Tears over Tarawa

NOTE: Of the 1,500 posts I've published, the following remains far and away the most popular, read by more than 35,000 people. It originally appeared on Memorial Day in 2016.

In the middle of World War II, 2,700 Women Marines (average age 22) served in Headquarters Battalion at Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. 

My mother was one of them.

She told many "war stories" later, mostly comical; and one, in particular, not comical.

The latter was set in late November 1943, when she helped operate a ticker tape machine inside the war room where the top brass worked.

The machine was dedicated to one purpose: transmitting live reports of casualties from the Pacific.

On November 20 of that year, 18,000 Marines began an amphibious attack on a Japanese-held "islet" called Betio.

A mere two miles long by a half-mile wide, Betio is a coral rock 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii and part of a larger atoll named Tarawa—in 1943, the most fortified spot in the Pacific.

As the history books tell, everything went wrong.

As the first assault wave prepared to hit the beach—code-named "Red 1"—high seas slowed the Marines' transfer from the battleships onto the landing boats, so the attack fell behind schedule.

Then, planned air raids were delayed, so the boats had to linger offshore, sustaining terrible artillery fire from the island. 

Slowly, the tide went down—much lower than expected—and grounded the boats on coral reefs. So the Marines abandoned the armored landing crafts and waded toward Red 1 hundreds of yards through chest-deep water and under brutal machine-gun fire from 100 Japanese pillboxes.

Those who made it onto the sand had to crawl inland, to avoid the rain of bullets. 

But hundreds of Marines never made it. They drowned in the surf. Their bodies so clogged the assault path the second wave of reinforcements couldn't be sent until the next day.

In Arlington, the generals in the war room stood watching a sign of the disaster-in-the-making on Red 1: the ticker tape machine.

My mother said it was spitting out the names of casualties faster than anyone had ever witnessed, or thought possible.

She said the normally gruff men were transfixed by the clattering machine. They stood looking helpless, and openly sobbing.

Your Mother Should Know

The comedian George Carlin liked to quip, “Business ethics is an oxymoron.” 

While most people on the receiving end of commerce would likely agree, having spent over forty years inside various businesses, I would rephrase Carlin's gag: Business ethics may not be an oxymoron, but it sure is an oddity.

It's as odd in the workplace as frontal nudity, purple hair and Hitler mustaches. 

Most business executives are decent folks who—to my view, anyway—conveniently "park their ethics at the door" along with their BMWs. Their workweek amorality doesn't make of them monsters or mobsters, but it does lend credence to Balzac's claim, "Behind every great fortune is a crime;" or a misdemeanor, at the least.

You'd think they would have learned right from wrong from their mothers.

Thank heaven there's now a guidebook for the ethically-challenged executive—one perfectly timed for the current global crisis.

Crisis Ahead, by crisis-management expert Edward Segal, provides a 250-page map through the corporate crisis minefield. But Crisis Ahead seeks to do more than that: it seeks to convert business ethics from an oddity to a commodity.

Segal is the author of a previous how-to, Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!, a cookbook for ambitious executives hungry for glory. Crisis Ahead is, in a way, that earlier book's "evil twin," a checklist for amoral executives eager to avoid the press's attention, a possible pillorying, or—worse—a pink slip.

Whereas the majority of books on business ethics—written by philosophers for b-school professors—are as impractical as they are impenetrable, Crisis Ahead is daringly straightforward, simple and "strictly business."

Segal states in his introduction—which includes a late-breaking essay on the Covid-19 crisis—that Crisis Ahead comprises only "quick, practical advice." The author's tips are aimed not at the academic, but at the business executive who needs to "prepare for, prevent, manage, and recover from a crisis, scandal, disaster, or other emergency." 

In other words, you'll find no theories, models or conundrums here. Crisis Ahead instead offers a bagful of "lessons learned" from illicit schemes, inside deals, sex scandals, errant emails and shoddy products, as well as no fewer than "101 best practices" intended for the beleaguered executive who needs to know "what to do in the moment: what levers to pull and what moves to make in real time when faced with a crisis." 

You also won't find terms like "environmental justice" or "social entrepreneurship" anywhere in the text; nor the names of philosophers, psychologists or theologians in the index.

So why consider Crisis Now a book on ethics? (Amazon—no paragon of the topic—has done just that, listing the book under both public relations and business ethics; but we'll set that aside for now.) 

The reason becomes clear when you read "Edward's Takes," brief sidebars by the author that accompany each case study. While these reflections consider "how well or poorly the company, organization, or individual did in responding to—or in some cases creating—a crisis," the vast majority also shine a light on the myriad misdeeds that led to the crises in the first place.

Time and again, we learn that executives themselves—not some error, accident, or act of God—bring about the catastrophes; that unscrupulous executives are indeed their own worse enemies.

You'd have thought they'd have learned better.

Swans

He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him.

— Hans Christian Andersen

Hospitals are swamped. Morgues are filled. Unemployment offices can't keep up with first-time applications.

What possible good can come from Covid-19?

I continue to hear people say we were blindsided, that the pandemic is a black swan.

The man who coined the term, financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb, disputes that claim. He thinks the pandemic was foreseeable and—like Bill Gates—predicted it.

