A Communication-Based Model of Leadership

A Communication-Based Model of Leadership

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

I have in mind a model of leadership that emphasizes the importance of communications. I define leadership as the ability to get people to participate in a journey from the way things are to the way they could and ought to be^[1]. The essential elements of this ability are:

• Profound understanding of how things work

• Clear vision of what is possible

• Capable of devising a plan

• Desire to make transition happen

• Ability to communicate vision to others in such a way that they want to go there.

Let me expand on each of these points to explain my theory.

Profound understanding of how things work

Leadership is impossible when those in charge don’t understand how the system works. Organizations don’t exist in a vacuum, so this understanding must extend beyond the boundaries of the organization: a real leader understands both how the organization works and how it interacts with its environment. This understanding of how things get done, of how decisions are made, and of how people come to accept policies is essential. [Albert Einstein^[2]]

Some of it can be learned from reading and study, but a real leader must go beyond book-knowledge to a much deeper, more intuitive understanding of the system. You can read books about how things are done—it’s only smart to understand the “official version” before you can see the unofficial one. A leader must be aware of how both official and unofficial channels work. Being “in the loop” and tuned into the grapevine are as important as reading the memos and reports that constitute the official version of events.

Real leaders learn the rules of the game and they also understand how and when those rules can be broken. [Be Leaderly]

This is where the debate over whether leaders are made or born begins. Some people, it seems, have an innate sense of how systems function. They can look at an organization and intuit how the people and institutions interact. This is part of the gift of “natural-born” leaders and it is the part that most of the rest of us have the most trouble with. 

If you don’t have the intuitive gift, this aspect of leadership means doing research, studying organizational behavior, and listening to how people describe what they do and how they do it.

The mentor can guide, lead, make connections, and give advice, which is why mentoring can be crucial in the development of a leader. A good mentor can help a novice see things that are invisible to the outsider. In law enforcement, a senior officer who acts as a mentor or as someone you can go to for reliable and confidential advice is called a “rabbi.” In American English, a mentor might be called a “guru” or a “career coach.”

Two other roles a mentor can play are storehouse and clearinghouse. A mentor who has been part of an organization accumulates knowledge over the years, like a storehouse of information. Organizations that have a high turnover of personnel can lose all this knowledge and expertise, resulting in employees wasting a lot of time and energy trying to solve problems that have already been solved (or which experience has shown can’t be solved).

A clearinghouse is a place that stores and distributes information, like a well-staffed library. The term is often used to describe a person or organization you can contact to find out where you can get more information. A mentor can act like a clearinghouse, directing others to resources that can help them solve problems.

Clear vision of what is possible

From one’s understanding of the way things are, a real leader can postulate a vision of the way things can be. A real leader can extrapolate from what is to see where the organization will be unless something happens to change direction. A leader who does not have a vision—a view of what could be—is probably just greedy for power.

This is where we separate the dreamers from those who merely want power. There is a time to take action and a time to remain passive. Some overpaid corporate executives feel a need to “do something” even when there is no real reason to do anything (as though they need to be seen to act to justify their bloated paychecks!). 

It is, however, foolish to re-direct the efforts of a successful organization simply for the sake of change. Evidence of this can be found in the bad decisions made by some companies in recent years to enter unsuitable markets or to introduce products for which there is no market.

Many people in leadership positions choose to “stay the course”—to keep the organization on the same track it has been on. This non-strategy is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can leave an organization far behind if management is not vigilant and attuned to changes in the environment. 

Some managers yield to the temptation to let things go on as they have always been because it is easier than making changes and it minimizes the possibility of making mistakes. 

Other managers make changes just to see what their subordinates can do. It’s easier for them to take a risk if they don’t have to face the consequences. Recent history is full of examples of CEOs who made illegal, unethical, egregious decisions and were able to avoid the consequences of their decisions.

Making changes is stressful for the people involved and for the organization as a whole. Some argue that change is inevitable and that workers should stop complaining. But it isn’t hard to find many cases where changes were made for no logical reason and the results were bad for business and bad for morale. Of course, organizations need to change and adapt to survive, but change for the sake of change is a sign of a lack of real leadership. 

Capable of devising a plan 

Having a clear idea of what can be done is worthless if you can’t figure out how to make your dream a reality. A good leader understands how to get from here to there and can plan a course of action. 

There are a differences in leader’s planning styles. Some are “Big Picture” people who come up with grand strategies. They focus on long-range goals and deal with obstacles and setbacks as they come along. Other leaders are “Detail-oriented” and try to plot every move in advance and worry over small details. A leader who spends too much time focused on details is headed for trouble. The problem is micro-managing, which wastes time and keeps subordinates from getting their jobs done.

Good leaders can do both—come up with a grand vision while keeping a not-too-intrusive eye on day-to-day progress. They are focused on their goals and avoid getting sidetracked or distracted. And, they are flexible, not so tied to their original strategy that they are unwilling to adjust their course if necessary. Flexibility is not the same as selling out or giving up on one’s principles. Being able to change course gives a leader far more options and opportunities.^[3]

Desire to make transition happen

Self-motivation is what propels a good leader. It can be based on personal ambition or a quest for power, but to make a dream a reality, a leader has to believe in the goal and have a burning desire to make the plan a reality. That motivation has to be strong enough to overcome any reservations the leader may have. If it is not, the leader will give up at the first sign of difficulty.

