At the end of the movie “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade explains his personal code to Mary Astor. He tells her, “When your partner is killed, you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t matter what you thought of him. You’re supposed to do something about it…” But there is a larger lesson here. When problems exist, you have to do something. You have to take action to fight the problems. Running away to live a life of narcissism and selfishness is not what men do.
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When things have reached a state of paralysis or gridlock, it is often necessary to shatter the paralysis by taking decisive, muscular action. Real leaders do not sit on their hands and wait to test the prevailing winds of opinion. Have the moral courage to act. Many today who call themselves “leaders” ignore or have forgotten this principle. This podcast discusses three historical examples taken from Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis. They show how he harnessed this concept in 1919 to break through the paralysis that had come to surround several difficult issues.
The willingness to do what is necessary is an essential condition of success in any enterprise. There are those who are willing to do what is necessary, and those who are not.
We discuss an anecdote from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” and several other historical examples, to bring these points into focus.
Quintus Curtius 
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