AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM
by Mike Manes
I was listening recently to a business owner talk about an employee’s “attitude problem.” Initially, I took the comments at face value. Later I asked, “What’s an attitude problem? Is his attitude good or bad? Is there one universal measure of attitudes or of problems? Is this measure timeless and exact? Is it situational or perspective based? What’s the context of the organization and marketplace environment? Are these static or dynamic?”
If you’re older than 50 you’ll remember the photo of Vietnam War protestors placing daisies in the barrels of M-16s as soldiers stood in formation. Many political leaders and most of our parents and grandparents criticized the “attitude problem” of these “long-haired hippie freaks.”
With the hindsight of nearly 50 years, perhaps we should celebrate the positive and passionate attitude of these “freaks” and second-guess all those in power who condemned them.
Robert McNamara, a former Ford Motor executive, was Secretary of Defense for JFK and LBJ He was well educated, hard driving, and talented. Most of us would have loved to have him in our organizations. Unfortunately, by his own admission, he was wrong in prosecuting the VietnamWar. As it turned out, the protestors were right.
For those of you too young to remember this war, consider instead the student in Tiananmen Square 22 years ago staring down the muzzle of that tank. To freedom-loving Americans his attitude was great – courageous and positive. To executives in the “C-Suite” of the Chinese government he was a “freak” with an “attitude problem.” I’m guessing this “problem” might have been eliminated. Someday perhaps China will celebrate that protester.
In his New York Times article on the death of Robert S. McNamara Tim Weiner provides insight into the man.
“He’s like a jackhammer,” said Lyndon Johnson. “No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He’s too perfect.”
Well before leaving the Pentagon, McNamara concluded that the war was futile, but he did not share this insight with the public for more than two decades. In 1995, he took a stand against his own action in connection with the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.”
McNamara had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy and to “empathize with him,” as he explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”
“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” said McNamara. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.
My interpretation of this article and of McNamara is that he was too focused – too sure of what he knew and too unaware of what he didn’t know. I’d bet that he was surrounded by “yes” men and women encouraging him. There were probably few people with “attitude problems” to challenge him, his decisions, and his perspective.
He or his inner circle had too much power and not enough restraint on that power. The inner circle treated him differently from the soldiers.
In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower had warned about the dangers of a military -industrial complex. Unfortunately. We the people didn’t hear this warning. We continued to let the military do what the military does – make war. The generals, colonels, and captains who ran the armed forces discounted both Ike’s warning and input from the frontline troops – and instead played to the audience of one that was Secretary of Defense McNamara. The rest is history.
Now fast-forward to your organization today. Are your people challenging who you are, what you do, and what you say? Is there even a remote possibility that they’re right? Will history prove them right?
Are you still serving customers in the same way you did decades ago, even though you know that these customers, your competition, and the marketplace have changed? Have you given any credence to the protestors who are (to the status quo - your management team) a bunch of “freaks?”
Have you put yourself in the skin of your employees, competitors, and customers and looked at the marketplace and your organization through their eyes?
Do you, the business owner, get the same feedback from your “generals, colonels, and captains” that your “frontline troops” might provide? How will you and the marketplace judge your performance and results 10 years from now? I hope you don’t have the regrets McNamara had!
Michael G. Manes can be reached at Square One Consulting, 625 Weeks Street, New Iberia, LA 70560; (Cell) 337-577-3885; e-mail: [email protected]; Web Site: www.squareoneconsulting.com. He serves as the Planning Key Consultant for IMMS.com. Reproduced, with permission, from his “Brokerage” column from Risk and Insurance Magazine.