Marching on an enemy camp in 1861, Ulysses Grant found it abandoned and understood the other colonel had been as afraid of him as he was of them. He had never before thought about the fear and uncertainty of the opposing side.
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
In the Jātaka tale of the monkey king, the leader sacrifices himself for his troop's safety.
Before he proposed, Charles Darwin worked the decision out on paper in two columns, weighing what each path would cost him.
Richard Titmuss argued that Britain's volunteer blood system produced safer blood than America's paid one. A Swedish experiment later offered donors a small payment and found it cut women's willingness to give almost in half. The lesson is about what a price tells people.
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