|
June, 2007,
Volume 11, Number
9
CONTENTS
STEADY AND SURE: The West Point Way of Character
Development
OPINION: Lt. Col. Yingling Speaks Out On Military
Leadership
 Dana
Gioia (pronounced Joy-a) claims to be the only
person in history who went to business school to be a
poet. Having earned a degree from Stanford’s graduate
school of business, he worked 15 years in corporate
life, eventually becoming vice president of General
Foods. In 1991, Gioia wrote an influential collection of
essays titled, “Can Poetry Matter?” in which he
explored, among other themes, the nexus between business
and poetry. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the
National Endowment of the Arts where he has overseen
programs aimed at making Shakespeare and poetry
recitation more popular in the U.S. Gioia, who is a
speaker at the
Wharton Leadership Conference in Philadelphia on
June 7, talked about these ideas with management
professor and Wharton Leadership Digest editor
Michael Useem and
Knowledge@Wharton, which
published this article on May 30, 2007. A
podcast version of the interview is available
here.
Useem:
You had worked for 15 years as a business executive,
including a stint as vice president at General Foods.
What have you carried from your poetry, into your poetry
rather, from that particular business experience?
Gioia:
Well, first of all let me make something clear, because
people often get my career a little bit confused. I’m
the only person, in history, who went to business school
to be a poet. This is because I wanted to be a poet and
I wanted to have a job, a career and I didn’t want to be
in academia. I found business interesting and I found
the problems and opportunities that you work with in
business very interesting.
So, I
went to Stanford Business School and then spent fifteen
years in corporate life. I sort of came into business as
a poet. And I have to say that having attended Stanford
and Harvard, that I got my education in business. It has
taught me a lot of things that have helped me as a poet.
I think
the most fundamental thing is that in business, I was
working with very smart people who were more average [I
think] in terms of their interests. They had a rather
high work ethic and they were very intelligent people.
And, I was able, for fifteen years to live and work with
people – who were not literary people. It gave me a
better sense of the language and of the kinds of
issues/ideas and subjects that the average person is
more interested in. And, it took me out of the “hot
house” of the English Department.
Useem: Let
me reverse the question. From your own experience, can
business managers themselves benefit the other way
around from poetry?
Gioia:
Oh absolutely, but I think that my own theory on it may
surprise people. I think that if you come into the
business, with an arts background, you have a
tremendously difficult time initially. This is because
it’s a very different world, it looks at problems
differently and by and large, they don’t necessarily
respect your background.
For that
reason, I did not let anyone I worked with know that I
was a poet. This is because, let me ask you a question,
if you had a poet working for you, wouldn’t you check
his or her addition? So privately I went through a very
difficult time. That being said, as you rise in
business, as you get out of the lower level staff jobs
and the quantitative analysis, and you get into the
higher level of problems, I felt that I had an enormous
advantage over my colleagues because I had a background
in the imagination, in language and in literature.
This is
because once you get into middle and upper management,
the decisions that you make are largely qualitative and
creative. And, most people who do really well in the
early quantitative stages are grossly unprepared for the
real challenges of upper management, at least in
marketing which was the industry that I was working in,
marketing and product management.
Useem: Let
me ask you something along this same line. You know that
Archibald MacLeish was an editor and a writer at
Fortune Magazine. Would you comment on the extent
to which business writers would also benefit with the
familiarity of or even a direct engagement in the world
of poetry?
Gioia:
Well, first of all, there is a long tradition of
American literary writers who have worked in business:
Wallace Stevens, T.S. Elliott, James Dickey, Richard
Eberhardt, as well as Archibald MacLeish. So, I think
that there is a natural connectivity, at least in
American culture between the creative and the
commercial. Now, the best business writers, I think, are
people who are first and foremost writers, but have had
some actually hands-on experience in the business world,
because they see it from the inside.
What you
really don’t want is the kind of business writing in
which the writer looks with distance, emotion or even
scorn on “these poor unfortunates who have to work in
the commercial world.” And you know someone who
understands the excitement, the creativity, and the
challenges and in a funny way – the sheer excitement of
working in certain aspects of business, especially
during certain times and in certain industries. So, I
think that like everything else, to be a good writer you
need to be a good writer in an abstract sense and to
have a passionate and real connection with the subject
matter that you’re writing about.