Taking on any new challenge is risky, so a good leader has to have dedication—a commitment to follow through with tenacity, even if the odds of success are not good.

This dedication, plus a belief in the plan and the goal, will generate the energy necessary to make change happen.

Which doesn’t mean leaders can’t have doubts; they can and should. But once they persuade themselves of the value of what they are doing, good leaders try not to get discouraged. They keep going in spite of adversity. 

The old saying goes “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” There are times, however, when a good leader knows that any further effort is futile and that quitting makes sense. It’s a shame when a leader can’t give up on a losing plan, so they continue to pour time, money, and energy into a losing cause to no purpose.

Ability to communicate vision to others 

The heart of good leadership is being able to get others to go along with your plan. A good leader can explain, in language people can understand, what he or she is trying to do and why. With carefully chosen words, a good leader can motivate people and persuade them to go along with the plan.^[4]

This kind of persuasive speaking and writing is essential to being a good leader. It helps people see benefits of following the leader, it uses both Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivators. It appeals to logic and emotion. 

It can’t happen if the leader isn’t seen as credible. 

The leader doesn’t need to know all the answers, but he or she should be able to recognize and respond to people’s needs, fears, and values. It doesn’t pander We use the term demagogue to describe a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

And that’s how you get people to go along with you from Where we are now to Where we could be!

^[1] Successful leaders know how to define their mission, convey it to their subordinates and ensure they have the right tools and training needed to get the job done, according to Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005.

^[2] “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else”. Not said by Albert Einstein

^[3] Effective leaders are made, not born, Powell said. They learn from trial and error, and from experience. When something fails, a true leader learns from the experience and puts it behind him. “You don't get reruns in life,” he said. "Don't worry about what happened in the past." Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005

^[4] Good leaders also must know how to reward those who succeed and know when to retrain, move, or fire ineffective staff. "When you get all these together the place starts to hum," he said. "You know you're a good leader when people follow you out of curiosity." Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005

2019 Time Management Skills: When Values and Needs are in Conflict

Time Management Skills: When Values and Needs are in Conflict

Steven B. Zwickel, 

August, 1991 (rev'd 2019)

Values

As children, we are given a set of values by the adults in our lives. Our parents (and others) teach us right from wrong, good from bad, and acceptable from unacceptable behavior. This system of beliefs about the way things “should be” becomes part of what is called a person's “values system.”

Values systems are very important:

• They give us a moral basis for our lives;
• They offer us ethical guidance;
• They provide us with a standard for measuring fairness;
• They set expectations on our behavior.

The different value messages we get about time management may include:

• It’s only common courtesy to show up on time
• It’s OK to be late even if you don’t have a valid excuse; people will always wait for you
• It’s never OK to be late
• You must never put off to tomorrow something that you can do today
• Procrastinators are unreliable and rude
• It’s OK not to respond to an invitation; people don’t really expect you to respond and something more exciting might come up if you wait
• Invitations require responses; if you say you will be somewhere and don’t show up, that’s extremely rude
• Most deadlines are merely suggestions

Needs

In addition to a values system, we each have our own set of psychological needs.   Needs are not given to us the way values are; they are part of who we are from the moment we are born—they're part of our biological and psychological anatomy. Some needs, like feeling thirsty or needing sleep, are very basic. others are much more complex, like a need for financial security or a need for personal privacy.

When your values are in conflict with your needs, the result may be a high level of anxiety, confusion, and emotional pain. Once you are aware of a conflict, you will find that there are several ways of resolving it. Working with a competent counselor can help. In fact, psychotherapy is an excellent place in which to attempt to resolve these conflicts. It is also possible for you to work things out for yourself. Here is one example of how such a conflict might be resolved:

A young woman from a highly-educated family was in a quandary. When she came home from college after her Sophomore year, she had a long talk with her mother.

"Mama, I’m doing well in school, but it’s time for me to declare a major subject and I don’t know what to do. I know that you want me to finish college and go into some profession, like law, medicine, or teaching. I also know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life cooped up indoors. I love being outdoors. I love nature. I don’t know what to do.”

Her mother wisely refrained from arguing with her. Instead, the two of them went through the college catalog until they found an academic field that involved working out-of-doors.

The young woman's values said: “stay in school. Become a professional.” At the same time, she felt a need to work out-of-doors. Luckily, she found a way to resolve this conflict.

How does this relate conflict between needs and values relate to time management? A person who gets anxious before going out in public needs reassurance and may stall until they get it. The same person may value being thought of as considerate and kind: not someone who keeps other people waiting. The conflict for this person is between the need to feel OK before going out and the value placed on being punctual and reliable.

People sometimes use love-relationships as a way of resolving these conflicts between needs and values. They get involved with a person who represents a polar opposite value in order to have a way of working through the conflict.

