A Timeless Memorial Day Message

From the desk of Chuck Fuller, CEO of The Results Company

Thank you for joining us on the Saturday of this Memorial Day weekend.

I’m an avid student of military history, as regular readers well know. My father manned a 50-caliber machine gun on B-24 Liberators during World War II (which I wrote about in this space last year), so Memorial Day has always carried a special resonance with me. 

But I’d like to share with you today a theme deeper than simple remembrance, and that’s leadership. Memorial Day seems a fitting time to talk about leadership on the battlefield, but true and impactful leadership can exist everywhere, including around your own dinner table.

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I’ll begin by quoting what I consider the greatest oratory in the history of Western civilization, delivered by Winston Churchill in his first speech after becoming prime minister:

“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

In his book, 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell cites this speech to emphasize what he calls the Law of Victory. “I think that victorious leaders have one thing in common: they share an unwillingness to accept defeat,” Maxwell writes. “The alternative to winning is totally unacceptable to them. As a result, they figure out what must be done to achieve victory.”

Churchill’s Great Britain, and later, Roosevelt’s America, epitomized this leadership mentality. There was no fallback, no Plan B. They walked the tightrope without a net, and there’s something terrifying about that, yes, but also profoundly energizing. Most leaders, of course, will never face a true existential threat. But operating as if they have no net – by choosing a path forward and committing to it – forces them to “really figure out what must be done to achieve victory,” according to Maxwell.

In the same book, he also writes about leadership that extends beyond the famous episodes recounted in history books and in movie theaters. “Every leadership situation is different,” he writes. “Every crisis has its own challenges.”

Maxwell makes his point through a metaphor about navigating a ship. “Leaders who navigate do more than control the direction in which they are going. They see the whole trip in their minds before they leave the dock. They have a vision for their destination, understand what it will take to get there, know who they’ll need on the team to be successful, and recognize the obstacles long before they appear on the horizon.”

This formulation of leadership as vision applies as much to the C-suite executive as to the parent sitting around the dinner table. The circumstances will change: A business may face a downturn, or a teenage son may experience life’s early challenges. But in any circumstance, the effective leader assesses the situation with an eye toward the desired outcome and leads others toward that vision.

In concert, these two leadership themes – committing to an outcome and conjuring the vision to achieve it – have applications in every facet of life, at least in my experience. 

And to what end do we lead, whether it’s our family or our business, or a military unit?

I turn to Billy Graham’s 1955 A Timeless Memorial Day Message for the answer:

“As I stood in the hospital quarter of the Danish ship ‘Jutlandia’ in Korean waters by an American boy scarcely 20 years of age and watched helplessly as this young life ebbed away, I thought: What right have thousands of pleasure-seeking Americans to go on living when this lad in the early flower of youth has to die? And in that moment, the fact dawned on me that if he had to die for America, some of us must live for America. Sometimes it is far more difficult to live than it is to die. They have handed us a torch, and we have a responsibility to see that they have not died in vain.”

Sometimes it is far more difficult to live than it is to die. 

I take that line to mean that, on this Memorial Day and every day, we’ve been passed the baton. It’s up to every one of us to lead those in our own spheres of influence and to carry our great national experiment forward. In doing so, we resolve that the deceased we honor on Memorial Day did not pass in vain. 

Ponder these thoughts during this time of remembrance.

May you and your family enjoy a blessed weekend.

Respectfully,