Issue No. 485 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights the life-altering implications of leadership transitions—with another bestseller from Malcolm Gladwell. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book I wrote with my son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #11 below.
The cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs “is a chapel from another universe. It looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens.”
The “Mafia Label” Was Not a Compliment
“This isn’t working. You’re out.”
Malcolm Gladwell’s page-turner, The Bomber Mafia, is the perfect end-of-summer read. Action! Bombs! Morality! Science! Politics! Leadership! (Did I mention leadership?) And…two very different views of war and how to win wars (Jesus or Satan?).
Gladwell writes, “The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry.” He adds, “And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself—What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?”
General LeMay informed General Hansell. “This isn’t working. You’re out.” Put yourself in Haywood Hansell’s shoes. “Hansell could stay on if he wished, to be LeMay’s deputy, a notion Hansell considered so insulting that he could barely speak.”
Gladwell continues, “The Bomber Mafia is the story of that moment. What led up to it and what happened next—because that change of command reverberates to this day.” The subtitle ignites your curiosity: "A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War."
Is your organization facing a leadership change (or putting it off)? This “case study” in command reminded me of David McKenna’s wisdom in Stewards of a Sacred Trust: “Like the ripple effect of a stone tossed into a pond, the CEO’s influence will move in waves through generations. No decision of the board, absolutely no decision, is more profound.”
The bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia further elaborates on this “case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime.”
Gladwell adds, “It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in basement labs at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back.”
And…it’s a story about mistake-making and Carl Norden (the genius), a Dutch engineer, educated in Switzerland, who came to America in 1904. Norden “…was a true believer in blank slate, and this reveals his ego. He said, ‘I don’t want to know the mistakes other people made. I don’t want to know what they did right. I’m going to develop what’s right myself.’”
And he did. I won’t spoil the story—the true account—of why the invention of the “Norden bombsight” ranks up there with vaccines, fertilizers, and air-conditioning. You’ll have to read it for yourself—all 256 fast-moving pages in The Bomber Mafia. Gladwell talks about his books in this recent interview on CBS Sunday Morning:
View Malcolm Gladwell’s 7-minute interview on CBS Sunday Morning.
Gladwell, as is his unique style, weaves history, speculation, and observation into another fascinating read. Example from way back: “I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, ‘Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?’”
And speaking of the military services, Gladwell digresses from his plot to add Carl Builder’s color commentary about what Builder calls “the puzzling and often contradictory behavior of America's military forces.” He adds, “…powerful—and glacially resistant to change—are the entrenched institutions and distinct ‘personalities’ of the three armed services themselves.”
Per Gladwell, “Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said, just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses.”
Compare the Army and Navy chapels to “…the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, ‘Wow, that’s a futuristic building.’ The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion.”
The Air Force, Carl Builder adds, “is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.” Thus—the culture war is first fought among the military services, and then on the actual battlefield. (Fascinating.)
Why the book title? The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” Gladwell elucidates, “Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: ‘We make progress unhindered by custom.’” The mafia label “was not intended as a compliment—these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.
“Harold George, one of the spiritual leaders of the Bomber Mafia, put it like this: ‘We were highly enthusiastic; we were starting on, like, a crusade…knowing that there were a dozen of us and the only opposition we had was ten thousand officers and the rest of the Army, rest of the Navy.”
After you’ve read (or listened to) The Bomber Mafia, watch the movie, Twelve O’Clock High. Gladwell: “It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay. Twelve O’Clock High starred Gregory Peck as the leader of an attack on a ball-bearing factory. It’s worth watching because it perfectly captures the persistence of the Bomber Mafia’s vision. The men had failed the first time, but it didn’t matter. They would try again. Whatever evidence was slowly gathering about the limitations of the Norden bombsight didn’t faze them. The dream was alive.”
View Twelve O’Clock High on Amazon Prime.
Twelve O’Clock High is often used in MBA courses (Harvard, etc.). I viewed it the first time in 2007 as a guest in Connie Salio’s course at Biola University’s Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership program. Click here to read my review. Click here to view Twelve O’Clock High on Amazon Prime (2 hours, 12 minutes).