For example, had the young woman described in this anecdote decided to go into an “indoor profession”, like law or medicine, she might have a found herself in a relationship with a man who worked and recreated outdoors, even if he came from a dissimilar social background. The relationship would provide her with reasons to spend more time outdoors —where she really wanted to be!

The problem with these relationships is that some people use them to get their needs filled without admitting it. So the subconscious message the chronic procrastinator gets is: “She'll keep me on time”. The high-speed Type-A person thinks, “He'll show me how to relax more.” These polar opposites can drive each other nuts!

Opposites Attract

People sometimes find these characterizations of different types of people and how they manage time—the Jets vs. Horse & Buggys, the Dawdlers vs. Scurriers—interesting (and amusing) because they accurately reflect their own families and love-relationships. Yet the potential for serious conflicts is so obvious that it raises the question of why people with opposite styles get into love-relationships with each other.

The answer is that people use their love-relationships as tools for managing their time. To understand the dynamics of these relationships, we need to look for a moment at some of the psychological factors involved. Some people choose a particular lover because they sense that that person can help them resolve some internal conflict.

Take the fellow who is always running late. He doesn't like being late, but he doesn't feel that he can change the way he handles time. When he meets a woman who is always on time (or even a little early) for everything, he finds her very attractive. If they fall in love and want to have a good relationship, how will they reconcile their different styles of handling time? There are any number of possible outcomes:

• They may never resolve their differences. They may fight and argue over who did what, but they never find a solution. Sometimes he will make her late, and sometimes she will force him to be on time.
• They may sit down and try to analyze their behavior—why is he always late? Why does she have a need to be punctual all the time? They may find that the whole question of timeliness is a symptom of more serious problems in their relationship. It may be that they need to work at being more sensitive to each other’s values. Or they may decide that this is not an issue worth fighting about and choose to ignore each other’s style.
• They may actively work to try to change each other—one trying to get the other to be more responsible, while the other is attempting to convince the first to be less compulsive.
• They may reach a compromise agreement to head off future conflicts. Perhaps they will decide that each will be only responsible for getting where she or he needs to be in a timely fashion. Or they may decide that they follow her time-line when going to “her” events and his when going to “his” events.

Where do you go from here?

You talk about the issues raised by the conflict between needs and values. Here are some questions to get the conversation started:

• Do you think a relationship between people with opposite styles of handling time can succeed? Is it a deal-breaker or can you negotiate to find a solution?
• Can you ask your love-partner to help you resolve these conflicts? What if they say no?
• How can you make changes in the way you handle conflict with your love-partner while still showing respect for each others’ feelings? 
• What happens to a relationship where people can't discuss conflicts like this one?

And here are some ideas for solutions (all of these require open and honest discussions):

• Take separate cars: arrive (and leave)  at different times.
• Discuss what needs to be done ahead of time and promise each other to start at a particular time. Promises must be sincere! 
• Determine how much time each of you will need to prepare and respect one another’s different timelines. No sarcasm; no demeaning remarks or put downs.
• Not every job is a rush job. Find a way to weight the items on your to-do lists so the important stuff gets done on time.
• Agree on a list of what needs to be done, deciding who will be responsible for each task and discussing how long you expect each task will take.

Hardball
Beware those who turn a disagreement over how to manage time into something much bigger. They may be playing some kind of psychological “game” to get their needs met at the expense of the relationship. Some issues in resolving these conflicts that may be games are commitment, sincerity, and maturity. 

• People who are truly committed to a relationship will make the effort to find an acceptable compromise. They have insight into their own limitations—what they can and cannot tolerate—and know that not every issue is a deal-breaker. Someone who is not really committed to the relationship will make no effort to find a solution.
• Sincerity is an issue in any situation where people’s self-esteem is on the line. These are called “ego-involvement” issues and they go to the core of a person’s value system. An insincere promise to solve a problem of this type can be seen as a betrayal of trust and end the relationship.
• People who play games instead of trying to solve problems often have maturity issues. Creating an uproar over something trivial, distorting the main issue so that it becomes a metaphor for something unrelated, or using the disagreement to attack the other person identify the way some immature people handle disagreements. A person who says, “That’s it. I’m outta here.” is merely using the disagreement as an excuse for acting-out behavior.

2019 We Could Have Won Moot Court

We Could Have Won Moot Court

Steven B. Zwickel, Esq.

2019

One requirement for completing the program at the law school I attended was mandatory participation in a competition called Moot Court. Working with another law student, we were asked to put together oral arguments supporting a hypothetical legal case. My partner (the wonderfully calm Susan Bergman Addamo) and I did the best that we could, but we never made it past the first round of the competition; we got no feedback and never found out what we should have done better.^[1] 

        This has bothered my for more than 40 years, but now I think I know what we should have done way back when.^[2]

Facts of the case

A man, identified as Plaintiff, happened to witness a horrible automobile accident, in which a person named Victim was mutilated and killed by a car driven by Driver. Plaintiff claimed that, as a result of having seen this terrible sight, Plaintiff suffered from insomnia, flashbacks, emotional turmoil, and other psychological effects. Thus, Plaintiff sued Driver for damages for the negligent infliction of severe emotional distress.

