Massive Income

In Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny, the abrasive captain of a minesweeper is relieved of command by his executive officer during a typhoon. Like Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain Queeg (played in the film version of the story by Humphrey Bogart) is a petty tyrant who ignores his crew’s advice, ridicules officers and sailors publicly, and explodes in anger over trivial matters. Captain Queeg takes over a sloppy ship and is determined to turn it into one of the Navy’s finest. To do that, he will need help from his officers, but in his first meeting with them (see Figure 6-6), he lets them know that he goes strictly by the rules and won’t tolerate debate. “I am book man”, Queeg says. “Deviate from the book and you’d better have half a dozen good reasons, and you’ll still get an argument from me, and I don’t lose arguments on board my ship. That’s one of the nice things about being captain”. Merrick, the executive officer, tries to tell the captain that the crew of the Caine is not used to doing things by the book. Implicit in his warning is that change will have to be managed carefully, but Queeg won’t hear it: “You can tell the crew there are four ways to do things on my ship—the right way, the wrong way, the navy way, and my way. If they do things my way, we’ll get along”.

Figure 6-6: The Caine Mutiny. Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg letting his officers know that he doesn’t lose arguments on his ship. Photo courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS.

Queeg knows the book, but he doesn’t know how to lead men. He is mercurial, becomes angry when challenged, and is easily distracted by trivial matters. During an exercise in which his ship is pulling a target, he orders the ship to turn and then sees a sailor with his shirttail hanging out. He had seen this infraction of the rules earlier and admonished the officers and crew never to let it happen again. When it does, he becomes obsessed with disciplining those responsible and loses sight of the ship’s movements. The helmsman tries to warn him that they are sailing in a circle and risk cutting their own towline, but the captain angrily tells him to shut up. When they do cut the towline, the captain blames it on faulty equipment and refuses to accept the responsibility for the incident. Queeg is a perfectionist who won’t tolerate any questioning of his authority. He won’t tolerate criticism and won’t admit mistakes, and his crew quickly learns that to avoid his wrath they have to keep silent. It’s an intolerable situation, and when Queeg freezes during a typhoon and the ship is in danger of foundering, the executive officer forcibly relieves the captain of his command.

The Caine Mutiny is fiction, but the events on board the USS Florida were not. The Florida is a Trident submarine, one of the most lethal weapons ever built. Nearly two football fields long, with a crew of 154, the Florida carried twenty-four long-range missiles with 192 nuclear warheads. It was one of America’s most potent nuclear deterrents. In September 1996, the Florida got a new captain, Michael Alfonso. It was his first command, and like Captain Queeg he quickly established who was in charge. He told the crew he was going to push them hard, and he did, but they were not prepared for his loud, abrasive style. Captain Alfonso was a screamer, and that is highly unusual in the confines of a nuclear submarine whose mission is to run submerged and silent for months at a time. Like Queeg, Alfonso berated officers and enlisted men publicly, often for minor infractions. The ship’s morale plummeted, and the crew began comparing themselves to the unfortunate crew of the Caine. In midsummer of 1997, the Navy investigated the reports of problems aboard the Florida, and Rear Admiral Paul Sullivan, perhaps worried about low morale on board a nuclear missile submarine, took the unprecedented step of relieving the captain of his command. The admiral had lost confidence in Alfonso’s ability to lead the officers and men on board the Florida.^[25] Table 6-1 shows more of the parallels between these two captains and their ships.

By this example, we don’t mean to imply that leaders who are abrasive, petty, and mercurial will always suffer the consequences of their negative interpersonal BD. Competent jerks sometimes succeed because the benefits they bring to an organization outweigh the damage done by their behavior or because the organization is afraid to remove them for some other reason. Richard Tedlow reminds us, too, that the giants of American industry were not always the nicest of people: “I’m not going to make the case in this article that the legendary titans of American business offer a template of leadership lessons for all of us to follow. Many were individuals we wouldn’t want to emulate, at least in every particular. They could be scheming and, more than occasionally, ruthless. Indeed, in many instances they were as titanic in the problems they created—especially the interpersonal problems—as in the empires they built”.^[26] What do we conclude from this? It is possible to behave badly and still succeed, but if you decide to go that route, you’d better have Andrew Carnegie’s resources, or Bill Gates’ timing, or John D. Rockefeller’s connections, because the odds are against you. More and more, employees as well as customers won’t tolerate it.