograph of some GIs—armed, their faces dark with camouflage—holding a Cuban flag. The soldier kneeling at the lower right is then-Lieutenant Snook. In the corner of another bulletin board is a movie still of John Wayne from the 1962 D-Day epic,
The Longest Day.
Snook’s Harvard degrees—an M.B.A. and a Ph.D.—hang on another wall.

I met Scott Snook when he was a much-less-accomplished yearling, or second-year cadet, and we were assigned to dig a foxhole together.

Snook rolls his chair to a filing cabinet and pulls a folder, then slides the packet across the desk insistently. The document inside, dark with close-spaced type, is the result of an in-depth study of leader development at West Point. The language, dense and pedantic, goes on for several mind-numbing pages. Then, a sentence in bold type:
“USMA has no clearly articulated ‘learning model’ or theory for how to develop leaders of character.”

I thought this a pretty serious omission for an institution charged with doing exactly that—at great expense to the taxpayer.

“We do what we do now because it has worked in the past,” Snook says. But there is no master plan, no theory to help determine what does and does not contribute. This explains why old grads (anyone from the most recently graduated back to eighty-year-old alumni) can talk about the same rite of passage, and one will claim, “It made me the man I am today”; while the other will say, “It was mostly stupid, fraternity-row stuff and a waste of my time.”

“Think of it like an academic course,” Snook says. “The Cadet Leader Development System is the syllabus. It describes what you do throughout the forty lessons of the semester. Then you have the tests and exams and papers to evaluate the student’s understanding. We have all that in place, too. What we don’t have is what comes before the syllabus, a theory of how students learn the subject.”

This finding was not well received by the Commandant, the one-star general responsible for cadets’ military training. Was it possible, the Commandant wanted to know, that this self-described “premier
leadership institution” had merely stumbled onto something that had worked well for so long? How, exactly, does West Point develop leaders of character?

Snook’s group wrote, “Our typical response is descriptive at best: ‘We have three programs: the military, the academic, and the physical. Within each program, cadets participate in a series of progressive and sequential activities. Here is a list of those activities …’”

The study doesn’t claim that what West Point is doing is flawed, but without a clearly articulated theory of how leaders are developed, there is no yardstick for evaluating new programs, no measure by which to judge current practices. The lack of an underlying theory means that questions about how to do things—and what the right things are—are difficult to address.

The report goes on to say that, “If we believe that the West Point experience is fundamentally sound, then we should be able to start with what we already do and back in, get the theory from practice.” Following this reasoning, the report offers a model for leader development:

The basic ingredient is good people. West Point takes great pains to admit young men and women who have demonstrated a readiness to learn, a willingness to take on responsibility. That’s why the admissions committee looks for the above-average student who is also the team captain, a leader in her church, a volunteer firefighter.

Then there are four key elements of the developmental experience. The first—and West Point excels at this—is challenge: dragging cadets out of their comfort zone, giving them novel experiences and difficult goals, forcing them to resolve conflicts and take on new roles. There must also be a variety of challenges, from the physical to the purely intellectual. The goal is to make sure that no cadet can function solely in the arena he or she feels most comfortable in. Quiet cadets are made to speak up, the football players do gymnastics, the women take hand-to-hand combat.

To get the most out of these challenges, the cadets must have support, which is the second part of the model. Every member of the staff and faculty is a coach; professors and instructors are Army officers
first. The third part of the model is assessment. USMA has a variety of feedback tools, some of them obvious: Cadets are graded for performance in leadership roles. Some of the assessment tools are not so obvious: A lot of self-examination goes on in the conversations among teammates, classmates, roommates. The fourth part of the model calls for reflection, for time to let the lessons sink in. Maturity doesn’t come overnight.

The final part of the model is the freedom to fail. There is ample evidence in educational theory, Snook says, indicating that young people are most open to learning after they’ve experienced a failure, particularly one that challenges their assumptions.

I recognized parts of this model from my own cadet experience. The challenges were frequent, daunting, and often downright painful. Cadets have a saying that describes it aptly. West Point, they say, is, “a two-hundred-thousand-dollar education, shoved up your ass a nickel at a time.”

I also remembered receiving and giving lots of coaching. During my years in the English Department, my boss was explicit about our duties: We were there to develop the next generation of military leaders,
and
to teach them to write clearly. I certainly remembered the assessment. Nearly every aspect of cadet life has some grade attached to it, down to the ridiculous, nit-picking detail.

But there were other parts of Snook’s model I didn’t recognize. There was little time for reflection and “the examined life.” One former Superintendent, General William Westmoreland, said that the ideal West Pointer is a man of action—as opposed to a man of thought. Many at the Academy and in the Army equate reflection with touchy-feely ivory-tower intellectualism at best; with navel-gazing egocentrism at worst.

Nor do I remember anyone telling me it was OK to fail. At West Point, as in many organizations, there is no room on the grade sheet for, “I dropped the ball, but I developed as a leader.” In this highly quantified world, in the long, detailed record of their performance, cadets get little credit for trying and failing and learning.

Then there were the things Snook’s model didn’t address. I could remember no particular moment I could point to and say, “That’s how they taught us about character.” I also had questions about those cadets who are not served well by the West Point experience: those who flee at the first chance, and the ones who graduate, then cut themselves off from all contact with classmates. I know graduates who have been bitter for twenty years over things that happened to them in their first year as a cadet. Finally, as in any large group, there are those who just didn’t get it, who remain dishonest, narrow-minded, bigoted.

Of course, my personal experience is dated. The only way to find out how today’s West Point goes about its stated mission of building leaders of character was to go there, to see what happens or fails to happen. Because I am not versed in educational theory or psychology, I went about this the only way I know how: by looking for the stories. I followed a cross section of people through the course of a year, from the plebes at the bottom of the chain, to the Superintendent at the top.

During the nearly two years of researching and writing this book, I continued working as a keynote speaker, talking to business audiences about leadership. Time after time I met people who assume that military leadership has nothing to do with leadership in the civilian world. One businessman I know (who is not a veteran) characterized the military approach as, “You tell em what to do, and they have to do it, right?”

Not exactly. Sure, there is some room for autocratic leadership, the “do this or else” kind, but there are limits to what that can accomplish. On the other hand, there are almost no limits to what can be achieved by leaders who inspire people. In its most critical task—combat—the military practices an extreme form of decentralized leadership that makes today’s dot-com wizards look like hidebound traditionalists. Current peace-keeping missions require an unprecedented degree of independent decision-making and flexibility. There are brand-new, one-year-out-of-college lieutenants on duty in Kosovo
who are the de facto mayors of small towns. They act as mediators, judges, counselors, and police chiefs in villages torn by bloody strife and haunted by four-hundred-year-old vendettas.

Many of the young men and women who will take over those responsibilities in a year or two are at West Point. The ones who learn their lessons well will succeed in and out of uniform. This is the story of how they prepare.

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