The Law

The case was governed by the law of torts. A tort is what lawyers call a wrongful act that causes someone else to suffer enough of a loss or harm to result in legal liability for the person who commits a tortious act. Examples of torts include assault, battery, causing an injury (deliberately or by negligence), causing financial losses, or invading someone’s privacy.) 

        The Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress is recognized as a tort in New York and it was and is grounds for a legal claim^[3]. However, in New York in 1974, unintentionally inflicting emotional distress was not considered a valid basis for a legal claim. In other words, deliberately scaring someone so that they have a heart attack is a tort, but accidentally frightening the hell out of someone is not.

        In our case, the lower court ruled that New York did not recognize Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress as a tort. That Plaintiff would witness the accident and suffer emotional distress afterwards was deemed “unforeseeable”, so the court ruled in favor of Driver. Plaintiff appealed, and we were supposed to argue Plaintiff’s appeal of the original judgment before the moot court.

Our (faulty) Argument

The best argument we could come up with was that New York should change the law and recognize Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress as a tort. A reckless driver, we said, whose behavior resulted in an accident, should be held liable for all the consequences of that behavior—foreseeable or not. Asking an appeals judge to overturn a longstanding legal principle was a weak argument and we deserved to lose.

How we could have won

Had we followed the progress of psychological medicine in recognizing the aftereffects of witnessing some awful event, we might have come up with better support for our argument.

        The idea that some people have strong, adverse reactions to witnessing horrifying events is not a new one, but for a very long time it was viewed as a “female” problem. For many centuries women were seen as subject to an illness called hysteria, which was characterized by symptoms like crippling anxiety, trouble breathing, fainting, nausea, nervous tics, insomnia, etc. It was believed that the cause of these symptoms lay in the woman’s uterus, thus the term hysteria, from the Greek foruterus. Obviously, men could not suffer from hysteria because they lacked a uterus. 

        In the old days, women were generally regarded as the “weaker” sex, ruled by emotion rather than by reason, and hysteria, also called neurasthenia, was just an extreme expression of typical female traits. 

        Over time, ideas about hysteria began to change; by the 1800s, doctors began see hysteria as a mental, rather than a physical disorder. The minds of women who were hysterical were perceived to be “alienated” from reality and a new medical specialty arose to care for them—the Alienists—the ancestors of today’s psychologists and psychiatrists. Near the end of the 1800s, doctors began to accept the theories of Sigmund Freud, including the idea that hysteria was not physical, but an emotional, internal illness that could be dealt with by trained psychologists.

        It should come as no surprise that women in the Victorian Era and well into the 20th Century had many reasons to become hysterical. For example, It was a time of severe sexual repression that left women bewildered, frightened, and ignorant about their own sexuality. Many, if not most, women lost babies and young children to disease and infection in the days before people knew about germs and sanitation. [One of my grandmothers had 5 children die as babies and toddlers; my father was the only child she had who lived to adulthood.] 

        Life was full of things that could traumatize any woman, regardless of class, education, or physical health. [My other grandmother experienced something similar to our Plaintiff. She happened to be on the scene when a streetcar in New York City ran over a woman and severed her leg. Grandma pulled the woman to the curb and wrapped something around the woman’s leg as a tourniquet. My mother, who was just a little girl at the time, witnessed this and carried the memory of this horrifying event with her for 60 years]

        Women in the bad old days were supposedly suffering from hysteria, but men with similar symptoms were diagnosed with “nerves.” [In 1866 hysteria was joined by a new diagnosis that had a similar set of symptoms: it was called railway spine, and it was a nervous disorder believed to be caused either witnessing the accidents that the dangerous railways of the time generated in large numbers or by what we now call whiplash. Unlike hysteria, railway spine affected both men and women. -Wikipedia] 

        Men were supposed to be the stronger sex—stoic, rational, and unemotional—the exact opposite of women. Real men were tough; they didn’t cry or express emotions.

        It’s not clear exactly when or how that began to change, but awareness of the fact that men did have emotional reactions came from experience on the modern battlefield. In spite of the carnage of the pre-firearm battlefield, there are few records of men having an emotional reaction afterwards. 
        One example of a soldier suffering the aftereffects of combat is the lead character in Shakespeare's 1601-04 play Othello. The play is based on a story from the mid-16th century that mayhave started with an actual incident involving a Moorish soldier in Venice. In Othello, Shakespeare describes a combat veteran who suffers from anxiety, anger, paranoia, and depression—all symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Shakespeare has the villain Iago refer to Othello's condition as "epilepsy" in Act IV when Iago lies about having slept with Othello's wife, and Othello passes out. That is just one of Iago's many lies. Shakespeare's play demonstrates that more than 400 years ago people were aware of the after effects of combat.

         That changed during the 19th century. People began to notice that some soldiers, and some civilians, with no physical evidence of wounds, were acting strangely. In 2015 the National Museum of Civil War Medicine mounted an exhibit on the mental health of Civil War soldiers, some of whom were diagnosed as having “acute mania” and “soldier’s heart” or “irritable heart”. Clearly these men were suffering from the aftereffects of combat.^[4]Accounts of the survivors of the bombardment of Vicksburg during the American Civil War include psychological trauma to both men and women^[5].

