Have you ever been awoken in the middle of the night by a klaxon? Stirred from a deep slumber to spring into action and be at the top of your game? With no time to warm up, get ready, or stretch a bit? Haven’t had this happen? No, me neither, and while it’s not on my bucket list, I enjoy thinking of the leadership lessons it offers.

Firemen, emergency room workers, and police all live on alert status and I bet Murphy’s Law governs their lives. This means that when they are called for help it is probably when they are dead asleep. While the adrenaline rush of these jobs is undeniable, I admire their sense of duty to the community that motivates them to keep going.

During the Cold War there were others, B-52 pilots namely, whose lives were governed by the klaxon and the klaxon alone. They spent their rotations in ready rooms where they were on hair trigger alert. When that klaxon sounded, as it frequently did during drills, they needed to wake up (sorry, no time for coffee!), sprint to their aircraft, and then take off and fly toward targets in distant Russia. It was all part of the famous 24/7 Cold War readiness posture. Today’s satellites afford a better heads-up so all those warnings and drills of the 1950s and 60s might sound quaint, but it was serious business back then as stopping a possible Communist Red Horde invasion was job #1…or that was the plan anyway!

Now you might not know a B-52 bomber from a Concorde or a 747 and that is ok for this discussion, but if you have seen the movie Dr. Strangelove then you have seen a B-52 (Here is a two minute primer in cased you missed it: B-52 )

These eight-engine bombers, built in the late 1950s and still flying, were one-third of what was known as the Triad—the three-pronged U.S. nuclear attack capability that also comprised the Navy’s nuclear missile armed submarines and the Air Force’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Aside: If you want to have the daylights scared out of you about how close we collectively came to the end of the world through nuclear war, read Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control. Spoiler—it was close.

Hollywood used this “ready to go to war at a moment’s notice” theme as the centerpiece for one of the most laughable “leadership” movies of the 1960s. Entitled A Gathering of Eagles, it starred Rock Hudson as the take no prisoners Colonel Caldwell—the officer who is tasked to get the air wing back into ship-shape after it had failed an inspection. He arrives on base knocking heads and taking names. In true movie style, the plot has a love interest for him in the form of a new wife with whom he can go home and do the Wild Thing (in an innocent early 1960s manner of course) should such ancient human passions flare. But alas! He does not have much time away from the office as he is a man on a mission.

As a worker bee all my life, I know that stale and flabby organizations need new leaders to make course corrections. A dose of “tough love” might be required and it is a good tool to have at the ready in the corporate tool kit. Employees occasionally even welcome a spoonful of this bitter medicine if it means being on a winning team.

In popular culture over the decades, however, Hollywood has joined with the business press in an unusual marriage in singing Hosannas to the leadership styles of those whom I call the Alpha Males on Steroids.

While Hollywood likes the brash and brazen leader, the business press let its admiration get out of hand. Just look at the love-fest they had with charlatans like the infamous Frank Lorenzo of Eastern Airlines or “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap of Sunbeam—both fortunately now defrocked and dishonored. Dunlap was so bad that the legal authorities banned him from ever again serving as an officer of a publicly traded company—and that’s any company—no matter how small.

Yet in their heyday, both Dunlap and Lorenzo were famous for parachuting into an organization and sandblasting it from top to bottom to extract profits. They were feared for the floggings they administered in bringing the workers to heel—as if they were dogs of a most wretched sort. Until these gents imploded the firms they were tasked to run, the business papers fawned over them in such sickening displays of infatuation that they made teenage puppy love look like a sophisticated English stage drama.

Of course, these turnaround artists had legions of acolytes who, in the manner of a modern Greek chorus, would repeat the mantra that all they were doing was serving the shareholder’s interests by making the corporation profitable…yeah right. Another aside: Should you wish to see if your blood will boil, you can look at the many good books that chart the destruction these men wrought. 

It is no surprise though that these hard charging types, for all their tough guy strumming and strutting, often steer the ship upon the rocks if unchecked.

They frequently forget that a manager looks after resources whereas a leader motivates people. While they envision themselves as leaders, what they are really doing is merely moving resources around.

It is hard though for an exec to be both a good leader and a good manager. It requires skill, work, and a good dollop of talent. Like me, you may have been lucky to have worked for bosses that have threaded this needle. I admire their good efforts.

Unfortunately, the corporate ranks are still occasionally populated by those who adopt the battle axe model and think that brute force methods will prevail. But we who are in the average ranks are finely attuned to nuance, it is one of our strong suites after all. We see through this charade and frankly are embarrassed for these tough guys. Part of their persona is that they do not care a whit what we think and that’s fine, but it does not hide how badly they miss the target when it comes to leadership.

Modern workers know that today’s jobs are just transactional. We lend a shoulder to the stone and for this work we get paid. When management no longer needs us, they let us go—it has always been this way and forever will be. Yet we are true assets to a firm when we feel empowered to make decisions and feel as if we are contributing to the task at hand. The bonus is that we are happier and thus starts the virtuous circle—it is as simple as that. So when these Big Bosses come in to “straighten things out” they should at least be accurate in their assessments.

This is why I called the Rock Hudson movie so laughable. Look at this clip: Briefing 

 I know it is just a movie, but a large jet (bomber or passenger) takes off at around 180 mph (290 kph). The aircraft needs only five seconds to go 1000 feet (305 meters). When Rock Hudson’s character Colonel Caldwell is theatrically grousing about some B-52s taking 1000 feet more for the takeoff roll… well, that is a whopping five seconds worth.

Sure, Caldwell wants his crews to be precise as attention to detail is important in flying matters, but these bombers were launching on flights that would last up to 14 hours so five seconds was not going to make much of a difference—particularly if the Russians had already launched a nuclear missile at the base as you can imagine. Military pilots around the world still chuckle at the histrionics of this scene, but sadly it perfectly reflects how some men and women behave when they think they are leading when in fact they are merely managing—and mismanaging at that!

Big deal you say. Well, actually it is. These hard-charging managers have their occasional use but they quickly lose the trust and respect of the employees if they take this acting gig too far. Strength is nothing without wisdom. We want our leaders to lead and to make the right decisions about the right things without latching onto the inconsequential.

We in the average ranks remind our betters that management and leadership are two completely different things. We know that the modern world is so technologically complex as to overwhelm us and thus the problems of this world will not be solved by the boss barging into the briefing room, throwing chairs, and laying down the law.

The men and women who chart the future know that creative relationships are based on the leadership/followership or servant/leader dynamic. Supervisors who take this to heart encourage workers not only to follow but to lead. They are not afraid of what their employees might do—quite the opposite! They encourage it so as to discover where it will, no pun intended, lead.

The officer ranks of the exciting and profitable firms we so admire and envy intuitively sense this. They are masters in creating work environments that are fluid in the constant give and take of leadership/followership. The result is that things get done and they get done better, smarter, and more creatively.

Leadership is hard to define yet we always recognize it when we see it. It can be subtle, oblique even, but it fosters the best environments in which to be productive. This means that if you wish neither to lead nor to follow then perhaps it is best to get out of the way before someone makes a fool of themselves!