Anchoring the Best Leadership Traits in Ourselves

BOOK REVIEW: MIGHT OF THE CHAIN: Forging Leaders of Iron Integrity

By Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, USN (Ret.) / Stone Tower Press

Reviewed by: Bill Harlow

The Reviewer —  Bill Harlow served as chief spokesman for the CIA from 1997 to 2004 and was Assistant White House Press Secretary for National Security from 1988 to 1992.  A retired Navy captain, Harlow is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers on intelligence and is the author of Circle William: A Novel.

REVIEW — Mike Studeman is a recently retired Navy rear admiral with 35 years of service.  A career intelligence officer, he held an impressive array of assignments including service as Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He is a Cipher Brief expert and acknowledged authority on China.  But instead of writing his first book after leaving uniform on the threat from China, he has instead produced a book aimed at addressing a different (although at times – intersecting) crisis: the lack of leadership. The book is called “Might of the Chain: Forging Leaders of Iron Integrity.”

The title comes from a Royal Navy lieutenant (later admiral) Ronald Hopwood work called the “Laws of the Navy.” The 1896 poem is well-known within the naval service but, most likely, not elsewhere.  The stanza that Studeman seized upon alludes to a ship’s anchor and chain and goes:

On the strength of one link of the cable,

Dependeth the might of the chain.

Who knows when thou may’st be tested?

So live that thou may bearest the strain.

Drawing on his naval experience (and heritage) Studeman explains how every person in an organization must pull their share of the load – because one weak link may sink the enterprise.


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The book has great value for sailors and non-sailors alike, giving readers insights on how to harden their own leadership mettle.  Studeman was motivated to share his views on leadership because of the shockingly low levels of confidence expressed by Americans regarding leaders in business, government and other walks of life recently.

Studeman has compiled a list of lessons learned over a lifetime that would help current and would-be leaders to stay on course.  The focus is more than just leadership, however.  Some of the lessons also deal with character and integrity – which are necessary for good leaders but encompass broader significance.  In delivering the lessons, Studeman cites brief glimpses from his own life and career to illustrate the points.

The book is divided into three sections – the first focusing on how someone can strengthen their own qualities, the second on how to shape a team, and finally on using that team to have a major impact.

The title “Might of the Chain” might sound ponderous, however the book is anything but.  A quick breezy read, chapters often build on one-word concepts like “charisma,” “enthusiasm” and “boldness.”  And each chapter includes short illustrations from his own life to drive home a point being made. There are also on-point pithy quotes from people ranging from Winston Churchill to Oprah Winfrey at the end of each chapter to reinforce the messages.

 Fear not – the book is not one of those “I love me” books one sees too often.  Studeman is unafraid to point out instances in his career where he made missteps – or where the hero of the story – the person who got something right, was someone else.

One of my favorite stories in the book comes in a chapter about discipling subordinates who have somehow run afoul.  In his first command tour, two of Studeman’s sailors got wrapped up in a Driving Under the Influence traffic stop. It fell to him to deal with the sailors at “Captain’s Mast” – the Navy’s non-judicial punishment.  In preparing for the Mast, he struggled with what kind of verdict to impose that would make a real difference.  Studeman’s wife came up with the idea of sending both sailors to a Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) event. The sailors attended a panel discussion involving parents who had lost a child to drunk drivers. And then both were directed to address the entire command about their emotional takeaway – and relief that they had not been responsible for such a loss. The entire command gained from what could have been handled differently – just punishment without enlightenment for two sailors.


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Over the course of Studeman’s career, he was in a position to observe a lot of good and bad leadership and draw on the things he saw. As a former White House Fellow, he could drop into the book things like a dinner he and a colleague had with the Supreme Court justices, for example, and questions he posed to the Chief Justice. And as head of intelligence for the Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Southern Command – there was lots of 4-star interaction to cite.

Speaking of 4-stars, for our older (well, more seasoned anyway) readers – the name Studeman will sound familiar.  His father, Bill Studeman, was a four-star Navy admiral who led the National Security Agency and was Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the 1990s.

One of the central lessons of the book is the importance of senior leaders to grasp the opportunity and responsibility to communicate. And that is certainly what the author has done in this case. Pulling together the various strands of his expertise, Studeman has called out the current crisis of absent leadership in the United States.  And he says that “our self-destructive politics has given oxygen for adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party, now leading the second-most powerful nation on earth, to strengthen their comprehensive national power and global influence by contrasting it with the polarization, chaos, inwardness, and gridlock of America’s democracy.”

Studeman says that leadership “…has become a neglected and underappreciated skill, generating extraordinary disappointment, performance failures and dysfunction in too many places in our country.”  His book is one man’s effort to address that problem.

Might of the Chain earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats

4

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