Risk in the Real

It's one thing to risk your own life in a field operation.

It's quite another to ask your people to risk their lives while you stand back and watch what happens. It isn't cute and it isn't pretty. Sometimes these things have to happen. Frankly, having stood in both places, it's easier to be the operator than it is to be the boss.

One of the people who works with me is a bit of a nonconformist. We had a disagreement. I suggested that if there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity. Conformists have difficulties wrapping their heads around decisions made based on what is present. It takes a real nonconformist to understand decisions made based upon what is absent.

Two of my people had an experience within the past few days which brought them to the understanding that even though I (the boss) might seem to be crazy at first blush, I'm usually right. It's good to work for a guy with a track record of being right when your life and the lives of your family hang in the balance. But it doesn't mean that the boss will be right all of the time.

And when you're the boss, you have to live with what you order people to do.

People in my business die alone. Our deaths are unsung; our motives unclear. We live and die in deception and guile, where all genius rests not in truth but subterfuge. We cannot do a thing clean, of itself. So we die slowly. Every challenged moment of each belabored day is barbed and thorned with memory of the things we cannot tell. We die defenseless with naught to avenge us but the mute records of what we observed in the strange lands that swallow us. 

I hope that my guys make it through this one. But nobody will know how it will turns out until it has turned out.