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 tell us these stories about ourselves acquire the status of leaders, and to the extent that each of us individually does the same, we acquire leadership status for ourselves, in however small an ambit. We, and those we follow, don’t always bear the titles that signify leadership, but this is the magic that makes the world sit up and take notice. Officially or unofficially, our stories guide us to our destiny.

In War Stories, I focus on a dozen such tales. They have reached and registered with a broad audience. They tell us about war as we have recently lived it. They also tell us how our business endeavors, our politics, and our civil society might be reframed to help us live better, less conflict-ridden lives. The films and books discussed in the following chapters take us to France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Rwanda. They also take us home, to the intersection of Wall Street, Main Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue, a nexus of aims and aspirations that should be Americans’ crowning achievement as a people yet seems now only to reflect confusion, disagreement, and reciprocal blame. Yet we know that in a democracy, leaders must balance performance with compassion, the forces that drive successful organizations with a recognition of the people who make them work.

The stories highlighted here document both the failures and the route(s) to success in living up to what we know to be true. Chapter by chapter, I extrapolate approaches to leadership from them, working through the progression of fighting, competing, imagining, and leading:

1. 1. A Conflictual Vision: According to von Clausewitz, both war and “State policy” express the social nature of commerce and competition. Do Americans simply have a genius for struggle? How do the stories we tell about ourselves amplify or mitigate that impulse?
2. 2. The Assault and Saving Private Ryan: How do we tell the story of the good war so that we understand why it was good?
3. 3. 9/11 and Homeland: Are enemies really “others,” or simply other versions of ourselves?
4. 4. The Hurt Locker and Blade Runner: What does it mean to be human and how do we honor that identity?
5. 5. American Sniper and Three Kings: When conflict occurs, how do we make it meaningful?
6. 6. Hotel Rwanda, Shake Hands with the Devil, and Consilience: How do we align individual, organizational, and systemic responsibilities in the face of competition for resources and behavioral patterns that guarantee those resources to some groups and not others?
7. 7. War, Restrepo, and Riding Giants: Why does it take outliers to imagine and then structure the forces that civilize us?
8. 8. Citizenfour and Jerry Maguire: Can we reconcile social control and individual ambition and in so doing produce successful social enterprise?
9. 9. Frontier Havens: What stories do we tell to ensure that we never lose sight of the horizon, even as we cherish the community it invites us to leave behind?

War stories, both literal and figurative, capture individuals and groups in struggle that we sanctify as heroic or revile as cowardly. They show us ourselves at our most human, for both good and ill. They invite us to relish the absence of conflict, even as they inspire us to acts that peace rarely occasions. For the leaders among us, they posit the necessity of putting others’ lives or well-being at risk, even as we seek to maintain and better those lives. This is the ultimate leader’s challenge in the armed services and equally in the public, private, and civil sectors, regardless of primary occupation. How we rise to the challenge and the responsibility it imposes determines the light in which our followers, our fellow leaders, and history itself judge us.

The progression articulated in War Stories, from fighting to competition to imagination to effective leadership, should be read as embodying that awareness and identifying examples of the stories by which we might live it. The arguments advanced in the following chapters are intended to help us move away from old, routinized approaches to social order to a more productive, more creative application of our natural impulses and a rephrasing of our ideological commitments. In so doing, they also offer a new model of leadership that we are already implementing, however fitfully: the change has come about despite the steady drumbeat of war, in part thanks to generational change but also because of social media, new technologies, and new philosophies of how the different sectors should interact.

Given my professional background, about which I will say more in the final chapter, I offer much of my commentary with a focus on the promise of private enterprise in its relation to both the public sector and civil society. It was Alexis de Tocqueville, as shrewd an observer of our social mores as has ever visited America, who commented succinctly and all-inclusively:

In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.6

De Tocqueville takes us back almost two centuries to an apparently very different, perhaps more hopeful America. Yet the associations—political, economic, social—that he celebrates here and the managerial skills that they imply are still very much with us and not just for us. The world and America have had a tough two-and-a-half decades. Isn’t it time we sought a different path and managed our collective way to a better place?