That would make it (although no less catastrophic) a gray swan.

The deaths (93 thousand) and job losses (36 million) are indeed catastrophic.

But many of us are witnessing aspects of the lockdown that are less so:

• The air and rivers are refreshing themselves
• Animals are reasserting themselves
• Parents are discovering they have children
• Children are discovering they have parents 
• Neighbors are discovering they are neighbors
• People are learning there's value in art, architecture and books
• Adults are rediscovering bikes
• Family members are sleeping regularly and eating locally grown food
• Citizens are realizing government isn't their enemy; and
• Republicans are beginning to realize the president is

I think—for some of us—the pandemic's an ugly duckling.

The "new normal" could look prettier than we ever imagined.

The Pity Pot

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that
lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

— Anthony Powell

The owner of a large Texas-based company saw fit today to blog about her "heartbreak" over furloughing her employees.

"Nobody wants to go in front of their employees and deliver bad news," she says. "But when the news to thousands of employees is that we were enacting a plan to save their jobs in the long term by furloughing them in the short term… well, nothing can quite prepare you for that."

She describes her discomfort at handing out several thousand pink slips; how she had to forgo her prepared speech and speak instead "from the heart;" and how she's truly madly deeply empathetic with her now-former employees. 

"Empathy cannot be something you only do halfway," she says solemnly. "Empathy is the thing that helps you truly connect with the people around you, guiding you through the tough moments by reminding you that, in the end, we are all human."

I have no doubt, on the heels of her self-disclosure, the owner feels better. 

After all, confession's good for the soul. 

But how do her out-of-work employees feel? Are they consoled by her reminder that, "in the end, we are all human?" We are. But not a few of us are also facing the breadline.

Self-pity isn't only humorless—tiresome and banal—as the novelist Anthony Powell says; it's unbecoming, in the way Marie Antoinette's toilet (above) is unbecoming: you can dress it up, but you can't take it anywhere. "Sitting on the pity pot," as they say in AA, is equally unbecoming; blogging from there is worse.

Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo thinks sitting too long on the pity pot reveals an individual's sense of entitlement: the "inner brat," frustrated by adversity, believes she's helpless, a "victim of circumstance."

In a leader, self-pity is particularly unseemly. As Edward Segal, a crisis-management expert and the author of Crisis Ahead, told me, "Self-pity is not a good look for a leader. Singing 'Woe is me' only shows you cannot put yourself in the shoes of your furloughed employees."

You'll recall how frequently BP's CEO Tony Hayward sat on the pity pot when he was interviewed by reporters during the Gulf oil spill. It won him no friends.

And you're aware, thanks to the daily Coronavirus briefings, how the president seems permanently affixed to the pity pot when he's interviewed. It isn't pretty.

I've managed people in my time; I've had to lay some off; and it was indeed painful—but not nearly as painful for me as it was for them. Denied their livelihoods, my self-pity was a luxury they simply couldn't afford.

Self-pity is pointless when those around you are looking for a leader.

Like hope, self-pity is not a strategy.

The Art of the Deal

The president notwithstanding, gangster Dutch Schultz truly understood the art of the deal.

When he sat for a conversation, Schultz never failed first to unholster his gun, drop it on the table before him, and ask, "Now, what was it you wished to discuss?"

I admire the Dutchman's style. Except I'm afraid of guns, don't own one, and don't pack in public. I prefer to pack my blankie.

From 1920 to 1933, Schultz distributed bootleg beer to speakeasies in the Bronx, building a loyal clientele through threats and intimidation. By 1928, his sales—adjusted for inflation—reached $30 million a year. Rivals called him the "Beer Baron of the Bronx."

Schultz was, without doubt, a psychopath; no act of violence was beneath him. By combining kidnapping, beatings, torture and murder, he and his gang of Jews rapidly showed the local Italians two could play at the game. Schultz became nationally famous for the phrase—coined by his accountant—“Nothing personal, just business.”

Dutch Schultz's 1931 Armored Lincoln

The Dutchman expanded his enterprise from the Bronx into Manhattan in 1928, crossing paths with the Irish gangster Legs Diamond. Diamond retaliated  by having Schultz's business partner killed. Schultz, in turn, had Diamond's partner killed; then Diamond, as well.

Schultz rounded out his portfolio at this time by adding illegal slots and lotteries to bootleg beer.

Like Al Capone, Schultz eventually was indicted for tax evasion. Although exonerated by two juries, Schultz fled New York in 1935, after the state's prosecutor threatened to indict him for running his illegal lotteries. He relocated his headquarters to the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark, New Jersey.

But Schultz just couldn't let go of his anger at New York's prosecutor. He told rival mob bosses he was going to kill him. Rubbing out a public figure was off limits, so the bosses contracted the hit squad Murder, Inc. to kill Schultz, which it did on October 23, 1935, while the Dutchman was dining in the nearby Palace Chop House.

My mother, 15 at the time, vividly recalled visiting the Palace Chop House and seeing the scores of bullet holes left by Murder, Inc. in the walls and windows and mirrors.

She also recalled attending a family wake where Squawk Reilly, Legs Diamond's business partner, arrived to pay his respects. Chastened by the Dutchman's recent demise, Squawk was attended by no less than four bodyguards.