Love him or loathe him, there is no disputing that Robert McNamara, who died yesterday at the age of 93, had an extraordinary career and an amazingly brilliant mind. He is most famous (or infamous) for his role as secretary of defence during the Vietnam War but he was also president of Ford (only for a month before being tapped by JFK to be secretary of defence) and, after leaving government, president of the World Bank for 13 years.

In 2003, McNamara returned to public prominence with the release of The Fog of War, a brilliant Errol Morris documentary in which he had a series of conversations with Morris about his rise from humble origins to some of the most prominent positions in business and government. Follow the link and you can see some clips.

I can’t recommend the film highly enough both for history and film buffs but also for managers. McNamara talks at length, for example, about some of the changes he was involved in at Ford. When assessing the safety record of the company’s cars, for example, he and his colleagues decided that they needed to make cars as safe for people as egg cartons are for eggs - seems obvious now but wasn’t back then.

July 9, 2009 6:47pm in Leadership, Management | Comment