About Face: A Book About Leadership
About Face is the remarkable story of a young man who rose from beingan army enlistee who snuck in under the wire with false identification atthe age of 15, who rose through field promotion to commissioned officer onthe battlefield in Korea at the age of 20 because of his recognized abilityto lead. By the end of the book, however, Hackworth is disillusioned bythe Viet Nam War. He moves to Australia to live in what the book jacketdescribes as "self-imposed exile." The story of how Hackworth transformedhimself from a 15 year old who signed up because he thought he would besurrounded by beautiful German blondes in post-World War II German, tofield hero and commander, to quiet expatriate, is a remarkable story thatdemonstrates traits of exceptional leadership at every step of the way. Hackworth was an orphan who had lost both of his parents by age 1.One can only speculate that this left him having to depend more uponhimself than other children might have, and perhaps have tended to make himrely more on his own judgment. Hackworth was raised by his grandparents,who were strongly independent people living in a small town in Coloradobefore the turn of the century, so he also had good role mod
After he did this, he resigned his commission and left the army. This wasparticularly painful for him because he had seen the battlefield save theworld from tyranny as an adolescent, had helped maintain that peace at avery young age, and helped prevent China from conquering a weaker neighborin the early fifties. And yet, when he decided that the war was wrong, he went against allthe rules of a good office and spoke out to the media against the Viet Namwar. After distinguishing himself on the battlefield inthe early days of Viet Nam, he even served as an information office,"selling" the Viet Nam War for the Pentagon in 1967. Another trait common to good leaders is honesty instead of bombast andbragging. There are several pieces of evidence that Hackworthdid not write this book out of a case of raging ego. However, when Hackworthenlisted, he rapidly found out that his new Army life would not be what heexpected. Hackworth showed that in the example above, and it is evidentthroughout the book. If Hackworth was lonely during basic training he doesn't mention it,but as soon as he was deployed, to post-war Italy, he discovered thatEurope was really in no position to provide him a beautiful young woman tosit on each knee. He did not hider as one would a co-writer; hegives her equal billing on the manuscript. An outstanding leader never puts morals and valuesin cold storage, and even though Hackworth was one of the most decoratedsoldiers of this century in the United States, He did not let himself beseduced by either power or praise. Second, he worked extremelyhard to verify the circumstances of each war story, realizing that warstories tend on to take a heroic bent with some things exaggerated andothers glossed over. This took tremendous personal courage on his part and showed another traitof outstanding leaders: he was willing to look at the circumstances aroundhim, decide if he and those he worked with were doing the right thing, andwas willing to speak up when changes needed to be made.
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