Leadership lessons can come from many places. One of the more interesting sources can be the movies. Today, I want to consider leadership lesson from three very disparate movies: Catch-22, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Patton. I end by considering some leadership lessons from a very different source: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. 

Catch-22

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the most famous books and movies from the second half of the 20th century. While it may  not seem apparent on first blush, it has several lessons for the business leader to learn going forward. In an article in Doc Daneeka’s Tent, entitled Readings from Catch 22: Staff Lessons, Part One, there were several which focused on the seeming insanity of the book. 

1. Beware the Snowball Impact of Seemingly Innocuous Statements

This lesson focused on a simple phone conversation which culminates in a circular loop of General Officer prank calls, but the primary lesson is found in a single sentence: Communications answered that T.S. Eliot was not a new code or the colors of the day.”

As the author noted, “Your rank or position and the echelon at which you serve can all contribute to the impact that an offhand comment or inaccurate statement can have. In a hierarchical organization like the military the tendency is to treat information from higher as true unless proven otherwise. As a staff officer you owe the organizations and leaders below you the due diligence of verifying the information you disseminate. Incomplete truths can be as, if not more damaging than false statements. The higher in the food chain you are the smaller the statement or error needs to be for significant consequences to occur.”

2. Find Your Subject Matter Expert

Another early lesson for the senior staff was to find a subject matter expert (SME). In this case it was a Private, PFC Wintergreen, an expert on ice cream. The author noted, “Within your staffs there will be multiple Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreens at each echelon. Take the time early on in your assignment to develop these relationships, and you will save yourself potential hours of frustration in the future.

To be clear – I am not making an argument for circumventing the chain of command or trying to start a discussion on formal vs. informal power structures. Rather, a good staff officer knows who they can rely on for accurate information when they absolutely need it and need it now. This Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen could come in the form of a subject matter expert, or another staff officer positioned closer to the center of the information flow.”

3. Be Professional

We have all been in situations where a more senior leader did not like us personally or did not fully appreciate our talents. However, “when you are in the situation of working on a staff directly for someone who dislikes everything about you personally. There are no quick and easy solutions. Hope is not a course of action, but hopefully that superior is able to separate the personal and the professional and you should make every effort to as well.

This is a topic on which entire books can be published and I am only dedicating a paragraph. In the event they tend to discard every issue or idea you bring to them, a method for moving your ideas forward in the organization is to have a peer bring them to your boss’s attention. Of course, you will not get the credit you deserve, but if you are strongly committed to advancing something you believe in then the indirect approach via a third party may very well be the only effective option.”

4. Keep Your Perspective

The author ended with the following, “I think an important lesson from the entirety of Catch-22 is not to lose your sense of humor and perspective. There will come a point on any staff you are a part of where you will find yourself in the middle of carrying out a task you find to be completely absurd, the people around you find absurd, and more than likely the individual who directed it finds it absurd as well. However, you will all continue to carry out the task. There is a difference between laughing at the situation and complaining about it. Complete the task, and make a note to see if there is a better alternative path to take in the future. Then go home, cross out the name of a character in Catch-22, replace it with the name of an individual in your organization who fits the profile, and take pleasure in how the story reads just as well the second me.”

Steve Wood, writing in his Steve on Leadership blog, in a post entitled So Much Older Then, Younger Now, took a difference focus by looking at the lessons through the lens of leadership paradoxes. He posed some "common paradoxes leaders face:"

1. I want to trust what my team does and I need to verify what they do.
2. I want to inspire my team with my charisma and be humble.
3. I want to use consensus and be decisive so the team has confidence in me.
4. I want to be liked as a friend by my team and keep my distance so I can provide constructive feedback.
5. I want to effectively manage my time and be flexible to listen to the needs of my team.
6. I want to directly communicate areas that need improvement with my team members and be diplomatic so as not to hurt their feelings.

Wood recommends you resolve such paradoxes by writing them down and then begin to work through them with your team, stating, “I suggest leaders engage appropriate team members in discussions about the paradox. The leader’s job is to think about and write questions that help teams solve the paradox. The goal is to arrive at solutions that satisfy both ends of the “and” or “but” statement. Unfortunately, leaders don’t often prepare properly for these discussions and, as a result, develop strategies that only satisfy one half of the paradox.”

Catch-22 provides some interesting, if non-obvious leadership questions and lessons. My suggestion is you watch the movie or better yet read the book and enjoy all the contradictions. 

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Mutiny on the Bounty

Next I consider the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, which had the never before or since distinction of having three stars nominated for Best Actor, Clark Gable as Fletcher Christenson, Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and Franchot Tone as Midshipman Roger Byam. The movie was based on the first of The Bounty Trilogy, written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, which also included Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn’s Island. The film is also the last movie to win Best Picture and no other awards. 

