A Heart in His Throat

Something we’ve been thinking about

In the summer of 1861, Colonel Ulysses Grant marched his regiment toward a Confederate camp in northern Missouri, his first command against an armed enemy. He wrote later that as they approached, his heart kept rising until it felt as though it was in his throat. Then they crested the hill and found the camp abandoned. “It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.”

How we see it through leadership economics

At West Point, students are often shocked to find that game theory’s whole contribution is to add another person’s choices into your own decision-making. Just like Grant, economists had rarely thought so formally about how people might change their decisions based on their expectations of what others would do. The first lesson of game theory is that other people’s options, information, and uncertainty affect your best choice. Good leaders account for this naturally.

Most of us negotiate, compete, and even argue against caricatures, granting the other side a confidence and a clarity we know perfectly well we lack ourselves. Grant never made that mistake again. Of every enemy he faced afterward, he wrote, “I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.” Before a hard conversation, the same move is open to anyone: picture the other seat, and the mind in it that is as unsure as your own.

A line we’re sitting with

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator