War Stories

Leigh Hafrey

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781631570056
• eBook ISBN: 9781631570063
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading advances a leadership model for business that takes Americans beyond combat and competition as the default setting for our daily enterprise. The book draws on feature and documentary films, TV, social science, and journalism to show that, in the 21st century, the United States is reaping the fruit of a long-standing and deep-rooted faith in one take on business practice. Rooted in the history of World War II and the Vietnam era, War Stories traces an arc of military American self-perception on the screen, the printed page, and in public conversation over the past 20 years. It juxtaposes to that arc a different, potentially more liberating and productive story, linking personal and professional commitments to organizational culture and, finally, systems thinking. Ethical, sustainable business practice depends on leaders who can tell that story of business in society, integrating public, private, and civil sector imperatives for an audience eager to engage them.

Chapter 1

Why This Book

War, huh, good God y’all / What is it good for?

—Edwin Starr1

After all, the chief business of the American people is business.

—Calvin Coolidge2

War, Competition, and Commerce

War is good for business. The written record suggests that contractors have supplied shoddy goods at extreme mark-ups to the military for as long as men (and women) have fought battles. Edwin Starr sang the Motown hit protest song “War” into the tumult of Vietnam. Bruce Springsteen brought it back in the mid-1980s to protest Ronald Reagan’s engagements in Central America and, in 2003, the wars that George W. Bush’s administration had chosen to wage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker bond over it in Rush Hour (1998), trading martial arts and Western-style cop moves before breaking up an Asian crime ring in Los Angeles’ fictitious Foo Chow restaurant. When Tucker claims the song for those in the know—does he mean Americans, Afro-Americans, or some other group?—Chan cries, “Everybody knows ‘War’!”3

For all of us, then, the association of commerce with combat goes beyond the last century of American foreign policy and its connection to what we think of as Daddy Warbucks-style profiteering. It’s about the larger society and always has been. In his now-canonic treatise On War (1832), the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz articulated a science of war largely motivated by Napoleon Bonaparte’s phenomenal military and political career in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Von Clausewitz comments:

We say therefore War belongs not to the province of Arts and Sciences, but to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better, instead of comparing it with any Art, to liken it to business competition, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like State policy, which again, on its part, may be looked upon as a kind of business competition on a great scale.4

No surprise, then, that 20th-century Wall Street should embrace a vocabulary of military action reaching back to the Middle Ages: “white knight,” “dark knight,” “hostile takeover,” employees as “soldiers” or “good soldiers,” etc. No surprise either that we should have evolved a culture that puts more than five financial-sector lobbyists in Washington for every legislator on Capitol Hill5 or that we should worry ever more about—another military-inspired phrase—“regulatory capture.” The connection, it seems, is bred in the bone.

But is it? Or is there more to our business selves than war? In spite of our nature and von Clausewitz’s narrow equation of commerce with competition and conflict, I would argue that we can tell a different story about business and that the story itself makes a difference. After the scandals of the early 21st century—Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and others—and the Great Recession that followed, Americans seem collectively to have recognized the need to rewrite the dominant national story in which, to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, “the business of business is business” or “the business of America is business.” Both those phrases have permeated domestic political discourse and to the extent that they offer a uniquely American model for daily life have become as significant an export to the rest of the world as the wonders of Hollywood and American popular music.

Two Related Challenges: Combat and Competition

It’s true, business is everywhere, and that alone warrants a set of stories that take a broader view of our lives in society and the commerce that we believe to be our lifeblood. In War Stories, I argue that Americans, today and for the near future, face two challenges that we intuitively and correctly link through our ongoing concern with effective leadership. Those challenges are combat and competition: expressions of the same fundamental disposition. Let me take them one at a time.

Combat

Today we talk not just about the war but “the wars” (plural). Now a whole new generation has the opportunity to fight. Now women have joined the ranks of war-fighters. Now drones populate the skies, replacing the pervasive, rhythmic thud-thud of Huey rotor blades over Vietnam with the thin hum of unmanned aerial surveillance craft, monitoring the battlefield and facilitating strikes. Now the hostility with which returning troops were met during the Vietnam War has given way to the admiration and gratitude accorded the World War II generation before them. Still, far fewer fight now, so their stories may well become a short chapter in America’s long history of combat rather than an opportunity to rethink the premises on which our society wages war and the way those wars, in turn, shape and constrain our notions of the good society. We cannot afford to let that happen.

In the face of the painful reality that those in positions of authority sometimes expend individual lives for a greater collective good, we romanticize the social order that enables and then depends on armed combat for its character. Americans have embedded the penchant for strife in everything from our commitment to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Second Amendment to a video-game culture built around “first-” and “third-­person shooters”: from commercial aircraft boarding procedures—“we now invite armed services personnel to board” (along with families needing assistance and first-class passengers)—to the provision of large-scale military hardware to police departments in small towns. Other countries display the same predilection for body counts, but our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have set expectations over more than two ­centuries for a society that puts citizens’ lives first, even as that same society has played a dominant role in the annals of lethal, global armed conflict over most of a century. We need now to look at ourselves and ask, “What do we value most: human life, or lost lives?”

Competition

The paradox of a simultaneous commitment to survival and a system predicated on the selectivity of that survival manifests itself equally in our civilian sphere. U.S. business practitioners have elevated individual success to a material level no other developed economy cares to match. Coolidge’s iconic invocation of the American proclivity for business simply recognizes a national ideology that appears on the surface apolitical but has nevertheless aided, abetted, and certified our rise as the dominant political and economic power in the world. It has also enshrined a combat model for global leadership that cripples American-style democracy, here and abroad, in the name of a limited and limiting, albeit spectacular, individualism.

In the now-steady national debate about rising inequality, we need look no further than this background for an explanation of the trend. If we worry about both the near- and long-term implications of income distribution in the United States, we need a leadership that can address the philosophical implications not only of our national addiction to war but also its civilian equivalent, competition. As we have waged war in the Middle East, we have also fought at home over the damage that followed the economic collapse of 2008 and the years following. The cost of prosecuting those wars aside, we made choices at all levels—public sector, private sector, civil society—that came home to roost with the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble. There is enough blame to go around, enough so that each of those sectors and their subdivisions—executive, legislative, judicial; banking, real estate; individual brokers and mortgagees—could and should spend significant time attending to its own faults. But will they do so?

One Unitary Solution and an Outcome:
Telling—and Testing—Our Stories

We can and should take the heat, both individually and collectively. War Stories shows how to rise to the challenge by exploring a few of the stories we have told ourselves in recent years and distinguishing the useful stories from the harmful ones, those that help us progress and those that hold us back. It also highlights the qualities that make for one or the other so that we can think about ourselves not just as passive recipients of these influential narratives but as storytellers in our own right, with the ­responsibilities that that right imposes. Building on combat and competition, the war stories we tell factor in imagination and in so doing generate the opportunity that we seek for leadership.

Imagination and Leadership

We live by story. The works of art that compel us most also compel most of us: They capture a situation that we do not know, or think we don’t know, and reveal to us a range of commonalities that make the strange familiar and vice versa. They keep us alert, intellectually and morally. As a result, those who find and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Why This Book
• Chapter 2: The Good Story
• Chapter 3: 9/11 and the Alien Within
• Chapter 4: 2019 and the Alien Without
• Chapter 5: Gettysburg-on-the-Gulf
• Chapter 6: The Manager, the General, and the Entomologist
• Chapter 7: Dragon-Slayers
• Chapter 8: The War at Home
• Chapter 9: State of Grace
• Bibliography and Filmography
• Index
• Adpage
• Backcover