Word: longman
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Before he caught United Airlines flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco on Sept. 11, Todd Beamer was engaged in a kind of soul searching that we have come to think of as very post-9/11. In Among the Heroes (HarperCollins), New York Times reporter Jere Longman writes that Beamer was tired of leaving his family for business. He was working at home more often. He had postponed his sales trip by one day to spend time with his sons and planned, after a day's work, to catch the red-eye home that night...
...Longman's answer is reminiscent of the pre-9/11 business-strategy tomes that explain success in terms of combat and athletic metaphors. "These were people at the top of their game," he writes, "who kept score in their lives and who became successful precisely because they were assertive." They were company presidents, managers, writers. They played sports--baseball, football, rugby, judo--and drew life lessons from them. They believed in the moral value of work. They expected the best of themselves and others (one passenger once went out to lunch and sent his cheeseburger back eight times...
...Longman's answer is reminiscent of the pre-9/11 business-strategy tomes that explain success in terms of combat and athletic metaphors. "These were people at the top of their game," he writes, "who kept score in their lives and who became successful precisely because they were assertive." They were company presidents, managers, writers. They played sports - baseball, football, rugby, judo - and drew life lessons from them. They believed in the moral value of work. They expected the best of themselves and others (one passenger once went out to lunch and sent his cheeseburger back eight times...
...These portraits are, like any obituary, colored by friends' and families' loving remembrances of the departed. But there is something else at work here. At times, Longman describes the passengers as if they were job candidates. They were "self-directed, independent thinkers," he writes, "people who could assess a situation and work in teams." If this reads like Management Secrets of Flight 93, in a way it is; Longman is explaining these heroes using the terms by which the world measured them. (And nearly a year and WorldCom later, it is heartening to see business skills treated as noble...
...also a reach. As Longman notes, Flight 93's passengers had a practical advantage: their flight was hijacked after the other three, and they learned about the suicide missions over cell phones and air phones. Any other explanation for their bravery is secondary. Of course you're going to find Type A, goal-oriented people flying cross-country on an 8 a.m. Tuesday flight. But what's to say that a planeload of weekend vacationers wouldn't have fought for their lives too? Nothing, except maybe a quasi-Calvinist assumption: success breeds virtue, and those who were leaders...