Useem: If
business and business writers can benefit from having at
least some contact with the world of poetry, you’ve also
written somewhat colorfully about keeping your early
writing a secret. And I love the story about how you
used to grab the 5 copies of The New Yorker
that would arrive in the company store before any of
your colleagues could buy one. That was quite a while
ago, better than fifteen years back. As you have had
contact with the culture of business, corporate culture
and the like, in recent years, is that world still that
unfriendly towards those who are involved in the
creative arts?
Gioia:
Well, you know business is deeply conflicted on this
issue. I don’t know any senior executive in the United
States that doesn’t lament the need for greater
creativity, conceptual innovation and imagination in
their corporation. But, they don’t know how to foster
it. This is because, as I said before, the very ways in
which they recruit people and the way they train people
are almost designed to scare people out.
It’s
really interesting, the fellow that created the Monk
TV show, used to be like a marketing assistant at
General Foods. I don’t know if they fired him or he
just quit because he was frustrated. But a lot of these
people who were involved at General Foods have
gone on to these immense creative careers, but they
didn’t have a channel for that. But, it was exactly what
the institution needed at these higher levels. So I
think that what you are seeing is the desire for it, but
I don’t see much consensus on how you create it – except
by hiring expensive inspirational speakers to come in
for a meeting and give you a talk – which makes you feel
good about yourself for 8 hours.
Useem:
I
am going to turn now to your contemporary or your
current position. You wrote, what has become a very well
known essay in 1991 titled Can Poetry Matter?:
Essays on Poetry and American Culture. To quote you
directly here “Society has mostly forgotten the value of
poetry.” I believe that you are going into your 5th
year now as chairman of the National Endowment for the
Arts. To what degree is that statement still applicable?
And then secondly, as chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts, what initiatives have you taken to bring
poetry back into the mainstream of American culture?
Gioia:
Well, I’d like to think and this may be delusional,
self-flattery, that Can Poetry Matter – because
it created [kind of] an international controversy about
the role of poetry and what it was in contemporary
culture when it appeared, that that article helped in a
sense, reinvigorate the role of poetry in public
culture. Many people that I know did things because of
having read that article.
That
being said, poetry is still largely marginal in our
culture. It’s not quite as bad as it was in 1991 when I
published this. And one of the things that we are trying
to do at the National Endowment for the Arts and as
indeed in institutions like the Poetry Foundation of
Chicago is trying to do is to make the best of poetry
accessible and available to millions of Americans. We
have done this in a number of ways.
We have
our Shakespeare in America Communities program,
in which we have helped fund 66 theatre companies. They
have now toured 1,600 cities, bringing to millions of
people the chance to see productions of Shakespeare,
especially a whole generation of high school kids who
are able to see it for free in these programs – and 70%
of them have never seen a play before. They are actually
able to have a fantastic first-time encounter with the
greatest English poet [Shakespeare] and this aids their
study.
We’ve
also helped create with The Poetry Foundation in
Chicago, a National Poetry Recitation Contest, where we
have had somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 high
school students participate in this last year. They
memorize poems and then they compete, first at a
classroom level, then a school level, a town level, a
regional level, a state level and then finally a
national level and this helps them to win scholarships.
We’ve
turned poetry recitation into a competitive sport. And,
as you know Americans like everything better if you do
it as a competition; just look at American Idol. We’ve
done these programs in addition to supporting hundreds
of small presses, poetry festivals and individual
writers. So, I think that we are doing as much as anyone
in the country is doing. Is it enough? No – but we’ll
keep giving it our best effort.
Useem: Thinking
about your own personal experiences over the last five
years, what are the two or three most distinctive
capacities that have been required on your part in order
to lead what amounts to America’s premier public sponsor
of the arts?
Gioia:
Well, I’m both pleased and alarmed to say that my job,
in any given week, requires pretty much every skill that
I’ve ever acquired in my life. But I think that’s the
nature of being a Chief Executive Officer, since you’re
helping shape something – you put yourself into it
fully. But I think the thing that I’ve learned from
business, which most artists never learn, is the Number
1 quality that I’m happy to have in this job and that is
the ability to create win/win partnerships with other
agencies and with individuals – so that by doing a
worthy project everybody comes out ahead.
I also
need creative judgment in this job because the problem
is not so much separating the good ideas from the bad
ideas, which I know people have made an issue of in the
past. It seems to me the real issue is how do you
separate the superb ideas from the merely very good
ones? And to, especially for our national initiatives –
to create a few programs of the highest quality that you
then can bring as broadly as possible.
I think
the third thing is just simply, and once again this is
something that I did not develop in the arts, but I did
develop in business, and that is skill and management.
This is just knowing how an idea happens, how it will
fall apart, what stages is it in, who do you have to
inspire, when do you have to check up on it? And you
know I’m a real believer in the David Packard and Bill
Hewlett system of “Management by walking around” that
just by dropping into people’s offices, talking to them
about it – you become very visible, very involved and
people know that you really care about what they’re
doing.
Knowledge@Wharton:
I wonder if we could go back to the
collection that you published in 1992, this was Can
Poetry Matter. One of the really fascinating essays
in there was on Business and Poetry, which you
began by quoting Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance
executive and also one of America’s finest
poets. Stevens wrote, “Money is a kind of poetry.” What
do you think he meant?
Gioia:
Well, it’s a metaphor and not an allegory, which means
that I don’t think he just meant one thing. A metaphor
radiates meanings. I think that at least two of the
things that he meant were that if you are in business,
money has a kind of imaginative power on you that’s not
really something denominated in dollars and cents. But
also, if you think about money as a metaphor, money is
the one thing in society that you can literally turn
into almost anything else. I think that he just took the
idea of money, which we think of as just purely
utilitarian and dull – and endowed it with a certain
amount of poetic pizzazz.
Knowledge@Wharton:
Why do you think American poets exclude business from
their poetry?
Gioia:
Well, the interesting thing I think is, I would take
your question one step further. Why do American poets,
who have worked in business, exclude business from their
poetry? This is because you know the conventional answer
would be that American poets don’t know anything about
business; they think it’s dull and boring and so why
should they write about it? And even if you accepted
that, there would be: why didn’t Stevens write about
it? Why didn’t Elliot write about it? Why didn’t Dickey
write about it? Why didn’t MacLeish write about it? And
that is the much more interesting question.
That is
one of the things that I tried to answer in my essay.
And I think it was because those people felt that in
order to separate their business lives from their
imaginative lives, they literally like Wallace Stevens,
he had this briefcase and when he opened it up he said
“This side is poetry, this side is insurance and you
don’t mix them.” So it’s male compartmentalization
perhaps.
But
also, American poetry has never really been very good in
the 20th century, about talking about public,
social issues. Even our political poetry [I think] is
actually quite weak as a tradition versus many other
nations. American poetry tends to be better at writing
about private or domestic personal experience, or empty
landscapes, the imagination or private life, rather than
the common life or the social life. And what is
business, but in a sense one of the most utilitarian
forms of social interaction.
Knowledge@Wharton: As
you have correctly pointed out, many poets have worked
in business and there are also business people who write
poetry. What does that tell us about the relationship
between business and poetry?
Gioia: Well
there is the old quote that “The business of America is
business.” In America, overwhelmingly the most talented
people in our society go into business. Now, I know
people in our English departments don’t like to believe
that, but it’s true. You meet people who are just
fantastic, sharp and talented people in the business
world. And they could have chosen any number of fields
and succeeded in them. A lot of them come into business
with another passion; it might be for music, it might be
for literature – it might even be for sports. And
sometimes, very talented people can maintain those
interests throughout their lives.
One of
the interesting things about publishing Business and
Poetry was that after I published it, no one had
ever even noticed before this essay that there was a
tradition of American businessmen who were poets. They
always treated Wallace Stevens as this singular example
and as I’ve just shown there were dozens of people like
this.
The
funny thing though was after I published this, I kept
getting letters from dozens and dozens more. I think I
had put a footnote, in one of the later editions with
about 30 names; I could now give you another 50 or 60
beyond that. I think what a lot of business people
enjoyed about reading that essay was that they were not
alone – they were not “total weirdo’s”. And so, I think
it really is a function that a lot of talented people go
into business and they continue to do something else as
well, whether it’s playing the piano, collecting art, or
writing poetry.
Knowledge@Wharton:
You referred a couple of times to the fact that as you
rise in business, imagination and creativity become
assets. Extending that point further, what do you think
poets and entrepreneurs have in common? Aren’t
entrepreneurs poets, but just working within a different
medium?
Gioia:
Well, if you take the word poet in the old Greek sense
of “a maker”, what entrepreneurs and artists have in
common is that they imagine something that they then
bring into reality. And, as any poet or any composer or
any entrepreneur knows, you imagine something, but to
bring it to reality you revise and recalibrate it a
million times to get it just right. So, I think the
ability of envisioning something and then bringing it
into being goes back to the ancient meaning of the word
poetry – Poesis which means the made thing.
