'Knock It Off' on Health Care: Firing Line
When I was a fighter pilot we would brief our "Training Rules" before getting into our jets to conduct training missions.
We considered these rules written in blood, and we strictly adhered to them. Early in the history of air-to-air training there weren't too many guidelines for training missions and the mishap rate reflected this. Midair collisions and crashes caused by insufficient fuel were common, as were crashes caused by pilots flying "outside the envelope" and losing control of their planes.
Today we still lose an occasional aircraft due to a training rule violation, but the mishap rate is a fraction of what it used to be.
If you observed an aircraft violating a training rule, or you violated one yourself, you called "Knock it off!" over the radio. As soon as those three words were heard, everything stopped. Red and blue aircraft returned to their starting locations and the unsafe situation was sorted out. If the situation wasn't too serious, the exercise continued. If not, everyone returned to base. Either way, the violation was thoroughly debriefed to figure out what happened and how it could be avoided in the future.
Tomorrow when the president speaks he should call "Knock it off!" on this health care exercise. There are too many red and blue aircraft in the same piece of sky and I've seen numerous training rule violations on both sides.
Americans tend to distrust the government, usually for good reason, and the administration has sufficiently clouded the discussion. Americans are also a forgiving people. We like when someone stands up and says "I messed up." This is the sign of a true leader. Bill Clinton learned this the hard way in the Lewinsky affair. Everyone knew he wasn't telling the truth, and had he admitted his indiscretion earlier the country wouldn't have been subjected to the red-faced finger-waving and the not-too-genuine
mea culpa
.
When leaders admit mistakes, they take a short-term hit, but they often are successful over the long term. Starting with a clean sheet of paper, a leader can debrief what led to the situation and improve things going forward.
There are some on the left who want to press forward with this unsafe situation no matter what, and they'll lose some large aircraft in the process. Sens. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) are running out of fuel in their home states and will most likely flame out by Election Day. There are some on the right in this exercise who want the fight to continue without calling "Knock it off!" so they can capitalize on the loss. This will be seen for what it is, and kicking someone when they're down isn't viewed as fighting fair. You don't shoot a guy when he's hanging in his parachute.
At the end of the day, red and blue aircraft in our military are on the same team and want to win together. We get in a room after the exercise and debrief what went right, what went wrong and how we're going to get better as a result of the mission. We shake hands and press forward.
Firing line: The health care/health insurance debate needs to focus on targeted problems and not the entire system. President Obama needs to use his charisma and goodwill, both fading rapidly, to press the reset button to "start." By calling "Knock it off!" tomorrow he will prevent things from getting too far out of control and display the ultimate trait of a good leader: the ability to say "I messed up."
Matthew "Whiz" Buckley is the Managing Partner of
, a business-consulting firm specializing in leadership development, risk management, and strategic planning for Fortune 500 companies and related organizations. Whiz flew the F-18 Hornet for the U.S. Navy. He's a graduate of TOPGUN, has close to 400 carrier landings, and flew 44 combat sorties over Iraq. He transitioned to the business world after he was scheduled to fly his first flight as an airline pilot on 9/11. Instead, he ended up flying combat air patrol over the U.S. He rose rapidly though corporate America, starting as Managing Director of Strategy at a Wall Street firm, to CEO of a financial media company. He is an internationally recognized speaker and combined his unprecedented experiences in the military and corporate America in the writing of From Sea Level to C Level.
