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Air & Space Power Journal - Winter 2006

Reality Leadership

Prof. John Charles Kunich
Dr. Richard I. Lester

Leadership means different things to different people in different contexts, which accounts for the baffling spectrum of theories, models, and methods, all jockeying for the leadership vanguard. Every serious student of the subject has a personal opinion about leadership, even if he or she has not (yet) offered us a written record of it. But leadership is neither mystical nor mysterious, at least in the abstract, where theorists remain unencumbered with the messy chores of implementation and execution. That’s why people have written so much about it—everyone wants a quick solution, and it’s not hard to write some ideas that make sense on paper and that even sound rather scientific. But after we peel away all the layers of wrapping paper and wade through the packaging popcorn, leadership involves nothing more than making a difference, creating positive change, moving people to get things done, and getting rid of everything else that does not contribute to the mission. This means reinforcing core values, articulating a clear and powerful vision, and then setting people free to develop better ways and better ideas. Yes, most of the clichés are true: leadership entails trusting and giving authority back where it belongs—to the human beings who actually perform the great bulk of what we call work. Trust is the glue that holds organizations together, and empowerment is the fruit of trust. True—and far easier to say than to do.¹

Leadership by cliché will not work unless personal strength, character, skills, and performance lie behind the phalanx of platitudes. The sad truth is that it is never easy to be a leader—to cope with the myriad intractable challenges that come bundled with the territory. If it were easy, many more people would do it. We do not learn most of the useful leadership lessons from reading. As much as we might crave the swift, effortless, and low-impact fix from books and articles, that passive and painless process rarely can substitute for little things like ability, talent, upbringing, diligence, creativity, opportunity, personality, experience, courage, vision, drive, values, perseverance, and luck. If only we could squeeze the essence of those sweet secrets into words on a page and enable readers instantly to make up for decades of error, wasted time, poor habits, inaction, bad advice, ill fortune, and laziness! Maybe if we could conceive a catchy and sophisticated-sounding new name to disguise our refried old bromides—perhaps Eight Omega Leadership or the One-Second Ruler—it would suddenly become a panacea for our power outage. Alas, instant leadership remains only a fantasy, even in this age of perpetual gratification, high-speed Internet, and no-fault living. No extreme makeover of the superficial trappings of musty, rusty, and medieval management methods will trick reality for us. The virtual reality of the self-help cult is a poor understudy for no-kidding reality, as numberless frustrated managers discover to their dismay when they fail to wring miracles out of all those gleaming formulas. A wise person understands that leadership success is a process and not an event.

Assuming a leadership role in the real world today guarantees us a mixed bag—more accurately a perverse piñata, loaded with both good and bad surprises as our reward for all that effort to crack open the shell of success. Along with the obvious satisfaction and benefits come tough pressures and responsibilities. Leaders are expected to inspire lethargic people to do their best, handle problem personnel and bad attitudes with ease, make difficult or unpopular decisions before breakfast, maintain high credibility, fend off cutthroat competition from all over the planet, explain senior management’s inexplicable positions to staff members, and keep cool in the face of contentious disagreement and unfair criticism.² No wonder leaders would like a little help. Based on our experience, we will pass along some lessons we have learned about specific strategies, techniques, and ideas to help leaders live with the challenges unique to their role. These tips will probably not work overnight magic, morphing someone from Homer Simpson into Alexander the Great as he or she sleeps. Anyone looking for that type of happy-news leadership liposuction can put this article down now. Remember, this is reality leadership—not something in the fantasy section.

What Leaders Really Do

The best leaders do not start out with the question “What’s best for me?” Rather, they ask, “What can and should I do to make a positive difference?” These leaders constantly ask themselves and their followers, “What are the organization’s mission and goals? Do they need to be modified? What surprises might lie ahead that we need to anticipate? What constitutes winning performance in this fluid environment?” In these challenging times, leaders prepare organizations for change and help them adjust as they struggle through it. Leaders never fake it, and there are no shortcuts they can take, as they first learn all they can about the situation, including resources and obstacles, trends and unmet needs, as well as hidden potential and ossified misconceptions. Still, the all-knowing person does not make the best leader—the all-understanding one does. Now more than in the past, a leader cannot often act like a dictator/tyrant. The leader’s people have human needs, and in the modern era, in many quarters, they are accustomed to being treated with dignity, respect, and maybe even kid gloves.

