Crew Leader Quotes

It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission.

Members of his crew knew dialects from further up the African coast, but they had never heard words like those spoken by these river people. Cao heard the name Kongo being repeated. Following the pattern of other African groups, they explained they were the BaKongo people and called their language KiKongo. Inland, they said, was the capital of their tribe, MbanzaKongo, where there lived a powerful leader or king, the ManiKongo.

Oooooh, don’t make her mad!” the leader gasps around his laughter.

The Empire was crumbling every day. Trillions of people were free because of the Rebellion. Because she was a general running a battle group instead of a cell leader flying the Ghost on one mad assignment or another. Still, she missed her old crew. Her family. She wished they all could have been with her aboard the Lodestar.

I told the others which trees to chop, where to get the mud, even though I was not the official leader. My father used to say, ‘Thing like a boss, not like a worker.’ He meant that it is better to use your brain and be active than to be sullen and passive, as most workers are. I worked harder than anyone in the crew because it kept my mind sharp and because it kept me from thinking about other things.

The soldier in the field and the crew member aboard a warship inevitably see a war from a limited perspective. Their goal is to carry out their mission or their appointed task, and trust that their commanders are aware of the larger situation and the vast matrix of facts, positions, options, and dangers. Leadership is a role and a task that should never be aspired to lightly. Neither should loyalty be given without reason. Even if the primary reason is nothing more than the soldier's oath and duty, a true leader will work to prove worthy of a deeper trust. But leadership and loyalty are both two-bladed weapons. Each can be twisted from its intended purpose. The consequences are never pleasant.

Gideon,” he said, “think for a minute about the qualities that a leader—even a co-leader—is required to have. He’s a team player. He’s good at inspiring others. He’s able to hide his true feelings, put up a false front when necessary. He projects confidence at all times—even if he doesn’t feel confident. He can’t be a freelancer. And he’s certainly not a loner. Now, tell me: do any of these qualities describe you?

She was leader of this little crew and she'd go first. Always. When she took on new members, she gave them one chance to get that right. If the words, but you're a woman. Let me take point, were ever spoken, that person was history.

I can remember many times when my boat crew struggled. It was easy to make excuses for our team’s performance and why it wasn’t what it should have been. But I learned that good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.

He surveyed what remained of his crew. Rotty still hovered by the wreckage of the longboat. Jesper sat with elbows on knees, head in hands, Wylan beside him wearing the face of a near-stranger; Matthias stood gazing across the water in the direction of Hellgate like a stone sentinel. If Kaz was their leader, then Inej had been their lodestone, pulling them together when they seemed most likely to drift apart. Nina had disguised Kaz’s crow-and-cup tattoo before they’d entered the Ice Court, but he hadn’t let her near the R on his bicep. Now he touched his gloved fingers to where the sleeve of his coat covered that mark. Without meaning to, he’d let Kaz Rietveld return. He didn’t know if it had begun with Inej’s injury or that hideous ride in the prison wagon, but somehow he’d let it happen and it had cost him dearly. That didn’t mean he was going to let himself be bested by some thieving merch. Kaz looked south toward Ketterdam’s harbors. The beginnings of an idea scratched at the back of his skull, an itch, the barest inkling. It wasn’t a plan, but it might be the start of one. He could see the shape it would take—impossible, absurd, and requiring a serious chunk of cash. “Scheming face,” murmured Jesper. “Definitely,” agreed Wylan. Matthias folded his arms. “Digging in your bag of tricks, demjin?” Kaz flexed his fingers in his gloves. How did you survive the Barrel? When they took everything from you, you found a way to make something from nothing. “I’m going to invent a new trick,” Kaz said. “One Van Eck will never forget.” He turned to the others. If he could have gone after Inej alone, he would have, but not even he could pull that off. “I’ll need the right crew.” Wylan got to his feet. “For the Wraith.” Jesper followed, still not meeting Kaz’s eyes. “For Inej,” he said quietly. Matthias gave a single sharp nod. Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn’t get her back. I’m going to get my money, Kaz vowed. And I’m going to get my girl. Inej could never be his, not really, but he would find a way to give her the freedom he’d promised her so long ago. Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.

Beloved, there is a truth to Trump’s election that many of you refuse to see: too many white folk are willing to imperil the ship of state because they lust for revenge. It is, in truth, wevenge, the unrepentant mutiny of a rogue white crew. They seem willing to cast aside a seasoned leader because of her gender, and her connection to the previous captain. Instead, they have embraced a fatally inexperienced skipper who threatens to wreck the vaunted vessel of government in the rocky waters of political ignorance. Whether

Captain Marquet came to understand that the role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. If the captain provides direction and protection, the crew will do what needs to be done to advance the mission.

Looking at Moby Dick as a mid-twentieth century revolutionist who was also a lover of Shakespeare, he had come to the conclusion that Melville’s masterpiece was the “first comprehensive statement in literature of the conditions and perspectives for the survival of Western civilization.”28 He saw Ahab, the mad captain taking the Pequod to the bottom of the ocean in pursuit of the white whale, as the forerunner of the totalitarian dictators of our epoch. The crew and the harpooners represented the creative power of the masses; the two officers, Starbuck and Stubb, the helplessness of labor and liberal leaders; while Ishmael symbolized the powerlessness and isolation of the intellectual.

