A Navy Admiral’s Bronze Rules: Managing Risk and Leadership

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A Navy Admiral’s Bronze Rules: Managing Risk and Leadership. By Rear Admiral Dave Oliver, USN, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2021.

Reviewed by Peter Jones

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In the Preface to An Admiral’s Bronze Rules, Admiral Oliver relates the story that when he was a junior engineer officer he was interviewed for nine hours by Admiral Hyman Rickover’s deputy and then sent to a submarine with poor electrical wiring. He writes that in his three years onboard, the boat had more than a thousand fires, or more than one a day, and the ship’s staff replaced every inch of electrical wire and nearly every electrical component. My reaction to this anecdote and to some others in the book, such as when he met Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev in a Chinese safe house in Georgetown, was to ask could all this be completely accurate. As I read the book I was regularly doing internet searches to get more background on some of the stories.

 

Admiral Oliver says that in leadership, the only golden rule is to never betray your ethics or risk your integrity. The next are bronze rules and he opines they survive under stress. In his last chapter he lists thirty-five of them that are earlier developed in a chapter devoted to each. The book uses career moments in the author’s naval and corporate career to draw out each of his lessons. While some leaders feature in the anecdotes, Oliver is the central leadership figure in these stories. Thirty-five bronze rules are a lot and I am not sure whether it was an anecdote in search of a rule or visa versa.

 

The author had a particularly varied and colourful career, especially in his shore appointments and post-Navy. This has certainly given him a great source of interesting anecdotes. He has excellent recall and I must confess I do not think I could remember incidents in my naval service in such vivid detail. Like most leadership books each reader takes from it different things. Like the recently reviewed Saltwater Leadership one may draw different conclusions from anecdotes than what the author intends. An example in Bronze Rules is Oliver’s Rule 28 on leaders assuming risk. His anecdote involved fraternisation between an officer and a sailor at a shore establishment. Oliver proudly recounts having a clear lower deck in which he had the officer stand up and Oliver announced the officer’s transgression to the gathering. He then had sailors put handcuffs and leg irons on the officer and escort him out of the auditorium. Oliver told the gathering that it was the last time they would see that officer in uniform. Perhaps unsurprisingly the officer was not found guilty and instead Oliver admonished.

 

Of the two books on leadership, Saltwater Leadership shines through, but Bronze Rules is a diverting read.

 

 

 

 

 

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