The Art of Manliness - #571： The Voyage of Character

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00:00:25.860 And now on to the show.

00:00:30.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Good character

00:00:38.860 is hard to define in the abstract, but easy to identify when it's embodied in the lives of

00:00:43.060 great individuals. In order to illuminate what worthy character looks like, my guest today has

00:00:46.780 written a book which consists of profiles of 10 of history's most notable admirals making out both

00:00:51.060 their inspiring and flawed qualities, as well as how these qualities intersected with their ability

00:00:55.320 to lead. His name is Admiral James Stavridis. He served as the commander of U.S. Southern Command,

00:00:59.240 U.S. European Command, and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and is now the dean of the

00:01:03.580 Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. On today's show, the admiral talks

00:01:07.140 about many of the figures in his latest book, Sailing True North, 10 admirals in the voyage of

00:01:11.060 character, including Themistocles, Sir Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, and Chester Nimitz. We take a look

00:01:16.020 at what these individuals did well, what they did poorly, and how their characteristics, decisions,

00:01:20.300 qualities, and overall moral compass impacted their leadership and influence. After the show's

00:01:24.220 over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash truenorth.

00:01:41.020 All right, Admiral James Stavridis, welcome back to the show.

00:01:44.400 Great to be on The Art of Manliness again, Brett.

00:01:47.180 So we had you on, it was last year, 2018, to talk about your book, The Leader's Bookshelf,

00:01:51.420 where you polled four-star generals and admirals to get their recommendations on the best books

00:01:55.720 for leaders. And I know our listeners really enjoyed that. That's episode number 373, for

00:02:00.400 those who want to check that out. You got a new book out called Sailing True North, 10

00:02:04.900 Admirals and the Voyage of Character, where you look at 10 great admirals from history and

00:02:10.060 try to find the leadership lessons and character lessons from them. And we'll discuss, talk about

00:02:14.660 some of these admirals. But before you do, in the book, you make this distinction between

00:02:18.840 character and leadership. And you say they're often, these words are often used synonymously,

00:02:23.700 but you think it's important to make a distinction between the two. So first off,

00:02:27.240 why do you think these words are used synonymously? And why do you think it's important to make that

00:02:30.380 distinction?

00:02:30.740 They are often confused. And they're two, in my view, quite distinct elements. And the first one,

00:02:38.680 let's start with leadership. Think of leadership as a big, enormous door that swings through the

00:02:44.140 world influencing others. And that door is somewhat indiscriminate, right? In other words,

00:02:51.360 we can think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great leader. He influences millions. He

00:02:56.680 leads the country through the Great Depression and through the Second World War. But you know what?

00:03:02.580 Pol Pot, the dictator of Cambodia, was a great leader. He was quite capable of reorganizing and

00:03:09.940 firing a society. And he ended up killing about a third of the people in the killing fields of 0.98

00:03:15.240 Cambodia. So those big doors of leadership can swing for good or for ill. And I would say that,

00:03:23.660 Brett, the hinge of that door, the hinge upon which that big door of leadership swings is called

00:03:30.640 character. It's the human heart. And what's in that heart and what kind of character a leader has

00:03:37.820 is what will determine whether that big door of leadership swings for good purpose or for terrible

00:03:44.740 evil in some cases. So bottom line, leadership is the door, but big doors often swing on small hinges.

00:03:53.160 And I wanted to write a book about character because I think we're kind of overweight in leadership

00:03:59.660 books. Everybody's got a leadership book out there, but not too many people are writing or thinking

00:04:06.180 coherently about character. So that was kind of the purpose going in. And of course, I framed it up

00:04:13.020 using what I know, the oceans, the lives of great admirals to try and illustrate some of the challenges

00:04:19.260 that these 10 admirals experienced over 2,500 years of recorded history.

00:04:26.220 And that's one thing about character. It's hard. With leadership books, you can kind of

00:04:29.960 do the bullet point tactics of what it means to be a good leader, like listen carefully, praise people.

00:04:35.360 But like character, that's hard to do, like distill down into bullet points.

00:04:39.580 It is. And the reason is that character comes to us through a different channel, if you will, than

00:04:48.420 leadership skills. Character comes to us initially, I would argue, from our parents, our family, when

00:04:55.760 we're small. There's a great deal of what's built into your psychology that becomes your character.

