Leadership in My Rearview Mirror: Reflections from Vietnam, West Point, and IBM - Softcover

Jack Beach

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158347353X ISBN 13: 9781583473535

Publisher: MC Press (US), 2012

Synopsis

With wit and wisdom, this book shares insights of a man who rose from being a reluctant draftee sent to fight in Vietnam to later becoming a colonel and an architect of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at West Point, and who currently works to develop IBM's senior leaders. This book does not describe the view from the heights of leadership; rather, it identifies the attributes and behaviors needed to make the climb and explains how to develop them in ourselves and in others. It emphasizes creation of organizational climates with 360 degrees of trust and deep engagement; explains the importance of intrinsic motivation; explores principle-based leadership; introduces The 5 Trust Vital Signs; promotes collective leadership; and concludes with a statement of concise tenets of the author's leadership philosophy.

About this title

About the Author

Jack Beach is a senior consultant with IBM’s leadership development organization, managing their leadership strategy and research unit and overseeing all executive leadership development programs. He is a former colonel in the United States Army who helped create the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has served as a consultant for chiefs of staff of foreign services such as Sri Lanka and the Republic of Maldives, deans of foreign military academies, the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments, and various senior leaders of the Army and Department of Defense. He lives in Newburgh, New York.

Excerpt. İ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Leadership in My Rearview Mirror

Reflections from Vietnam, West Point, and IBM

By Jack Beach

MC Press

Copyright İ 2012 Jack Beach
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58347-353-5

Contents

About the Author, 
Acknowledgments, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
Introduction Title Fight, 
PART I: The Reflective Leader: Leadership and Other Things I Learned Along the Way, 
Chapter 1: Out of Control, 
Chapter 2: The Face in the Mirror, 
Chapter 3: The Cost of Leadership, 
Chapter 4: Values: It's All in the Feet, 
Chapter 5: Leader of Rebels, 
Chapter 6: Trusting the Untrustworthy, 
Chapter 7: "I Am—Somebody!", 
Chapter 8: It's All You, 
Chapter 9: Of Frogs and Leaders, 
Chapter 10: Talk, 
Chapter 11: It Pays to Treat People Unjustly, 
Chapter 12: Just Names, 
Chapter 13: On Leadership and Kite Flying, 
PART II: Leaders in Search of Leadership, 
Chapter 14: Leader in Search of Leadership, 
Chapter 15: Packing Parachutes—Leadership Isn't What It Used to Be, 
Chapter 16: Leading Kindergarten Recess, 
Chapter 17: On Their Knees at 2 A.M. in the Drugstore, 
Chapter 18: "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", 
Chapter 19: Turbulence Creates Leaders/Leaders Create Turbulence, 
Chapter 20: Leadership: It's Just Talk, 
PART III: Leaders in Their Own Words, 
Chapter 21: Leaders Are Full of Hot Air!, 
Chapter 22: Crisis at 35,000 Feet, 
Epilogue: Your Leadership Book, 
Appendix I: IBM's Leadership Framework, 
Appendix II: U.S. Coast Guard Principles, 
Appendix III: U.S. Coast Guard Values, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Out of Control

So, what got me reflecting on leadership? There were several things. First, my Ph.D. is in clinical psychology. I have been a student of human behavior for a long time. But the biggest impetus for me to look specifically at leadership was that I spent thirty years in the Army. Throughout that time, as I advanced from private to colonel, I had positions of increasing responsibility, and for the final nearly eighteen years, I was a professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Since retiring from the Army in 1999, I have been a leadership developer with IBM, working mostly with executives and high-potential pre-executives. I have responsibility for overseeing all the executive leadership development programs and also manage the Leadership Strategy and Research Group. For more than forty years, my job has been to think in a self-conscious and disciplined way about leadership and how it is developed. But even before I became formally involved with leadership training, I would reflect on and try to dissect my experiences in an attempt to meet the leadership responsibilities entrusted to me.

In the pages ahead, I will be sharing some autobiographical stories and my takeaways from them. My organizing strategy is to present them, for the most part, in chronological order, starting with my earliest days in the Army. In fact, let's start with my very first day.