Charles Laughton’s portrayal of Bligh, as Captain aboard the Bounty, was almost as a marionette. However, it was Bligh’s leadership style that I want to focus on. As noted by Robert Webb, on his Motivation in the Workplace site in an article entitled Captain Bligh and Leadership, said “Bligh’s problems on the Bounty is an excellent example of how one man changed from control leadership to team unity in a matter of minutes.” Bligh “micro managing the HMS Bounty crew and wanted everyone to know he was the boss, which was more important to him than efficiency. To compound the problem, he considered maximum control as a means to achieve efficiency. As a result, everything went wrong.” 

However, after departing Tahiti, and after a series of progressively more antagonistic acts towards the crew, they finally had enough and mutinied. The mutineers cast Bligh and eighteen crewmembers adrift in a lifeboat. As told in the second of Nordhoff and Hall’s The Bounty Trilogy Men Against the Sea, without charts or navigation tools, they sailed the open boat 3,600 miles to the Dutch colony, Timor, near Java. This outstanding achievement is only possible with a team united behind a common goal, with what Webb termed “use of comfort zone navigation, the art of using intuitive forces where facts are not available.”

Webb went on to note that Mutiny on the Bounty “has elements of every work environment, the struggle between getting the job done and leaders desire for control. Social prejudice and intuitive forces are always working in the background that will develop a supporting or fighting attitude. In Captain Bligh’s case, he managed by control and the seamen were resisting control. Each side was in a fighting mood and each was searching for ways to outwit the other, not an efficient way to get things done.

Aboard the Bounty, Captain Bligh’s priority was total control. In the lifeboat things were different, priority was survival, or get the job done. Survival automatically unites people into a team where team members are willing to listen to others opinions, free of social prejudice.” 

On the Bounty, control for Bligh was the top priority and it was this desire for control that resulted in no unity on the ship; there was a high degree of social prejudice among the crew and there were three distinct groups pulling the ship and the crew in different directions; Bligh made his decisions based on preconceived opinions of class and prejudice. Contrast these factors with those on the lifeboat after the mutiny. Here there was no prejudice, with all men treated equally; it was not control that had priority but the unity of the men in the lifeboat; the men were literally pulling together for unity which resulted in the control Bligh so wanted on the Bounty.

Patrick J. Murphy, writing in a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled Is it Time for Mutiny?, looked at the events from a different perspective. He and a colleague asked the question “When do mutinies succeed?”

To answer this question, they “spent four years mining obscure primary-source accounts and journals from the era from the mid-1400s to the early 1600s to write Mutiny and Its Bounty. This was the time when seafarers like Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Henry Hudson undertook risky ventures at sea. Their venturing began in Portugal and Spain and went on for hundreds of years and with staggering volume. It’s a rarely studied era, but it holds deep lessons in human enterprise — even more, in many respects, than the study of modern industrial organizations.”

Murphy found four conditions were present in the documented mutinies: 

1. Leadership is destructive. Murphy found “that mutinies go differently for different kinds of bad leaders. When leaders are technically weak, for example, but well-liked, members depose them via fast, tactical mutinies. The case of Henry Hudson, set adrift on today’s Hudson Bay, is a prime example. Members depose technically brilliant but not well-liked leaders with careful, strategic mutinies. Here, a mutiny against Ferdinand Magellan on the South American coast comes to mind.”

2. Values have been flouted. Murphy found that “when leader actions threaten the values that members share, an organization becomes a social powder keg. In the Age of Discovery, those shared values were centered on basic needs like the supply and quality of food, and the safety of the crew. In a modern organization, an assault on a work group’s shared values more likely threatens higher-order needs for meaning and esteem." 

3. Ringleaders are strong. It turns out that mutineers are not weak but are usually quite strong-willed individuals. Murphy wrote, “a mutiny requires coordinated, energized action, the role of the ringleader is essential. Credible, inspiring ringleaders are as vital to mutinies as founders are to entrepreneurial ventures.” 

4. The external environment is uncertain and features novel threats. Murphy said the historical record revealed “bad leaders are especially prone to poor management decisions when the environment is uncertain and not programmed actions are necessary.” [Maybe like the Atlanta coaching staff in the fourth quarter of the recent Super Bowl LI.] However, and “at the same time, threats and opportunities to an organization are opportunities and threats (i.e., transposed) for a mutiny inside that organization. They are important to mutiny planning and execution.” 