Useem: We
have you as a featured speaker on June 7th at the
Wharton Leadership Conference. The topic of the annual
conference this year is “Developing Leadership Talent.”
And just by extension, if you could just say a couple
words about the extent to which you see the American
public becoming more developed in their ability to
engage in and appreciate the arts whether it’s in
poetry, theatre, music or beyond.
Gioia:
The arts have had an enormous expansion during the last
40 to 50 years. There are now opera companies, dance
companies, theatres and museums in virtually every large
town in the United States. So, the numbers of arts
participants have gone way up. And so I think
consequently the arts play a broader role in more of
America. It’s not just people that live in Chicago, in
Philadelphia, in New York, in Los Angeles and in San
Francisco – it’s now everywhere in the country.
I also
believe that most Americans understand that if they want
to have a thriving and healthy community, the arts have
to be part of civic life. The definition of a town that
a new business wants to relocate to... that a company
that’s trying to attract talented people will be looking
for is a community with a really wide and deep selection
of the arts.
Knowledge@Wharton: I
actually will not ask a final question but would love to
hear one of your poems.
Gioia: I
just thought that I would read the shortest of poems,
it’s only six lines long and it’s called Unsaid. And
it’s about how much of the existence we lead is
invisible to anyone but ourselves, because it’s
internal.
Unsaid
So much of what we
live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
STEADY AND SURE: The West Point Way of Character
Development
By Mark Hanna
Mark Twain once observed “A round man
cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away.
He must have time to modify his shape.”
Twain’s wisdom parallels the
practices of the
United States Military Academy at West Point, which
year after year transforms inexperienced and youthful
cadets into seasoned officers and leaders. How West
Point achieves this transformation, and how human
resources practices help bring it about, is the subject
of a recent article in the Spring, 2007, issue of
Human Resource Management entitled,
“Building Strong Ethics and Promoting Character
Development: The Influence of HRM at the United States
Military Academy at West Point.”
The two authors,
Evan Offstein and
Ronald Dufresne, spent almost 800 hours over an
18-month period at West Point to understand which HR
practices were helpful in turning raw recruits into the
right stuff.
The West Point Way
West Point
starts with two fundamental assumptions about the
educational process: (1) values, honor, integrity, and
ethics can be learned, and (2) incoming men and women do
not possess the same values as the organization. Hence,
West Point’s leadership program ensures that all cadets
receive a consistent ethics and values education.
Offstein and
Dufresne argue the West Point way to ethical development
hinges on four principles:
-
Investing early, investing heavily;
-
Crawl, walk, and run mentality;
-
Low cost of building character;
-
Positive organizational learning.
Investing
Early, Investing
Hheavily
West Point’s
emphasis on character development starts early – before
cadets even arrive on campus – and continues long after
they earn their commission as second lieutenants. In the
course of their four-year education, cadets have at
least 47 class hours with ethical content.
The early
exposure begins with the recruiting, selection, and
initial socialization process. First, admissions staff
scan applications for evidence of leadership and
“selfless” activities. Second, West Point has several
practices similar to the business practice of providing
a “Realistic Job Preview,” a constellation of methods
organizations use to give prospective employees a taste
of a job’s positives and negatives.
Upon admission,
all candidates offered admission are sent a book called
In Search of Honor and a CD explaining the West
Point Honor Code. Any incoming cadets who feel they
cannot abide by the honor code disqualify themselves
from admission. Third, West Point emphasizes orientation
training and socialization. Upon arrival on campus,
cadets are given another book called the Cadet Basic
Training Values Education Guide. They are linked up
with carefully screened junior and senior cadets who
serve as role models. Before retiring at night they hear
stories of West Point history and folklore. They also
hear inspirational speeches from alumni, including
graduates who have won the prestigious Medal of Honor
and famous four-star generals. (To read or listen to
General Douglas MacArthur addressing West Point cadets
in 1962 on “Duty, Honor, and Country,” click
here.)
Crawl,
Walk, and Run
mentality
The West Point
way to character development is graduated. First-year
cadets learn that, “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal,
or tolerate those who do.” They are also taught a
number of simple rules-of-thumb to help them analyze
ethics problems. Cadets, for example, can ask
themselves: (1) Does this action attempt to deceive
anyone or allow anyone to be deceived, and (2) Would I
be satisfied by the outcome if I were on the receiving
end of this action?
