Session 22

Class resources:

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP - AN EXAMPLE (continued)

In the second half of the movie, we focus more on the individuals.

You are watching one organization go about its tasks, but there was another organization dedicated to disrupting their efforts

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The intertwining of organizational needs and individual capacities

A blog posting from a previous class includes links to various takeaways from this movie. After you have seen the movie, look at them and ask yourself if these were the lessons you drew from the movie.

Elmer Bendiner's experience is also again instructive.

After a while my career as an amateur airplane spotter had a routine. It began early in the morning. The B-17 Flying Fortresses, heavy with their bomb loads, climbed slowly overhead to a height where a whole bomber group would form up and then head east over the North Sea.
Hours later they returned, no longer in tight formation but in clusters with obvious gaps where some had been lost. Finally came the stragglers, often with pieces missing from a wing or a tail. I recall one or two that managed to fly with half of a horizontal stabilizer missing or a wing tip half ripped off. Engines ran unevenly, sometimes coughing smoke.
Obviously, I had no idea of the hell that those aircrews had endured. As it turned out, one of the best accounts of that hell was later written by a B-17 navigator, Elmer Bendiner, who flew from that same base, in The Fall of Fortresses, an enduring classic of the World War II bombing campaigns.
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You don't have to read these unless you wish to, but we might touch upon them in conversation

Things to think about

This story about how people reacted to the missions they had to do is also instructive.

Hardwicke and his crew have trained and flown together for nearly a year and for the combat airman to shirk his duty, to fail a buddy, is unthinkable. Hardwicke, as commander, believes the least discipline is best. Treat the men fairly, and they will respond accordingly. Today, November 30, 1944, marks their 26th combat mission together.
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Things to keep in mind as you watch the second half of the movie

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SOMETHING TO TAKE AWAY

Past, present, and future

Past - Gene Krupa
In the PBS television series about the history of jazz music, it was mentioned that a 1938 concert in Carnegie Hall was the big breakthrough for jazz music into the American mainstream. But at the start of the concert, things were dragging and not looking good. Gene Krupa couldn't stand it and burst forth with a solo on his drums, a solo that no one had expected. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, At a groundbreaking Benny Goodman concert in Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, Krupa's sensational driving beat behind “Sing Sing Sing” ... defined him as the very model of a modern drummer.
Present - Bernard Purdie
... this prolific studio player grew up in Maryland before moving to New York in the early 1960s where he got his start doing sessions with jazz artists like Nina Simone and Gabor Szabo. Known for his intricate hi-hat "ghost notes," Purdue soon became one of the most in-demand drummers in the entire industry, serving as Aretha Franklin's musical director for several years when he wasn't busy recording with everyone from Steely Dan to Mongo Santamaria to Bob Marley. The question isn't who Pretty Purdie played with; it's who he hasn't.
Eight-year-old Yoyoka Soma's favorite drummer is John Bonham, so for her entry into the 2018 Hit Like A Girl drum contest, she covered Bonham's part on Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times." ... She absolutely smashes through the song with three foot pedals and polka dot socks putting in bass work. She's even got the facials and head banging down. And the dampening of the cymbal is a detail only a tenured drummer like herself could add.
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