I entered the Army as an inducted draftee. I came of age in a time of an active draft — even before the draft lottery. I was twenty-four years old, which was old for a draftee. I was in my second year of graduate school when I was called to report. After petitioning the draft board for a delay, I was allowed to complete my semester; they postponed my induction date several months. Three days after defending my Master's thesis, I was in the Army. Things were happening quickly.

In the afternoon following my thesis defense, my wife, Maureen, and I loaded all our belongings into a U-Haul and moved from Orono, Maine, back to our hometown of Catskill, New York. Catskill is a small village of about five thousand people on the west shore of the Hudson River. The Catskill Mountains are just a few miles farther to the west. My parents had an apartment in their home where my father's widowed mother had lived, which they made available to us. Maureen's parents and family lived only about five miles away in the hamlet of Leeds, New York. Leeds was even smaller than Catskill, about four hundred residences at the time. Although Leeds was only about one hundred and twenty miles from New York City, Maureen had attended a three-room school through the eighth grade, at which time she and her eleven classmates entered Catskill High School, which is where we met. It seemed like being home was the best place for her as we waited to see just what Uncle Sam was going do with me for the next couple of years. While it was pretty likely that I would be headed for Vietnam, Maureen was not yet ready to entertain that possibility.

On July 1, 1969, I got up and headed for the draft board, which was on Main Street, across from the courthouse and next to the bus station. As I walked, my mind was not so much on the future as on the past. It was a clear day, and I could see the mountains. We lived at 9 Liberty Street in a large Victorian home that my grandfather had built in 1904. The particular location was chosen because it had a panoramic view to the west of the Catskill Mountains and the Catskill Mountain House, where my grandfather had been raised. One block to the east, the woods bordering the Hudson River began.

In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, which was the first of five books in his series Leatherstocking Tales11, Natty Bumppo, the main character, speaks of a "second paradise." When asked where that is, he replies,

"Where! why, up on the Catskills ... there's a place in them hills that I used to climb to when I wanted to see the carryings on of the world. ... You know the Catskills, lad; for you must have seen them on your left, as you followed the river up from York ... the place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet ..."

And when he is asked, "What see you when you get there?" He answers, "Creation ... all creation. ..." As our high-school alma mater put it, we were "in the land of Rip Van Winkle, nestled near the Hudson's shores." Catskill, with the river and the mountains laced with waterfalls and swimming holes, was to me every bit the paradise Natty Bumppo said it was.

I thought of the hours spent along the river shore, having picnics, making bonfires, and on occasion camping overnight in the woods with childhood friends or paddling our canoe to Rogers Island on the far side of the river. I mentally reminisced about my brother and me hitchhiking out to the mountains with our friends to spend summer days basking on the sun- warmed rocks and diving from the cliffs into the cool clear pools that formed beneath picturesque waterfalls. It was an idyllic place to have grown up. It was no surprise to me that the fabled Rip Van Winkle would have spent so much time avoiding all manner of labor just to tread the wooded wilderness and delight in the vistas to which its pinnacles gave way or that Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and other Hudson River School artists would have considered its magnificent landscapes as manifestations of God.

As I turned the corner from Liberty Street onto King Street, my reverie ceased as I ran into a friend, Eddy, who lived on the street one block down from Liberty Street. Eddy's house was the second house to the left when I looked off my back porch. As it turned out, Eddy, too, had been called to report. Greene County was not densely populated, and the draft board's quota was modest. Eddy and I were the only two being drafted from Greene County for the month of July. We proceeded down King Street, turned right onto Broad Street, and then left down Clark Street to Main Street to wait for the bus that would take us thirty-five miles up the New York State Thruway to the induction center in Albany.

As we crossed Main Street at the foot of Clark Street, we were face-to-face with the First Baptist Church where "Uncle Sam" had been a member. Samuel Wilson was a meat packer who supplied beef and pork to American troops during the War of 1812. As the barrels of meat were destined for the United States government, they were stamped "U.S.," from which the troops got Uncle Sam. He and his brother Nathaniel had a slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Catskill. Also of interest was William Smith, a longtime resident of Catskill, whom local residents insist was the original model for the personification of Uncle Sam in a top hat, bow tie, vest, and striped pants. Photos dating from almost a decade before James Montgomery Flagg painted the well-known World War I "I Want You" recruiting poster show Mr. Smith in the iconic dress. As Eddy and I walked the remaining few yards to our destination, I thought to myself, "You want me, old man — you got me!"

