“The Fog of War” Documentary in Business Practice

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Table of Contents

Empathize with your enemy
Belief and seeing are both often wrong
You can’t change human nature
Get the data
In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
Works Cited

The focal point of the paper is to evaluate the five learning from the documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Errol Morris. This documentary was produced by Michael Williams & Julie Ahlberg and was released by the United States Sony Pictures on 21 May 2003. This documentary layout some very important strategic and tactical goals of war that are perfectly aligned with the hospitality industry or can be translated into business practices. This will demonstrate how strategy is the same regardless of its context. The five of R.S. McNamara’s eleven life lessons can be enumerated as Empathize with your enemy, You can’t change human nature, Get the data, Belief and seeing are both often wrong, and In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

Empathize with your enemy

In other words, this means one should always be aligned with the adversary to solve the given problem with the trust factor. The situation that exists in a company often indicates a low level of trust between management and workers. The level of trust between workers themselves appears to be high due to their unwillingness to divulge facts like names and incidents. Trust between workers themselves and between workers and the management is very important, and the management should see to it that it is built. This is also the case between supervisors and middle and top management. Of the lot, the supervisors seem to be the most isolated. They appear not to have the trust of the top management and the workers below. The supervisors themselves reciprocate the feeling.

More open communication and socialization is one way to develop trust. This will be a slow process but should be taken up seriously. Supervisors and managers unwilling to cooperate should be transferred or terminated after a warning. This case is especially true for supervisors. This is the first level of official communication between the top management and the workers. This step will also help in gaining the trust of the employee.

They will feel that the management is serious about change. A people-oriented leadership style with a small mix of autocracy would be ideal in managing workers. A senior worker who has the trust of other workers maybe even being promoted to the post of supervisor. This is the method the management should empathize with the adversary at production, and strategy is extremely beneficial for the management.

Belief and seeing are both often wrong

In terms of business, theoretical knowledge is often secondary. Where business leadership is concerned, dependence on theory may lead to ramifications. Some critics feel that scientific methods are not applicable in the art of management, which mainly concerns human beings, such as Leadership formulation and management of Leadership. According to the efforts to manage, industry scientifically has worsened the relationship between the employers and the employees.

Their point of view is that, though, in the leadership framework, workers get absorbed into a comparatively more employee-friendly group-oriented associative work culture, but the feeling of individuality remains in them. This is a reason behind their halfhearted contribution to the progress of the organization. However, it is not so. In fact, using practices or policies of scientific methods of management like leadership construction or Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals, need trained mind, which is used to unbiased observation and is not amenable to hasty conclusions and untenable theories.

The leadership of a team of professionals instructs the managers to be detached and impartial. The development of industrial relations to make a company productive is an evolutionary process, depends on the initiative, constructive thinking, and discipline on the part of all engaged in the industry. The form of relationship between the employee and the management with which the unitary ideology is concerned is about hundred years old issue, and the most important aspect is understanding and not mere education. It can be stated that “belief and seeing are both often wrong,” but an understanding of a capable leader is always right. Thus, understands and sensitivity that is more important than beliefs.

You can’t change human nature

This concept is not new but is hardly evaluated. This can be used in the context of the business environment when applied to the workforce of an organization. Once this is understood, the manager can deal with the production line with efficiency. The efficiency of the manager of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals lies in not only making the employees work but to make them work willingly, sincerely and consciously, by employing new knowledge, new methods, new designs, new machines, and novel techniques of production and by allaying mistrust and antagonism.

It is obvious to mention that there is a huge amount of pressure on the managers, and it is still obvious the true leader is the one who is able to successfully negotiate this pressure. There are several outlets of this pressure, and some of them can be related to personal psychology too. With success or constant failure, a leader may tend to be more arrogant, over strict, ruthless taskmaster, and rigid. All these are personal problems, but when put into the parameters of a company or corporate house, these elements become very hard to digest and thus become detrimental for the company. However, it should be taken into consideration from the management point of view of the company and proper measures be taken. One good move is to incorporate a refreshed educative move. Another individual measure may include elaborate counseling by a professional management counselor.

The manager of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals under the aspects of Management principles can be defined as the art of creating industrial relations of any kind between people engaged in the industry. These can be stated as the relation between employers and employees, relation between individuals entering into commercial contracts, relation between investors, etc., in order to maintain true cooperation of all concerned along with motivating the entire deal into a positive favor.

Get the data

This is basically knowledge management. It is already realized that this time of knowledge era, a time when the value of knowledge has become greater than the value of physical products. This difference accounts for an organization’s Intellectual capital or, more specifically, its knowledge assets (i.e., everything the organization knows). Knowledge is now perceived as an asset that can enhance any organization, whether it is in the public or private sector. This change is having a profound impact on the world economy characterized by global competitiveness and constantly shifting markets; these knowledge assets can provide organizations with the competitive advantage they are looking for.

In this view, they can be considered knowledge-intensive businesses, and they, more than other services, need to keep their employee’s knowledge current and on the cutting edge. Training and competence development are critical for creating, maintaining, and renewing knowledge, and hence competitiveness. Whether concerned with structure, technology, culture, nonstandardized processes, and top management commitment, knowledge communication within an organization highly depends on the above. The existing organizational structure contributes to how knowledge is transferred and shared among DS, and these results in the existing communities of practices created by LES for creating and enhancing their own learning.

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil

This is the most controversial of all. However, it is the most effective measure at the same time. Ethics are often called upon when making a decision, especially when the choices become a simple matter of right or wrong. In many cases, the easier choice is often the unethical one. So does that, in fact, make it wrong? With so many differing opinions on the subject, it is hard to say for sure.

One particular view allows common ethics to be thrown by the wayside in order to achieve happiness for oneself. The view, or way of life for some, is known as utilitarianism. It is the Belief that good is whatever brings the greatest amount of happiness to the largest amount of people, thus meaning that those not included in the ‘largest amount of people will more than likely be left with some form of pain. That, in a broader view, is essentially what utilitarianism is – pleasure versus pain. Actions are right if they promote happiness and are wrong if they produce the reverse of happiness—not just the happiness of the performer of the action but also that of everyone affected by it.

Whether utilitarianism is ethical or not is a matter of opinion. If the utilitarian ideas are used by a moral-minded intelligent person, then it could be considered ethical and even just. As people, we are all programmed to want the same thing above all else – happiness. Utilitarianism recognizes that and sees that it is an intrinsic need found in every person. Therefore, to follow a way of life that considers what would make the largest majority of people happy could very well be the right thing. However, in some cases, happiness for one large group can, at times, mean immeasurable pain for a smaller group.

Thus, utilitarian views can be seen as ethical, but only when executed in an ethical manner or for good in the long term. Thus, a business can engage in evil if it is beneficial for the greater mass in the long term.

Works Cited

Morris, Errol; The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara; Michael Williams & Julie Ahlberg; United States: Sony Pictures; 2003.

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