“All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
Back when future Hall of Fame coach Bill Belichick was a former head coach after a largely failed stint with the Cleveland Browns, he famously offered his opinion in a very tense moment about an upcoming play over the mic that connected all the coaches to one another, including head coach Bill Parcells. His analysis proved correct as the subsequent play revealed. An exasperated Parcells replied with “Yeah, you’re a genius, everyone knows it, a goddamn genius, but that’s why you failed as a head coach.”
Belichick’s light or heavy insubordination came to mind while reading Marc Wortman’s fascinating new biography, Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power. In the U.S. military culture, being right has been known to be the path to bad fitness reports and a failure to advance in an up-and-out culture. As a consequence, officers are known to be political as opposed to officious. Oh well, as Wortman’s new book makes plain, Hyman Rickover was the opposite of political. And the U.S. Navy enjoyed immense progress during his service as a result.
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