Bow Waves & Propellers: Leadership

“It surely must be lonely at the top, and that prospect is one reason I never sought to rise from the professoriate to the administration. The pay was tempting but just the prospect of dismissing someone would have been unnerving. Good leaders and bad can often compartmentalize their emotions and lock them away in a sound-proof room while sleeping peacefully next door, but that room was never part of my top-storey plan.”—By Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger 

“Country without czar is village without idiot.”—Russian proverb

“A rancher can do more with an apple in hand than a cattle prod.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/25/2014—Examining a wartime photograph of Gen. Erwin Rommel with his shoulder to his staff-car fender helping his men extricate it from the mud, I thought . . . this is a picture that ought to be on every leader’s desk.

I was reminded of the photograph when I heard Dr. Jim Barker, president of the school where I once taught, tell a group of faculty about his first night on the job.

While Jim and his wife were preparing for bed, his son telephoned to say that the family car had broken down and all the local garages were closed. Jim changed back into his street clothes, drove his wife’s car to the site of the breakdown, and helped his son, a Clemson undergraduate, push the vehicle to a shuttered garage. As he was pushing, Jim wondered what the trustees, who had honored him earlier, would say if they saw him. Then he wondered what he would say. As he told his son, “You know this is a service I would supply any Clemson student.” He neglected to mention faculty and staff, but I know he probably meant “the Clemson family,” a phrase he often used to describe roughly 25,000 people.

Over the next 14 years that he worked in and out of Clemson’s “Oval Office,” Jim gave away a dozen of his own hand tools to students on a scavenger hunt, fed and entertained 98,000 people in his home, personally called the grieving families of twelve students on Christmas after one particularly bad semester, welcomed scores of students to play basketball in his backyard when the gym closed for repairs, turned down his stereo’s volume when students called to complain, did 32 push-ups in a shag-carpet costume after Clemson scored a touchdown, waterskied briefly behind eight young women in a racing shell, and shook hands with some 60,000 students at their graduations. This in addition to raising tens of millions for the school’s endowment and leading an idealistic drive to make Clemson a Top 20 university. (“We” are currently ranked twenty-first.)

A previous Clemson president had claimed that he often felt like a cemetery manager who, despite his well-appointed penthouse office, could not get people to listen. Well, I was occupying one of those basement offices, and I was listening. It’s insulting to be counted among the dead even as you are trying to lift a hundred students each semester.

Perhaps more than anything, a great leader needs to be a good communicator . . . not a “gooder communicator” as one anonymous boss put it in a staff memo.

It’s often been observed that the higher one rises in any hierarchy, the more isolated one feels, but Jim Barker has proven to my satisfaction that isolation is not a precondition of power.

Alexander the Great perhaps best exemplifies the military leader with the common touch. In one battle in India, and a very long way from home, he scaled a siege ladder alongside his Macedonian troops. Fighting hand-to-hand on the ramparts of the citadel he was seeking to conquer, he watched in horror as the ladder he’d scaled broke and fell under the weight of several climbers coming to support him. With one hand on an arrow lodged between two ribs and the other hand still on his sword, Alexander held out until his men climbed another ladder, rescued him and, inspired by their leader’s personal sacrifice, carried the day.

Taking risks such as the scaling sequence at Multan helps to explain why so many later military leaders chose to direct wars from a safe distance. Alexander died at 32; Ulysses S. Grant, who was the first to exploit the advantages of the telegraph, died at 63, largely from the effects of tobacco and alcohol. Like his opponent, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Grant’s army usually was “the fustest with the mostest,” but they marched into battle with little more than the memory of a pep talk from their commander.

It surely must be lonely at the top, and that prospect is one reason I never sought to rise from the professoriate to the administration. The pay was tempting but just the prospect of dismissing someone would have been unnerving. Good leaders and bad can often compartmentalize their emotions and lock them away in a sound-proof room while sleeping peacefully next door, but that room was never part of my top-storey plan.

Why President Bill Clinton did not die of a stroke during the Lewinsky affair and the impeachment proceedings which followed is a fascinating but unresolved mystery to many presidential observers, including this one. I feel sure it would have crippled me and most others devoid of that brain vault.

William Gladstone said a good prime minister had to be “a good butcher.” If I were a leader like Gladstone, “butchering” is one chore I’d have to delegate but not before giving it a better name.

Speaking of American presidents, Jimmy Carter’s failures may have stemmed from his obsessive need to manage everything from the sign-up sheet for the White House tennis court to the rescue of American hostages in Iran. He’s been much more successful as a writer and human rights advocate since leaving Washington.

His successor and polar opposite Ronald Reagan advised, “Surround yourself with the best people, delegate authority, and don’t interfere.” Unfortunately, Reagan was not the best judge of “the best people,” for 138 members of his administration were either investigated, indicted, or convicted before his second term concluded. Several other presidents, both Democratic and Republican, run a disappointing second to Reagan.

Too often, as Lawrence Peter cynically observed, “the cream rises until it sours,” but it’s unlikely Dr. Peter ever met Dr. Barker.

My father was a gifted leader, proven by the fact that he led 660 African-American combat engineers across northern Germany in 1945 without losing a single man in combat. After two of his men were arrested, and ultimately hanged, for raping a pregnant British woman while they trained for combat, Dad climbed onto the hood of his Jeep to address his gathered battalion. In a fine example of moral leadership, he said he would not tolerate anyone in his command taking advantage of a fallen enemy soldier or civilian, much less an ally. I wish Stalin had been within earshot. To me, this was Dad’s finest hour in the war, more so than crossing the Rhine under enemy and friendly fire.

However, Dad was less successful in leading me, his only son. In the only face-to-face, heart-to-heart conversation I can remember with him in my youth, he said, “You can expect some hair growth in your crotch, Soldier.” His idea of moral training was to drive me to Sunday school and point me to the door, and his method of leading me into manhood was to buy me a book with instructions to read it. Nevertheless, when the time came to choose a college and a career path, I chose engineering simply because Dad was an engineer, and he was really the only model I had, given the family’s dozen moves in 17 years. Perhaps because Sputnik was orbiting overhead, no one had told me I could major in English. After one quarter as a civil engineering major at Georgia Tech, my failing grades bore witness to the fact that I’d been “under-advised.”

Dad was not the sort of leader who drives slower than the speed limit on narrow mountain roads to keep others from passing; he just drove his red Cadillac faster than anyone else cared to drive. Garry Wills wrote that his father knew the way to get a son to do a father’s bidding was to grant him his freedom. Dad didn’t grant me my freedom; I seized it. Two weeks into my second quarter at Tech, I enlisted in Dad’s army. He made a few phone calls in an effort to thwart me, but I’d gone over his head.

I’ve been responsible for my freedom ever since, and it’s really the only leadership position (which didn’t need a consensus) that I’ve actively sought.

Note: The second image above is an Official White House Photo taken by Pete Souza; l to r: Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Bush at the grand opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.