00:05:02.860 And then your education, secondly, I think builds character and reading and inculcating new ideas

00:05:12.200 through the educational process, which for most of us goes on for close to two decades, if you stop and

00:05:18.880 think about it. And then thirdly, your life experience. At the end of the day, we all collide with the real

00:05:25.880 world. And how those events unfold for us deeply, deeply sharpens our character, particularly, I think,

00:05:34.600 in our 20s. And character then, I think, kind of sets in place in your 30s and 40s. You can still

00:05:42.260 change elements of your character throughout your life, but it gets harder and harder. So at the end of

00:05:48.600 the day, I wanted to create a book that could help be a bit of a roadmap, or to use a nautical metaphor, a set of

00:05:59.700 buoys for how character is created and how you can examine and evaluate your own character.

00:06:08.060 And I also think stories are very powerful in conveying character. Yeah, you can't do it a bullet

00:06:16.800 point, but if you just tell the story of an individual, it can be inspiring, right, in a subtle way.

00:06:22.420 That's absolutely right. And at one point, I was going to title the book Sea Stories, like stories from

00:06:30.900 the sea. But at the end of the day, I like that image of sailing true north. I think there's something

00:06:37.860 powerful and compelling in it. And by the way, of the 10 admirals in the book, not all of them sailed

00:06:44.360 true north every day of their lives, some of them quite far from it. And I think, to your point, we learn

00:06:52.220 both from inspiring stories of good people showing us positive attributes of character, we can also learn

00:06:59.560 from people who are fundamentally dark. There are dark currents in the human heart. And by learning 0.87

00:07:08.020 and recognizing those, I think they become counterexamples for us. And there are some of

00:07:13.880 these admirals who definitely fit that side of the equation as well.

00:07:18.600 And we'll talk about one of them, a pirate. We're going to get to that guy. But let's talk about this

00:07:24.680 first admiral you highlight. And it's Themistocles, the famous Greek admiral. Tell us about his world

00:07:31.380 that he lived in and what challenges as a leader that he faced.

00:07:35.300 Well, first of all, as you know, Brett, I'm Greek American, Stavridis. So I'm contractually required

00:07:41.040 to have a Greek in every story I tell, every book I write. So it was always a given. We were going to go 0.99

00:07:47.820 back to the ancient Greeks and find somebody who faced big challenges of character. And that was

00:07:53.980 certainly the case for Themistocles. He lived about 2,500 years ago. And he was the leading political

00:08:02.360 actor and also the leading military admiral, if you will, the leader of the Athenian naval forces

00:08:10.920 in the wars between Greece and the Persian Empire. And Themistocles faced an existential challenge.

00:08:20.240 The Persian Empire was vast. It encompassed at that time about half of the world's population. It

00:08:27.700 stretched from present-day India to the Mediterranean Sea and the western coast of Turkey. Think about that

00:08:34.460 for a moment. And as far south as the Arabian Peninsula, as far north as the Black Sea. It was an 0.92

00:08:40.580 enormous, powerful, militarily capable empire. And they decided they wanted to conquer Greece. And they

00:08:48.200 edged up to Athens. Athens was the final city, the final major city. And the Persian Empire Xerxes sent

00:08:57.160 a massive fleet of these triremes, these great road warships, rode by, in the case of the Persian slaves. 0.71

00:09:06.000 And Themistocles, knowing he faced this existential threat, gathered up all his oarsmen and his ship

00:09:14.520 captains and the marines who would cross over and fight on the decks of the other ships the night before

00:09:20.380 the battle. And he said to them, look, we're outnumbered, perhaps 10 to 1, yet we have one great advantage.

00:09:29.500 All of you, everyone in this fleet, from the youngest oarsmen to the most senior

00:09:36.520 captains, were all free men. Yet in these Persian ships, all of the oarsmen, the vast majority of the 0.57

00:09:45.020 propulsion of these warships, were slaves. And Themistocles said to his oarsmen and his captains and

00:09:54.440 his warriors, tomorrow, there will be a great battle at sea. And tomorrow, you must row for

00:10:03.140 your families, for your wives, for your children, for your parents. Tomorrow, you must row for your

00:10:11.600 city. And tomorrow, you must row for freedom, for freedom itself. And with that charisma and that

00:10:22.220 inner strength of character, he conveyed and inspired. And on the morrow, the Greek fleet destroyed

00:10:31.080 the Persian fleet in an extraordinary battle. Still studied today at Annapolis at the Naval Academy,

00:10:37.260 by the way. So I think he's a good first example of the power of inner character, particularly to

00:10:45.960 inspire others. Again, that small hinge of character swinging the big door of leadership.

00:10:50.160 But I'll close with something on the darker side, which is that he was also extremely arrogant,

00:10:57.600 prideful. And after this enormous victory, he went back to Athens and attempted to completely

00:11:05.120 overtake the politics of this free city, and eventually was banished and ended his life in the

00:11:12.760 court of the Persian emperor. It's a Greek tragedy, and it's a story of hubris, and how sometimes our

00:11:19.820 greatest strength can be our greatest weakness as well. That's Themistocles from Sailing True North. 0.99

00:11:25.800 And as you've studied Themistocles, what have you taken away that you've noticed that you've

00:11:31.600 taken something from Themistocles and applied it to your own role as a leader in the Navy?

00:11:37.040 You know, I began to hear about Themistocles when I was a boy from my father, and it was always a 1.00

00:11:44.300 cautionary tale. And the caution is, no matter how successful you are, and even at the very peak of

00:11:51.940 success in your life, avoid arrogance. Avoid that tendency to overreach. Exercise humility. That's the

00:12:02.560 real lesson of Themistocles. And tragically for Themistocles, it is a negative lesson for us as we see him.

00:12:11.060 That's what I take away from that. And in every job I've had when I was a ship captain, or the

00:12:16.980 commodore of a group of destroyers, or commander of an aircraft carrier strike group in combat, or

00:12:23.140 supreme ally commander in NATO, I've always had that little voice in the back of my head saying,

00:12:29.320 hey, you're not the center of the universe here. You have a role to play, but you are only part of

00:12:37.080 something that is vastly greater than yourself. That's a good little voice to have in the back

00:12:42.440 of your head.

00:12:44.380 So the next admiral you highlight is Zheng He. I think I pronounced that right. Chinese admiral.

00:12:49.520 Tell us about him.

00:12:50.920 He lived about 100 years before Christopher Columbus, so in the early 1400s. So while the Europeans are 1.00

00:13:00.320 putting together the expeditions that discover America, if you will, they were sailing in quite

00:13:08.280 small ships, about 150 feet long, maybe 60 people. A hundred years earlier, Zheng He is in command of

00:13:17.800 a Chinese fleet where the ships are 500 to 600 feet long and carry three or 400 mariners.

00:13:27.500 China at this time is a regional power that had the capability to become a global power, but

00:13:35.880 chose not to. Zheng He led these treasure expeditions and economic expeditions that sailed from the

00:13:45.560 South China Sea through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean, to the Arabian Peninsula, to the

00:13:51.400 coast of Africa. Enormous, enormous sea voyages. He was at the right hand of the Yangl emperor of the 1.00

00:13:59.340 time. But here's what you want to know about Zheng He. Resilience. When he was 10 years old, he was

00:14:07.820 captured in a raid, was a small boy, was enslaved, and then castrated. And as a eunuch, rose from those

00:14:18.960 horrific circumstances to the pinnacle of military power in the Chinese empire. It's an extraordinary 0.99

00:14:25.860 story of resilience. And the character lesson is that no matter how far down you are, you can still

00:14:34.800 come back if you exercise discipline and calmness of spirit and a willingness to face the challenges and

00:14:46.680 overcome them. And that's the story of Zheng He. He's a figure of great resilience.

00:14:52.420 Well, the character, yeah, after you got him, was resilience. But then you also, when you're

00:14:55.740 talking about Zheng He, you talked about how you admired his organizational ability as a leader.

00:15:00.840 Yeah, remarkable. And again, think about the ability here, because he was not just a commander

00:15:07.220 of these fleets. He was the constructor. He was the naval architect. He designed them. He was given the

00:15:16.900 power to conscript as many people as necessary. He built shipyards to build these enormous wooden

00:15:24.620 structures. He effectively invented the idea of these large sailing ships with massive crews. So that

00:15:33.580 organizational ability, I think, is also much at the heart of Zheng He.

00:15:39.200 And what did you take away from him? Like, how did you apply the lessons from him in your own

00:15:43.040 leadership career?

00:15:44.780 Yeah, two things, and we've touched on both of them. One is any task, no matter how big it is,

00:15:51.320 you can reduce it to small components and methodically execute it. That's organization.