We arrived at about seven-thirty in the morning and had been standing outside the draft board for a few minutes just chatting and waiting for the bus when I noticed Eddy was taking off his clothes. At first, I thought he had unbuckled his belt to tuck in his shirt, but the loosening of the belt was followed in fairly rapid sequence by his pants dropping to the sidewalk, then his shirt, and he continued until he was as naked as the second he had made his entry into the outside world. He then proceeded to walk back and forth, fist in the air, chanting, "Hell no, I won't go. I'm for peace, brother. I'm for peace!" The irony that Eddy's demonstration took place a few yards from the church in which Uncle Sam had worshipped years before has never escaped me.

Eddy's protest was clearly not something I had anticipated. Catching a glimpse through the window of the demonstration going on outside, Shirley, the clerk at the draft board, called the police. Meanwhile, I was walking alongside Eddy with my arm around his shoulder trying to reason with him — but to no avail. I am not sure that Eddy realized I was there. Although Eddy may not have felt my presence, I was acutely aware of his and Shirley's. Even a small village feels pretty crowded when you are walking with your arm around a naked guy on Main Street.

Within minutes, Harry, one of the local cops, arrived. Harry, Eddy, and I were the same age, give or take a year. We were also neighbors. Harry lived next door to Eddy. But they were not friends — quite the opposite. Harry pushed Eddy face first against the wall, cuffed his hands behind him, and took him away.

So, why do I tell you this story? What does it have to do with leadership? The episode taught me that sometimes we just have no control over events. We cannot always control circumstance, and we will not be able to influence some people. Such inability to control or influence does not undermine the importance of leadership; leadership remains important; but not everything is a leadership issue. I had little control over being conscripted. But I showed up ready to do my duty. And, as hard as I tried — and I definitely tried — I could not get through to Eddy. In the end, all I could do was fold his clothes, make sure he had his glasses, which he had also taken off, and see that Harry did not use excessive force. You do what you can with what you can control, even if you cannot control very much.

Not having full control is not an excuse for lack of leadership. In speaking to a group of new IBM executives, Lisa Su, who at the time was VP, Semiconductor Research Center, said, "As an executive I find myself looking at a situation and thinking, 'How can it get better?'" As a leader you may not be able to do all that you would like to do, but focus on what you can do — not what you cannot. And, in whatever ways possible, work to make things better.

So, what became of Eddy? With the help of a lawyer (and doctors), he was able to prove that he had psychomotor epilepsy. He was released and went back to college. He died several years ago. He was a kind and gentle soul. His friends, including me, will remember him for more than his one naked act of civil disobedience.

CHAPTER 2

The Face in the Mirror

Soon after Harry had taken naked Eddy to the police station, the bus arrived to take me to the induction center in Albany. In addition to getting a cursory physical exam and raising my right hand to swear to "support and defend the Constitution," I mostly waited around. The induction center was full of inductees — one by the name of Bill Cloonan. Bill had just completed his first year of law school when Uncle Sam thought that he deserved a break from school. He was from Kingston, New York, a city on the Hudson about twenty-five miles south of Catskill. We quickly became friends.

By mid-afternoon, Bill and I along with the other inductees were on a bus and headed for Fort Dix, New Jersey, for Basic Combat Training. I had no idea what I was about to experience, nor did I have much anxiety about it. The bus left us at the reception center. The transformation from a lowly and flawed civilian to a noble soldier was about to begin.

The first step in our journey from civilian to soldier was getting a haircut. Even those who had tried to preempt the Army by shaving their heads the night before did not escape. The act of sitting in the barber chair and having an Army barber spend a few seconds running his clippers over your head is a sacrament. Its outward manifestation is a flawlessly shaved head. The immediate mystical impact is that the person undergoing the experience no longer has any question about who is in charge.

