I’ve just finished a truly wonderful book, A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection, by a remarkable man James B (that’s for Bond) Stockdale. To be more precise, it’s a collection of his speeches and essays. James Stockdale was a POW in Vietnam, where he spent eight years in a political prison, four of them in solitary confinement.
It was interesting to read Admiral Stockdale’s take on optimists. To him, they were a menace, a liability. Optimists would come unglued under pressure, when there was no hope in sight, and for them things would go downhill from there.
“The existence of evil in the world has produced one of the oldest problems that humankind has pondered; man has had a most difficult time accommodating it. There is no moral economy in this universe in which virtue is rewarded and evil punished. To become unglued when you first discover this hardest lesson of life, and particularly when you are under pressure, is to flirt with danger. Life’s silver lining is a creation of the optimist, and under pressure, the optimist is a hazard to navigation. […]
“The test of our future leaders’ merit may well not lie in hanging in there when the light at the end of the tunnel is expected but rather in their persistence and continued performance of duty when there is no possibility that the light will ever show up.”
Working and living at a small company, I came to the same conclusion—optimists are a menace. Optimists are good at dispensing unreasonable expectations (we call it “a sunshine pump”) and swiping crap under the carpet when the outlook isn’t rosy. I used to hear plenty of happy talk that business was doing good, the sales funnel looked healthy, investors were lining up, etc, while I knew the business was bleeding red. And when the true picture is revealed sooner or later, the credibility and trust of the optimist are ruined, and the company morale gets sacked. You should see this: an optimist in panic is a bear in a china shop.
Face the music
When running your own business, I believe it is absolutely essential to have the guts to face reality, especially when it’s unpleasant. Anything less is a delusion.
It is my observation that weakness of character is more often found in companies which trump up their goodness and accomplishments, as opposed to talking about their customers. Is it surprising their office walls are usually decorated with inspirational posters?
