The Uncredentialed Leader

Key Insights

Expertise can become a liability when contexts change unexpectedly
Leadership systems often reward past performance over future adaptability
Crises demand improvisation, not rigid adherence to doctrine
The most dangerous leaders are competent ones facing incompetent challenges
Historical patterns repeat when organizations fail to recognize contextual mismatch

The Structural Post-Mortem Series - When technical expertise leads to catastrophic failures
Economics Greed Series - How greed corrupts leadership and decision-making

References

Here are the combined references formatted as a numbered APA list.

Beevor, A. (1998). Stalingrad. Viking.
Cohen, E. A. (2002). Supreme command: Soldiers, statesmen, and leadership in wartime. Free Press.
Cohen, E. A., & Gooch, J. (1990). Military misfortunes: The anatomy of failure in war. Free Press.
Evans, D. C., & Peattie, M. R. (1997). Kaigun: Strategy, tactics, and technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941. Naval Institute Press.
Galbraith, J. K. (1954). The Great Crash, 1929. Houghton Mifflin.
Kahrl, W. L. (1982). Water and power: The conflict over Los Angeles’ water supply in the Owens Valley. University of California Press.
Keegan, J. (1987). The mask of command. Viking.
Outland, C. F. (2002). The St. Francis Dam Disaster revisited. Historical Society of Southern California.
Parshall, J., & Tully, A. (2005). Shattered sword: The untold story of the Battle of Midway. Potomac Books.
Peattie, M. R. (2001). Sunburst: The rise of Japanese naval air power, 1909-1941. Naval Institute Press.
Sampson, A. (1999). Mandela: The authorized biography. Knopf.
U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. (1931). Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Seventy-First Congress, third session, on operation of the national and Federal Reserve banking systems (S. Doc. 71-3). U.S. Government Printing Office.
Van Creveld, M. (1985). Command in war. Harvard University Press.
Worster, D. (1992). Rivers of empire: Water, aridity, and the growth of the American West. Oxford University Press.
Wylie, J. C. (1989). Military strategy: A general theory of power control. Naval Institute Press.

A chaotic aircraft carrier deck seen through rain-streaked windows at dawn.

The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 1: The Admiral Without a Fleet

The Uncredentialed Leader 1 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 1: The Admiral Without a Fleet 2 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 2: The General Who Refused to Retreat 3 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 3: The Banker Who Couldn't Save the Bank 4 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 4: The Engineer Who Built the Wrong Dam ← Series Home The Agony of a Single, Silent Minute At 7:28 AM on June 4, 1942, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo stood on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Akagi, wrestling with a command decision that would fracture the Japanese Empire. His scout plane had just radioed a terse, incomplete sighting: “Enemy ships sighted.” Not their composition. Not their bearing. Just their existence. This was the Battle of Midway’s pivot point, compressed into a vacuum of information. ...

A frozen WWII German helmet and broken glasses in cracked mud.

The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 2: The General Who Refused to Retreat

The Uncredentialed Leader 1 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 1: The Admiral Without a Fleet 2 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 2: The General Who Refused to Retreat 3 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 3: The Banker Who Couldn't Save the Bank 4 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 4: The Engineer Who Built the Wrong Dam ← Series Home The Frozen Perimeter of an Order In the hellish winter of 1942-43, the German 6th Army occupied not a city, but its corpse. Stalingrad was a frozen, shattered maze where the front line was a hallway, the enemy a silhouette in the next apartment block. At its center, in a makeshift headquarters in the Univermag department store, General Friedrich Paulus faced an impossible calculus. His 250,000 men were encircled, starving, and running out of ammunition. The temperature was -30°C. The only voice from outside the pocket was that of Adolf Hitler, crackling over radio: “Fortress Stalingrad will be held to the last man and the last bullet.” ...

A pyramid of blank stock ticker tape under a banker's lamp.

The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 3: The Banker Who Couldn't Save the Bank

The Uncredentialed Leader 1 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 1: The Admiral Without a Fleet 2 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 2: The General Who Refused to Retreat 3 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 3: The Banker Who Couldn't Save the Bank 4 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 4: The Engineer Who Built the Wrong Dam ← Series Home The Sound of a Bubble Bursting On the morning of October 24, 1929—Black Thursday—a low, gathering rumble echoed through the canyon-like streets of Lower Manhattan. It was not thunder, but the sound of thousands of stock tickers clattering in unison, printing losses. On the ninth floor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, a tall, austere man named George Harrison listened. As the acting governor, his mandate was simple: be the lender of last resort, the calm hand that steadied the financial system. Over the next week, he would try. And his efforts, constrained by orthodox thinking and a fundamental misdiagnosis of the crisis, would help turn a market crash into the Great Depression. ...

A close-up of a single crack seeping water in a concrete dam wall.

The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 4: The Engineer Who Built the Wrong Dam

The Uncredentialed Leader 1 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 1: The Admiral Without a Fleet 2 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 2: The General Who Refused to Retreat 3 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 3: The Banker Who Couldn't Save the Bank 4 The Uncredentialed Leader – Part 4: The Engineer Who Built the Wrong Dam ← Series Home The Sound That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, a low, groaning rumble echoed through San Francisquito Canyon, north of Los Angeles. It was not an earthquake. It was the sound of 12.4 billion gallons of water finding freedom. The St. Francis Dam, a 205-foot-tall curved concrete gravity dam, was disintegrating. In minutes, a wall of water up to 140 feet high would rip through the valley, killing over 400 people. At the epicenter of the disaster stood one man: William Mulholland, the self-taught engineering genius who had built the dam with his own hands, and under his sole authority. ...

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