If the haircut was the baptism that freed us from our old life as civilians and allowed us to be born again as soldiers, our transmogrification was completed by the removal of our civilian clothes and the donning of simple, green, not-so-holy raiment known as fatigues. Why they were called fatigues would rudely and clearly be revealed to us during the next ten weeks. (In recent years this uniform has become the battle dress uniform, or BDU. No longer solid green, it has a camouflage pattern. I suspect this change of name and color was a marketing ploy on the part of the Army.) Instantaneously, whether a person had been a "rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant," or, yes, even "chief," we were rendered devoid of all trappings that might otherwise distinguish us from our fellow recruits. Who we or our parents were no longer mattered. Moreover, in the eyes of the drill sergeants, we all even shared the same name, trainee, signifying our membership in the lowest caste of the military. The playing field had not only been flattened, it had been turned into a pit, and for the next ten weeks our measure would be taken on how able we were to climb or crawl out of that pit.

Having shed our old selves and put on the new, we were again subjected to a physical examination, similar to the one we had endured just hours ago. One had to wonder what they thought could have occurred in the intervening hours, but they were taking no chances. Following the second physical, we took a battery of written tests that would in large part determine our "MOS" (Military Operational Specialty). Finally, before being assigned to our companies, one of the post's senior officers addressed us. He let us know that "in this era of nuclear weapons, rockets, guided missiles, and other modern tools of warfare, the most important element of the nation's defense is the man who employs these tools." I have a sneaking suspicion that he knew that we were not going to be involved in nuclear war or even one all that modern, because he quickly segued from the technological to the primal. "Man's natural habitat is the earth, and in war, he must eventually defeat his enemies by struggles on the ground." He concluded by making clear that he and the other officers and non- commissioned officers had a singular purpose, and that was to ensure each of us would be "thoroughly disciplined, technically qualified, and physically, morally, and mentally conditioned to survive on the battlefield." We were then assigned and transported to our new companies, each convinced that we were on our way to becoming the ultimate weapon — the American soldier.

As luck would have it, Bill Cloonan and I ended up not only in the same Basic Training company but also as roommates. There were six to eight of us to a room. About two weeks into Basic Training, the drill sergeant switched one of our roommates and gave us a new one — Dickie Dickenson.

Dickie was about six feet tall and probably weighed all of one hundred and thirty-five pounds — and was the biggest "tie up" in the company. He never seemed to know what he was doing or supposed to do. Within five seconds of the drill sergeant leaving the room, I had Dickie by the collar, up against the wall, and made it very clear to him that if he messed up in this room, he would have more problems than all the chaplains in the United States Army could remedy. Bill, who was sitting on his bunk, shining his boots, just looked up with a wry smile and said, "Jack, I am really impressed with all the psychology you learned in graduate school."

This one moment had an impact on me that has lasted to this day. First, I was incredibly embarrassed. My first and immediate takeaway was that I could be a real "rear end." And to this day, I have never raised my voice or been rude to a direct report or subordinate — I cannot say that I have been as considerate of peers, superiors, and bosses.

There were other lessons as well. One, we need to have at least one person we can trust to give us honest feedback — to hold a mirror up to us and say, "Do you see what you are doing? Do you see the impact? Is this what you intend to have happen?" At IBM, we call that straight talk.

Two, we need to be open to feedback. Straight talk is not only about giving it but also about receiving it — especially when the truth is personally disquieting.

Three, and perhaps most important, we need to take advantage of developmental moments. When we talk about coaching, people often think that it occurs on the third Thursday of every quarter. There is nothing wrong with scheduled coaching sessions; they are important. But coaching is also about who you are as a leader. Always be ready to take advantage of teachable moments. They generally arise unexpectedly, but if you are ready to take advantage of them, the impact will be far greater than that of many scheduled — and more detached — coaching sessions.

Yet another insight was that poor performance is not always improved by increasing motivation. Dickie Dickenson did not need more motivation; he was already doing his best. Leaders need to help a person's best get better. Dickie needed a helping hand. I was adding to the problem, not helping to resolve it. As leaders, we need to determine what resources and development people require and also figure out how to keep people at their optimal level of motivation. That is where we get peak performance. Sometimes reaching optimal motivation means backing off.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Leadership in My Rearview Mirror by Jack Beach. Copyright İ 2012 Jack Beach. Excerpted by permission of MC Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: MC Press (US)
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158347353X
• ISBN 13: 9781583473535
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288