Thought, and other crimes

Martin Sheen and a romantic military trope explain corporate reality

1st Lieutenant Rowan spent eight days on horseback traversing the mountains of Cuba, though I like picturing him in the jungle | Credit: Mike Blank

Harvard Business School graduates consider themselves extremely entitled. Or so the reputation goes.

Yet the same is said of millennials or, for that matter, the average recent college graduate.

But is there a greater sense of entitlement as generations issue forth from wombs — and then schools — inexorably over time? Maybe. But Elbert Hubbard apparently thought entitlement was already at its peak when he wrote “A Message to Garcia” — back in 1899(!).

Hubbard’s famous essay is de rigeur for new entrants, “plebes,” at the U.S. Naval Academy, wherefrom this author graduated. The story itself is a kind of one-line refrain spoken occasionally among servicemembers, setting a foundation for the way in which military officers think about leadership. Though it is telling that the story is used more often in jest and cynicism than in serious discourse.

If you’ve never read it, put on your best robber-baron monocle, picture late-19th century geopolitics, and give it a try (free PDF).

In “A Message to Garcia” we see Army 1st Lieutenant Rowan tapped by U.S. President William McKinley to take an important dispatch to Cuban insurgent General Calixto García: “somewhere […]…