Issue No. 195 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a remarkable book on the zillion of details involved in one of the greatest war ruses of all time. It’s filled with leadership lessons and why missing even the smallest details can literally kill you. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Operation Details
If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and summer just passed you by without a satisfying beach book, maybe you can still squeeze this one in. But it’s really more than a book for the mountains or the beach, it’s an amazing narrative of a war machine bureaucracy that—due to detailed planning—gets it done.
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory is unlike any spy novel I’ve ever read. I’ve enjoyed all of Tom Clancy’s novels starting with The Hunt for Red October. But this is different—and better—and all true. Operation Mincemeat is painstakingly documented (details). But don’t let the 60 pages of footnotes (pages 339 to 400) scare you off. It’s a page-turner.
In World War II, following the successful North Africa campaign, a tiny team at British Intelligence in London attempt to create the biggest ruse in war history—convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe will come through Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. The big idea: find a corpse, build an identity, dress and drop it off the coast of Spain by submarine—and deceive the Germans spies in Spain into believing that the officer’s secret documents contained the invasion plans.
It’s a true thriller—and the details and insights are extraordinary. The small team in London (about 20 men and women and just five typewriters in a stuffy underground office) executed the plan with spy movie genius. Along the way, the leadership and management issues jump off the pages, including how to recognize the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.”
“…John Godfrey identified what he called ‘wishfulness’ and ‘yesmanship’ as the twin frailties of German intelligence. ‘If the authorities were clamouring for reports on a certain subject the German Secret Intelligence Service was not above inventing reports on what they thought probable.’ The Nazi high command, at the same time, when presented with contradictory intelligence reports, was ‘inclined to believe the one that fits in best with their own previously formed conceptions.’ If Hitler’s paranoid Wishfulness and his underlings’ craven Yesmanship could be exploited, then Operation Barclay might work: the Germans would deceive themselves.”
SPOILER ALERT! I won’t give you the all delicious details in this review, but the Allies win. How Operation Mincemeat did its part to save perhaps thousands of lives on both sides is a poignant read. For detail-oriented people (who bless others by mastering the Operations Bucket and the Systems Bucket) this true account will not disappoint.
To order this book from Amazon, click on the link below for Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Has our team ever been tempted to succumb to the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship”?
2) The conventional wisdom is that “the Devil is in the details.” But, wait a minute; is not God into the details? Who has God gifted on our team to focus on the details?
Staples Out of Staples! - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Systems Bucket, Chapter 18, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to train your team in tickler tracking.
Inventory is the second highest killer of morale. A couple of years ago I went to my local copy and print center at Staples® to use one of their five self-service photocopy machines. Those incredible workhorses were out of staples. There was no Plan B. Honest! Staples® was out of staples!
There’s a solution: the Daily-Weekly-Monthly-Quarterly-Annual Tickler Tracking form. You can download this from the Systems Bucket. Look for The "D.W.M.Q.A.T. Form" for Repeatable Tasks, on the Management Buckets website.
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