00:15:58.400 And I always say it's like graduate school or any school, really. Doing well in school is not about

00:16:05.740 being smart. It's about being organized and breaking down learning into small chunks that

00:16:12.180 you can inculcate. So organizational skill. And the other thing I think of, again, is this idea of

00:16:19.480 resilience. Hard to imagine a harder starting line in a race than being enslaved at age 10 and castrated

00:16:27.640 when you put that in perspective, your day doesn't look so bad, does it? And I think that has been a

00:16:35.000 helpful takeaway for me.

00:16:37.160 Another interesting tidbit that I got from the book is he was a practicing Muslim, which was

00:16:40.740 interesting. You know, he's in the mean court. He's probably a religious minority, but he's still 0.98

00:16:45.220 able to do well in that environment.

00:16:48.160 Absolutely. And I think this goes to another attribute, which you will, is flexibility. It's

00:16:54.600 not being utterly dogmatic about things. Several of the admirals, perhaps we'll talk about later,

00:17:01.480 were very certain of themselves at all times. I think Zheng He comes through the ages. And of

00:17:08.720 course, this is 500 years ago. It's difficult to have precise descriptions of individuals like we can

00:17:14.380 today. But Zheng He comes across in the historical record as someone who will mold himself to the

00:17:21.920 circumstances. And I think probably being a Muslim in a Confucian court would lead to that. 1.00

00:17:29.560 The next leader you include on your list is a pirate, which is not something you'd expect in

00:17:33.560 a book about leadership lessons from admirals. That's Sir Francis Drake. So what can we learn

00:17:38.620 from Sir Francis Drake about leadership and character?

00:17:41.800 Yes, this is a classic, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good of Sir Francis Drake is he's

00:17:49.640 utterly decisive. He's a gifted mariner. He is someone who can inspire his subordinates.

00:17:57.740 And he, as a result, he circumnavigates the earth for the first time. He's the first commander who

00:18:04.880 makes the entire circumnavigation of the world and survives. Magellan's famous voyage did circumnavigate

00:18:13.300 the globe, but Magellan died before the voyage was complete. Drake is the first one to lead an

00:18:18.940 expedition and survive going all the way around the world. Secondly, he leads the British forces

00:18:25.100 that defeat the Spanish Armada. And like Themistocles, he's an existential threat to England, 0.99

00:18:32.080 and he succeeds. So he has great gifts of decisiveness and command. That's the good. The bad is he is the

00:18:42.580 dark currents we talked about truly flow through his heart. He is rapacious. He is driven by a desire

00:18:50.720 to amass great wealth. His burning ambition allows him to overcome what many others would face as moral

00:19:00.320 and ethical boundaries. So the good, the bad, and the ugly is his techniques include enslavement,

00:19:07.100 rape, rape, murder, summary executions of his crew. He is a dark, dark figure, very much a pirate. And on a 0.98

00:19:16.980 slightly lighter note, for any of the listeners who have been to the ride at Disney World, the Pirates of

00:19:22.720 the Caribbean, it's based on the exploits, if you will, of Sir Francis Drake in the Caribbean. A very

00:19:30.300 dark figure, but a very compelling one as well. That's a great example of being a good leader,

00:19:36.100 but not having the character to go along with it. Exactly. We're going to take a quick break for

00:19:40.820 your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So any list of great admirals wouldn't be

00:19:46.540 complete without Horatio Nelson. For those who aren't familiar with him, tell us a bit about his career and

00:19:51.400 his lasting influence on the British Navy and culture. Yeah, I think he's arguably the greatest

00:19:56.860 admiral in history. In a certain sense, like a couple of the other admirals we've discussed,

00:20:02.480 England at this time is facing an existential threat from Napoleon Bonaparte, who, if he could

00:20:08.820 have built the ships and overcome the British Navy, could, I believe, successfully have invaded

00:20:16.420 the British Isles. So Nelson is commander of the British fleet at this time. He is on patrol off the

00:20:25.180 coast of Spain at a place called Trafalgar near Cape Trafalgar. And he fights a battle with the

00:20:32.700 combined fleets of France and Spain and utterly destroys them. It's the greatest single-sided 0.98

00:20:39.980 victory at sea I can imagine. And with everything riding on it, the only one that matches up with it,

00:20:48.080 I suppose, is Themistocles back at the Battle of Solomus, who saves his city, state, Athens.

