A Few Good Men

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It’s always bugged me a bit to admit it, but in many ways Nicholson’s witness-stand rant in A Few Good Men—I agree with it. We do live in a world with “walls.” Outcomes matter. Success requires the right players in the right positions, and that requires ruthless decisions. Turnarounds are not polite. Terminations and unsavory actions are sometimes necessary. That’s not villainy—it’s responsibility.

But if you look more closely, the failure in Jessup’s logic wasn’t the spirit of toughness.

It was the inaction.

Santiago should have been replaced. Cleanly. Directly. Owned. Instead, a “Code Red” was used as a workaround—discourage him, send a message, force him to quit. That’s the tell. Sorry, Colonel Jessup: that was your failure. Not that you demanded standards, but that you refused to carry the moral weight of enforcing them like an adult. You wanted the outcome without the accountability.

The business version shows up in acquisitions all the time.

Crisp decisions are required. Sound definitive actions are cleaner. If someone doesn’t fit the moment, you separate the person from the situation and you make the move—fast, clear, and humane. What you don’t do is denigrate inherited staff or processes hoping they’ll depart. That isn’t a method. It’s cruelty dressed up as leadership.

And it’s a great business lesson:

If a leader is speaking poorly of inherited staff, be wary.
Real operators don’t need to humiliate the past to justify the future. They make the tough calls, own them, and move on. The ones who keep narrating how broken everyone was before they arrived are often telling you something important: they’re not building a turnaround—they’re building a myth.