MAY 2007
Getting Traction From Military Blunders
The 23-year-old third-generation West Point graduate was having a tough night. As a second lieutenant, Doug Crandall, MBA ’03, had been assigned to lead a platoon of 16 men and 4 tanks through the backwoods around Fort Polk, La., searching for artillery targets. After half an hour, the tank broke down, requiring maintenance; 16 hours later, Crandall tried taking a shortcut, only to sink into a bog at midnight.
“As I sat on top of the tank, I had this sergeant yelling at me, ‘What the heck are you doing,’ [in] more colorful language,” Crandall recalls. “I couldn’t blame him for being mad—I’d gotten us stuck.” Crandall could have yelled back, pulling rank on the sergeant-mechanic, or sent him packing. But he realized he needed the man’s help to get the tank going, even if it meant letting the platoon know he’d been wrong. “I deferred to him and admitted my mistake,” Crandall says. They worked together while a rescue vehicle extracted the tank. Crandall shared this story with GSB lecturer David Bradford, and together they turned it into a case now taught at the School. [read the case]
This failure helped shape Crandall’s vision of leadership. He has collected his and other West Point authors’ thoughts in a book of essays, Leadership Lessons from West Point (Jossey-Bass, 2006). The book’s foreword was written by business writer Jim Collins, MBA ’83. Crandall met Collins through New York’s Leader to Leader Institute, a nonprofit that helped produce the book.
“Life experience is key to learning leadership,” says Crandall, an Army major and award-winning teacher who now serves as executive officer to the U.S. Military Academy’s dean of the Academic Board. “Leadership is everything you do. … It’s when you’re stuck in a bog; it’s when you’re leading soldiers in Iraq; it’s coaching a sports team,” he says, and even “running a meeting.” He underlines being able to recognize failures and face up to them—even if it means looking a subordinate in the eye and saying, “I was wrong.”