        It was the First World War that really opened the door to the idea of men reacting to horrifying events. Over the course of the 20th century, doctors began to understand that something terrible happened to men who went to war. It was called "shell shock"^[6]and “gas hysteria” in the First World War.

        Doctors also revived an older term, neurasthenia, to describe a psychiatric disorder which was the result of the terrors of modern warfare. Exact numbers are hard to find, but as many as 80,000 British soldiers suffered from shell shock in WWI. Unfortunately, some victims were stigmatized for not being manly enough, for cowardice, and for shirking.

        In WWII, the condition was called “battle fatigue” and soldiers were said to have “a thousand-yard stare” to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of men who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them.

        In the Korean War the condition was diagnosed as "operational exhaustion.” 

        In the 1960s, “combat fatigue syndrome” or “combat neurosis” was recognized as a problem for Vietnam War veterans. Nowadays, the condition is called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD was not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980, six years after we argued our case in moot court. 

        There were articles published in professional psychiatric and psychological journals about PTSD in the 1960s and 1970s, but, even if we’d known about them, I don’t think we law students would have had access to them. {Before the internet, you had to go to an academic library to find journal articles in a specialized field. We didn’t have any way of doing that.} 

        The keyword we missed was “stress”; had we used that term, we might have found articles that could have led us to the growing field of PTSD. Stress management books and articles didn’t really become popular until the growth of the self-help movement in the late 1970s and 80s.^[7]

We could have made our arguments stronger

Had we known about PTSD, we could have told the story of hysteria—how it was once considered a “women’s problem” and over time, as described here, it became clear that terrifying events affect both men and women. We could have demonstrated that, while hysteria is no longer recognized by as a medical disorder, a strong emotional response to terrifying events, as Sigmund Freud noted, can affect both males and females. 

        If Driver caused the accident by negligence, then we would argue that Driver is responsible for any consequences, regardless of whether they were foreseeable or not. PTSD is a real medical condition and, whether caused by intentional acts or by negligence, it should be considered valid grounds for a tort.

After 44 years, I rest my case.

---

^[1]The moot court requirement was controversial at my law school back in 1975. See the article “Moot Court Hazing” in (1975) The Justinian: Vol. 1975 : Iss. 3 , Article 2: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/justinian/vol1975/iss3/2

^[2]This article on how we could have won was inspired by the marvelous Prof. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who let me sit in on her Torts class in 2016 (preparing for a presentation I was asked to do on how to teach Millennials). I learned more in one hour with Prof. Charo than I did in two semesters in Brooklyn with an arrogant, condescending schmuck of a teacher.

^[3]The author of the textbook on torts that we used in law school described the evolution of this particular tort in an article he wrote for the Michigan Law Review. Prosser, William L. “Intentional Infliction of Mental Suffering: A New Tort” (1938-39; v.37, p.874.)

^[4]See Horwitz, Tony, Smithsonian Magazine “Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?”; Jan. 2015; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ptsd-civil-wars-hidden-legacy-180953652/

^[5]During the siege, Union gunboats lobbed over 22,000 shells into the town and army artillery fire was even heavier. -Wikipedia

^[6]“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancetin February 1915, only six months after the start of the war, in an article by Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps -https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-55376701/These videos demonstrate the effects of shell shock, but they are hard to watch: See Shell Shock - The Psychological Scars of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Specialhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTRJZGWqF8,The Effects of Shell Shock: WWI Nueroses | War Archiveshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWH,Shell Shock during World War Onehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/shellshock_01.shtml

^[7]My own book on the topic, Workplace Stress: Nine One-Hour Workshops (Families International, Inc.) wasn’t published until 1994. 

Not-so-bad Military History Books {Who writes them and why}

Steven B. Zwickel

August, 2019

My dear wife hates military history books. She says they're boring and meaningless.
     Consider: 

“At 0944 General so-and-so ordered an attack on the left flank, which met fierce resistance from Field Marshall Blunder’s hussars, uhlans, dragoons, and lancers. Fighting continued until 1414, when the redoubts, parapets, “mamelons and ravelins” were enfiladed and stormed. The battle went on, and on, and on…” 

She’s got a point.
     
I was first exposed to military history in elementary (K-6) school, when we were required to write and present to the class our book reports. This was back in the 1950s and two of the more popular books that (only the boys ever) reported on were Quentin Reynolds Battle of Britain (1953, Random House) and Richard Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary (1943, Random House). Both of these were about the Second World War—something all of our parents had recently lived through, though they rarely spoke about it.
     The Reynolds book sparked a school-yard discussion about whether the title was misleading or not. Some boys held that, without machine guns or bazookas, it was unfair to refer to the “battle” of Britain, which only involved German bombers and English Spitfires. 

