Imagine managing a project with nineteen sponsors, each with their own unique, personal, political agendas. This is the situation the present NATO supreme allied commander, General Wesley Clark, faces. Imagine the quality of direction you'd receive as a military commander working within this system. The whats and hows would get pureed into an indistinguishable mess. I guess that the sponsor "coalition" insists upon deciding things that they have no business deciding, making decisions on issues requiring extensive technical experience and the attending judgment that only extensive experience brings. They will, like all sponsors, imagine strategies that have no chance for success in the real world. They will, again, like all sponsors, insist upon the impossible even to their own demise.

Joulwan comments: "In a democracy, you owe it to your political leadership to really lay out the military options and what the risks are if your military advice is not taken. You have to become part of the conversation. Disagreement is not disrespect or disloyalty. Or do you just go along to get along?"

There is a notion, ancient and certainly wrong, that a good soldier follows even bad orders. Current military theory says that a good soldier has a higher responsibility than simple abrogation to the chain of command. Each soldier must filter orders through their highest sense of professional responsibility. "Follow orders, yes. But follow orders informed by your blunt military advice," Joulwan advises.

Project team members experience this dilemma daily. How should you respond when directed to do something that makes no sense? If you have learned to stuff your offended sense of professionalism, you'll serve your leader as poorly as you serve yourself. Leadership never was about making all the decisions. Nor was it ever about being omniscient. Leadership is about helping the community make coherent sense out of the disparate perspectives surrounding them. Leading is impossible without the benefit of dissenting perspectives. Going along to get along is first unprofessional and ultimately self destructive.

Each of us is clueless in our own way. The most clueless among us are those who believe themselves to be clued in. Leaders who assert their superior perspective usually prove just how clueless they are. Followers who wait for wise direction wait a very, very, very long time.

The Spanish colonial viceroys learned how to manage as Joulwan suggests. Each viceroy reported directly to the king. Imagine the difficulty reporting to someone who lived half a world away, with whom a single message might take eighteen months between query and response. The viceroys learned that they could rarely implement the king's direction without first interpreting it in a way that best served the king's intent. Their justification for this intervention was simple. "The king is wise," they reasoned, "and since the king is wise, he would never ask us to implement an order that did not best serve his interests." To preserve the king's wisdom, then, each viceroy took it upon themself to interpret the king's direction in a way that best preserved the king's unassailable wisdom. The alternative was to make the king less than wise, and few things rival the frustration of working for a stupid king.