Monthly Archives: March 2020

03/22/20

No Perfect Leaders

I have been in the leadership business since I was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute in 1969. As an Army officer, we were not converted into “wartime” CEOs, our constant context was war. That was what we were trained to do.

It is like nails on a blackboard when I hear venture capitalists describe the “wartime CEO” using the Army as a context.

All of this has drawn me to assess the leadership of the country in the context of the WutangCurse.

The nature of leaders

The WutangCurse is a crisis and it will require stalwart, sound, optimistic leadership to navigate the medical, the intellectual, the psychological, and the economic shoals of this dilemma.

We do not have perfect leaders. Life gives us leaders who may be or become perfect for that challenge.

Today, I think we have two of them: President Donald J Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Winston Churchill, an exemplar

Winston Churchill was the perfect leader for England and what would become the Allies — long before the United States entered into the war — when on the heels of Dunkirk, he spoke directly to Hitler and told him England would resist the Nazis with ever fiber of their being.

In August 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill signalling “V for Victory”

In the Parliament of the United Kingdom, 4 June 1940, having lost his army’s heavy weapons in France, his army in tatters, Prime Minister (since 10 May 1940, the date upon which the Nazis launched their attack against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg) Winston Churchill, rose and said in his inimitable voice:

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”

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03/21/20

Real News

Guy calls me and says, “Can you believe that Mike Bloomberg spent a billion dollars on his election campaign?”

I say to him, “You’re full of crap. Bloomberg was on in the race for half of November, December 2019, January, February, until 4 March 2020. No way he spent that kind of money. That’s more than Trump plus all the other Democrat candidates for the entire primary and, maybe, the general election.”

Guy says, “Want to make a wager?” He has a certain kind of smile that makes me a little wary.

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03/21/20

Capitalism To The Rescue

The day after Pearl Harbor, Ford Motor Company announced it was retooling all of its production lines to produce Jeeps and other military vehicles thereby setting in motion a wholesale shift of American industry to support the war effort. Three and a half years later, America was producing 50,000 airplanes of all types on a monthly basis.

The US would produce 640,000 Jeeps (270,000 by Ford alone, the balance from other auto manufacturers) in those three and a half years. When I was in the Army in the 1970s, I had a Jeep like this. I loved my Jeep.

This is what happens when American industry is tapped to rise to a national crisis. Today, we see the same thing happening in the startup world.

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03/20/20

Being An American In Trying Times

I once asked a man who had been in the Army when Pearl Harbor happened what it felt like to be attacked and lose most of our fleet in the mud. I imagined it was harrowing. I imagined that America was scared to its core. I was wrong.

This man would fight in the war in Italy — through two hard winters — carrying an M1 until he was “asked” to run a battery of 105mm guns in support of his infantry regiment and was ultimately to receive a battlefield commission ending the war capturing a German railway construction battalion which he oversaw as POWs.

“So, how did that feel?” I asked him, meaning how did that feel the day of and after Pearl Harbor.

He looked at me with the wise look that men who have lived hard lives like him, who have put his ass on the line for our country, who have killed our enemies in close combat, who have shot it out in direct eyeball-to-eyeball fire with Kraut 88s across Italian valleys, and he said, “I knew we were going to put an ass whipping on those Japs like they never imagined.”

I was incredulous because I had read west coast newspapers of that time and they had the Japs landing in California any day now. The Japs took the Philippines and a bunch of other places. The Germans had already invaded Poland two years earlier. The Germans declared war against us and we had fewer than 200,000 men in the Army and they had 6,000,000 plus great tanks and those damn 88s.

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03/19/20

Voices From the Real World III — Madrid, Spain

OK, a chum of mine is in Madrid, Spain where he is a financial entrepreneur buying up transition properties and breathing value into them with capital and repairs. Smart guy.

He is at home with WutangCurse symptoms with a wife and child. He is in quarantine within his own home.

He sent me the updated numbers for Spain. I always like seeing the detailed, granular breakdown for things like this. Take a look. [Translates as follows: Total conf=Infected, UCI=ICU, Fallecidos=Deaths, Curados=Healed.]

He goes on to further elaborate that he is one of the 20,000 in self-imposed isolation in Madrid alone. He has been feeling poorly for six days, but has plenty of room and a nice arrangement whereby he can even be isolated from his family.

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03/17/20

When Innovation Kills Good Jobs

In case you have not noticed, there is a short term crisis that has necessitated the closing of many schools, a re-orientation toward distance learning, and a growth of innovation surrounding this changed condition.

Distance learning has been an ongoing thing for some time already and the use of technology in education is no spring chicken. [Some of the big college MBA programs are delivered exclusively through distance learning with limited to no degradation of the experience.]

One distance learning company has an outstanding call for 5,000 teachers to provide classes through its platform.

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