     The “Diary” (a word most of us associated with girly-type writing) gained credibility when one of my classmates claimed his uncle or cousin or other relative had been there and it was just like in the book.
     Book report presentations always ended with the pupil telling the class, “If you want to find out how it ends, read the book.” Not terribly original.
     My elementary school didn’t really teach a lot of history, much less military history. I think we went from Columbus to Lincoln in 5th Grade and as far as the Spanish-American War in 6th Grade.

     ☞ The school building was itself a veteran of that war, having been built in 1898 as a hospital for recovering soldiers. The most famous graduate, although I didn’t learn this until many years later, was the actress and silent film star Clara Bow. 

I peeked (yes, I was one of THOSE kids) and read to the end of the 6th Grade history book, where I discovered that, in 1914, a war broke out in Europe that would eventually embroil the entire world, including the United States of America! This, I assumed, must be the World War that had ended a decade or so earlier. Later on, one of my classmates explained to me that there were TWO World Wars; we won the first one, but the sore losers demanded a do-over, so we had to do it again.
     We read some war-related books in junior high school. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was required reading, so we weren’t too enthusiastic about it. Books about war seemed to be either personal memoirs or military histories. Memoirs, like Red Badge, gave readers a sense of what war was like, but no real idea of who was fighting, why, and how the war played out. Many of us read Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, a minute-by-minute account of the D-Day landings.
     Later on, we read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead, and I think quite a few of us were scolded for trying to sneak a euphemistic “fugging” into our conversation in imitation of Mailer’s GIs.
     Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was the big anti-war book that caught on with my generation as we faced the dilemma of the Vietnam War. Vietnam split the nation—doves (peaceniks) who opposed the war and hawks who supported it. I was lucky, in that I was rejected by the Army because I have only one working kidney. This good fortune, however, left me with many decades of guilt: because I did not have to go to Vietnam, many others did, all of whom paid a price for doing so.
     My guilt led me to read everything I could about the Vietnam War (entirely personal memoirs) and that left me feeling even worse knowing what my countrymen had gone through while I sat at home. After that, I lost any interest in reading military history.
     Twenty-five years later, after my father died, I inherited several boxes with his souvenirs from his service in WWII. For a few years, they sat in my basement, but eventually I started going through them to see what was there. That was when I realized I really didn’t know too much about the war in the Pacific and why my dad had spent part of his life on a tropical island. My curiosity induced me to start reading military history; I wanted to learn more about WWII, not just the campaign my dad was in, but the larger picture of the war.
     The war history books were fairly helpful in understanding what led up to the war, what happened during the war, and how it ended, but I also came across lots of books about battles, military units, and warships. Some of these were personal memoirs and I found them incomprehensible. They alluded to people, places, ships, and machines without any discussion. A reader who was not there—in that battle, on that ship, flying that type of airplane—couldn't possibly understand what the authors were talking about.  

      Here is an example:

The Front Royal was a T2-SE-A1 (Navy designation) tanker which was the workhorse of the tanker fleet – 481 being built during the war. A typical tanker crew had 42 to 45 mariners and 17 Armed Guard. A T2 was typically 523 feet long overall, had a 68 foot beam, 30 foot draft, displaced 10,448 gross tons (21,880 loaded displacement tons) , with 6,000 shaft hp turbo- electric propulsion, a speed of 14.5 – 16 knots and a liquid capacity of 141,200 barrels (nearly 6 million gallons). T2’s were named after monuments, national parks, forts, battles, historic settlements, trails, lakes or swamps. The ship was likely named after the 1862 Civil War battle fought at Front Royal, Virginia but this is unconfirmed. *

Surely, only someone who served on Front Royal during the war would find this both interesting and intelligible. 

     I teach communication courses, and a main requirement is that my students write with a clear understanding of why they are writing and for whom they are writing. I will not give them a passing grade if they can’t explain their purpose and audience.
    The WWII memoirs baffled me; I could not figure out why they were written or who the intended readers were. Why were these books written? Why had they been published? Was there really a market for these books? Their very existence was a puzzle.

It was only a few years ago that a news story on TV helped me understand the purpose and audience of the World War II memoirs. 

The United States has been at war in Asia for more than 18 years and as of this writing (in 2019) fighting in Afghanistan continues. We now have a new generation of war vets who have returned from the battlefields with their own memories, including painful recollections of terrifying events that have caused many to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These men and women may experience symptoms of PTSD as described by mental health experts, such as:

• vivid flashbacks (feeling like the trauma is happening right now)
• intrusive thoughts or images.
• nightmares.
• intense distress at real or symbolic reminders of the trauma.
• physical sensations such as pain, sweating, nausea or trembling.  https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml

Many efforts are now underway to understand the effects of PTSD and to help vets deal with the symptoms. The story I watched on TV described how social workers and psychologists were helping a group of Iraq/Afghanistan vets. As part of the process, the veterans were asked to write about their experiences in combat, including those horrifying episodes that had triggered their PTSD. By writing down their stories the vets were somehow able to come to grips with what had happened to them and to deal with the stressful aftermath.

That’s when it hit me: the indecipherable World War II memoirs were the veterans’ way of dealing with the horrors of war. 

