Up the beach

I have a confession to make. Even after all of your fantastic book recommendations (which I honestly intend to get to), I still went out and bought Stephen Ambrose's book on D-Day and spent my vacation time relaxing on a beach reading about men getting massacred on a beach (different beach, though). It's an amazing book. It's tense and heartbreaking and reading these first-hand accounts makes one realize that the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is at least accurate, if not a little understated.

One of the things that's really stuck with me in this book is the lesson of how important leadership is. As boats landed off target and officers were killed immediately out of the boats, men huddled in the relative safety of the seawall and often did nothing. Logic says that this was out of fear, but time and time again on Omaha Beach, what made these men immobile was much less fear or exhaustion, but more because they didn't know what to do. Men who were frozen in absolute fear were shaken out of it only when they were given something to do, when someone took charge and pointed the way.

This made such a big impression on me because the quality of leadership is something that a lot of people severely undervalue. There's a gross overuse of the word and concept of being "proactive" in a lot of today's working world, and it ignores the fact that people need leaders to actually lead. Regardless of ability or intelligence, most people desperately need goals given to them clearly, and the lazy concept of expecting workers to work "proactively" (in other words: figure out what you're supposed to do) just flat-out doesn't work.

Sorry to get all job seminar on you. I just keep reflecting on how amazing it is that good leadership can get fear-stricken men to pull themselves together and move into a hail of bullets. This extreme example reminds me of how I've worked under good leaders and how the times when I've either been leaderless or have had ineffective, vague leaders, there's no amount of proactivity that can make things right.

Oh, also, it reminds me that things can be a LOT worse.