00:20:54.420 But here's the difference. Horatio Nelson dies in the battle. And there's nothing better for your

00:21:01.560 reputation than dying right at the absolute peak of an enormous victory. And your last words are,

00:21:09.840 God and country, protect my wife. He is really, in every sense, becomes the iconic admiral and is

00:21:20.480 still heroically regarded in Great Britain. In fact, many folks have been to London and gone to

00:21:26.380 Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London. And on it is a plinth. And at the top of it is an

00:21:32.500 enormous statue of Horatio Nelson. In that sense, it's like, if you think of it in terms of Washington,

00:21:39.860 D.C., it's like the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial kind of put together. And he is

00:21:48.520 so highly regarded. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. His moral compass didn't always sail

00:21:57.380 true north in the sense of he had a long-term adulterous affair with a very beautiful young

00:22:04.620 actress, Emma Hamilton, conceived a daughter, a child born out of wedlock, named her after himself,

00:22:12.980 by the way, Horatio. And he was scandalous in that regard. It's hard to overstate how society at that

00:22:22.580 time looked at an arrangement like that, which was frankly quite public. And thus people were quite

00:22:28.820 scandalized by it. And then secondly, we would say today he was kind of a publicity hound. He just

00:22:36.280 loved to get his voice out there, get his engaged publicly. He needed public acclimation. So a few

00:22:47.960 failings on the moral side, but overall, in terms of his impact on the naval profession,

00:22:54.740 got to score him really at the top. And last thought, his great gift and what I take away from

00:23:01.160 Lord Nelson was his ability to build teams. All of his ship captains worshipped him. He just inspired

00:23:09.480 people with his kind of simplicity of command and his kindness to his sailors. In an age in which the

00:23:17.240 lash was commonly used, he refused to do so. He took incredible care of his sailors, making sure they

00:23:24.560 had the best food, the best doctors. He was a beloved as a leader. And he inspired this idea of

00:23:32.620 the band of brothers. His ship captains operated together better than any other military unit in

00:23:40.300 modern military history. And thus he won this epic battle of Trafalgar.

00:23:46.720 And how have you developed your team building capacity as a leader during your career? I mean,

00:23:51.440 any lessons you took away personally from him on team building?

00:23:55.100 Indeed. You mentioned one of them, which is obsessive concern about living conditions,

00:24:02.960 logistical support, taking care of people in very visible ways. Nelson walked the decks of his ships

00:24:12.280 constantly, went into every corner of their ships, made sure that things were right for the sailors.

00:24:18.640 People will reward you when you do that. And then secondly, that near peer network, the people who

00:24:27.100 are at your level or just below are often the most honest observers who will give you the best advice.

00:24:35.540 Nelson did both of those things brilliantly. He took care of people below him. He reached out

00:24:41.660 to the left and the right to the peers around him, built these bands of brothers.

00:24:46.020 I took both those lessons, particularly, for example, when I was a young ship captain for the

00:24:51.400 first time on USS Barry, an Arleigh Burke destroyer. I would walk that ship hour after hour, day after

00:24:58.200 day. I loved that crew and they saw that. And secondly, talking to the other captains on the waterfront,

00:25:07.080 learning from each other, that band of brothers mentality served me well throughout all the days of my

00:25:14.240 career. Another character strength of Horatio Nelson that I took away from your section on him was his

00:25:19.440 resilience as well. He lost an arm, lost a leg. He had seasickness, even though his career was being

00:25:26.000 an admiral. He was. He was also a very small guy, which is one of the reasons I like him. I'm like a

00:25:33.580 towering five-five. Lord Nelson was five-four, a small even for those days. And he weighed, I don't

00:25:42.520 know, 125 pounds. I've seen his uniform hanging in the British Royal Museum. It looks like a boy's 0.99

00:25:49.140 uniform. He's a small, slight man, yet he was fearless in battle, would often lead boarding parties

00:25:56.840 when he was a junior officer. And as you say, he lost his right arm, which he was right-handed and

00:26:02.680 had to reteach himself to fight and to write with his left hand. Some very valuable archives, by the

00:26:09.240 way, are letters that he wrote as a left-hander as he was learning to write again. And then he lost an

00:26:16.120 eye in a subsequent battle. And he was the quintessential small but very tough kind of

00:26:24.100 individual that you just have to admire. And yes, the resilience was a big part of that.

