The Charade

Yesterday was Memorial Day.  One of the things that I am reminded by each and every Memorial Day is leadership.  A lot of leaders lead with ego.  Others don’t.

I have been around both. The ones that lead with ego often put up a lot of roadblocks.  They put up a lot of false narratives that have to be run down.   In a startup boardroom situation, this isn’t productive.  It wastes a massive amount of time because at a board level you have a fiduciary responsibility to run down a lot of the narratives.

The ones that lead with ego often are controlling.  They are consistently suspicious and they are always positioning.  They block things that might hurt their powerbase and consistently try to advance their powerbase by any means necessary.

The ones that lead with ego take credit for all the good and deflect or blame for all the bad.  I think we can find plenty of examples currently and in human history that lead by ego.  The leaders that don’t lead by ego are less prevalent and also because they just go about their business you don’t hear a lot about them.

I was reminded about the difference yesterday and the stark distinction between General Mark Clark and General Lucian Truscott.

General Clark was the commander of Allied forces in Italy during WW2.  In histories I have read, he deserves a lot of the blame for the deaths of thousands of Allied GI’s. Rick Atkinson’s book The Day of The Battle, outlines a few times where Clark sent Americans into what became a killing field.

Truscott was the opposite.  He was not a West Pointer.  He rose through the Army because he was good.  He was empathetic of his troops and they performed for him.  Sometimes, he was a sonofabitch, but he was always fair.

Truscott never ran a charade.