The reason for writing the memoirs was to help the authors jettison the psychological pain and trauma. The audience for these stories was no one but the authors—they were writing for themselves, trying to deal with their memories. The World War II vets didn’t have access to all the social and psychological services vets have today, so they came up with their own solution to dealing with PSTD: they wrote it down and got it out of their heads.

And that’s why there are so many “bad” books about warfare out there.

* from A Memoir of Edward Frederick Barta’s Service in the United States Navy Armed Guard during World War II <https://www.armed-guard.com/barta.pdf>

2004 Who Really Invented PowerPoint

A True (sad) Story

Steven B. Zwickel

March, 2004

In the summer of 1981, one of our local radio stations—WZEE, or Z-104— had a contest. First prize was an Atari 2600 (officially called the Atari Video Computer System or Atari VCS) game set that looked like so much fun I really wanted to win. {By an odd coincidence, the prizes were donated by a man who eventually married my sister-in-law}

Just my luck, I won the Grand Prize: an Atari 400 computer with an enormous 16K of memory.

When I got it home, I plugged it in and attached it to my TV set (it didn’t come with a monitor). Nothing happened. I read the manual and discovered that it couldn't do anything unless I bought program cartridges for it, so I sent away for two ROM cartridges—one that used joysticks to play basketball and another that interpreted BASIC programming language.

To make things happen on the screen, I had to learn how to program using BASIC, which took a few months of my life (let's just say I was between jobs and going through a divorce, so it wasn't a big strain on my other obligations.)

BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and, by the following spring, I had learned enough to know some simple programming techniques, including how to change the color of the background on a TV screen (computer monitors were extremely expensive and color monitors virtually unheard of in 1982) and how to put lines of text up on the screen.

In those days, I was trying to make a go of it as a social worker in private practice, doing some counseling and running adult ed classes on interpersonal skills and relationships. I had been teaching a course on Divorce Adjustment for several months and had made a series of flip charts on heavy stock to illustrate the different topics.

Making flip charts that were neat and legible was hard work. I got the idea of using the computer to make the flipchart visuals come up on a TV screen and, after a few weeks of work, I had written a short program that would do just that—put a list of items on the screen and change to a different visual when I hit the down arrow key.

I took that little 16K computer to my class in April, 1982 and hooked it up to a big TV to show my visuals, thus becoming the first person to use the technology that eventually became Microsoft PowerPoint.

According to both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia, PowerPoint was developed by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin for the American computer software company Forethought, Inc. and it became a real program sometime in 1985, some three years after I used my little Atari to show text on a screen.

Making visual aids on a screen seemed like such a logical use of the Atari that I never even considered applying for a patent my idea. But, who knew????

Sometimes, I could kick myself.

➡ Two good things came out of this experience: first, I learned enough about programming code so that it wasn't a deep, dark mystery and I understand how computers work. Second, because I became an early adapter of the home computer, unlike some of my contemporaries, I was never afraid of them.

2019 No More War Games

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

I was  watching a boy playing with an action figure and it got me thinking about my toys when I was a child.

I never played with action figures, mostly because there weren’t any, but also because they would have been considered dolls, and no self-respecting boy in the 1950s would ever think of playing with dolls. (Not entirely true, now that I think about it. From time to time my sister would take out her dolls to play with them and I would either make fun of them, tip over the tea party to make my sister angry, or grab one and play keep-away to make her even angrier. So, in that sense, I did “play” with dolls.)

I find modern-day action figures for boys troubling for a couple of reasons. First, there’s way the figures look—enormous shoulders and bulging muscles on their arms and legs. If they were female, there’d be a huge outcry over “body shaming”—the modern term for making girls feel inadequate. The musclebound action figures seem like an ad aimed at boys to encourage them to start taking steroids.

The other reason the action figures concern me is that they always seem to be fighting the bad guys (in whatever fantasy world  they may be) all by themselves. In fact, boys seem to play with the figures alone, by themselves, in combat against some imaginary enemy. The action figures always seem to come equipped with an impressive arsenal of weapons that can stab, slash, shoot, or impale their enemies. But they do it all alone; they are not part of a platoon, much less an army, of other muscular action figures. And boys who play with these toys also seem to play by themselves.

I don’t know how this affects the boys, but the contrast to the way my friends and I played when we were young is striking.

We played war games. We were a dozen years removed from the end of World War II and our parents had fought the “Japs” (Yes, we called them that. And we called them “Nips” and a lot worse.) and Nazis (We saw no difference between Germans and Nazis—to us they were the same evil bad guys.) and won. Our folks may have been pacifists before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I never heard of a parent who objected to our playing war in the 1950s.

Our war games were never about a single soldier; we played with entire armies. Toy stores sold plastic bags with 144 soldiers in fighting stances. Inside the comic books we hid from our parents were ads for even larger bags with more soldiers. I think I had 288 Civil War soldiers, both Union and Confederate, a large collection of WWII GIs (with tanks!), and several groups of Indians and cowboys.

Our armies were kept in cigar boxes and we’d carry them from our house to our friends when we wanted to play war. The battlefields were made up of whatever was handy—often wooden blocks stood in for houses and forests, but the phone book always made a good hill and a rolled up sheet of newspaper could be a river (when flattened) or a fence soldiers could hide behind.