People today need to know—demand to know—that the leader cares and will do his or her utmost to help them get the job done. An old-school General Patton wannabe who tries to shove a “my way or the highway” leadership model past the gritted teeth of today’s personnel will soon find himself discredited. Flexibility, sensitivity to individual circumstances, and a determination to empathize are more suited to the twenty-first-century workplace than the old leadership-through-intimidation paradigm. Just as people cannot lead from behind, they cannot lead solely by applying their soles to their workers’ behinds—not anymore, at least. And that is a hard lesson. Techniques that might have worked a few decades or centuries or millennia before are not guaranteed to work as well next week. They probably require serious adjustment before we can graft them onto a contemporary leadership style. After all, leadership is not arithmetic or Newtonian physics—closer analogues are chaos math and the quantum-mechanics world of the uncertainty principle. It is all about people, and people are ever-changing. The leader who does not know that, or who does not want to know that, is apt to find no one following his or her lead. Why not? Did not it work for Attila the Hun?³

The tried-and-true (and trite) old tricks often don’t work on the new dogs in this year’s workplace. The reason for that lies at the center of what reality leaders really do—and really need to do—to succeed now. People currently entering the workforce are different from the entry-level employees of even a couple of decades ago in ways that present a leader with a jumbled grab bag of adversities and advantages. They may have shorter attention spans, less acquaintance with strict standards, and lower experience with long, arduous tasks. Today’s young employees—even those with college diplomas and advanced degrees—may lack some basic skills and background knowledge once taken for granted. As our educational system has transformed—with much less emphasis on fact learning, rote memorization, and what used to be the fundamentals of reading, writing, mathematics, spelling, grammar, logic, and other disciplines—our graduates require much more critical thinking, remedial education, and training before they can perform at an acceptable level in many jobs. The leader has to provide that education and training. A progressive intellectual environment becomes possible only when critical thinking serves as the foundation of education. Why? Because when students learn to think through the core competencies they are learning, they are in a better position to apply this learning to their lives and daily work. In a world characterized by constant change and increasing complexity, people need critical thinking for economic, social, political, military, and educational survival.

Young graduates today have far more technological sophistication than the previous generation of new employees and usually can teach their leaders a thing or 60 about computer-aided research, software, hardware, and a host of powerful, modern tools. They can handle all manner of telecommunication and high-speed computerized methods with a facility that will astound many old-timer leaders who climb on a chair if someone mentions a mouse in the office. The wise leader is humble enough to use this digital edge to the fullest, even while filling in the young associates on some basic writing and sociocultural fundamentals.

Teacher-leaders cannot safely assume anything about new recruits in terms of knowledge, skill, or attitude—only that they are human and will surprise them in ways that range from delightful to dreadful. If entry-level employees (or even senior ones) appear to have a work-ethic deficit or seem disrespectful or ill mannered, no contemporary Attila can change all that by merely barking a few orders. People have a deep-seated and ineradicable need to achieve and succeed, but a modern leader must find the right way to access that latent potential within each individual, and this often entails considerable teaching and back-to-basics skill training in the workplace. Screams, threats, and periodic exclamations of “You’re fired” or “You just don’t fit in” will not compensate for decades of acculturation and educational priorities that are a bit (or a lot) off track from what the leader wants from his or her people. Teaching and learning remain central to what today’s leaders really do, and that continues throughout the life cycle of their relationship with their people. (That is why we touch on the concept of perpetual learning later in this article.) If a person ignores either teaching or learning for long, the leader’s office will soon house someone new who better “fits in” the twenty-first-century boss’s chair.

Healing an Achilles’ Heel

Primarily, leaders fail or fall short of their potential because they have an undiscovered and/or unhealed Achilles’ heel—a weakness serious enough to negate all of the many positive attributes they may be blessed with. It follows that perhaps one of the most important actions a leader can take is to find and rectify whatever hidden flaw threatens his or her future. This is unpleasant, painful, and arduous work; thus, most people never do it. No off-the-shelf text on liposuction leadership can swiftly suck out our latent and long-festering vulnerability while we recline and rest. Unless we face our flaws, we gamble that one day they will face us—at a moment when a single, unaddressed issue jeopardizes everything we have achieved, and one big “Oh, no” upends a career overflowing with “Attaboys.”

