Leadership Excuses

Hindsight always seems to be twenty-twenty. I can write a story about how the Steelers lost the Super Bowl because they lack the unit cohesion and the esprit de corps that the Green Bay Pakers have. I could also probably make some fairly compelling arguments too. There was bad coaching, general management was terrible, and the players just were not motivated. This could all be true or false, but believable none the less. To say the Bay of Pigs invasion failed because of a psychological process known as “group think” is one possible reason the John F. Kennedy authorized Cuban exiles to fight against a force over one hundred and forty times their size. It is possible that the President was convinced the plan would succeed because there were many smart minds in the room and they all reinforced each other’s confidence. However, it is also possible that Kennedy sent the exiles in because they were expendable people willing to fight for a cause. It is a lot more politically tolerable to claim that many factors led to a bad decision and everybody was blinded by something, than to say that the President decided to send a bunch of people in to see what happened. This is not to say that group think is an illegitimate phenomenon by any means, but it does mean we have to be careful where we recklessly apply it. The failure in Cuba was definitely a result of miscalculations, but they may have just been caused by plain bad leadership.