Does your organization have a bold idea? Launching a new program or department—radical or revolutionary? Gladwell’s research will give you the guts to try. He notes, “The Tactical School was a university. An academy. But not many of the faculty had any experience teaching. And the things they were teaching were so new and radical that there weren’t really any textbooks for anyone to study or articles for anyone to read. So they mostly made things up—on the fly, so to speak.
“Lectures quickly turned into seminars, which turned into open discussions, which spilled out into dinner in the evening. That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.”
Again—no spoiler alerts, but don’t miss these snippets:
• “Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can’t see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world’s but also their own narrow interests. But I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”
• The four tenets of the Bomber Mafia doctrine (previously all bombing was done at night, but these revolutionaries tried it in broad daylight with the new invention).
• How “spitballing” (“thought experiments”) before bombers and even bombsights existed—enabled innovation.
• Why Londoners never panicked during the Blitz of 1940-1941, per a government film, “The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.”
• Gladwell’s poetry: “…he’s a figure who made a novelist’s fingers itch.”
And these:
• On Hansell: “…unflinchingly honest, a little naïve, but fundamentally a romantic, with all that implies.” His first date with Dorothy Rogers: she “found him tiresome. He wrote her every day for the better part of a year. She answered two, maybe three of his letters. They were married in 1932.”
• Curtis LeMay on the easy way to win the war: “…there ain’t no such animal.”
• Why Haywood Hansell “sided with Jesus” on how to end the war. “You should never do evil so that good may come. But LeMay would have thought long and hard about going with Satan. He would have accepted the illegitimate means if they led to what he considered a swift and more advantageous end.” (What’s your view?)
Your theology matters. Don’t skip Chapter 9’s shocking report on the bombing of 67 (not a typo) cities before Japan surrendered in August 1945. Would you…authorize those bombings?
To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (5 hours, 14 minutes).
P.S. Need more war stories to wrap up your summer reading? Check out:
• The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier's Date With Destiny — Could World War II's Greatest General Have Stopped the Cold War? by Robert Orlando (read my review)
• View the award-winning movie, Silence Patton, directed by Robert Orlando, 2018 (1 hour, 25 minutes) – Click here.
• Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (read my review)
• New movie coming in 2022: Operation Mincemeat
And…click on these titles to read my reviews of three more Malcolm Gladwell books:
• Talking to Strangers (2020)
• David and Goliath (2013)
• Outliers: The Story of Success (2013)
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Was it worth it? Was General LeMay’s horrific bombing campaign prudent? (It, perhaps, prevented a U.S. invasion of Japan and more lost lives.) Now imagine that you’re calling the shots. Is a shorter war your highest value?
2) The Norden bombsight had a virtuous goal: precision bombing with minimal civilian casualties. Oops. The opposite happened. What should we be learning from the study of war?
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Mistake #11 of 25:
Traveling Without Preparing
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson
Wow! Counting this issue, John has reviewed four books by Malcolm Gladwell, but he refrained from borrowing any of Gladwell's book titles for the "mistake" book. LOL!
In Mistake #11, “Traveling Without Preparing,” John recommends a Malcolm Gladwell bestseller and also confesses, “I was unprepared for the intricacies and nuances of being a global citizen. I should have asked for coaching from experienced goodwill ambassadors.”
He writes, “Now with 59 countries crowding my passport, I realize an empty suitcase is preferable to an empty mind!” So with the help of coaches and just-in-time books, John learned (somewhat!) how to navigate other cultures across the globe. He especially appreciated two books:
• Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, says that your long-standing assumptions about leadership might need to change, based on a person’s ethnicity. For example, Greeks and Guatemalans are in the top five of the “uncertainty avoidance” countries (high reliance on rules), while Swedes and Jamaicans represent the top-five cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity. (Did John mention he’s Swedish?) Read John’s review.
• Leading Across Cultures: Effective Ministry and Mission in the Global Church. James E. Plueddemann quotes Joshua Bogunjoko, “Cross-cultural leadership is a school from which you never graduate.” Must-read: the informative two-page vignettes, “Reflections on Multicultural Leadership.” Read John’s review.
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Before you bet the farm on your next marketing blitz—slow down and invite early feedback on your innovation. Explore how to test pilot a campaign first. Contact Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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