Lack of sleep can be dangerous:

… Harvard’s Charles Czeisler. He notes that going without sleep for 24 hours or getting only five hours of sleep a night for a week is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent. Yet modern business ethic celebrates such feats. “We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ ” Czeisler wrote in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article.

This finding matches up with what we’ve discussed about doctors. The problem gets hidden inside the data in the business world because the harsh measurements of death is absent; no one knows what would have happened to the Murphy account if the saleswoman had more rest. Plus, we don’t like to think about how lack of sleep impairs us.

The story I tell about lack of sleep is, of course, one from Ranger School. I think it was the last patrol in Florida phase, and I was the squad leader for a nighttime linear ambush. One of my team leaders was trying to tell me something, and he was literally falling asleep standing up, while he was talking to me. He’d drift off, stumble forward a step, catch himself, wake up, and keep talking. Amazingly I remember being wide awake at the time, and asking the RI about what you might do in just this situation. He basically said “you have to do whatever you can, because sleeping means dying.” Okay, he didn’t say the last couple words, but that lesson doesn’t have to be learned in today’s Army, not since Vietnam.

How might we put these ideas into practice? For one, if leaders delegated more fully to teams, then each team could function independently with the same task, conditions, and standards as the others (three sales teams covering the same region, for example). Let each team leader decide how to manage and lead her people. If the results are what matter, then let the results speak. Senior people shouldn’t get hung up on optics, particularly if the only reason is because it’s easier to count hours in the office than measure sales effectiveness or adjust for the quality of the leads.

So give your teams intentions-based guidance. Let the lowest-level leader decide how they’ll operate (in terms of schedule, responsiveness, mindset), and let the results speak for themselves once you gather enough data to smoke out the externalities that tough working conditions can create.

What is your number one fallback technique for taking care of your subordinates?

What popped up quickly was that he was the source of the famous (to me, at least) quote:

The map is not the territory.

We all learned about this one in the Army, whether at IOBC (Infantry Officers’ Basic Course) or in Ranger School. The idea was that looking at a map for your leader’s reconnaissance was asking for trouble. While a map is “a representation of the Earth’s surface as seen from above,” it’s not as accurate as reality. There are things in reality that don’t show up in maps, such as heavy vegetation to slow your progress, or trees that hinder vehicles but provide cover for infantry. The lesson was that it is important to put “eyes on the objective,” and verify that the representations matched reality.

This lesson wasn’t just about map reading and planning and executing operations, though; it was also about things like reports from subordinates that something was done, like the completion of a layout and inventory of equipment to turned in. We learned, as young lieutenants, that failure to inspect is a failure of leadership: a report of all done is not the same as the thing actually being done.

(This notion seems self-evident, and I have no desire to wander off into the pyscho-babble extensions of some authors.) But my next thought was that this idea, of recognizing the disconnection between real reality and perceptions or descriptions of reality, have always been interesting to me and maybe even explain why I’m good at being a lawyer and maybe why I’m happily married to a scientist.

Ex.: I remember a very fun lecture in high school physics (HT to Claude Meyers, the droopy-mustachioed teacher: this one has stuck in my head a long time). He was explaining the dual-slit experiments that revealed the wave-particle duality of light. He noted that the typical question was fundamentally wrong: is light *really* a wave? or is it *really* a particle? The answer he said, was that it was neither: it was what it was, and that “thing” exhibited these characteristics under these conditions. That was all there was.

So now, as a lawyer, I see this principle at work in two different ways. First, in the litigation context, we’re always trying to find and present evidence of “what really happened,” and the hurdle is that we’ve generally decided, via the rules of evidence, to only believe certain types of evidence as connecting the evidence with the reality. A good example of this is a recent case that involves a forged letter authorizing a wire transfer. The bank’s receipt of the letter is not actual authorization: it’s just the receipt of a letter that is some kind of evidence, reliable or unreliable, correct or wrong, of actual authorization.