00:26:29.080 Last point, back to the blind and one eye thing. He was also a kind of difficult subordinate. He was

00:26:35.800 great to his peers, great to the people who worked for him. He didn't always do exactly what his bosses

00:26:41.160 wanted him to do. And if he saw a signal at sea, and of course, ships are maneuvered at sea in these

00:26:47.900 days by flapping signal flags in the breeze. If he didn't like the signal from his senior's

00:26:55.860 flagship, he would often put the telescope to his blind eye and claim he didn't see a signal and then

00:27:03.700 do whatever the hell he wanted to. Fortunately for him, it virtually always came out better than what

00:27:10.780 his boss had wanted him to do. But Brett, that's where the expression to turn a blind eye to something

00:27:17.200 comes from, from Lord Nelson and his telescope to his blind eye.

00:27:21.540 That's a good bit of trivia you can drop at a party.

00:27:24.200 Yeah. Next time you're on Jeopardy.

00:27:26.340 Right. So the next admiral you talk about, we're finally getting into U.S. admirals,

00:27:31.400 American admirals. And the first one you included was an academic. He's an academic admiral named

00:27:35.900 Alfred Thayer Mahan. Tell us about him, his influence on the U.S. Navy.

00:27:40.620 Sure. You cannot overstate the strategic influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan. He was not a good

00:27:47.080 sailor. He was mediocre at best in command of ships. In fact, one of his fitness reports

00:27:54.640 actually had a line in it that said, Captain Mahan needs to develop his ship handling skills,

00:28:02.640 and it is not the business of naval officers to write books. Because, of course, that's what he

00:28:08.720 really was skilled at. He was a writer, a strategic analyst who built a plan for an emerging global U.S.

00:28:16.700 Navy. He's living at the end of the 19th century in the late 1800s. And he absolutely crafts the ideas

00:28:25.860 that went into Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet. He's the one who comes up with the idea of

00:28:31.420 building global naval bases all around the world. He sketches out the future of America as a world

00:28:38.900 sea power and writes a whole series of books about this, which are still used today and, by the way,

00:28:44.820 are studied by other nations. China today in the 21st century is building that kind of global naval

00:28:52.580 capability that Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote about well over 100 years ago. So, intellectual, brilliant,

00:29:01.040 but kind of a mediocre operator and personally a very cold person, not someone who had a lot of

00:29:08.560 empathy for others. He was scholarly. Dostoevsky said somewhere that an intellectual is a man with

00:29:17.200 spectacles on his nose and winter in his heart. That was kind of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a brilliant mind,

00:29:25.180 but not high emotional intelligence to go with it.

00:29:29.960 So, what lessons have you applied in your own career as an admiral from him?

00:29:34.180 Well, first of all, certainly all the strategic thinking, but in the context of our conversation

00:29:40.680 today about character and leadership, I took two things away from him. One, his relentless,

00:29:49.020 relentless pursuit of the truth, of find the facts wherever they lead you as you write the strategy.

00:29:57.000 He was a researcher who wanted all the facts. That's pretty powerful. And then secondly,

00:30:05.500 life balance. If you want to have a fulfilling life, at least for me, and I think for most people,

00:30:12.740 you have to let other people into your heart. You have to spend time with others. You have to have

00:30:18.080 real empathy for others. That was his flaw. And I've often thought in my own context that to

00:30:27.000 how important it is to find that time to connect with family and friends, not always easy in these

00:30:33.360 lives and careers we lead, but a powerful counter lesson that I take away from Alfred Thayer Mahan.

00:30:39.680 Yeah. So, a leader needs to think about those high-level things like strategy, but also

00:30:44.640 get out from the ivory tower and be able to interact.

00:30:48.320 Exactly. Very well said. Very well said.

00:30:51.500 So, you talk about Chester Nimitz, and I think people might be familiar with the name because

00:30:55.100 we have a, there's a carrier named after him. Who was Chester Nimitz and why is he known as the

00:31:00.820 Admiral's Admiral?

00:31:02.220 Yeah. He's certainly the greatest of the American admirals. I would say he's the Nelson,

00:31:08.580 the Lord Nelson of the United States of America. And he's born in the early part of the 20th century.