These early
lessons are augmented with an active communication
campaign to deepen the cadets’ ethical knowledge. For
example, cadets receive a small booklet called the
Hip Pocket Values Education Guide, which offers core
basic knowledge and definitions of terms like
plagiarism, equal opportunity, non-toleration,
copyright, and sexual harassment. The book
reduces the chance of unethical behavior due to
ignorance.
The Cadet
Leadership Development System gives cadets a chance to
practice their leadership and ethical skills in a series
of real-life Army situations. The experiences come with
increasing levels of responsibility; a senior cadet may
start out leading peers and junior cadets in simple
tasks and end with high-stress situations involving time
pressures and hostile actors. The situations bring more
ethical temptation and ambiguity for the cadet to
navigate.
Low
Cost of Building
Character – through
Social and Vicarious
Learning
One of the key
lessons of the West Point experience is that moral
development programs need not be expensive. Some of the
most effective moral education comes through cadets
observing positive role models on campus and avoiding
negative examples discussed in anonymous but true “Cadet
X, Cadet Y” cases in class.
A social
psychologist might say cadets are engaging in social
learning and a related phenomenon, vicarious learning.
Social learning occurs when individuals learn new
behavior by watching others in a situation and then
imitating their behavior. It can take on a positive or
negative form. As well-known social psychologist Albert
Bandura found through experimentation, a child who
watches an adult furiously hit a bouncing “Bobo doll” is
likely to hit the doll as well. Vicarious learning
occurs when an individual learns through observation
without direct participation. After Hurricane Katrina,
for example, many Gulf Coast residents discovered they
did not have adequate home insurance. Many home owners
across the country took heed and reviewed their own
policies.
At West Point,
faculty, staff, and visiting speakers are screened to be
good role models, just as cadets are screened and
developed to the point where they, too, can be positive
role models. As college alumni know, some of the most
important aspects of higher education happen in
late-night dorm room discussions or other
outside-the-classroom experiences.
Positive
Organizational
Learning:
In earlier days,
a West Point cadet who had an ethical lapse was likely
to be disciplined in a highly visible and punitive way.
They might have been given the “perp walk,” ostracized
in front of their peers, or even dismissed. Today,
dismissal remains an option in serious cases; however,
mild-to-moderate lapses are seen as an opportunity for
positive, growth-oriented learning, both for the
individual and the organization as a whole. When cadets
have ethical lapses, they engage in admission,
reflection, and rehabilitation through a process called
the honor mentorship program.
Under this
program, the offending cadet is teamed up with an Army
officer who acts as a mentor. According to Offstein and
Dufresne:
Cadets must attend regular counseling
sessions with the mentor; write and maintain a
moral-ethical journal; write a “Cadet X, Cadet Y” honor
case; teach part or all of a cadet honor class; create,
design, and implement a developmental project; select a
role model; write a summary essay of the developmental
experience; and keep a developmental portfolio
containing the above documents.
Done properly,
cadets deepen their moral sophistication, and others
learn through their mistakes (again, vicarious
learning). The whole organization can benefit.
West Point also
uses the traditional HR practice of job rotation to
promote organizational learning. As either juniors or
seniors, all cadets join an active-duty Army unit for
four to six weeks. Typically, this happens in the summer
and involves leading a unit under the supervision of a
junior officer or non-commissioned officer. The cadets
leave the West Point environment to learn how the
“outside” Army culture operates on a day-to-day basis.
Cadets who
continue on to graduate studies are often assigned back
to West Point to serve as instructors or administrative
staff. They serve in this capacity for three years
before again returning to an active service unit.
Several years later, some senior officers come back to
West Point to serve in a more advanced capacity and get
a “refresher course” in its culture and values. Officers
from other commissioning sources such as Officer
Candidates School (OCS) or the Reserve Officer Training
Corp (ROTC) are also given an opportunity to instruct at
West Point and learn the culture.
These kinds of
job rotations serve organizational and individual
learning in two ways: (1) by continuing and
reinvigorating the socialization process, and (2) by
spreading West Point values and beliefs throughout the
entire U.S. Army organization.
Concluding
Observations
Offstein and
Dufresne’s article makes clear that West Point relies
not only on traditional human resource practices like
rigorous recruiting, selection, training, and job
rotation, but also more progressive practices like
managing communication and shaping organizational
learning, socialization, and culture. The result is an
institutional approach that favors the development of
character over blind adherence to rules. This approach
is in alignment with the philosophy of Mark Twain, who
once said, “Laws control the lesser man…Right conduct
controls the greater one.”
