Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.

Lost

Marry I will not, for my affections were buried in the grave.

— James Buchanan

Last month, C-SPAN—continuing a tradition inaugurated in 1948 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.—again asked professional historians to rank America's presidents.

Once more, James Buchanan ranked as the worst.

Critics of the survey charge the historians with presentism. 

But it's hard to dispute a finding based on 142 respondents' answers, or the fact that Buchanan has wound up the biggest loser in nearly every survey since 1948. 

Buchanan has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of the ranking survey because he hastened the American Civil War. 

He left the presidency in 1861 with the nation already split in two, the pro-slavery Confederacy and anti-slavery Union.

Buchanan's presidency might never have happened had Ann Coleman learned 40 years earlier to ease her drug use.

Ann was a looker and—better still—an enormously wealthy one. 

Her father was among the richest citizens of the young Buchanan's hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and perhaps the richest man in the state. 

A rising attorney, Buchanan zeroed in on the comely Ann, Lancaster's undisputed "catch" of 1819.

After a whirlwind courtship, the couple became engaged—despite Ann's father's objections—in the summer of that same year.

But, as it turned out, the greedy and ambitious Buchanan was a neglectful fiancé. He spent the evening hours working in his law office, left town for months at a time, and even failed to write when away. 

He also had a wandering eye. 

Ann was so pained by her fiancé's neglect—and the town gossip about him—that she broke off their engagement in December, moved to Philadelphia, and turned to quaffing laudanum, the 19th century's equivalent of OxyContin.

Within only days, she overdosed and died. 

Her presiding physician, keen to quell any talk of suicide, attributed Ann's death to female hysteria.

Lancaster's gossips immediately began to call Buchanan a murderer and Ann's father refused his request to see her body or attend her funeral. 

Buchanan became distraught, swore off ever marrying, and fled Lancaster for Washington, DC, where he devoted his life to politics—a devotion that led, 35 years later, to the White House. 

He always told people Ann's death had left his life "a dreary blank," but gossips and political opponents claimed Buchanan—America's only bachelor president—was in fact gay.

The secretive Buchanan still possessed Ann Coleman's love letters when he died in 1868. 

Per his will, the letters were burned by the executors of Buchanan's estate.

Character is Not for Sale: Why I Hate SUVs.

A man should give us a sense of mass.

— Emerson

When deciding whether to grant a security clearance to someone, our intelligence agencies take into account what they call the "whole person;" not merely the record of his or past behaviors, but their sum total—the sort of actor they represent.

We'd call that sum total character.

Bankers actually do call it that. Character to bankers is one of the "Five Cs," the five factors they consider when deciding whether to make a loan.

Character to a banker amounts to stability—how long you’ve lived at your current address, how long you’ve been in your current job, and how promptly you pay your bills. Bankers want to know you're steady, trustworthy, and likely to repay the loan.

Writer Tom Wolfe called character "the right stuff," an ineffable "it," a je ne sais quoi that blends combat-tested chutzpa with a self-effacing style. More than just a track-record of stability, the right stuff comprises the Hemingwayesque knack for demonstrating "grace under pressure." As astronaut Wally Schirra said of the right stuff, "it's something you can't buy."

Emerson called character the "genius by whose impulses a man is guided;" a genius, he said, as likely to rear its head in business as on the battlefield (Emerson didn't anticipate space flight).

"The face which character wears to me is self-sufficiency," the philosopher said. "A man should give us a sense of mass. Our action should rest mathematically on our substance."

Character as substance: I like that definition. I see it on quiet display every day—particularly among the many businesspeople I know who are struggling to emerge whole from the pandemic. Although they don't say it, they worry as much about their employees', suppliers', and customers' futures as their own; often more so.

They know character amounts to taking one right step after another, even when the path is rocky and uncertain. 

Now that's the right stuff.

Unfortunately, too many other Americans think the right stuff is for sale and that you can buy it—in the form of an SUV.

SUVs continue to push sedans out of the American automotive market, because they make their owners feel "important" and "safe," according to consumer research conducted automakers.

That research shows these Americans are, in the researchers' words, "self-oriented" and "crime-fearing." 

In other words, selfish and paranoid.

When behind the wheel, SUV drivers, according to the research, believe, "I'm in control of the people around me." And they show it by hogging the road; driving aggressively; lane-changing recklessly; parking thoughtlessly; and eyeing you with contempt at all times.

SUVs, in turn, are designed by Detroit to feed their drivers' warped, apocalyptic fantasies. Resembling the armored cars starring in Mad Max movies, SUVs are fierce, furious and overfed weapons of brutal destruction. 

I hate SUVs; and, by extension, their cowardly, hoggish and self-important drivers. 

And I have a message for them.

Character is not for sale.

Above: Bust by John Francis Murray.

Paint Licks

 

I’m pleased to announce the release of my first e-book, Paint Licks.

Paint Licks gathers insights by 30 painters, living and dead, into the whys and hows of painting.

Download your free copy now.

Share it with a friend.

And let me know if you enjoy it.

Information Compulsion

Everything you say should be true,
but not everything true should be said.

— Voltaire

The late writer Tom Wolfe believed that everyone suffers from "information compulsion," that everyone is "dying to tell you something you don't know."

Wolfe relied on the compulsion to draw secrets out of the hundreds of people he interviewed during his career, including Ken Kesey, Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, Junior Johnson, Hugh Hefner, Phil Spector, and Leonard Bernstein.

We're taught as kids to be discreet, not to volunteer information or share "family business."

And we learn as young adults the numerous penalties attached to having loose lips, when we see peers chastised, ostracized, marginalized, demoted or fired for compulsive blabbery. 

We even take a formal oath of secrecy whenever we're forced to sign one of those sinister-sounding NDAs.

So why do we so readily cave to "information compulsion" when it comes to social media?

In the past 24 hours alone, I have learned through Facebook:

• Despite her need to, a painter I know cannot sell any of her artwork.
  
  
• Another painter I know has been "blocked" for more than a year.
  
  
• A student in a group I follow is clinically depressed.
  
  
• A publisher I know can't stop grieving over his father's death.
  
  
• An event planner I know can't find a job—or even get an interview.

I'm no Pollyanna. Like everyone else,  I too have my share of irksome troubles.

But sharing them on social media, as if it were one big recovery meeting, makes no sense to me.

Surrendering to information compulsion may reduce your anxiety, but it confers no honor upon you, and is sure to haunt you in the long run.

"The ideal man bears the accidents of life with grace and dignity," Aristotle said, "making the best of circumstances."

You want to be that man (or woman or neither).

Because dignity is non-negotiable.