Petraeus on being 'brutally honest' with the public

Gen. David Petraeus discusses "surge" leadership, empowering subordinate leaders, and staying "brutally honest" with the public in the second part of his recent On Leadership video interview.

The Post's David Ignatius empowering his subordinates and giving them "the freedom to fail" and "freedom to experiment and try things."

"I realize that we were making some progress in this regard when I saw a sign on a commandment post door out in West Baghdad one time and it said on it, 'In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been and execute aggressively,' and needless to say, I took that sign with me," Petraeus said. "We added that to our counter insurgency guide, we indeed had one of the admonitions, as a series of admonitions with explanations of what each admonition meant; one of those was to encourage initiative."

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(Video by K. Crnko, E. Tenety, and A. Useem)