Middle Management Blues

You may know author Norman MacLean from the short story “ A River Runs Through It ” which was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt.   MacLean also wrote a fascinating study of a forest fire in Montana in 1949 that killed twelve “Smokejumpers”, the elite fire fighting parachutists.   The fire at Mann Gulch in central Montana takes up the first half of “ Young Men and Fire ”, published two years after Maclean’s death in 1990.   The second half is the story within the story of MacLean’s efforts to find what really happened so he could write the first half of the book, all the while knowing he had to hurry because time was gaining on him. It may be a stretch to fold an account of a forest fire in the middle of BFE into a blog about management, but as I read the book I realized similar situations happen at work, although our fires are obviously figurative.   I’ve wondered to myself if I would have had the foresight and the courage to unearth the proble...