ON LEADERSHIP:
“WHEN THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.”
It can be shockingly easy for a person that has been placed in a position of power and leadership to fall into a state of self-delusion.
Adolf Hitler is an excellent example. By 1944-1945, as the outnumbered and outclassed Wehrmacht fell apart all around him, the head of the Nazi state hit upon the idea of conscripting the few males who were left alive in Germany to bolster their ranks. These weren’t men in the prime of their youth, fit and ready to serve; all of those men were already serving in the armed forces, and many of them were dead. All that remained were the old and the feeble, and those too young to bear arms under anything approaching normal circumstances. This new German army was comprised of young boys and grandfathers, bolstered by a few hard-core SS fanatics; equipped with the dregs from the Wehrmacht armories and sent out to defend the borders of their homeland against the advancing Allied armies which were converging upon them from multiple directions.
Needless to say, it ended badly for the old men and boys. The lucky ones surrendered, and most were treated humanely. The unlucky ones, those who tried to put up any semblance of a fight, died.
None of the German generals were under the slightest illusion about the ability of this pitiful last-ditch effort to truly swing the tide of the war back in their favor…none, that is, except for the man at the top. Hitler’s command staff recounted numerous circumstances of their Fuhrer standing in front of a battle map, making grandiose, sweeping gestures with his arms. ‘Army A’ was to push here, driving the Americans back across the Rhine. ‘Army B’ was counterattack there, driving into the flank of the British and putting them to flight. And then the armies were to link up with one another and drive the invaders back out of German territory on the point of their bayonets.
Which was all well and good, except for the inconvenient truth that the armies to which Hitler was referring, the grand formations on which he had pinned all of his hopes, never actually existed. They marched only on paper, and in his over-active imagination.
Rag-tag formations of old men and boys do not make an army; nor do they successfully stand against hardened infantry and armored divisions which have been bloodied by years on the battlefield. The results were very, very predictable, and came to fruition in a bunker beneath the streets of Berlin, at the business end of a Luger pistol and some cyanide pills.
One of the many ironies inherent in this state of affairs can be found in the fact that Hitler had managed to successfully divest himself of anybody at all who had the ability and the willingness to tell it like it really was. Erwin Rommel, arguably the Third Reich’s most talented general, was driven to committing suicide by the Nazi high command, his alternative being to face a kangaroo court on charges of plotting to kill Hitler. This was actually a very fortunate thing for the Allies; had Rommel survived and achieved supreme command of the German war machine, the Second World War might have dragged itself out for a great deal longer, taking many more innocent lives in the process.
Once every senior officer with any measurable degree of backbone, candor, or integrity had been killed, fired, or demoted, there was nobody left to scream “The Emperor has no clothes!” Hitler had succeeded in surrounding himself with a bevy of “yes-men,” all of whom were only too willing to buy into his deranged fantasies (or at the very least to pay them lip-service) in order to maintain their tenuous grasp on power and security in the rank structure.
Hitler also put an inordinate amount of faith in his secret projects, the so-called “wonder weapons” that would supposedly drag the Allied powers kicking and screaming to the negotiating table and allow him to sue for peace. Some of these black projects did actually make it into the field, such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets (the V stood for ‘vengeance’) which rained down upon British cities from the skies and which taught the world a very important lesson: you don’t bomb Londoners into submission, and in fact, trying to terrorize them will tend to have quite the opposite effect. This, incidentally, was a lesson that remained every bit as true of New Yorkers in 2001, and one which Al Qaeda has also singularly failed to learn.
The deranged head of the Nazi state was putting his faith in a handful of high-concept jet-powered and rocket-power fighter aircraft, and other gadgets which would not have looked out of place on the set of a James Bond movie. He made grandiose promises regarding these devices, touting them as the savior of the German war effort. Allied fighters and bombers would be swept from the skies of Germany by these ingenious machines, which would roll straight out of the experimental engineering labs and onto the assembly line. Everything was going to be just fine, if the German people would only hold on for a little while longer…
“Everything will be just fine, if you only hold on for a little while longer.” Have you ever heard that phrase spoken by a leader for whom you worked? And more importantly, did you believe them?
A spirit of optimism is essential to being an effective leader; and yet, blind optimism is not a virtue. Far from it, the leader who blindly leads his or her people into an uncertain future is doing nobody any favors at all. Optimism must be tempered with a keen sense of what is actually realistically achievable; if not, it may lead to the potentially fatal delusion that all is going to be well if one simply does the same old thing in the same old way, perhaps putting in a little more effort than before, and just allows a sufficient amount of time to pass.
As the old cliché goes, a good definition of insanity is doing the same old thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result at the end of it. If your organization is moving steadily along the road to ruin, doing more of what you’ve already done in the past is almost certainly not going to help, not even if you are putting in twice as much effort as you have before. Does somebody have the courage to point out that the Emperor has no clothes? If not, chances are that the future looks dark and is not going to get brighter any time soon.
