I recently gave a speech in which I quoted several people, and afterwards someone came up and asked me what my FAVORITE leadership quote was. I regretted not having it memorized. I did not because it’s actually not a quote, but a longish-for-a-quotation passage from Stephen Vincent Benet’s wonderful free-verse poem, John Brown’s Body, a Pulitzer Prize winning book (before the honor became un-burnished) worth every second of its reading.
It is in part my favorite because it is both beautiful in its spareness, and so heavy with the mortality and human frailty that each of us lives with today.
If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way -
The General loses his stars, and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block parts.
It is also my favorite because when I first read it, 20 years ago, I finished the passage, leaned back, and said to myself, "It’s all about people." And that was the first moment I knew I would do what I’m doing right now.
- Mark Horstman, Manager Tools