The metaphor of an Achilles’ heel is potent because legendary Achilles himself was a demigod and the greatest warrior who ever lived, virtually a one-man army capable of winning wars with his unmatched abilities for whatever side he favored. He could slay the enemy’s premier hero, even Hector of Troy, and conquer the mightiest of obstacles. Yet his famous heel was ever present throughout his astonishing string of marvelous triumphs, and at the climax of his crowning victory over Troy, it allowed a far inferior enemy to kill him. If a lowly heel can fell the ultimate military genius at the pinnacle of his power, all leaders would do well to check carefully for whatever vulnerability threatens their own success.

That does not mean that such self-inspection is fun or easy. No one, from Achilles on down, likes to confront his or her own imperfections—especially ones deep and deadly enough to provoke utter failure. Sometimes we have no awareness of our own worst weaknesses, at least on a conscious level, simply because it is far more comfortable to avoid them and pretend that all is fine than to wrestle with such pernicious internal perils. Moreover, some character defects manifest themselves only when a particular, specific combination of unusual circumstances coalesces, which might not happen more than once or twice in a lifetime—if at all. Staring long and closely at ourselves in a starkly lit mirror to identify those often well-concealed weaknesses can be challenging and repugnant work. It involves methodical analysis of often horrible memories of incidents in which things went very wrong. When and why did this happen? Has it recurred? Could it recur?

All of us could also effortlessly critique many leaders—great and not-so-great, ancient and modern—and catalogue the flaw or cluster of flaws that undermined them. From Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander the Great to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, it is so easy for us to play Name That Heel that one wonders why these prominent individuals did not do it themselves and proactively root out all those inimical defects. How could they not see their glaring blind spots? Why would such successful and eminently experienced leaders make colossal blunders—even make them repeatedly—when the consequences seem so obvious and predictable to us in our retrospection recliners? We can help ourselves to a few cheap laughs at the Big Boys’ expense. But then, when it is our turn to literally help ourselves by putting our own character under the microscope, the game jumps suddenly to a much more challenging and decidedly less festive level.

Completely eliminating our greatest weakness may prove impossible, given that it likely formed through many years of experience. At a minimum, however, we ought to identify and then stay away from those specific temptations, situations, preconditions, and circumstances that have proved their potential to breach that weakness and thereby cause our downfall. By gaining cognizance of the existence and nature of our Achilles’ heel, we acquire the opportunity to be alert to whatever warning signals tip off the approach of our special combination of dangerous conditions and therefore exercise extra caution to guard against giving in to our weakness. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde famously but erroneously declared, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,” but actually the best remedy is to understand the temptation and what causes it, strive constantly to remain removed from those causes, stay vigilant for early signs of trouble, and then use all our strength to resist surrender.⁴ Doing nothing along these lines makes it far more probable that one day people will gossip about our own stunning failure and shake their heads that we could throw our once-promising careers away on something so blatantly foolish and so entirely obvious (to others) that we should never have gotten caught up in it. Finding and healing our Achilles’ heel (or heels) can be one of the greatest favors we ever do for ourselves, our people, and our organization.

Service, Not Self

As young children, we tended to believe that being a leader is an unqualified blessing, amounting to getting our own way all the time and calling all the shots. That might be a fair description of a despotic dictator who rules with an iron fist tightly clenched around a bundle of fear and force. Such tyrants live and die by violence and threats, and their methods have no place in a modern free society—even though some megalomaniacs might imagine themselves as divine-right royalty within their little domains. Paradoxically, in our contemporary, self-centered, Me Century culture, where narcissism and self-esteem are paramount, the best leaders put service to others before service to themselves. To lead people who put themselves first, we would do well to check our own egos at the door and focus on what is best for our people, organization, and culture.

This concept of servant leadership is as old as humanity, but we are fated to relearn it every generation. It feels backwards, as if the leader must put aside the perquisites and privileges of the crown to stay on top—almost abdicating the throne to keep it. But authentic leadership does not involve serving ourselves, and self-aggrandizement remains foreign to the true leader, whose proper aim is to move people to do what is best for the greater good—not what is best for the leader’s petty and narrow personal interests. Only by regarding the broader interests of others—employees, colleagues, customers, and so­ciety—can leaders prevail in a world where people routinely expect to be first. Of course, over time a leader will strive to impart some measure of other-regarding selflessness to his or her employees as well and move the entire organization into a service mode—but this plan unavoidably begins with the leader’s own attitude.⁵

Humility, a modest sense of one’s own importance, is basic to reality leadership. For people weaned on a formula of high self-esteem, humility and self-sacrifice would appear oxymoronic—a concept blatantly at odds with itself. But that is precisely why it is so crucial to productive leadership. It is not easy, and it is not obvious—but it is effective. Only by turning outside our constricted, selfish miniworld and looking at what is best for others can we serve them and, ultimately, succeed in our own right. A dictator might demand that his serfs put up a huge statue of him in the city square, but one day that monument to megalomania will be torn down, maybe by those same serfs. The only lasting memorials to leaders are those earned through assiduous devotion to something greater than themselves—and greater than any one person.

That splendid brand of selfless leadership differs greatly from the “best friend” or babysitter leadership you might think appropriate for workers coddled, pampered, and cushioned with an inflated sense of self-esteem since conception. It does no one any favors to dumb down the organization’s expected performance level or to numb down our alertness for failure to meet those expectations. Reality leadership demands recognizing the truth about ourselves as well as our coworkers, competitors, customers, and culture—and then insisting on a cooperative and coordinated approach to making that truth work for our organization. No one can do this with sloppy work, lowered standards, tolerance for intolerable attitudes, or excuses for inexcusable behavior. People will eventually respond positively and appropriately to a selfless leader who settles for nothing less than best efforts and high-quality production from everyone—from the leader to the most inexperienced newcomer.

Pampered, grown, and nanny-cosseted self-esteem junkies will probably bristle initially when someone suggests (for maybe the first time in their lives) that their performance is less than above average. However, once it becomes clear that everyone, including the leader, must adhere to a no-excuse, no-kidding production, they too will usually adapt and even take pride in at last meeting and exceeding exacting standards. After all, self-esteem becomes only selfish steam unless real substance lies behind it and we ultimately see undeserved praise as saccharine for the soul. As generations of recruits have learned the hard way from surviving a grueling boot-camp ordeal, they can realize great value by reaching deep within to overcome the steepest challenges of their lives. Furthermore, the genuine sense of pride and camaraderie that comes with such a personal and organizational triumph far outshines any false pride that well-meaning but overly lenient caregivers so easily hand out. Those rewards and accolades we earn are infinitely more satisfying than those given us, precisely because we had to toil, think, struggle, and do more than was comfortable to obtain them. In that sense, the gift of high standards and high expectations for one and all is one of the greatest and truest gifts any reality leader can convey.

Mentoring for Leader
 Development

One can make a strong argument that ­leaders are neither born nor passively made; rather, they are developed and develop themselves through education, training, and a special set of experiences. Mentoring offers a good place to begin. It is largely a teaching process, beginning with parental nurturing of children and continuing through the life cycle of organizational and personal interrelationships. A key principle here is that mentoring is both an obligation and a privilege of leadership. It is something we give people. In mentoring, reality leaders provide followers with the guidance they need to make intelligent and informed decisions. Through mentoring, the senior imparts wisdom and experience-derived know-how to the junior. This process includes passing on and discussing principles, traditions, shared values, qualities, and lessons learned. Mentoring provides a framework to bring about a cultural change in the way the organization views the professional development of competent people. In most organizations today, people must take an uphill and bumpy ride on the road to the top—they simply cannot float there, nor will anyone carry them. Mentoring involves guiding and coaching—helping people move in the right direction. Clearly, mentoring is a vital way to help us reach our desired destination.

Perhaps the most powerful method by which we can shape the professional development of our employees, mentoring has become a buzzword, often carelessly shot into the air along with a dust cloud of other jargon from the unofficial, unwritten dictionary of those who consider themselves on the cutting edge of modern leadership and management. Real mentoring, properly understood, is much more than just another clipping from last week’s “Dilbert” cartoon. It can and should be adjusted to fit the idiosyncratic needs and situations of both parties to the mentoring partnership, as elastic and malleable as human beings themselves. The antithesis of the old-school, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter mentality, mentoring—because of its capacity to conform to individual circumstances—is ideally suited to today’s partnering environment. Thus, it is literally a time machine that allows us to have a profound influence many years beyond today’s hubbub and humdrum and allows us to make a significant difference in the lives of our people.

A mentor—a trusted advisor, teacher, counselor, friend, and parent, usually older and more senior in the organization than the person being helped—is present when someone needs assistance in an ongoing process, not just a one-shot, square-filling formality. Because of the widely recognized value of mentoring, many organizations have made it routine, turning it into a meaningless exercise in mandatory window dressing—just one more pro forma ritual to perform and check off on some to-do list. With all the blood drained out of it, mentoring becomes just as ineffective as any other quick-fix leadership “secret” copied mindlessly from some leadership-for-losers book. Throughout our society, authentic mentoring can apply to all leaders and supervisors responsible for getting their work done through other people—but it takes much more than a perfunctory patch. As mentors who take the time to do it right, our greatest validation may come one day when we witness our former protégés—the individuals assisted by mentors—in turn undergo metamorphosis and emerge as mentors themselves.

The modeling of proper behavior, an indispensable ingredient of good mentoring, occurs when the leader demonstrates for the protégé exactly what he or she expects. It is an ongoing exercise in “do as I do,” follow-the-leader game theory, but we play this never-ending game for keeps. We have seen too many examples of leaders who consider themselves exempt from the rules—even the laws—that apply to everyone. Corruption, scandal, and ruin on both an individual and institutional level metastasize from the leader’s attitude of special privilege. The leader who tries to conceal personal dishonesty, immorality, or lawlessness behind a mask of faux integrity can only mentor people into becoming similar frauds because such rottenness will inevitably be exposed, having permeated the organization at every level. The true mentor must prove that “do as I say” and “do as I do” are utterly indistinguishable, without regard for time, place, or circumstance. It may not always be personally convenient or expedient for the mentor-leader to be and do everything he or she asks of the workers, but it is a nonnegotiable prerequisite of genuine leadership excellence.

As mentors, the fact that we can matter, even if for only one protégé, may be one of the most rewarding events a leader experiences. Neither dramatic nor flashy, this outcome may remain invisible to everyone but the protégé, but to that person it has profound significance. This is not the kind of marquee-magic, big-bang leadership legerdemain many people yearn for—just the kind that really does work a quiet, personal form of magic an inch at a time.⁶

Perpetual Learning

Good leaders understand that organizations cannot grow unless people grow, including the leader and everyone else. Professional development or perpetual learning involves becoming capable of doing something we could not do before. It requires growing and developing more capacity and self-confidence in ourselves and in our people. Now more than ever, leaders must ensure that professional development remains a constant activity, as we mentioned in our section about what leaders really do. We do not go to school once in a lifetime and then put education aside forever; we stay in school all of our lives.

Developing people—really developing them, with all the individually tailored effort that entails—is fundamental to how the organization views itself and how it is viewed by leaders, customers, competitors, and colleagues alike. The organization reifies its capabilities through perpetual learning, enhancing every person from the inside out, and working the same internal alchemy on the overarching team structure. Only by holding the “learning constant” foremost in their vision can reality leaders have a chance of keeping their people fully capable of fulfilling an ever-shifting mission under steadily unsteady circumstances. Given the complexity of life in the world today, no one doubts that continuous learning and adaptation are directly related to and absolutely essential for overall, long-term success.⁷

Leadership and
Implementing Change

Do not read the following joke if you have already heard it more than 43 times. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is simple. Only one, but it is very expensive, takes a long time, and the light bulb must want to change. However, unlike changing the legendary light bulb, implementing real change does not necessarily take a long time. It can happen very quickly at some times, while at other times it crawls with imperceptible, glacier-like slowness. This is true of all types of evolution, whether good or bad. A major function of leaders calls for maximizing the former and minimizing the latter. Positive change—the kind that we cause proactively rather than the kind that falls on top of us by default—requires the right strategy. We need a system, including a workable and institutionally internalized process, to bring about the good-news change and identify/dodge the car-crash kind. Without an effective leader engineering useful change, change will inevitably find us even as we sit still, and we will usually not welcome that variety of accidental alteration.⁸

This age of instability can be an uncomfortable time for people who long for things to remain as they are—familiar, well understood, and routine. Since continual change is a given, a leader must resolve to put change to work, squeeze a harness around it, and ride it toward the right horizon. We best predict the future by inventing it, but we cannot do that by mechanically applying any formula from a self-help book, and no do-it-yourself kits exist for this. No matter what neologisms we create to describe our methods and irrespective of how many charts and four-part process lists we concoct to conjure the illusion of quantifiable precision, we still glimpse the future, if at all, through a glass, darkly. But we can look at what we need now and two years from now, and then set purposefully about making it happen. If we devote significant amounts of time on a regular basis to meeting with our people at all levels to brainstorm ideas for dealing with the years to come, we will find ready confirmation of our suspicion that we do not know all the answers and do not have a monopoly on all the good questions. We will also find that action works like a powerful medicine to relieve feelings of fear, helplessness, anger, and uncertainty because we become no longer just passive passengers on a runaway train, but engineers with influence over our journey. Instead of changing with the times, we must make a habit of changing just a little ahead of the times and doing what we can to nudge change in the optimal direction; in the process, we will enhance our living with a constructive purpose.⁹

Conclusion

In summary, we reflect on John W. Gardner, who wrote as thoughtfully as anyone on the complexities of leadership. His words almost constitute a leadership creed: “We need to believe in ourselves and our future but not to believe that life is easy. Life is painful and rain falls on the just. Leaders must help us see failure and frustration not as a reason to doubt ourselves but a reason to strengthen resolve. . . . Don’t pray for the day when we finally solve our problems. Pray that we have the freedom to continue working on the problems the future will never cease to throw at us.”¹⁰

Perhaps the synthesis and summation of ­everything we can do to become ethics-based reality leaders call for using our freedom to the fullest and setting our hearts on doing all we can to develop a group of individuals into a cohesive and purposeful problem-crunching team.¹¹ This will necessarily entail all of the activities we have covered in this article: comprehending the concepts of leadership, conducting genuine mentoring and teaching, healing our Achilles’ heels, practicing perpetual learning, and inventing our own future at all levels. If we become, at our core, members of that team with no interests out of harmony with what is best for the team and the organization it serves, many of the fancy theoretical notions about leadership will take care of themselves—or we and our teammates will take care of them ourselves. Reality leadership may not fit into any academic textbook’s equations or inspire any novelist to rhapsodize us into fictional immortality, but it delivers because it embraces the totality of real things and events that leaders come to grips with on a daily basis.

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Notes

1. Les T. Csorba, Trust: The One Thing That Makes or Breaks a Leader (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2004), 23–24.

2. Warren Blank, The 108 Skills of Natural Born Leaders (New York: AMACOM, 2001), 13–14.

3. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 15–16.

4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, chap. 2, etext no. 174, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/dgray10.txt.

5. Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 208–9.

6. John C. Kunich and Richard I. Lester, Survival Kit for Leaders (Dallas: Skyward Publishing, 2003), 71–73.

7. Paul Hersey, Kenneth H. Blanchard, and Dewey Johnson, Management of Organizational Behavior: Leading Human Resources, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 229.

8. Oren Harari, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 23.

9. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 312–14.

10. John W. Gardner, On Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1993), 195, xii.

11. Jeffrey A. Zink, Hammer-Proof: A Positive Guide to Values-Based Leadership (Colorado Springs, CO: Peak Press, 1998), 5.

Contributor

Prof. John Charles Kunich (BS, MS, University of Illinois–Chicago; JD, Harvard Law School; LLM, George Washington University School of Law) is a professor of law at Appalachian School of Law, Grundy, Virginia, where he teaches courses in property, trial advocacy, and the First Amendment. In the Air Force, he served as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, an instructor at the JAG School, chief counsel on constitutional torts and tax for Headquarters General Litigation Division, an environmental and labor attorney with Air Force Space Command, and senior legal counsel for Falcon AFB, Colorado. The author of five books and numerous law-journal articles, Professor Kunich is a graduate of Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, and Air War College.

Dr. Richard I. Lester (BA, MA, Auburn University; postgradute study, University of London; PhD, Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom) is dean of academic affairs, Ira C. Eaker College for Professional Development, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He previously served as chief of social and behavioral sciences, US Armed Forces Institute; education officer with Strategic Air Command and United States Air Forces in Europe; and faculty member at the University of Maryland. He is the recipient of the State of Alabama Commendation Medal, Meritorious Civil Service Award, and Exemplary Civil Service Award. Widely published in national and international journals, Dr. Lester frequently lectures at military institutions in the United States and abroad

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University

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