00:31:14.780 He's born a million miles from the ocean in a small town in central Texas called Fredericksburg,

00:31:21.000 Texas, not too far from Austin in the hill country of Texas. He's in a German-speaking family

00:31:27.780 when he's born before World War I, and then wants to go to West Point. He's a land kind of guy. He's

00:31:35.400 probably never seen the ocean until he fails to get into West Point, and then is selected to go to

00:31:42.100 Annapolis to the U.S. Naval Academy, and adapts himself. And his gifts, as he rises through the

00:31:50.640 ranks, and his progress is steady but not spectacular, his gift is his empathy, his quiet

00:32:00.260 confidence, his calm demeanor. He reminds me a lot of Zheng He, as we understand the Chinese

00:32:07.840 admiral over the centuries. I think the two of them, Nimitz and Zheng He would have been quite

00:32:12.780 similar. They were also both large men, had physical stature going for them. They both were

00:32:19.120 very skilled organizers. They both were quietly confident. Chester Nimitz never had to go through

00:32:27.420 what Zheng He did in his youth, obviously. But Nimitz had this gift of inspiring confidence in others

00:32:35.860 without being the smartest person in the room, without raising his voice, without being flamboyant.

00:32:41.920 And it's interesting to contrast him, for example, with his army counterpart at the time, General

00:32:46.920 Douglas MacArthur, who was that flamboyant, loud, charismatic, got to be the bride at every wedding

00:32:56.480 and the corpse at every funeral kind of personality. Nimitz was the opposite of that. And I'll close on

00:33:03.300 Nimitz by saying, picture this in terms of resilience. This is his Zheng He moment. He finally gets

00:33:11.960 command of the Pacific fleet. That's the good news. The bad news is he gets it two weeks after Pearl

00:33:18.300 Harbor. The fleet is destroyed. All the battleships are sunk. Cordite is in the air in Pearl Harbor. Bodies 0.97

00:33:26.360 are being pulled out of these ships. The carriers are out at sea dodging the Japanese. All that's left 0.98

00:33:33.140 in that port are a few diesel submarines, small, stinky, oily little boats. So instead of taking

00:33:42.220 command on a beautiful day, standing on a gorgeous battleship in his service dress whites, Chester

00:33:49.540 Nimitz takes command of what's left of the Pacific fleet, standing on the deck of a tiny diesel

00:33:55.540 submarine. And what does he do? He squares his shoulders. He keeps almost everybody from the previous

00:34:03.700 staff because he knows what happened at Pearl Harbor could have happened to anybody. He builds teams. He does

00:34:11.080 that Nelsonian thing of building and working with his peers. Only Nimitz could have subdued the flamboyant

00:34:19.480 personality of Douglas MacArthur. Only Nimitz could have melded a team that includes Admiral Bull Halsey,

00:34:26.560 the most flamboyant of American admirals and the biggest publicity hound we've ever produced. Only

00:34:33.500 Nimitz had that kind of self-effacing, take the big task, beat the Japanese empire, but break it down 0.99

00:34:40.440 into small bites. Let's rebuild the fleet. Let's overhaul the ships. Let's fix everything we can.

00:34:46.220 Let's figure out where the Japanese are going. Let's build a strategy. Let's work with MacArthur. 0.91

00:34:51.880 Let's get all my admirals together. Slowly, methodically, three and a half years later,

00:34:57.000 we signed the declaration of surrender of the Japanese empire in Tokyo Bay. That is a trajectory of

00:35:05.160 real character above all. No, that's the thing that stood out to me when I read about him is his

00:35:11.160 discretion. He saw the big picture and he'd oftentimes do things that in the short term might

00:35:17.600 have looked weak for a leader to do, but he understood he was playing the long game and he

00:35:22.260 knew that if he did that, it would help the overall goal that he was going for. That's absolutely right.

00:35:28.540 Let me give you an example from my own career. When I was a four-star admiral for the first time,

00:35:34.300 and my job was to be commander of U.S. Southern Command, everything south of the United States,

00:35:40.620 all the military activity in Latin America, Caribbean, Central America, and so forth. My

00:35:47.460 instinct was to rush into very high-level military kind of exercises. What I decided instead was to

00:36:00.820 play that long game, which is don't use the heavy hitter, big carriers, cruisers. The long game is

00:36:10.060 soft power in a place like Latin America and the Caribbean. It's medical diplomacy. It's quiet

00:36:17.700 counter-narcotics and intelligence work. It's counter-insurgency in Columbia. It's building

00:36:24.000 schools, wells, and clinics. It is literacy training. Playing that long game was very,

00:36:32.480 very powerful for me in that job. This is before I became the NATO commander. That was a very different

00:36:39.120 job. But in that job, I really drew on the lessons of Chester Nimitz.

