Years ago, I became immune to having reactions to mosquito bites after getting bitten over a hundred times in a 20-hour timespan by at least 3 types of mosquitoes, one of which was Aedes Aegypti (the stripey bastards that carry Dengue Fever).
I always knew that the redness, itching, and swelling was an autoimmune response to the introduction of certain proteins present in mosquito saliva, so I'm wondering if it's possible to override that response by introducing enough saliva (with myself as a prime example), and what the wider implications of that are.
Not naive at all. This is an accurate picture of how we were taught to approach decisions - that every soldier was someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's loved one. As leaders, our decisions didn't carry just the burden of their lives, but the lives of everyone else who would be affected.
> If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).
And you are absolutely right. I knew officers who didn't care about their soldiers and saw them solely as underlings. If I had my way, they would have never seen the privilege of command.
This is a much more accurate reflection of how the military handles empathy. Empathy is in no means antithetical to professionalism.
If anything, empathy is a key trait for effective leadership because it engenders trust between leaders and subordinates. Soldiers are neither robots nor imperial stormtroopers. We don't shun basic expressions of humanity for the sake of it, and certainly not as a general rule.
> I wonder if people are confusing a “tough” or “accountable” culture with an uncaring one.
And this is EXACTLY what I meant in my article when I said people frequently misunderstand the concept of professionalism.
This isn't an article about winning wars, and I'm not advocating that building great teams is a guarantor of success.
This is a guide for those who have decided on their own that they want to focus on building a great team, because their personal assessment is that a great team is what they need to succeed.
Precisely this. I wrote this as a rebuke of assertions that lessons in the military are only valid in the military, and that they aren't useful elsewhere because "this isn't the Army."
I personally served with plenty of Singaporean-Malays. My first Officer Commanding was Malay. The idea that their faith renders them a risk is not a view we hold.
Team-sports actually was an example I used in an initial draft re: professionalism (the idea that you leave everything on the field when the game ends) but I ultimately dropped it because I was stacking one analogy on top of another.