LEADERSHIP FRAUGHT WITH COMPROMISE
By Maj. Gen. Jerry R. Curry
(Ret'd)
CurryforAmerica.com
Recently Admiral Mike Mullin,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited our
soldiers fighting in
What he should have said was, “Yes, I’ve told the President and the Secretary of Defense that you’ll get your checks on time if I have to rent out half the Pentagon for office space, sell an aircraft carrier, or put a freeze on every dime of procurement money spent! And if that doesn’t work all the Chiefs of the Services, along with me, will have our resignations on the Secretary’s desk before sun down.”
That’s not compromise, that’s leadership.
Many years ago I was the Chief
of Staff of V U.S. Corps stationed in
A group of educators traveled
from the
“General,” he began waving me to a seat in his cramped office. “It is good of you to stop by. To what do I owe this honor?”
“The honor is mine,” I said. “I came to congratulate you and your school for winning such a prestigious academic award. Be certain we will arrange for an appropriate ceremony to publicly acknowledge it.”
We talked of many things and, finally, I leaned forward and asked a question I had wanted to ask for a long time. “Tell me, what makes for an excellent school like yours?”
He leaned back in his chair and said more to the open window than to me, “You’ll not find a good school with a bad principal, nor a bad school with a good principal.”
Of course, he was right. It is
leadership that makes the difference, and his
comment applies to most organizations and
institutions. Leadership is everything, from the
White House to Congress to the state houses to the
news media and to the battlefields of the
The U.S. Congress could use a good dose of leadership right now. Recently the Senate left town for a six week recess without passing a short term bill to keep the FAA funded and running. One party, as they headed for vacation, blamed the other party for this debacle saying they refused to compromise on cutting funding for rural airports.
Whatever, this leadership
failure resulted in 4,000 FAA employees being
immediately furloughed and over 70,000 construction
workers losing their jobs, when many badly needed
construction projects were stopped and put on hold.
If there was a real leader in the Senate, he or she
would have stood to their feet and declared that,
“Congress will remain in session until this bill is
passed!” If the Senate balked at that, the President
of the
At the same time that this pathetic abdication of Senate leadership was taking place, real leadership was being demonstrated by a handful of FAA employees who declared that for safety reasons they would continue to come to work and perform safety inspections, without pay, until the problem was sorted out and the necessary legislation passed.
Those responsible for providing leadership from the White House to Capitol Hill, to the Department of Transportation and the FAA clearly abdicated their positions of leadership. Those in the FAA, not in leadership voluntarily assumed the mantle of leadership and responsibility and kept things going until their bosses came to their senses.
The junior high school
principal back in