00:36:43.320 Did you find any weaknesses in his leadership or his character?

00:36:46.420 I really can't. With Nimitz, I think he's as close to perfect as you can come,

00:36:52.480 at least the way I look at people. I suppose you could say, well, he didn't have that kind of

00:36:58.640 crackling charisma. He wasn't one to leap up and give the flashy, perfect press conference.

00:37:07.460 And I'm not sure that's as important in a leader for me as those inner quiet qualities of character

00:37:17.100 are. So again, big door of leadership swings on that small hinge. I'd take that hinge of Nimitz over

00:37:25.180 anybody else in this book. So throughout all these admirals you highlight, they all have different

00:37:29.540 traits that they've exemplified and character traits and leadership abilities. Did you find a common

00:37:35.840 thread between all of them, like attributes that they all possess and had in common?

00:37:41.300 I don't think there is a single trait that all of them possessed. But I'm going to add 10 seconds

00:37:49.660 about one other admiral. I know this is the art of manliness, but there is a woman admiral in the 1.00

00:37:54.880 book, and that is Admiral Grace Hopper. She's the last admiral in the book in terms of chronology. 0.97

00:38:01.520 And she's a computer scientist, a mathematician. She's completely different than all the other

00:38:07.480 admirals. But she has a quality character trait that I think is vitally important, and that's

00:38:14.780 intellectual curiosity. As a seven-year-old, she starts disassembling alarm clocks, trying to figure

00:38:20.520 out how they work. Her whole life is one of finding out and learning. She's also wonderful to be around.

00:38:28.480 I've met her several times. Just a dynamic, funny woman. She writes the computer program COBOL,

00:38:36.380 essentially inventing the idea of programming computers at the end of the Second World War,

00:38:41.560 and serves on active duty as an admiral longer than any other admiral in American history other than

00:38:47.660 Hyman Rickover. And so Grace Hopper has intellectual curiosity. And so I suppose if there were one quality

00:38:55.060 that every one of these admirals had, it would be that, that they were curious about the world and

00:39:02.160 willing to try new things. Intellectual curiosity often related to creativity, not always, but I think

00:39:10.080 that's sort of the package that flows through all of them is that blend of curiosity and creativity.

00:39:19.360 Almost all the admirals have moments of extreme doubt and fear and failure. So I think all of them

00:39:29.040 demonstrate resilience in fairly significant ways, some more than others. But if you look at other

00:39:36.420 qualities of character, you know, things like humility, balance, honesty, a sense of justice, empathy,

00:39:43.820 yeah, some of them had those qualities and others did not. And that's why if I'd wanted to write a

00:39:50.460 book about character and I was going to pick one admiral, I'd probably write about Nimitz, as you can

00:39:56.080 guess. But in order to illustrate kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly, as we talked about with the

00:40:01.860 pirate Drake, you really do have to pick, I'd say, at least 10 admirals. There are a couple of great

00:40:08.080 admirals that didn't quite make the cut. But bottom line, the closest there is to a universal pair of

00:40:15.680 qualities, I suppose, are creativity and resilience. Well, it's been a great conversation. Where can

00:40:21.420 people go to learn more about the book and your work? First and foremost, I'd say go to my website,

00:40:27.220 which is really easy to remember. It's just Admiral Stav, the first four letters of my last name,

00:40:34.440 admiralstav.com. And then secondly, when you do check out the book, in the back is a kind of mini

00:40:43.880 bibliography. It's not an academic one, but for each of the admirals, it lists two or three books

00:40:50.200 with a couple of sentences about each of them that'll propel you on this voyage of character

00:40:55.860 as you hopefully continue to sail true north. Well, Admiral James Stavridis, thank you so much

00:41:01.680 for your time. It's been a pleasure. It's my pleasure, Brett. We'll do it again when my next

00:41:05.900 book comes out, which is going to be a novel, which will be out in about a year. So stay tuned.

00:41:11.700 I'm looking forward to that. My guest today is Admiral Stavridis. His latest book is called

00:41:15.980 Sailing True North. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more

00:41:19.800 information about his work at his website, admiralstav. That's admiralstav.com. Also check out

00:41:24.400 our show notes at aom.is slash true north. You can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:41:31.680 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com

00:41:40.640 where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles about different topics.

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The Art of Manliness - December 23, 2019

#571： The Voyage of Character

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