Shackleton was looking for those with something more. He was looking for a crew that belonged on such an expedition. His actual ad ran like this: “Men wanted for Hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” The only people who applied for the job were those who read the ad and thought it sounded great. They loved insurmountable odds. The only people who applied for the job were survivors. Shackleton hired only people who believed what he believed. Their ability to survive was guaranteed. When employees belong, they will guarantee your success. And they won’t be working hard and looking for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it for themselves.

Then, Zil and a half dozen of his crew swaggered into the plaza from the far side. Astrid clenched her jaw. Would the crowd turn on them? She almost hoped so. People thought because she wouldn’t let Sam go after Zil she must not really despise the Human Crew’s Leader. That was wrong. She hated Zil. Hated everything he had done and everything he had tried to do. Edilio moved quickly between Zil and a few of the boys who had started toward him, sticks and knives at the ready. Zil’s kids were armed with knives and bats, and so were those who wanted to take them on. Edilio was armed with an assault rifle. Astrid hated that this was what life so often came down to: my weapon is bigger than your weapon. If Sam were here it would be about his hands. Everyone had either seen what Sam could do, or heard the stories retold in vivid detail. No one challenged Sam.

In heist movies, there's always a montage of scenes where the caper crew rehearses for the big day. The greaser person practices maneuvering through a mock laser beam field made up of string. The driver races through obstacle courses, back alleys, and dark city streets. The hacker pounds on her keyboard, staring at screens full of code. The gadget person demonstrates all their clever toys. The key master practices opening a safe. The muscle finds a few security guards to knock unconscious and wrestles guard dogs to the ground. The inside person seduces or befriends the target and gets them to spill their secrets. And the leader organizes it all with the help of her second-in-command. At least, that's the way it works in the movies. In real life, with a bunch of newbs who are scraping by with low-paying jobs, inflexible hours, difficult bosses, and a bunch of side gigs to make ends meet, just organizing a rehearsal heist was one hell of a task.

When I was on the streets thugging, I wanted loyal people around me. I made my crew aware if you’re going to bleed, I will bleed, too. If we have to go to prison, then we are going to prison together. But one thing about us: if someone is locked up in prison, whatever it takes, we gon’ get that person out. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members Thugging, loyalty, prison, Rebellion Raiders, gangbanging, street life, gang life, support, togetherness, unity, lock up, When I was on the streets thugging, I wanted loyal people around me. I made my crew aware if you’re going to bleed, I will bleed, too. If we have to go to prison, then we are going to prison together. But one thing about us: if someone is locked up in prison, whatever it takes, we gon’ get that person out. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

Men of the trident have some games handed down to them by their ancestors: when you cross the Line, you must be “baptized.” The same ceremony takes place in the Tropics as on the banks of Newfoundland, and, whatever the locale, the leader of the masquerade is always “the Old Man of the Tropics.” Tropical and dropsical are synonymous to sailors: the Old Man of the Tropics therefore has an enormous paunch. Even under the tropical sun, he is outfitted in all the sheepskins and fur coats that the crew can find. He sits crouching on the maintop, bellowing from time to time like a wild animal. Everyone stares up at him. Then he starts climbing down the shrouds, heavy as a bear and staggering like Silenus. When he lands on deck, he roars some more, leaps, seizes a pail, fills it with water from the sea, and pours it over the head of anyone who has never crossed the Line or reached the icy latitude. You may flee below deck, leap onto the hatches, or shinny up the masts, but Old Man Tropic is always after you. It all ends with the sailors getting a large sum of drink money.

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

Two sailors hauled on ropes, hoisting the jolly boat up to the ship’s side, revealing two apocryphal figures standing in the center of the small craft. At first glance, Sophia only saw clearly the shorter of the two, a gruesome creature with long tangled hair and a painted face, wearing a tight-fitting burlap skirt and a makeshift corset fashioned from fishnet and mollusk shells. The Sea Queen, Sophia reckoned, a smile warming her cheeks as the crew erupted into raucous cheers. A bearded Sea Queen, no less, who bore a striking resemblance to the Aphrodite’s own grizzled steward. Stubb. Sophia craned her neck to spy Stubb’s consort, as the foremast blocked her view of Triton’s visage. She caught only a glimpse of a white toga draped over a bronzed, bare shoulder. She took a jostling step to the side, nearly tripping on a coil of rope. “Foolish mortals! Kneel before your king!” The assembled sailors knelt on cue, giving Sophia a direct view of the Sea King. And even if the blue paint smeared across his forehead or the strands of seaweed dangling from his belt might have disguised him, there was no mistaking that persuasive baritone. Mr. Grayson. There he stood, tall and proud, some twenty feet away from her. Bare-chested, save for a swath of white linen draped from hip to shoulder. Wet locks of hair slicked back from his tanned face, sunlight embossing every contour of his sculpted arms and chest. A pagan god come swaggering down to earth. He caught her eye, and his smile widened to a wolfish grin. Sophia could not for the life of her look away. He hadn’t looked at her like this since…since that night. He’d scarcely looked in her direction at all, and certainly never wearing a smile. The boldness of his gaze made her feel thoroughly unnerved, and virtually undressed. Until the very act of maintaining eye contact became an intimate, verging on indecent, experience. If she kept looking at him, she felt certain he knees would give out. If she looked away, she gave him the victory. There was only one suitable alternative, given the circumstances. With a cheeky wink to acknowledge the joke, Sophia dropped her eyes and curtsied to the King. Mr. Grayson laughed his approval. Her curtsy, the crew’s gesture of fealty-he accepted their obeisance as his due. And why should he not? There was a rightness about it somehow, an unspoken understanding. Here at last was their true leader: the man they would obey without question, the man to whom they’d pledge loyalty, even kneel. This was his ship. “Where’s the owner of this craft?” he called. “Oh, right. Someone told me he’s no fun anymore.” As the men laughed, the Sea King swung over the rail, hoisting what looked to be a mop handle with vague aspirations to become a trident. “Bring forth the virgin voyager!

Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5 This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6 Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails: There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7

Deandre Felton was a good boy, his family and friends agree. He was also a leader. But on this night in September of 2012, Deandre and his crew were bored. The mall was closed, but he and his boys were high on drugs and still wanted to have fun. So Deandre came up with what was not a new idea, but fun nevertheless. They decided to beat someone up. They had just come from a local park where Deandre and fifteen others beat up two girls, sending one to the hospital with a broken arm. Then Deandre decided to blow off a little steam and play the Knockout Game. He knew the game was usually pretty safe—for the attacker, that is.1 In Meriden, Connecticut, victims aren’t likely to carry concealed weapons, nor do they fight back. As one player said in Philadelphia as his victim begged for mercy: “It’s not our fault you can’t fight.” Deandre and his crew found their victim a few minutes after leaving the mall. Soon Deandre and his confederate DeShawn Jones were peeling off from the group, heading for a guy walking home from work. Alone. We don’t know his name or race or anything about him other than he was The Wrong Guy. With their friends lurking less than one hundred yards away when Deandre and DeShawn attacked, the guy fought back. He pulled a knife. Soon Deandre was dead and DeShawn was on his way to the emergency room.

By explaining the process to the crew and giving them the tools to improve their performance, we empowered them to determine their own success.

the role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission.

Later that month, my tank driver, Chamberlain, was badly burned when, having primed the stove with petrol, he took the half empty jerrycan and laid it down behind him. Unbeknownst to him, a trail of petrol led from the stove to the jerrican, and when he threw a match on to the stove, the jerrycan blew up. His resultant injuries were so severe that he had to be evacuated and didn’t return to the crew until September.

We found that when people know they will be asked questions they study their responsibilities ahead of time. This increases the intellectual involvement of the crew significantly. People are thinking about what they will be required to do and independently study for it.

These televised scenes grew dark and violent. Roaring and exploding as private cops and militias fired into crowds of young families; some still tiny and in diapers. “All too often,” came the narrator’s voice again, “Adults try to silence those who have seen what their leaders have been trying to hide. “Children learn very early that it is not socially acceptable to speak the truth. “Just play the game, they are told, just try to get along with how things have to be. “Life is just that way.” On the screen, children, many of them dressed in rags, had gathered in small, desperate knots behind The Walls. Begging for food, or for the simple right to speak, as PolitiChurch bullies fired into their small and loose clusters. Children fell. Bleeding. Moaning, blinded, crippled, or dead. Many of them weeping from the teargas. “Life is just that way,” came the voice again.......... Even there though, not every cop felt quite clear in his conscience. While some took aim even at cameras and film crews threatening to expose their militarized thuggery, others held their fire. Or maybe shot into the sky. The world was breaking apart into factions. No one could just turn his back on something like this. The repercussions from this kind of violence followed troubled souls even into their sleep. They would have to take a stand. Somebody had to do something.' From 'The Soul Hides in Shadows

Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course.

He had a smart crew, and if he spoke too much, they’d shut up and listen to him instead of volunteering their own very useful opinions. ‘Good leaders lead,’ Pantillo had told Erik once. ‘Great leaders listen.

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary.

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

A shiver passed through Mag. She realized, then, that no one had used that word before, not out loud. They’d talked about work stoppage, about real work for real pay, about all coming down sick at once. But no one had ever said strike, a word from the depths of history passed down by the miners and completely absent from the curriculum in the company-run school. The word seemed so archaic, so impossible, and at the same time heavy with power. Clarence had written the word in his proposal to the crew leaders in the other towns, but even then, no one had said it out loud, like it was some kind of black magic that couldn’t be taken back once spoken.

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The organization of high-tempo air operations from carriers remains an extremely challenging proposition even today, but in June 1942, the Japanese were world leaders in this field. Their fleet carriers would typically hold about 90 aircraft, confined into a very tight space. There were two hangar decks, with lifts connecting them to the flight deck above. Japanese ground crews were very well trained, with the result that they could turn around aircraft much faster than their British or American counterparts. Nonetheless, these were crowded ships, and they were already coming under attack from the Midway-based American aircraft. Furthermore, in addition to switching armament for Nagumo’s reserve bomber force, the crews were maintaining a rotating force of covering fighters. There were always Zeros on deck waiting to take off, being refuelled, or just having landed. Hoisting heavy torpedoes into the bomb bays of the Kates was also a very skilled operation that only specialist torpedo armorers were able to undertake. In short, this was a recipe for delay and confusion, even given the superb quality of the Japanese ground crew, and as Nagumo changed his mind twice in the span of less than an hour, the issues the Japanese faced on the carriers were exacerbated. 

