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Moral Leadership – perhaps we need to bring back NAVPERS 15890


Today, many are focusing on lessons-learned in the Navy.  One might think about what we have forgotten in the Navy and what we have moved away from.  Progress is great, moving forward is useful – but, what have we forgotten?  We’ve moved away from some very sound principles in the Navy. Find NAVPERS 15890 and read it.  Moral Leadership is as important as ever.

This is from All Hands in 1958. . .

For your information, the Navy is starting a leadership program. In a sense, it broadens the character program of which you have heard. It applys to handling a ship’s boat, to servicing the guns, to scanning with radar.


It applies to the fighting man (or the man ready, able, willing to fight-if you prefer). It applies to leading and being led. Perhaps it most closely applies to the petty officer, the CPO and junior officer.  

For example, we were briefed on the program by an ex-POW. What he had to say opened our eyes. Inter-reliance; self-leadership; strength of character- these were the terms he used.  He used them to describe the men who had survived in POW camps. It was an object lesson to us.

We’re giving you some of his ideas, together with the principles of senior officers, past and present. A new manual, Moral Leadership (NavPers 15890), tells more about the program. You take it from there.

Remembering…7 short years ago. PO1 Ronny S. Vigilant is the first Sailor to be designated an Enlisted Information Dominance Warfare Specialist (EIDWS)

Ann Vigilant accepts a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, posthumously awarded to her son, Petty Officer 1st Class Ronny S. Vigilant, from Capt. Steven J. Ashworth, at Arlington National cemetery August 5, 2010. Petty Officer Vigilant, who died unexpectedly of natural causes on June 8, was instrumental as a subject matter expert during the initial phase of the Enlisted Information Dominance Warfare Specialist qualification program. For his critical contributions to the program, Ronny S.Vigilant was the first Sailor Navy-wide designated as an EIDWS.

IT1(SW) Ron Vigilant – “Sailor, rest your key. It’s silent now.  Your message is eternal.”

Tom Peters says that a great source of innovation is your angry people

Tom Peters has read hundreds of books about innovation and talked with thousands of people about it.  He has concluded that the best source for innovation is PoP: Pissed-off people. These are the people who are tired of the status quo and are determined to make a change. These are the folks who will go to the grave fighting to change things.  (Sound familiar – Sean Heritage, Rebecca Siders, Jason Knudson?)

They are the one who will overcome the inertia of stillness and change thing.  They overcome the resistance of the system. People universally don’t like to be changed.  The people pissed off about the status quo are willing to take the heat and fury of the people/system they are trying to change.  (We need more pissed off people apparently – COs would be a good place to start – STOP maintaining the status quo; shake things up.)

Juan Trippe was the founder of PanAm. And somebody wrote about him and said this: “What drove Trippe? A fury that the future was always being hijacked by people with smaller ideas—by his first partners, who didn’t want to expand air mail routes; by nations that protected flag-carriers with subsidies; by elitists who regarded flight, like luxury liners, as a privilege that could only be enjoyed by the few; by the cartel operators who rigged prices. The democratization he affected was as real as Henry Ford’s.”

And I think whether it’s Juan Trippe and an airline or, again, whether it is a 26-year-old who thinks a purchasing process is the stupidest thing that he or she has ever seen in their life, that is the source of innovation. What’s the bottom line? Don’t get rid of your angry and furious people who are annoyed at you by the way you do things now. Sure it can go too far.  If you believe what I’m saying, fury, anger, irritation—pissed-off people—is the only serious source of innovation. Only. Period. One. Singular. 

Handwritten letter


A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

Catherine Field – The New York Times