Murphy tied these long ago events to modern day business situations. He pointed to “the current entrepreneurial age, launched in mid-twentieth century Silicon Valley, is itself the product of a mutiny. The brief history is that it all began when the team at Shockley Semiconductor rose up against its founder William Shockley. The “traitorous eight” as Shockley would call them ever after, went on to found the set of firms (including Intel and AMD) that made Palo Alto the center of technology innovation. It was a culture defining event that embedded assumptions still present in the Valley about the value of trained specialists, delegated power, autonomy, flat and adaptable organizational structures, and questioning flawed authority.”

It turns out there are multiple lessons to be learnt from 18^th Century British naval voyages. As a leader, you do not want to engage in the behavior of a Captain Bligh and lead your top subordinates to feel they have nothing to lose by overthrowing your captainship. As a follower, it turns out that a successful mutiny requires many unique, business-related skills. Before you make any move you need to check to see that you have the requisite technical and inter-personal skills to pull it off. 

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All the King’s Men

Next up is the 1949 version of All The King’s Men, which won for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. The movie was based on the book of the same name by Robert Penn Warren and is a thinly veiled autobiography of Huey Long. The film traces the rise (and fall) of politician Willie Stark from a rural county seat to the governor’s mansion is depicted in the film. He goes into politics, railing against the corruptly run county government, but loses his race for county treasurer, in the face of unfair obstacles placed by the local machine.

Stark teaches himself law, and as a lawyer, continues to fight the local establishment, championing the local people and gaining popularity. He eventually rises to become a candidate for governor, narrowly losing his first race, then winning on his second attempt. Along the way he loses his innocence and becomes as corrupt as the politicians he once fought against. When his son becomes paralyzed following a drunk driving accident that kills a female passenger, Stark’s world starts to unravel and he discovers that not everyone can be bought off.

The leadership lessons are largely political but also demonstrate the power of personal relationships as the narrator Jack Burden, who admires Stark and even when disillusioned still sticks by him. Stark’s campaign assistant, Sadie is clearly in love with Stark and wants him to leave his wife, Lucy. Meanwhile, Stark philanders and gets involved with many women, taking Jack’s own girlfriend, Anne Stanton, as his mistress.

It is a fascinating study of a mid-20^th century politician from a largely rural state yet demonstrating that many of the issues relevant to the 1930s are still relevant today.

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Patton

Finally, I consider General George Patton’s leadership style, which is also relevant for today’s business leader. In his portrayal of the General, George C. Scott brought to life one of the highest profile Allied generals of World War II. The movie was almost as controversial as Patton’s tenure in Europe, yet no one can deny his grasp of both strategic goals and tactical genius. Yet, what leadership lessons can be drawn from the movie and Patton’s life?

For the movie it all starts with his opening speech, which is compilation of multiple speeches given by Patton over his career. Many leaders miss a very good opportunity to set a tone and expectations when they initially take leadership of an organization. When you are called on to lead a company, you face a dilemma: How do you start, do you send a memo? How about a meeting and if so with whom? The decision you make can set the tone for not only how middle management will relate to you but how they may relate to others who work for them.

How many of your employee base would say they work with you rather than the work for you?

Rhett Power, writing in Inc. in a piece entitled, The General Patton Approach to Leadership and Success noted that Patton’s leadership style still resonates today because it was so powerful. Yet many of Patton’s techniques translate to the modern day. He cited several examples regarding Patton’s principles of command and management:Say what you mean and mean what you say.

• Always be alert to the source of trouble.
• Select leaders for accomplishment and not for affection.
• Every leader must have the authority to match his responsibility.

In an interesting take on Patton’s principles for making decisions, Power noted:

• In the long run, it is what we do not say that will destroy us.
• Talk with the troops.
• Know what you know and know what you do not know.
• Never make a decision too early or too late.

Power also wrote about Porter Williamson, who served with Patton in noting that even though Patton was a volatile and scary leader, he had a special knack of imprinting his leadership aura on others. He cited to Williamson for the following “I served with General George S. Patton Jr. No man served under Gen. Patton; he was always serving with us. In truth, I still serve with Gen. Patton, and he continues to serve with me. He makes me take cold showers, he makes me take deep breaths, and he makes me pull in my bushel of blubber.”

How many of your employee base would say they work with you rather than the work for you? This statement encapsulates a leader who talks and listens to his subordinates. There is no better style of leadership to emulate.

There are many different ways to garner an understanding of what makes a business leader successful. Through watching movies with a critical eye, you can divine some useful and practical tips to help make your leadership program thrive with greater resilience in your organization.

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Leadership Lessons from Sgt. Pepper’s

This year marks the 50th anniversary of perhaps the most iconic album cover in the history of rock and roll, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In a Rolling Stone article, entitled Beatles' Iconic 'Sgt. Pepper' Art: 10 Things You Didn't Know, Colin Fleming wrote about the concept and execution. Fleming described it as “wonderful swirl of visuals, ranging from that most distinguished assembly of personalities on its front cover courtesy of Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, to some sleeve work by the Dutch design team the Fool, to Michael Cooper’s photographs, to the grab-bag of cut-out treasures that accompanied the album.” In honor of the 50th anniversary of the cover shoot for the album, I thought we might consider some of the leadership lessons from it. 