growing, like a storm on the horizon, gathering, the echo of thunder distant but present. For whatever reason, it doesn’t affect me. I am certain that there is something out there, waiting for us. We press on, into the darkness, barreling at maximum speed, the three nuclear warheads on our ship armed and ready. I feel like Ahab hunting the white whale. I am a man possessed. When I launched into space aboard the Pax, my life was empty. I didn’t know Emma. My brother was a stranger to me. I had no family, no friends. Only Oscar. Now I have something to lose. Something to live for. Something to fight for. My time in space has changed me. When I left Earth the first time, I was still the rebel scientist the world had cast out. I felt like an outsider, a renegade. Now I have become a leader. I’ve learned to read people, to try to understand them. That was my mistake before. I trudged ahead with my vision of the world, believing the world would follow me. But the truth is, true leadership requires understanding those you lead, making the best choices for them, and most of all, convincing them when they don’t realize what’s best for them. Leadership is about moments like this, when the people you’re charged with protecting have doubts, when the odds are against you. Every morning, the crew gathers on the bridge. Oscar and Emma strap in on each side of me and we sit around the table and everyone gives their departmental updates. The ship is operating at peak efficiency. So is the crew. Except for the elephant in the room. “As you know,” I begin, “we are still on course for Ceres. We have not ordered the other ships in the Spartan fleet to alter course. The fact that the survey drones have found nothing, changes nothing. Our enemy is advanced. Sufficiently advanced to alter our drones and hide itself. With that said, we should discuss the possibility that there is, in fact, nothing out there on Ceres. We need to prepare for that eventuality.” Heinrich surveys the rest of the crew before speaking. “It could be a trap.” He’s always to the point. I like that about him. “Yes,” I reply, “it could be. The entity, or harvester, or whatever is out there, could be manufacturing the solar cells elsewhere—deeper in the solar system, or from another asteroid in the belt. It could be sending the solar cells to Ceres and then toward the sun, making them look as though they were manufactured on Ceres. There could be a massive bomb or attack drones waiting for us at Ceres.” “We could split our fleet,

be highlighted and help can be offered and received. In short, an environment in which people feel safe among their own. This is the responsibility of a leader. This is what Rick Fox did. He built a high-performing team by creating an environment in which his crew

Serb leaders refuse to admit that genocide Is what happened to Bosniaks in Srebrenica Tomislav Nikolić, Dodik, Šešelj, Dačić, and Vulin are an evil crew That call the genocide in Srebrenica untrue

Serb leaders refuse to admit that genocide Is what happened to Bosniaks in Srebrenica Tomislav Nikolić, Dodik, Šešelj, Dačić, and Vulin are an evil crew That call the genocide in Srebrenica untrue

With permission in hand, church leaders in Holland now shifted to the equally complicated matters of money. While the Virginia Company had the capacity to grant permission, it no longer had any capacity to finance an overseas voyage. The congregants needed to raise capital. For prudent and conservative men of wealth, the considerable expenses of a ship, crew, and supplies were far too risky to merit investment, especially as overseas ventures proved especially prone to complete loss. The solution, then, seemed to be to find men of means given to speculation—men driven by appetites for glorious gains, who were willing to overlook the possibility of loss on a venture or two.

Sports teams conduct practice sessions and call time-outs mid-game to quickly review what’s going wrong and introduce modified approaches. This is true even in sports that don’t allow breaks. In rowing, for instance, a coxswain might call on a crew to focus on a particular aspect of their technique for five or ten strokes to recover their timing. A basketball point guard might dribble a few seconds off the shot clock while shouting directions to her teammates so they can regroup. Similarly, leaders must reserve time for slowification. Toyota, studied for their organizational learning and outstanding performance, routinely puts breaks between shifts so leaders can run problem-solving and improvement activities before production resumes. When production is interrupted, downtime is often used as a slowification opportunity.

These teams started with a provisional plan, the “sheet music.” Film crews had a detailed daily schedule. The SWAT team outlined a plan for each mission—which specified, for example, who would cover the exits of a house, where snipers would be stationed, and when officers would bust down the door. But when things didn’t go as expected, because people understood one another’s roles so well and how their roles fit together, teams were adept at revising their plan on the spot.

As the leader, he bore the responsibility for his boat crew’s poor performance. Yet he seemed indifferent, as though fate had dealt him a poor hand:

The big boss was in here today,” the day people said. “He asked us how many heats we made, and we told him six. He chalked it down on the floor.” The next morning Schwab walked through the mill again. The night shift had rubbed out “6” and replaced it with a big “7.” When the day shift reported for work that morning, they saw a big “7” chalked on the floor. So the night shift thought they were better than the day shift, did they? Well, they would show the night shift a thing or two. The crew pitched in with enthusiasm, and when they quit that night, they left behind them an enormous, swaggering “10.” Things were stepping up. Shortly, this mill, which had been lagging way behind in production, was turning out more work than any other mill in the plant. The principle? Let Charles Schwab say it in his own words: “The way to get things done,” says Schwab, “is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel.

The intruders spoke no words as they rushed in. Five boys carrying baseball bats and tire irons. They wore an assortment of Halloween masks and stocking masks. But Derek knew who they were. “No! No!” he cried. All five boys wore bulky shooter’s earmuffs. They couldn’t hear him. But more importantly, they couldn’t hear Jill. One of the boys stayed in the doorway. He was in charge. A runty kid named Hank. The stocking pulled down over his face smashed his features into Play-Doh, but it could only be Hank. One of the boys, fat but fast-moving and wearing an Easter Bunny mask, stepped to Derek and hit him in the stomach with his aluminum baseball bat. Derek dropped to his knees. Another boy grabbed Jill. He put his hand over her mouth. Someone produced a roll of duct tape. Jill screamed. Derek tried to stand, but the blow to his stomach had winded him. He tried to stand up, but the fat boy pushed him back down. “Don’t be stupid, Derek. We’re not after you.” The duct tape went around and around Jill’s mouth. They worked by flashlight. Derek could see Jill’s eyes, wild with terror. Pleading silently with her big brother to save her. When her mouth was sealed, the thugs pulled off their shooter’s earmuffs. Hank stepped forward. “Derek, Derek, Derek,” Hank said, shaking his head slowly, regretfully. “You know better than this.” “Leave her alone,” Derek managed to gasp, clutching his stomach, fighting the urge to vomit. “She’s a freak,” Hank said. “She’s my little sister. This is our home.” “She’s a freak,” Hank said. “And this house is east of First Avenue. This is a no-freak zone.” “Man, come on,” Derek pleaded. “She’s not hurting anyone.” “It’s not about that,” a boy named Turk said. He had a weak leg, a limp that made it impossible not to recognize him. “Freaks with freaks, normals with normals. That’s the way it has to be.” “All she does is—” Hank’s slap stung. “Shut up. Traitor. A normal who stands up for a freak gets treated like a freak. Is that what you want?” “Besides,” the fat boy said with a giggle, “we’re taking it easy on her. We were going to fix her so she could never sing again. Or talk. If you know what I mean.” He pulled a knife from a sheath in the small of his back. “Do you, Derek? Do you understand?” Derek’s resistance died. “The Leader showed mercy,” Turk said. “But the Leader isn’t weak. So this freak either goes west, over the border right now. Or…” He let the threat hang there. Jill’s tears flowed freely. She could barely breathe because her nose was running. Derek could see that by the way she sucked tape into her mouth, trying for air. She would suffocate if they didn’t let her go soon. “Let me at least get her doll.

Where are you going, Albert?” Albert said nothing. How rare, Quinn thought: Albert speechless. “Not really your concern, Quinn,” Albert said finally. “You’re running out.” Albert sighed. To his three companions he said, “Go ahead and get in the boat. The Boston Whaler. Yes, that one.” Turning back to Quinn he said, “It’s been good doing business with you. If you want, you can come with us. We have room for one more. You’re a good guy.” “And my crews?” “Limited resources, Quinn.” Quinn laughed a little. “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you, Albert?” Albert didn’t seem bothered. “I’m a businessman. It’s about making a profit and surviving. It so happens that I’ve kept everyone alive for months. So I guess I’m sorry if you don’t like me, Quinn, but what’s coming next isn’t about business. What’s coming next is craziness. We’re going back to the days of starvation. But in the dark this time. Craziness. Madness.” His eyes glinted when he said that last word. Quinn saw the fear there. Madness. Yes, that would terrify the eternally rational businessman. “All that happens if I stay,” Albert continued, “is that someone decides to kill me. I’ve already come too close to being dead once.” “Albert, you’re a leader. You’re an organizer. We’re going to need that.” Albert waved an impatient hand and glanced over to see that the Boston Whaler was ready. “Caine’s a leader. Sam’s a leader. Me?” Albert considered it for a second and shook the idea off. “No. I’m important, but I’m not a leader. Tell you what, though, Quinn: in my absence you speak for me. If that helps, good for you.” Albert climbed down into the Boston Whaler. Pug started the engine and Leslie-Ann cast off the ropes. Some of the last gasoline in Perdido Beach sent the boat chugging out of the marina. “Hey, Quinn!” Albert shouted back. “Don’t come to the island without showing a white flag. I don’t want to blow you up!

Rachel— Is it twisted that I want to thank you for the time I’ve had with you? You’ve been nothing short of amazing throughout all of this, and I’m thankful for every moment. I know I’ve avoided answering you before, but I want to tell you why I stole you away in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, but everything to do with the men you’re associated with. They’re good men, never doubt that; but by doing their job, and putting assholes like the leaders of my crew in prison, they put their lives on the line. And when you came into the picture, it put you in my hands. We were going to use you as bait to get the leaders out, and it was my job to watch you . . . and eventually take you. Watching over you once you were here in this house had never been part of the plan, but after the four months of watching you day in and day out, I couldn’t leave you to fend for yourself here. As you’ve come to find out, I would do anything to keep you safe, and I won’t stop until I get you out of here. What will happen after tonight, I’m already prepared for and know I deserve. But I want . . . no, need you to know, I never wanted this life. I would have done anything to stay away from it, and even more to get out of it. Sometimes we just don’t have a choice. Because of who I am, and what I’ve done, I never thought I was meant to find love. Thank you for unintentionally showing me how wrong I was. Even though your heart belongs to him, loving you—even in secret—has changed my life. And if I die tomorrow, I’ll consider myself lucky to be able to die loving you. Trent Cruz I

America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.

I’m particularly struck by Byron’s focus on speed—on “zipping through” complex problems of logic and storytelling—because it reminds me of what Andrew Stanton says about being a director. I’ve told you about Andrew’s belief that we will all be happier and more productive if we hurry up and fail. For him, moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one. Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course. “People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,” as Andrew says. “It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.

