Organizational Body Language

摘要

A year or so ago, I watched Thirteen Days, a movie about the John F. Kennedy administration's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie was interesting and compelling, and it featured some very impressive performances. The moment that I found most arresting-for reasons that had only partly to do with the plot-took place in the White House situation room, where the president and Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, are desperately trying to manage the rather bellicose Joint Chiefs of Staff as they impose a blockade on Cuba. At one point, a navy admiral orders his ships to fire a warning shot across the bow of a Soviet ship, and McNamara angrily confronts him. When the admiral defends his decision in military terms, McNamara erupts with these memorable lines: "This is not a blockade-this is language! A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen!"