In the corporate or transactional context, we use similar ideas to zero in on potential problems, whether to avoid or diagnose: we create restrictions on certain behavior, which might be innocent, to prevent mischief; we ask for certain documents to provide signposts to problems but that might themselves not be reliable (see forgery, above).

Recognizing the distinctions between these types of problems and their similarity, understanding the practical world well enough to identify more vs. less reliable indicators, and helping frame the relationship between two parties is the essence, to me, of being a good corporate lawyer. If contracts are, as I’ve said for years, fundamentally mechanisms for allocating risk between the parties, then this function of understanding map v. territory and being able to handicap the outcome is critical to coming out of negotiations with a set of transaction documents that can assist the parties in making the real world look like their vision (turning a territory into a map!).

As a final thought, I had a mini-epiphany on this quote either during pre-OCS map reading classes taught by LTC Daimler, Ret., or perhaps during IOBC or even at Ranger School:

The earth is a 1:1 map of itself.

Maybe even Korzybski would agree with that.

(For example, I recently met an in-house attorney with JetBlue who was in the Army National Guard during law school and then deployed to Iraq. That’s not easy either.)

I found this language to be odd:

Some First Amendment scholars worry that laws regulating the use of symbols are similar to those against flag burning, which the Supreme Court has said are unconstitutional limitations on free speech. Others have also questioned whether overzealous activists risk slanderously and erroneously accusing people of fraud because of missing or misprinted military documents.

I agree completely with the “wearing a medal” issue, even more vehemently if it’s protected speech criticizing the military and the government. We protect the Constitution so that we can keep these rights; I’m one of the only former military folks I know who doesn’t have a problem with flag-burning. I believe that it’s great for other people to take out their frustration and anger on a US flag rather than on a citizen or soldier, sailor, airman, or marine.

But to accuse someone? That would take some serious self-righteousness and some serious proof. I doubt that anyone who actually held any of these medals would take it on themselves to throw stones at someone else without being absolutely convinced; the idea of denigrating a soldier who was deservedly decorated would seem to me to be the type of conduct that these folks would find outrageous. I, for one, have no problem detailing the extent of my “action” in the Army: the unit I was to join went to Panama in 1989 but I was waiting for OCS and never joined the unit; I was in OCS during Desert Storm, and all of Ft. Benning was worried about thousands of casualties; at OCS we openly talked about the School’s prominence in turning out 2LTs, many of whom went to Vietnam and promptly died; but we stayed home and the war was over; I was in Hawai’i during Bosnia, and my old boss went to Somalia. I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was stand ready to do whatever was asked of me, and that’s enough. I know people with actual medals, who’ve actually fought. I can’t imagine demeaning them by pretending I did something I hadn’t. I don’t know who would.

This quote is both heartening and disturbing:

Special Agent Mike Sanborn, who since 2007 has led the unit in the F.B.I.’s Washington office that handles stolen valor cases, said that while the bureau did not keep statistics on the crime, the biggest increase came after 2006 with the passage of the Stolen Valor Act, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim, verbally or in writing, that a person had been awarded a medal. Previously, the law only prohibited wearing a medal that a person did not earn.

I know of someone who apparently (and I won’t name him or how I know; he knows the truth; his name certainly doesn’t appear on this list) noted the award of a Silver Star to his resume at one point early in his career. It hasn’t appeared in a recent bio (he recently held an admittedly high-profile government job) and I didn’t see the resume with my own eyes. I guess he certainly won’t be punished for violating this law (ex post facto rears its ugly head), but he knows if he should be.

That’s the end of it. Even knowing that I don’t believe him, I’m humble enough in the face of thousands who did vastly more than I did to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt by letting the world sort it out. It’s not my place to pretend that I’m protecting the honor of the heroes I know by challenging one misguided fellow; I honor them by displaying the character traits they taught: courage, competence, character, commitment; by living up to the motto many of them lived and fought by; and by raising my children to be honorable themselves.