Preparing Yourself For Leadership (Tech & People vol IX)
An Important Career Lesson from the life of Dwight Eisenhower, a 20th Century Giant
Colin Powell passed away not too long ago and in reading about his great legacy as a statesman and a mensch, I learned that he and I have something in common—an admiration above all others for the 34th President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower.
So in memory of not one but two great Republican moderates (remember when we still had moderates?), I am going to dedicate this newsletter to Ike, who gave remarkable gifts to his country and to the world, which are often underrated.
There is a lot to love about Ike: For one thing, his deep commitment to a civil society and against the military industrial complex, a term he famously coined in his farewell address in 1961. That’s a great speech and you should check it out. ‘A chance for peace’, a more remarkable but lesser known earlier speech he gave 1953, was an attempt to leverage Stalin’s death for world peace.
Here’s a quote from that great speech, that I cherish:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Ike must have asked some research assistants in the budget offices to make sure these calculations were right. It was worth it to make a point.
The man who won WW2 had no qualms or regrets about what it took to win. He knew he had to be done. But he also knew how important it was to resist those who would rush into unnecessary wars. He was no pacifist, and he made sure the USA had sufficient arms to accomplish its strategic goals and deal with the Russians and others. Sufficient arms, but no more.
Because if we give into our fears and build one more bomber than we need, that’s two hospitals we didn’t build. and so on.
This was not idle talk. In Ike’s time, the US kept itself and the post-war world (largely) at peace, which was not a forgone conclusion, and was a positive force in the world for it (even if some Israelis and Britons will cite the 1956 war as evidence to the contrary). It kept a balanced budget. It made amazing progress. Most of the highways we drive on to this day were built then. So were the atomic energy plants, and much besides.
And of course, before he did all that, he defeated Hitler, won the war and saved the world.
When you start to dig into Ike’s legacy and biography, which I highly recommend that you do, one thing jumps out, which is the unusual trajectory of his career. Schematically, it looked something like this:
What do we see in this drawing? (aside for my pitiful drawing skills, that is)
We see Ike’s career path was very non-linear. In the first 51 years of his life he grew up, went to West Point, became an army officer, and got promoted up to Lieutenant Colonel. He was a rather obscure officer at that point. I read one source that said he was at the time the oldest man —alas, they were all men at that time—of his rank serving in the army. To give you an idea of his station back then, Wikipedia says he got an offer around that time to quit the army and go be head of police in the Philippines. A year later, in 1942 he was commanding millions of troops as supreme allied commander in Europe. 10 years after that he was POTUS.
If Ike had had a fatal heart attack at 51 (which he might have - his health was not so great throughout his life) , he would be less than a footnote in history. Luckily for the world, he did not.
This is a newsletter about tech and people, not a lesson in history, so let me try to belatedly get to the point.
Compare Ike with people whose stars shone bright and early. Alexander the great, for example. Or closer to our tech world - Mark Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Bill Gates, the Collison brothers. Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple. Tech reveres youth, and reveres a meteoric rise to power. It’s great if it happens to you (although I am sure it has its dark side in your personal life) but in my experience it’s a poor career plan for most people. It’s worth noting that even when it does happen, the path afterward is often not linear. Steve Jobs achieved so much more in his middle age in his 2nd time running Apple than he ever did in the first.
Ike is a much better role model for most of us. His example shows us you can reach any height later in the game, provided you have a strong base to build upon. You need to have experience, rigor, discipline and integrity. You do need a bit of luck. Ike did too. That fateful year of 1941, fortune smiled on him on more than one occasion, and a couple of times he was just in the right place at the right time. But mostly he was promoted by George Marshall (of the famous Plan of the same name) and others because he had spent 30 years preparing himself for that moment and built up his commanding will, analytical skill, strategic decision making skills and other strengths. He had spent decades building up exactly what would be needed, probably without knowing it.
I see a lot of people, especially talented and ambitious people, worrying so much early and in the middle stages of their careers about their next promotion, about making a certain level like a Staff Software Engineer by a certain time, or moving into management so they can climb up the ladder. Every thing I have seen in my career and others around me, suggests that they should stop doing all that, and be more like Ike.
Work hard (but recharge and avoid burnout), improve yourself, stay curious, learn, set a high standard for yourself and try to get 1% better every week. Work intentionally, set goals for yourself, commit to causes bigger than yourself. Make others successful and yourself more experienced. Perfect your craft. One day before you know it, it will be Pearl Harbor and your time will come. And then the progress will be non linear, and all that investment will pay off.
Not all of us will one day becomes supreme world leaders. That’s not the point. The point is that career progress is not linear, but it is mean-reverting — it reverts to the trend line of your own internal growth. If a few years go by and you feel stuck like they passed you buy, keep in mind you are building up strengths for a future opportunity. It is sure to come, as sure as night follows day.