When the centennial of the Civil War came around in 1960 and 1961 dozens of articles about the battles, the battlefields, the soldiers, and the meaning of the war to both north and south appeared in all the major papers and magazines. I remember a particular issue of Life (March 17, 1961 if you want to look it up) that contained all the parts and instructions for a game called 1863. The board was a map of the USA printed on a gatefold in the magazine. You would cut out the pieces printed in the magazine and glue them to small squares of cardboard to represent the different military units. Millions of people learned how to play a war game from 1863 and the game was soon printed and sold by Parker Brothers with plastic soldiers in a gray and blue box. 

Civil War toy soldiers appeared everywhere. The ones you ordered from the comic books were plastic, cast in blue and gray in different poses. The soldiers were about an inch high and molded in low relief—so flat that they were almost 2D. Each rested on a flat base so they could stand up and face the enemy.

Playing war games with friends was a social activity that required imagination and communication. We each had our own preferences and ideas about how to set up and use our soldiers. One of my friends was obsessed with Custer’s Last Stand and he always played the US Cavalry, even though they always lost. Another friend usually wanted to wage war on Iwo Jima. I was partial to Civil War games and often took the South side.

My family took a trip to Gettysburg when I was eight or nine and we hired a guide to show us around the battlefield. He rattled off statistics and I had trouble understanding his accent. “There were 400 keelt, 500 wunded, and 110 meezing” meant 400 killed, 500 wounded, and 110 missing.

For a while, I thought the South had a point. Kids tend to be conservative in their thinking and the idea that the Union wanted to mess with the southern states’ traditions seemed wrong. But I soon realized that the traditions involved slavery, which I absolutely hated. That put me firmly on the Union side in future war games.

The trip to Gettysburg inspired me to buy my first board war game. A company called Avalon Hill had come up with new ways to simulate combat, using a board with a battlefield map, dice to create randomness and uncertainty, and lots of small (easy to lose) cardboard pieces representing different military units. 

The Avalon Hill Gettysburg game came with hundreds of square cardboard pieces and a book of complex rules. It was played on a map divided into hexagons, which permitted players to position units facing six different directions. After playing it a few times, it became clear that, once the whole Union army got to the battlefield, there was nothing the South could do to win the game.

A few years later, Avalon Hill came out with an updated version of Gettysburg that had a better map and more complicated rules.

I was interested in how battles were won and lost and I bought other Avalon Hill war games. Some were fun, some taught me history lessons, and a few had rules that made them simply unplayable. When I got a computer, one of the extras I purchased was a war game based on the Eastern Front in World War II. All the games had rules that evened up the contest so that, theoretically, the weaker side had a shot at winning.

But as the Civil War had first piqued my interest, it also led me away from war games when I came across a diorama of part of the Gettysburg battlefield called the battle of the railroad cut. Without going into a lot of detail, a railroad company had started to build a line into the town and excavated a path through the hills to the west. The southerners advanced on Gettysburg from the west and several units walked right through the railroad cut. Union soldiers in front of them and standing on the sides of the cut opened fire. It was “shooting fish in a barrel.” They called on the rebels to surrender, but they refused and the slaughter continued until the few remaining rebels were captured or escaped.

The story made me question the whole idea of war games. War isn’t a game, of course, but this episode left me with a strong distaste for war in any form. I learned that no one in their right mind would want to play a truly realistic war game. I learned that the outcomes of many famous “history-changing” battles were pretty much inevitable—in the real world there are no rules to make it an even match. With extremely rare exceptions, the larger, more powerful army always wins. 
I have stopped playing war games. I still play checkers with my granddaughter, but I think that's as close to combat as I ever want to go.

"Most of what we call history consists of the adventures of small bands of heavily armed teenagers lacking adult supervision"

---Steven Zwickel

==================

"I was now embarked on a military career. This orientation was entirely due to my collection of soldiers. I had ultimately nearly fifteen hundred. They were all of one size, all British, and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade.

        "My brother Jack commanded the hostile army. But by a Treaty for the Limitation of Armaments he was only allowed to have coloured troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery. Very important! I could muster myself only eighteen field-guns—besides fortress pieces. But all the other services were complete—except one. It is what every army is always

short of—transport. My father’s old friend, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, admiring my array, noticed this deficiency and provided a fund from which it was to some extent supplied.

    "The day came when my father himself paid a formal visit of inspection. All the troops were arranged in the correct formation of attack. He spent twenty minutes studying the scene—which was really impressive—with a keen eye and captivating smile. At the end he asked me if I would like to

go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said ‘Yes’ at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities o( military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to

the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. However that may be, the toy soldiers turned the current of my life. Henceforward all my education was directed to, passing into Sandhurst, and afterwards to the technical details of the profession of arms. Anything else I had to pick

up for myself."

- Winston Churchill, My Early Years, “Harrow” p. 19 

        

(Churchill entered Harrow in 1888, when he was 14, and left in 1892 for Sandhurst, which he entered in 1893 when he was 19)