Author’s Note:
Mark Hanna is a freelance business writer based in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. He can be reached at
markhanna@mchsi.com
OPINION: Lt. Col. Yingling Speaks Out On Military
Leadership
By John
Baldoni
Accountability
is easy when things go right, and everyone is eager to
take credit. When things go south, then the blame game
begins. Whether the topic is a failed strategy or a
failed product, nay-sayers call for someone’s head while
critics wonder why no one will stand up to put things
right.
When it comes to
military decisions about Iraq, politicians and citizens
alike have cried foul. While military leaders have
expressed private misgivings over the conduct of the
war, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling distilled his own
misgivings into a thoughtful, stinging article entitled
“A Failure in Generalship,” which appeared in the
Armed Forces Journal in late April. His article was
the first to make public charges of incompetent
leadership, according to The Washington Post’s
Thomas Ricks. Yingling
told Ricks he decided to write the article after
attending a Purple Heart and deployment ceremony for
troops. “I find it hard to look them in the eye. Our
generals are not worthy of their soldiers,” he said.
A veteran of two
combat tours, Yingling knows war first-hand. Why, he
asks in his article, have the generals not been more
candid about the terrible conditions in Iraq and done
more to prepare troops for the current conflict? He
writes, “The most tragic error a general can make is to
assume without much reflection that wars of the future
will much like wars of the past.” What is needed is an
ability to visualize conflicts of the future and train
and equip the military to fight them. According to
Yingling, the lessons of Vietnam have been forgotten,
and, once again, America finds itself in another
intractable situation.
In spite of
intense criticism from others, Yingling has not backed
down. After publication of his article, the military
forbade him to speak to the media in uniform. As he told
Barbara Starr of CNN, if he cannot speak in uniform then
he will not speak at all.
Yingling offers
three valuable lessons in accountability.
Stand up for
what you believe when it matters. Yingling is still
in active duty, a status that normally prevents service
members from openly criticizing their commanders. But so
convinced is he of the need to speak out, he’s not
waiting for retirement; the time for action, from his
point of view, is now. What if a corporate manager found
him or herself in a similar situation, with grave doubts
about the integrity of the organization’s leadership?
Yingling’s example provides a difficult but not
impossible road map. He articulated his views through an
authoritative channel. A troubled manager could express
his or her convictions through a solid business brief
that points out alternate courses of action.
Advocate
change to benefit everyone. “If America desires
creative intelligence and moral courage in its general
officer corps, it must create a system that rewards
these qualities,” writes Yingling. He puts the onus on
Congress to exercise proper oversight in the promoting
and retiring of generals. Yingling advocates 360-degree
evaluations for general officers, in which direct
reports, peers and bosses provide input into the
development and promotion process. Yingling’s reason
for publishing is to improve conditions for troops.
Managers who push for change can adopt the voice of
their customers, using their needs and wants as points
of leverage.
Take the heat.
Yingling will have to suffer the consequences of
speaking out; his career may be over. But his sense of
urgency about the need to improve military leadership
drove him beyond consideration for his own career.
Managers can stand up for seemingly impossible causes if
they are willing to face the consequences. When Dean
Baquet was editor of the Los Angeles Times, he
told his bosses at the Tribune Company he would not
layoff any more news staffers. The Times,
he argued, had already cut enough staff and more
cuts would compromise editorial integrity. That action
eventually cost Baquet his job, but he became a symbol
of journalistic integrity in an era of corrosive
cut-backs. (He was also able to land on his feet with a
job at his former employer, The New York Times.)
A matter of
Principle
Standing on
principle can take a personal toll, but sometimes an
individual feels he or she has no other choice.
Organizations should be grateful that such men and women
are willing to step forward when they see a great wrong
being committed. It is only through these courageous
acts of truth-telling that good organizational
principles can prevail.
As much as is
practicably possible, organizations should cultivate an
atmosphere of free speech and open criticism, so that
the best ideas are allowed to come to the surface.
Without such internal channels for dissent, leaders like
Lt. Col. Yingling are forced to take their messages to
outside channels, where their critiques may damage the
public standing of the organization. The best criticism
should be accepted, digested and acted upon from within.
In the words of George Washington, “If
the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and
silent we may be led, like sheep to
the slaughter.”
Author’s Note:
John Baldoni is a leadership communications consultant
who works with Fortune 500 companies as well as
non-profits. He is the author of six books on
leadership; the latest is How Great Leaders Get
Great Results. He can be reached through his
website,
www.johnbaldoni.com. |
