Course 5: Leadership Excellence

The U.S. Navy paid my way through college. I paid them back with four years of service. The first 18 months were in Vietnam, where I was a Navy combat engineer (Seabee). I had two tours in Vietnam, two commanding officers (COs). I call them “Captain Day” and “Captain Night.” Together they taught me more about leadership—good and bad—than I could imagine. And the lessons stuck.

Captain Day, my first deployment boss, loved his sailors—not unlike Dwight Eisenhower loved his Army troop—and Herb Kelleher loved his team at Southwest Airlines (more on that coming up). He was a no nonsense get-the-job-done-on-time guy, but he clearly gave a damn—A BIG DAMN—about each and every one of us. He also avoided the command tent and spent most of his day in the field. Ten years after Vietnam I learned what to call his style: MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around—a Hewlett-Packard invention.

Deployment No. 2 brought “Captain Night.” He had a different style of “leadership” entirely. It’s often called “by the book.” He was a stickler for formalities. In fact, I sometimes thought he was more interested in typo-free reports of jobs not yet done than hell-and-high-water-completed construction with, perhaps, sketchy documentation. I had a crappy time, as did virtually all of us junior officers; and our track record in getting things done for our customers was less than sterling. For me, the quintessential event came when I was summoned to the CO’s office and lectured on the difference between “tangible” and “palpable” in a report I’d prepared that was going up the chain of command—to this day, over 50 years later, I have no idea what the difference is between the two words. But I damn well know the difference between “Day” and “Night”—and the yawning gap between leadership that fosters growth and pride-in-accomplishment versus leadership that does the opposite.

I went from Vietnam to the Pentagon, and got another “degree” in leadership—this time leadership in big bureaucracies. Some of my bosses could move mountains, some could not.

I don’t like fancy stuff so I’ve boiled my leadership learning in this course to 24 tools. No theory, just 24 leadership tools that work. My goal, then, is to give you a big box of “stuff”—practical ideas you can apply as soon as you finish watching and reading.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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You can view and review the lecture materials indefinitely, like an on-demand channel.

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