Cadet Randy Hopper, Keith H. Hammonds,

Leadership Lessons (IV)
"I led a team of incoming plebes during basic training. I thought I had to lead the way that I saw others doing it -- with stress and shouting, like a
traditional drill sergeant. Well, my unit performed very badly. And they hated me. That experience shook me up. I realized that leadership isn't rule-based. It
isn't about stress. It's about inspiration, about setting and communicating a vision. It's about gaining trust. Once you have someone's trust, once you get
them on the same sheet of music, they don't want to disappoint you. Then leading becomes very easy."
--Christina "CJ" Juhasz, '90, director in online ventures, Merrill Lynch West Point's Leadership Curriculum Until after World War II, there was no explicit leadership instruction at West Point. Back then, the academy was known primarily as an engineering school. How could leadership possibly be taught? How do you teach judgment or inspiration in a classroom?
Hike to the top floor of Thayer Hall, and you will find Lieutenant Colonel Greg Dardis engaging small groups of firsties in discussions of classical-leadership
theory, dissecting such leading-edge thinkers as Morgan McCall and Peter Senge. Cadets today can actually major in leadership. And even if they don't, such
instruction is deeply ingrained in the curriculum. In their third year, cadets must take a course called Military Leadership. The timing is significant. At that point, cadets have returned from a summer spent
interning with Army units around the world, often temporarily replacing platoon leaders in the field. They have served as team leaders in their cadet company.
"They have experience under their belts," says Dardis, who graduated from West Point in 1979 and now heads the leadership and management studies program. "They've observed both good and bad leadership." The object is to reflect on that experience, to assess it in terms of theory. Early in the course, cadets are asked to write about their leadership philosophy a graded exercise that forces them to reflect on their talents and weaknesses. They write reflection papers that explain theoretical constructs in terms of their own experiences.

Cadets also take on a raft of case studies penned by West Point faculty, most of them rooted in combat situations. The students also engage in action-learning projects -- some of which are distinctly non-military. When Snook taught the class, he would take his students to the elementary school that serves West Point families: "I'd say, 'You all think you're leaders? Well, you're going to lead a recess.' " The assignment: Develop a plan for overseeing seven minutes of playground activity. Most often, cadets responded by thinking in terms of command and control: First we'll play dodgeball. Then we'll move to the swings. I'll direct every movement of every kid out there. Then they watched the teacher lead an actual recess. As kids poured out onto the
playground, there was chaos. And then order emerged, as the children basically organized themselves into teams. The exact order that resulted was unpredictable but it was entirely predictable that some form of order would emerge. "I asked them to rate recess," Snook recalls. "Well, they said that everyone had fun, and no one got hurt. So I asked them to tell me about the leader. 'Well, the teacher just stood there,' they said. So, is leading that easy? Is it totally hands-off? No. The way you influence complex, chaotic systems is by setting the starting conditions. You set the starting conditions, the left and
right boundaries, and the minimum specifications. The teacher had a fence around the playground, and she established four or five rules. After that, her job was managing by exception." Meanwhile, the leadership of West Point is thinking about the institution's exceptional past -- and challenging future. The academy exists on a razor's edge. To stay effective, it must retain much of what makes it different -- yet it also must continuously accommodate changing external demands. "We can't be so different that the notion of being the Army of a democracy fails," says Lieutenant General Daniel W. Christman, the academy's well-regarded superintendent. "We have to reflect what society demands of us." The 1965 graduate believes that in order to fortify its relevance in the post-Cold War era, the academy must adjust its mission. It must reflect the new ambivalence with which America regards its armed services. That means equipping its graduates less for combat leadership than for "officership" -- a vague notion that encompasses any number of the roles that the Army may fill. "We need to educate cadets in a way that doesn't constitute a military straitjacket," Christman says.

That may be so. West Point produces young officers who have been encouraged to act as entrepreneurs, to act quickly and decisively, to operate effectively amid chaos. These are traits that clash with the reality of military service in peacetime. So here's the irony: If the academy's education has become less
applicable in the Army, it has grown more relevant in business. "Running a company, especially a startup, is not unlike a battle," says Mark Hoffman, a
1969 graduate and now chairman and CEO of online-exchange giant Commerce One. "Bombs are going off all around you. The market and the competition are changing constantly. Your stock price is falling. You have to stay calm in the face of strife."
West Point dedicates itself to producing graduates who will, as its mission statement avers, "dedicate a lifetime of selfless service to the nation." The
vague wording concerns those who believe that such service should be strictly military. But as a nation, we are short of great leadership in every sector. We
may lament West Pointers' abandonment of the military. But guess what? Business has become the new national defense. Service to economy, selfless or not, constitutes service to the nation.

Keith H. Hammonds ( ), a Fast Company senior editor, is based in New York. Visit West Point on the Web (http://www.usma.edu), or contact Lieutenant Colonel Scott Snook by email ( ).