GQ isn’t part of my staple reading diet, but every so often my personalized Google News feed pulls in a great story loaded with actionable insights. Last month, it was an article on the breakout of personal genomics, entitled, “The Book of Me.”
Today GQ published an article online on four-star General David Petraeus, entitled, “Leader of the Year.” A key graph:
He starts by talking about his father, Sixtus Petraeus, who passed away six months ago at the age of 92. Petraeus couldn’t even leave Iraq to bury him. (As he puts it, “Our soldiers make all the same sacrifices.”) Sixtus was a Dutch sea captain who came to the U.S. at the start of World War II, “when Holland was overrun. He was at sea, and they couldn’t go back to Rotterdam, so they went to New York.” He was “a stubborn, independent Dutchman” who was both extraordinarily proud of his only son and a strict disciplinarian who pushed him to the limit. “I was raised by the kind of father who if his son could do twenty pull-ups, he wanted you to do twenty-one. There were, you know, no excuses. I mean, there was a phrase he actually used: ‘Results, boy.’ ”
Later on in the article, writer Lisa DePaulo notes that the patterns of change experimented with and refined to success by Petraeus when he was running the 101 Airborne Division in Mosul in 2003, did not come from the top of the “theatre” or Pentagon command structure. They came from “the fringe,” or as Petraeus says:
“Well, I would sort of think it was intuitively obvious. To be truthful…strategic leaders make big decisions at times. And at my level, in the first year and very early on, a huge decision was to say, ‘We are going to do nation building.’ I know that we as a country didn’t think the military should get into nation building and all this. But very early on, we decided in the 101st that we’re gonna do it…”
Those who have followed the Iraq war in depth — and not just through the superficial coverage in most of the press — will know that Petraeus was not popular with his “uplines” in the command structure for his views or for the successes he achieved in Mosul, even though he did it without “glory-seeking” or challenging the chain of command. **
After his outstandingly successful Mosul tour of duty was up, Petraeus was transferred by his superiors in the Pentagon command structure, back to a desk job for awhile (where he wrote a new Army field manual on counterinsurgency strategy), before being plucked out by President Bush to turn the war around.
That’s an oversimplified and truncated version of events, but the point is that Petraeus didn’t wait for those “smarter” than him, “more experienced” than him in the “same old same old” to tell him what to do, within his legitimate sphere of decision making and action taking.
As an aside, if you enjoy romances, writer Lisa DePaulo humorously shares how Petraeus met and courted his wife. DePaulo notes with supreme deadpan:
Perhaps the “wildest” thing was when he [young cadet Petraeus] ended up dating the daughter of the superintendent (who also happened to be a three-star, soon to be four-star general named William Knowlton) of West Point. Or “the Supe’s daughter,” as she was known. Knowlton was a man you didn’t want to mess with…
SPEAKING OF AMWAY GLOBAL, have you thought about how real change — and as Petraeus puts it, “irreversible success,” — is going to come to your business? As Bridgett put it in a comment at IBOFB’s Amway Talk blog a couple days ago, change always happens at the fringes first.
** disclosure: one of my cousins served with the 101 Airborne in Mosul as an army doc for two years, which has added to the respect I have for Petraeus’ approach to modeling personal leadership and responsibility.
