Don’t Wish for Obedient Employees | Inc.com
A good piece from the “honest advice” stream.
Though you (ok me) might expect that the military is a place where orders are obediently followed. in fact, the opposite seems to be true in many instances – the task of owning “moral courage” is spread around:
“What’s perhaps surprising is that the military has considered this issue with infinitely more subtlety than most business schools. In part, that’s because obeying orders has a distinctly worrying history in the military: Think of the Third Reich or of My Lai. But the Army is also crucially aware that what goes on in the field is too complex and changes too quickly and unpredictably for any one leader to be able to anticipate or even keep up with events. That means power and initiative has to be distributed and people have to be trusted. What that also means, according to [Fred] Krawchuk, is that moral courage isn’t one person’s job; it’s everyone’s.”
letter to a new manager 