Finding Love on a Tiger Cruise

Sunday night my wife and watched the Hallmark show USS Christmas. It was a love story and partly took place on a Naval battleship’s Christmas “Tiger Cruise” for family members. The lead star’s sister was a fighter pilot stationed on that ship and she joined her for the Christmas cruise. It caught my attention from the fighter pilot aspect as well as being a Hallmark feel good love story.

Full disclosure. We like Hallmark movies. The characters in them are nice people usually trying to do good things. The two main characters usually fall in love and there are happy endings and in spite of a familiar pattern to the plots, very enjoyable to watch.

A very happy time in my life was meeting my wife and falling in love with her. The love continues to grow and I pretty much remember everything about the night I met her which will be exactly 50 years ago this December 20^th. Watching these Hallmark shows recreates experiences of people falling in love. What’s not to like about this? Right now there is an overabundance of Christmas movies, but soon we will have some Valentine’s Day topics, then wedding stories followed by beach house rentals. Whatever the background cover, these are happy love stories. No embezzlements. No murders. No backstabbing and no nasty people. Nice love stories.

This program also reminded me of a fighter pilot that spoke at Withum’s State of the Firm meeting last January. The speaker was Carey D. Lohrenz, the U.S. Navy’s First Female F-14 Tomcat Fighter Pilot who gave a riveting presentation based on her career. She wrote about the leadership aspects of her training in Fearless Leadership and her presentation was also based on that. Her program was excellent and I believe it elevated the plane of our thinking and contributed to expanding our horizons. Everyone also received a book and I read it soon afterward. This TV show reminded me of that and I relooked at the book and found the extensive notes I made when reading it.

Some of the gems Carey expanded on were the three elements of fearless leadership: Doing the right thing, being honest and being trustworthy. She also said and wrote “cutting corners never leads to excellence.” Other gems are that there is no room for error when you are trying to land an F-14 on a moving ship and the amazing thing is that everyone working on it is 19 years old and that takes discipline and exacting training and execution by the entire team, having a fully developed articulated vision will give your team a sense of purpose, the right processes and checklists are necessary and important, as is a commitment to excellence and to keep developing your skills. The book ends with her imploring readers to create their own future and to not be a passenger in their own life. I could go on, but read the book if you are a leader, or want to be – you’ll benefit from it, and so will your staff.

So, USS Christmas and Love, and Fearless Leadership. That works!