Leadership in My Rearview Mirror: Reflections from Vietnam, West Point, and IBM - Softcover

Beach, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158347353X ISBN 13: 9781583473535

Verlag: MC Press, LLC, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

With wit and wisdom, this book shares insights of a man who rose from being a reluctant draftee sent to fight in Vietnam to later becoming a colonel and an architect of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at West Point, and who currently works to develop IBM&;s senior leaders. This book does not describe the view from the heights of leadership; rather, it identifies the attributes and behaviors needed to make the climb and explains how to develop them in ourselves and in others. It emphasizes creation of organizational climates with 360 degrees of trust and deep engagement; explains the importance of intrinsic motivation; explores principle-based leadership; introduces The 5 Trust Vital Signs; promotes collective leadership; and concludes with a statement of concise tenets of the author's leadership philosophy.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jack Beach is a senior consultant with IBM&;s leadership development organization, managing their leadership strategy and research unit and overseeing all executive leadership development programs. He is a former colonel in the United States Army who helped create the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has served as a consultant for chiefs of staff of foreign services such as Sri Lanka and the Republic of Maldives, deans of foreign military academies, the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff&;s Departments, and various senior leaders of the Army and Department of Defense. He lives in Newburgh, New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Leadership in My Rearview Mirror

Reflections from Vietnam, West Point, and IBM

By Jack Beach

MC Press

Copyright © 2012 Jack Beach
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58347-353-5

Contents

About the Author, 
Acknowledgments, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
Introduction Title Fight, 
PART I: The Reflective Leader: Leadership and Other Things I Learned Along the Way, 
Chapter 1: Out of Control, 
Chapter 2: The Face in the Mirror, 
Chapter 3: The Cost of Leadership, 
Chapter 4: Values: It's All in the Feet, 
Chapter 5: Leader of Rebels, 
Chapter 6: Trusting the Untrustworthy, 
Chapter 7: "I Am—Somebody!", 
Chapter 8: It's All You, 
Chapter 9: Of Frogs and Leaders, 
Chapter 10: Talk, 
Chapter 11: It Pays to Treat People Unjustly, 
Chapter 12: Just Names, 
Chapter 13: On Leadership and Kite Flying, 
PART II: Leaders in Search of Leadership, 
Chapter 14: Leader in Search of Leadership, 
Chapter 15: Packing Parachutes—Leadership Isn't What It Used to Be, 
Chapter 16: Leading Kindergarten Recess, 
Chapter 17: On Their Knees at 2 A.M. in the Drugstore, 
Chapter 18: "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", 
Chapter 19: Turbulence Creates Leaders/Leaders Create Turbulence, 
Chapter 20: Leadership: It's Just Talk, 
PART III: Leaders in Their Own Words, 
Chapter 21: Leaders Are Full of Hot Air!, 
Chapter 22: Crisis at 35,000 Feet, 
Epilogue: Your Leadership Book, 
Appendix I: IBM's Leadership Framework, 
Appendix II: U.S. Coast Guard Principles, 
Appendix III: U.S. Coast Guard Values, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Out of Control

So, what got me reflecting on leadership? There were several things. First, my Ph.D. is in clinical psychology. I have been a student of human behavior for a long time. But the biggest impetus for me to look specifically at leadership was that I spent thirty years in the Army. Throughout that time, as I advanced from private to colonel, I had positions of increasing responsibility, and for the final nearly eighteen years, I was a professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Since retiring from the Army in 1999, I have been a leadership developer with IBM, working mostly with executives and high-potential pre-executives. I have responsibility for overseeing all the executive leadership development programs and also manage the Leadership Strategy and Research Group. For more than forty years, my job has been to think in a self-conscious and disciplined way about leadership and how it is developed. But even before I became formally involved with leadership training, I would reflect on and try to dissect my experiences in an attempt to meet the leadership responsibilities entrusted to me.

In the pages ahead, I will be sharing some autobiographical stories and my takeaways from them. My organizing strategy is to present them, for the most part, in chronological order, starting with my earliest days in the Army. In fact, let's start with my very first day.

I entered the Army as an inducted draftee. I came of age in a time of an active draft — even before the draft lottery. I was twenty-four years old, which was old for a draftee. I was in my second year of graduate school when I was called to report. After petitioning the draft board for a delay, I was allowed to complete my semester; they postponed my induction date several months. Three days after defending my Master's thesis, I was in the Army. Things were happening quickly.

In the afternoon following my thesis defense, my wife, Maureen, and I loaded all our belongings into a U-Haul and moved from Orono, Maine, back to our hometown of Catskill, New York. Catskill is a small village of about five thousand people on the west shore of the Hudson River. The Catskill Mountains are just a few miles farther to the west. My parents had an apartment in their home where my father's widowed mother had lived, which they made available to us. Maureen's parents and family lived only about five miles away in the hamlet of Leeds, New York. Leeds was even smaller than Catskill, about four hundred residences at the time. Although Leeds was only about one hundred and twenty miles from New York City, Maureen had attended a three-room school through the eighth grade, at which time she and her eleven classmates entered Catskill High School, which is where we met. It seemed like being home was the best place for her as we waited to see just what Uncle Sam was going do with me for the next couple of years. While it was pretty likely that I would be headed for Vietnam, Maureen was not yet ready to entertain that possibility.

On July 1, 1969, I got up and headed for the draft board, which was on Main Street, across from the courthouse and next to the bus station. As I walked, my mind was not so much on the future as on the past. It was a clear day, and I could see the mountains. We lived at 9 Liberty Street in a large Victorian home that my grandfather had built in 1904. The particular location was chosen because it had a panoramic view to the west of the Catskill Mountains and the Catskill Mountain House, where my grandfather had been raised. One block to the east, the woods bordering the Hudson River began.

In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, which was the first of five books in his series Leatherstocking Tales11, Natty Bumppo, the main character, speaks of a "second paradise." When asked where that is, he replies,

"Where! why, up on the Catskills ... there's a place in them hills that I used to climb to when I wanted to see the carryings on of the world. ... You know the Catskills, lad; for you must have seen them on your left, as you followed the river up from York ... the place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet ..."

And when he is asked, "What see you when you get there?" He answers, "Creation ... all creation. ..." As our high-school alma mater put it, we were "in the land of Rip Van Winkle, nestled near the Hudson's shores." Catskill, with the river and the mountains laced with waterfalls and swimming holes, was to me every bit the paradise Natty Bumppo said it was.

I thought of the hours spent along the river shore, having picnics, making bonfires, and on occasion camping overnight in the woods with childhood friends or paddling our canoe to Rogers Island on the far side of the river. I mentally reminisced about my brother and me hitchhiking out to the mountains with our friends to spend summer days basking on the sun- warmed rocks and diving from the cliffs into the cool clear pools that formed beneath picturesque waterfalls. It was an idyllic place to have grown up. It was no surprise to me that the fabled Rip Van Winkle would have spent so much time avoiding all manner of labor just to tread the wooded wilderness and delight in the vistas to which its pinnacles gave way or that Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and other Hudson River School artists would have considered its magnificent landscapes as manifestations of God.

As I turned the corner from Liberty Street onto King Street, my reverie ceased as I ran into a friend, Eddy, who lived on the street one block down from Liberty Street. Eddy's house was the second house to the left when I looked off my back porch. As it turned out, Eddy, too, had been called to report. Greene County was not densely populated, and the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MC Press, LLC
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 158347353X
• ISBN 13: 9781583473535
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar