"Among the Heros" by Jere Longman
Volume 11, Number 35
Issue 531
A few people who know me well know that I often think back to how my employees, family, clients and associates handled September 11, 2001 as it relates to their business and professional lives. Though I had lived through national tragedies before and have always been fascinated with current events, September 11th was a very busy day in my office because of September 15th tax return due-dates and the fact that we had an IRS agent camped-out in my conference room ready to start a difficult audit. Since that day, I have looked back at my staff’s and my own actions concerning that day over and over in order to think about what was handled well and what was not from both professional and personal standpoints. I even wrote my own short story about it in my first Zine; many people have read that story.
I just finished reading Among the Heros ($24.95 HarperCollins) by New York Times reporter Jere Longman. It’s the story of United Flight 93 and the passengers and crew who fought back. The book jacket lining’s assertion “of the four horrific hijackings on September 11, Flight 93, which crashed into a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, resonates as one of epic resistance” is an understatement. Though I don’ think that this book was intended to be inspirational for entrepreneurs, I think that is. Often, I look for sources of information that will role-model leadership and courage. This book profiles how educated strangers--many of them businesspeople--knew that the worst decision is to not make any decision.
The following passages are taken from Among the Heros:
“Tom [Burnett] was chief operating officer of Thoratec Corporation, which was headquarterd in Pleasanton, California. This was an urgent, opportunistic time for the company, a leading manufacturer of heart pumps for patients awaiting transplants. Thoratec was seeking approval to use the pumps as permanent implants. . . Tom had been traveling frequently, bringing investors and reporters up to speed about the company’s plans.
“He was thirty-eight. . . He had graduated with honors from Thomas Jefferson High School in Bloomington, and, in 1980, as quarterback of the football team, he had guided the Jaguars to a conference championship. He won an appointment to the Air Force Academy, obtained his MBA from Pepperdine, became a successful businessman, possessed a ravenous intellectual curiosity. He had a genius-level IQ, his wife said. At six foot two, two hundred five pounds, Tom carried his size with such grace and agility that people rarely realized how big he was until they stood next to him.
“Adorning Tom’s office were busts of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, strong leaders who had acted decisively and according to their conscience in times of crisis, even in the face of public opposition, men who could rally others to their cause by the sheer force of their character. Political leaders of the day often disappointed him with their tentativeness and lack of conviction.
“A political conservative, Tom valued qualities like sacrifice, valor, courage patriotism, honor, dignity and citizenship and longed for a time when these words carried weight and were not hollow platitudes. . . According to Deena, he lived by two guiding aphorisms: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” and “Live every day as if it is your last, for surely one day you will be right.”
Sometimes, one of the least important things about being a successful entrepreneur is to be rich in money. Go and buy this book. It will make you rich in a very important way. It will remind you that the entrepreneurial freedom that we, as businesspeople, enjoy right now in 2003 has been paid for with the blood of real Americans and not always ones that are in uniform. What would you have done if you had been among the forty passengers and crew members on United Flight 93? If you ponder that question, I guarantee that it will make you a better person, which will make you a better entrepreneur because you will realize the debts that you owe those who have sacrificed for your success.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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