This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around—and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion—then the crew will balk. They know better than anyone when they are working hard but not going anywhere. People want their leaders to be confident. Andrew doesn’t advise being confident merely for confident’s sake. He believes that leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

The study of stress in space had never been a big priority at NASA —or of much interest to the stoic astronauts, who worried that psychologists would uncover some hairline crack that might exclude them from future missions. (Russia, by contrast, became the early leader in the field, after being forced to abort several missions because of crew problems.)

If the crew is confused, then their leader is, too.

Ma'am I am still a strong believer if my tough Queen HILLARY CLINTON, she was the only technical person who deserve the white-House,Millions across the world thought she could win at all cost but as we know no one is GOD and none can predict with accuracy with trying the Faiths in form of TRYING . Trump is a tough man with reliable and sustainable wealth so I don't doubt his abilities and strategic business tricks by utilizing his technical brains to his advantage at all times ,My queen relaxed big time at the beginning ,and mid-campaigning moments ,she speed up at the last days which led to our Lost . Trump on the other side ,create a very tougher audience attraction and mass dominance with NEGATIVITY and DIVISION , captured the attention of the whole world at the Mid-Campain moments and Relax with Comfort knowing he will be walk into Victory with the stronger Mess he created from the very Beginning . I admire and still think Trump should rate his Brains for playing his Political Game with ultra-Modern BRANDING tricks that made him the most viewed ,followed and the center of attention for the world not just America. I respect such business logic tricks ,cos they productive but Trump should trade with Caution and remember he is just an ordinary creature and flawed just like any other person ,unless our first father and mother were not create the same and Equal . A technical person like him who understands Business should know ,weapons and killings are not part of business ,in business all you requires and constantly has to invest in is your TECHNICAL BRAINS ,always beat your enemies and oppositions with their individual and personal Unique and Ultra Modern Innovations to distinguishes between a Leader and a follower. I am still a tough and firm believer of my queen and I don't even have to think about their Past or what people claims about them cos I understand the reasons why great minds always attract violent and deadly opposition from mediocre minds so I don't judge anyone and can even judge anyone not even myself but watching her back is my Pledge and if a worthless person makes the wrong move towards hurting her ,it's turn will be know who true SNIPERS are and why we have accurate general snipers . Cos a YoungMan claims when that hour arrives can he give all the crew plotting evil against her an accurate shots to hell until we meet there one day

The iPad 2 was a significant improvement over the first version. It was lighter, it had two digital cameras—one on the screen side to facilitate videoconferencing and taking selfies, and another with a higher-resolution camera and flash, on the back side, courtesy of that crew of camera engineers that had been brought on board after the first iPhone.

Sir Roy Fedden headed the British team sent to defeated Germany by Sir Stafford Cripps. Fedden, a slim, elegant, clean-shaven man whose photographs usually reveal an expression of focused determination, showed keen intelligence and a fascination with car and aircraft engines at an early age. Passionately fond of his wife Norah Crew, and somehow finding time between engine experiments to sail and fish, Fedden, 60 years of age in 1945, attacked his task with customary gusto. Fedden Years earlier, Erhardt Milch and Hermann Goering, to Fedden's astonishment, permitted him to tour no less than 17 of their secret aeronautics facilities when he visited Germany in 1937 and 1938. The Luftwaffe leaders hoped to overawe Fedden with the potential of German military aircraft design, and thus cause him to influence the British government to reach an accommodation with the Third Reich. Fedden, in fact, urged the English leadership to modernize their aircraft design to match the Germans' potential and was fired.               Realizing their error several years later, the government re-employed Fedden in 1944, and a mix of aeronautics engineers, scientists, and RAF officers comprised Fedden's team.

Roman and I didn’t leave much room for discussion about who from our crew would go. Levi, Walker, and Hudson were a bit different. While Levi always tends to take on the leadership role, we found out real quick that there is no one leader in their clan or whatever they call it. Instead, they vote on things like our crew does. Only, this vote didn’t go the way they planned, so they ended up playing “rock paper scissors” to decide who would come today.

The leader squinted at the Striga skull on top of the stop sign, looking smug and slightly bored. The rest of his crew looked about the same—too much time at the gym, too much love for tactical sunglasses, too secure in their badassery

During my own training and performance in BUD/S as a boat crew leader,” I told them, “I can remember many times when my boat crew struggled. It was easy to make excuses for our team’s performance and why it wasn’t what it should have been. But I learned that good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.

ADVISOR: (401 to 600 points) An advisor is one of the most strategic ranks in a gang. They are the brains of the Mafia and strategize plans to keep the crew strong and profitable. They are the mastermind behind Mafia. Advisor design action plans to reach goals. They prepare plans, so soldiers take calculated risks to achieve the gang's goals while maintaining secrecy. They are the most trusted and closest to the godfather. You are wise and calm like Advisors in a gang. Your friends and family ask you for advice. You are most likely book-smart and intelligent. You devise plans to achieve your goals. Appropriate careers for you can be as a teacher or a scientist. Although you are mostly not leading the group, you are a special person for the leader. You are primarily introverted and live in your mind a lot.

Kid, are you looking to enter the city? It’s five copper coins to get in, but since you’re young and you look hungry, we’ll give you a discount—three copper coins to get in.” The guard was the leader of the crew going off-shift. He had a little girl around Cha Ming’s age, and he had a bit of leeway with entry permits. Cha Ming fished through his belt pouch and took out his last two copper coins. It was the last of the money his parents had left him, and he didn’t know how he would be able to gain a third coin. Noticing the reluctant look in the youngster’s eyes, the guard frowned. Cha Ming’s eyes darted down as he heard the dull sound of a coin hitting the stony city road. “You dropped a coin,” the guard muttered softly. “I have a few young kids your age. Kids always do careless things like dropping coins when paying.” Seeing the gentle look in the guard’s eyes, Cha Ming quickly took the hint and picked up the coin,

Back in Pearl Harbor, we visited the USS Bowfin submarine museum and called it officer training. I was worried that the crew would think some of these things tacky, but that wasn’t the case. It helped provide organizational clarity into what we were about—the why for our service. USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.

Groups like SEAL teams and flight crews operate in truly complex environments, where adaptive precision is key. Such situations outpace a single leader’s ability to predict, monitor, and control. As a result, team members cannot simply depend on orders; teamwork is a process of reevaluation, negotiation, and adjustment; players are constantly sending messages to, and taking cues from, their teammates, and those players must be able to read one another’s every move and intent. When a SEAL in a target house decides to enter a storeroom that was not on the floor plan they had studied, he has to know exactly how his teammates will respond if his action triggers a firefight, just as a soccer forward must be able to move to where his teammate will pass the ball. Harvard Business School teams expert Amy Edmondson explains, “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” Without this trust, SEAL teams would just be a collection of fit soldiers

I have to ensure that everyone has a voice,” Aaron said when I asked him about his most important responsibility as a team leader. “There were times when it was awesome to have the flight engineer’s opinion, but there were a couple times where he treated his perspective as the end-all be-all.” That was when Aaron intervened. He asked others on the crew to offer their view. “Tom, what do you think?” “Petty Officer Robbins, what about you?” This is an important point about psychological safety: it needs to be cultivated lest crucial voices be lost. Making sure that everyone is heard is not a matter of good manners or inclusivity for its own sake. Rather, it’s what helps to keep an aircraft in the air and to safely land it.

The leader of the Harlequin Crew is a badly bred ruffian with all the decorum of a crab in a bucket of lobsters, but he seems like a man of his word.

the role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. If the captain provides direction and protection, the crew will do what needs to be done to advance the mission.

He saw his judgments as “something you polish.” You look for confirming evidence and get tunnel vision. Judgments close your mind in dynamic situations, and you miss important but subtle bits of information that are critical to success. In many instances Gleason believed that if the leader made sense he could let go and have the crews make their own decisions.

1Lt Charles Matteffs, platoon leader first platoon C/1-61. He was instrumental in keeping alive the 22 survivors of his trapped platoon and several helicopter crews on 12 Nov 1969 until they were rescued in the wee hours of 13 Nov 1969 by Captain Blunt and a volunteer patrol in Starr Valley. Also later in his tour, he became Scout Platoon Leader of 1-61 (courtesy Charles Matteffs).

In the end, the U.S. admirals consoled the grief-stricken families of the Scorpion crew while promoting a false cover story on how the submarine was lost. Their Soviet counterparts did even less for the families of the men of the K-129, merely announcing weeks after the loss that the submarine and its crew were gone. The men who were lost, the ninety-nine men of the Scorpion and the ninety-eight men of the K-129, gave their lives in the service of their country. In return, their military leaders robbed the families of a full accounting of how their men had perished. The men of the USS Scorpion fell in combat.

During LaPorte’s wake, Accardo and Aiuppa reportedly huddled in the corner of the Hirsch’s West End Funeral Home holding court and in conference to determine the next leader of the Chicago

Extreme Ownership—good leadership—is contagious,” I answered. “Boat Crew Two’s original leader had instilled a culture of Extreme Ownership, of winning and how to win, in every individual. Boat Crew Two had developed into a solid team of high-performing individuals. Each member demanded the highest performance from the others. Repetitive exceptional performance became a habit. Each individual knew what they needed to do to win and did it. They no longer needed explicit direction from a leader.

(the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.

Greeks worshiped Achilles. He chose death! He could have chosen a long and comfortable life. Greeks had a word for this kind of life: “by his mother’s side.” It was almost poetic formula. It’s said of Jason, leader of the Argonauts and his crew, and of what they chose against. But Jason and his crew chose instead a great voyage into the unknown and great fame. Achilles chose a short life of war, and he chose death to avenge his friend. He thereby won eternal fame among men. Theseus chose danger, a great voyage, the Labyrinth: he saved his homeland from a foreign beast that devoured its choicest young every year. Who will be our Theseus?

Through trial and error, the crew arrived at a body of practices and principles that were dramatically more effective than those within the leader-follower model. It was only toward the end that we understood we had replaced the leader-follower model with the leader-leader model.

the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

A tyrant, in the future, is about to retire and turn over the 3 or so planets he controls to a younger aspirant. The young wife of the tyrant, however, wishes control to go to her, and to prove to her husband what a dreadful leader the aspirant would make. All time-travel experiments have failed, but there is a theoretical possibility that alternate presents could be reached. Instigated by the tyrant's wife, a research crew begins the job. MEANWHILE, the aspirant has let no grass grow beneath his feet; he responds to Project Alternate by hiring one of Earth's larges industrial corporations to build a fake alternate world, in which he rules, and all is wonderful. Now comes the tour de force. The tyrant's young wife learns about the construction of a fake alternate world. Her response: she engages a team of clever experts—along the lines of that in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE—to worm their way into the fake alternate world and plant fake fakes there, which will give it all away when the tyrant is brought to visit it. All seems clear at this point. The aspirant is having a fake alternate world being made; the tyrant's wife is busily subverting it. But—aha! Everyone's scheme is brought down in a great crash when a real alternate present is reached. The tyrant sets out to visit it—naturally. But it bears no relation at all to their own world. It is a 'board-game' world, with squares and the possibility of moving from one square to the next. Each square is a sort of alternate world on its own; the squares differ that much from one another in tone, structure, mood, color, with the characters themselves altering to fit into the Geist of each square. On one square, for example, all food tastes marvelous. On the next square, milk is a deadly poison. And so on. Ultimately, the characters discover the nature of this world: each square represents a particular mushroom, and that of a poisonous mushroom is a poisonous micro-world . . . the morel square, of course, being nearly on a level with heaven.

they were the oddest couple: Perot, the crew-cut, buttoned-down, uber-patriotic, navy veteran bankrolling a former hippie who still preferred to go barefoot, was a vegetarian, and didn’t believe in using deodorant. And yet I now knew Steve well enough to understand that he and Perot, whom I’d interviewed a few times, were actually kindred spirits: both were idiosyncratic, idealistic autodidacts.

Consider some of the directives to see how unreasonable they were. The one issued on 21 December 1993, for instance, said that crew members could go on leave at any time. They would not have to give advance notice and, by implication, could walk out of a flight at the very last minute. This directive, when seen in the context of an earlier agreement, which said that a flight was not allowed to take off without a full crew complement, ensured that the unions had the power to ground a flight if their demands were not met or if they wanted to hold the management to ransom. All they had to do was ask one of their members to opt out of a flight just before take-off, which they did quite frequently, and the management would have to come scrambling to their doorstep. On several occasions, the in-flight service officers posted at the airport had to call me up in the dead of night to report that the crew complement rule was leading to a flight delay and I would have to speak to the union leaders for a waiver or convince an air-hostess who had been promoted to the officer grade—and was therefore not a member of the union—to fly instead.

Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement and champions of Sarah Palin, with whom Bannon was close, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to drive the 2013 government shutdown.

Based on information recently revealed about the clandestine osnaz, a strong case can be made that the extra men inserted on the K-129 fit the description of a KGB osnaz unit. A special operations unit would have had the skills needed to position and launch a missile, after coercing or incapacitating the K-129 officers and senior crew. One other skill attributed to the special troops that would have been a factor in such an attempt is their training in defeating sophisticated locks and security systems. This training might have led the leaders of the takeover to overestimate their ability to bypass K-129’s missile fail-safe system.

Both GRU spetsnaz and KBG osnaz teams disguised themselves as enlisted men and mingled on special assignments with regular military units, including submariners. The special operations units were broken into teams of eight to ten men with an officer, warrant officer, or senior petty officer in charge. This unit description corresponds to the odd group of sailors who boarded K-129 at the last minute. That group numbered ten men and a leader wearing the insignia of a senior petty officer. It was later reported that, while a number of crew replacements came from other submarines in the Kamchatka Flotilla, the origin of this last group of eleven men has never been determined—or at least never been reported by Russians authorities writing about the K-129 incident.

Ironically, the relatively simple fail-safe device that may have prevented doomsday was probably supplied by the Americans. In the 1960s, small groups of military science and technology specialists in the United States and the Soviet Union had secretly cooperated in a program to prevent an accidental or rogue nuclear war from breaking out. Even as the leadership of both states belligerently rattled their nuclear sabers in public, there was quiet cooperation to prevent the deliberate misuse of nuclear weapons. Of particular concern was the theft or unauthorized appropriation of one or more nuclear weapons by terrorists, a lone madman, or a rogue air force or naval crew. In the case of the K-129 incident, a small group of American scientists—and a highly secret decision by President Lyndon Johnson to share classified, nuclear fail-safe technology with Soviet leaders—may well have prevented the obliteration of an American city and a potential third world war.

To me, the spectacle of demagogues sending millions of people to their deaths, wrecking the world with holy wars and bloodshed, tearing down whole nations to put over some religious or political ‘truth’ is—” He shrugged. “Obscene. Filthy. Communism, Fascism, Zionism—they’re the opinions of absolutist individuals forced on whole continents. And it has nothing to do with the sincerity of the leader. Or the followers. The fact that they believe it makes it even more obscene. The fact that they could kill each other and die voluntarily over meaningless verbalisms . . .” He broke off. “You see the reconstruction crews; you know we’ll be lucky if we ever rebuild.

Contemplating provisions that Balfour, the leader of the Opposition, deplored as ‘vindictive, inequitable [and] based on no principle’26, the Lords embarked upon a counter-offensive. First into the fray were the dukes, the most senior-ranking peers, whose prestige was inextricably bound up with their great estates. To the Duke of Rutland, the Liberals were nothing but ‘a crew of piratical tatterdemalions’. The Duke of Beaufort expressed his desire to see Lloyd George set upon by ‘twenty couple of dog-hounds’. In anticipation of the state of poverty into which the Budget would throw him, the Duke of Buccleuch stopped his guinea subscription to the Dumfriesshire Football Club. The Duke of Somerset withdrew all his charitable subscriptions and sacked a number of his workers. Really, remarked an incredulous Margot Asquith, ‘the speeches of our Dukes have given us a very unfair advantage’.

It means if one single hair on your head is harmed, I would burn down the world to avenge you. Leaders only get one mark. There’s no harem of women under protection. It’s sacred. You only get one.