The idea for the cover was from Paul, who “produced ink drawings of the cover concept and shared them with Blake and his wife Haworth. “I did a lot of drawings of us being presented to the Lord Mayor,” Paul explained in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, “with lots of dignitaries and lots of friends of ours around, and it was to be us in front of a big northern floral clock, and we were to look like a brass band. That developed to become the Peter Blake cover.”

Leadership Lesson: Plan your strategy out in a one, three and five year go-forward plan (courtesy Stephen Martin).

However, it may have been that he was at the very least ‘inspired’ by another band’s album cover. Fleming noted, “A Beatles tribute/parody EP, released three years prior to Sgt. Pepper by the Swedish brass band Mercblecket, featured artwork that was strikingly similar to the final Pepper cover. McCartney hasn’t gone on record about the earlier image, but Mercblecket did entertain the Beatles upon their arrival in Stockholm in 1964, and according to Swedish record dealer Jorgen Johansson, group member Roger Wallis has claimed he gave McCartney a copy of the EP during the trip.”

Leadership Lesson: In leadership, as in law, there are no new ideas. But you can synthesize other’s ideas into a new formulation. 

The cover was originally to have been an abstract painting. Fleming wrote, “The Beatles were also going to situate themselves in an Edwardian sitting room amidst some bric-a-brac of old trophies and photographs. The appeal of Blake was that his art was envelope-pushing in a more modern sense, but with elements of the past, and the Beatles wanted Sgt. Pepper to appeal as much to teenagers as octogenarians.”

Leadership Lesson: Sometimes your first ideas can be improved upon. 

John Lennon had some of the most strident ideas on who should have appeared on the cover art. Fleming related, “Each Beatle had been tasked with coming up with a list of men and women throughout history that they wished to have join them at the grand imagistic fete seen on the album cover. All told, there are 57 photographs in the collage. Lennon wanting to be “bold and brassy” in McCartney’s words, stumped for Hitler and Christ to appear, and also Gandhi. EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood vetoed Gandhi’s inclusion, worried that the album would not sell in India. Occultist/satanist Aleister Crowley did manage to make the grade, though.”

Leadership Lesson: Consider how a leadership initiative will be perceived after you translate it from English into a foreign language for use outside the US. 

There was a wide range of reactions from the celebrities who appeared on the cover. The most classic was from Mae West who said, “What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club band?” Others had more varied reactions, “Shirley Temple wanted to hear the record before she would commit. Blake considered the collage “a theater design,” his mindset being that the fictional band had just played a concert in the park, and now were taking a photograph with their audience. Leo Gorcey, who starred in the Bowery Boys films, wanted $400 for his likeness, thus taking himself out of the mix.”

Leadership Lesson: Seek input from your stakeholders for any key leadership initiative. 

The album cover was the first to feature the songs lyrics on the back cover, but it had the unintended effect of sparking the Paul is dead hysteria, although as John Lennon later noted, it was great for album sales. Fleming wrote, “On the album’s reverse, McCartney’s back is to the camera, and next to his head are the lyrics “without you” from George Harrison’s “Within You Without You.” “Clues” are alleged to be sprinkled throughout the record’s artwork: with the guitar floral arrangement on the front cover, for instance, and the O.P.D. badge that McCartney is wearing, which John Neary, in a Life article, called the British equivalent of “Dead on arrival.””

Leadership Lesson: When engaging in leadership training, make sure you are understood by foreign audiences. 

It was the most expensive album cover up to that time. As Paul noted, “We originally wanted to have an envelope stuck inside with gifts in, but it became too hard to produce. It was hard enough, anyway, and the record company were having to bite the bullet as it was costing a little bit more than their usual two pence cardboard cover.” Fleming ran the numbers and found, that “Most album covers cost around 50 pounds to make; this Beatles/Blake/Haworth opus ran to more than 3,000 pounds. A lot of that had to do with paying people to use their likeness, which was rarely a factor for a rock LP cover.”

Leadership Lesson: If you find that a leadership solution you want is too expense or your department does not have the budget, consider the operationalization aspect of the tool and obtain funding from another corporate function. 

Sgt. Pepper’s is right up there for me as one of the very greatest rock and roll albums of all-time. I still remember when it was released, via radio, to the western world. At the age of 10, I might not have fully appreciated the lyrics but, even then, I knew good music. My suggestion is that you fire up your iTunes (or even better yet go full retro and fire up the turntable), turn up the volume and sit back and enjoy.