Allow Me To Tell You About General Palmer
I have yet to meet or speak with General Palmer. As Superintendent of West Point from 1986 to 1991, he was responsible for changing the cadet leader development culture from a punitive structure to a more mature and mentorship-based system. He was able to do this when leaders such as Eisenhower and MacArthur tried without success.
Several years before completing this book, I sent General Parmer a draft copy of my manuscript. He liked what I was writing and encouraged me to complete the project. What followed was a series of wonderful emails between us. I now consider him as one of my mentors.
I asked him if he would be kind enough to write the foreword to my book and thankfully he agreed.
He is an accomplished military historian and has written many books on military history.
Foreword
Forward by Dave R. Palmer
Lieutenant General, U.S. Army Retired
Library shelves groan under the weight of a seemingly unending flow
of tomes devoted to exploring that essential but elusive element called
leadership. Yet it remains stubbornly elusive. What is it? How does it differ
from management? How does one acquire it? Is it inherent at birth?
How is it measured? And on and on. Trying to answer those questions
has been a continuing challenge over the ages. Still, the questions persist.
Mark Scureman confronts that challenge head-on in this exceptional
book. His approach is unique—and successful.
To begin with, he knows what he is talking about. He writes from a
lifetime of experiences in a variety of organizations, where he himself
was a boss on several levels and also had ample opportunities to observe
others, both good and bad. He graduated from our nation’s premier leader
development institution and served a career in the Army before entering
the business world, where he has devoted years to lecturing and consulting
on the topic of leading and managing. His grasp of the parameters of The
Boss’s Challenge is both personal and thorough. As a result, this book is as
rich as they come in solid guidance on how to lead and manage--and how
to recognize the difference between the two. In short, how to become a
competent and effective boss.
Society is full of organizations requiring leaders and managers. These
people are omnipresent and come with any number of labels: commanders,
chiefs, presidents, governors, mayors, captains, supervisors, directors,
chairmen, superintendents, commandants...and the list goes on. Here all
are gathered under a single title: The Boss’s Challenge.
Scureman starts by stating six humbling realities a potential leader or
manager must weigh before accepting a supervisory position. Significantly,
the very first one is, “You could have said no.” Then he posits a slate of
differences between managing and leading that every supervisor at any level
must wrestle with, and describes each in an easy to follow narrative. Most
have an entire chapter devoted to them, facilitating studying them in any order.
Anecdotes highlight his discussions. He stays faithful to the rule that
the more complex an issue the more valuable is an appropriate anecdotal
example. Points made by story tend to stick. Compellingly illustrative is the
very initial one, appearing a few pages into Chapter One. Read it before
going into the whole book.
His writing is marked by common sense delivered in plain English, his
prose stands free of military, academic, or technical jargon. That rare style
alone nudges the book toward classic-hood.
Notably, and insightfully, the book’s focus is more on developing leaders
than merely addressing leadership in theory, another factor making it stand
out starkly among the genre of leadership publications.
A suggestion...print in large, bold font a listing of the titles for Chapters
Two through Thirteen. Frame the resulting chart and hang it in your office
where it can be seen every day at work. It will serve as constant guidance
for your continued development throughout a full and satisfying career as
“boss.”