Leadership Lessons from West Point

Chapter 2. LEARNING FROM FAILURE

Doug Crandall

In the fall of 1996, I came a split-second from launching a 120-millimeter tank round that had it flown its course might have killed a number of American infantrymen participating in a live-fire exercise at the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center. Just a few months later, in the dead of winter at Yakima Training Center, about a hundred miles from Seattle, I retreated to the warmth of a small restaurant called the Oasis and bit into a tasty cheeseburger while seventy of my soldiers suffered outside in the cold. Fast-forward nearly a decade, to just a few months ago, and you would have found me embarrassing my own nine-year-old son through the public correction of his mistake on a soccer field.

That ...