A personal journey from the cockpit to the boardroom
Gulf war hero John Peters faced torture and imprisonment when his Tornado was shot down over Iraq in 1991.
His story shocked the world. How has this experience impacted on John’s life? As a management trainer, John now
helps companies improve their business performance.
What relevance does your experience have in today’s business world?
OK, I know that few people have been a POW, but nevertheless we all have to deal with unexpected change. It is a matter of
circumstance and choice, whether it is in war or in business.
Going to war is unreal: one’s life is accelerated into overdrive. There is a saying in the military, "You never fight the
war you train for", and that was the case in the Gulf. We were training for a Central European war, which was an,
end-of-world-as-we-know-it scenario. In reality, we found ourselves going into a regional desert scenario.
The circumstances were quite different. Sure, the fundamentals did not change, but the application did. We had to
change and learn new techniques very rapidly.
Then my mission went horribly wrong and things sped up even more. The shooting down, the capture, followed by interrogation.
They are trying to change everything all the time to disorientate you, to defeat you. You just have to accept where you are
and adapt very quickly.
The business world is getting quicker, people have less time to make decisions. They need to be able to assimilate problems
more quickly and have the confidence to make a decision. In flying, you have to think ahead; if you procrastinate, the problem
gets bigger and bigger and the aircraft seems to go faster and faster. It is the same in business. I recently spoke alongside
Michael Dell on Leadership at the IOD and his best advice for business was "solve your problems as fast as you find them".
Too many people in business procrastinate too long on the real priority decisions. Accept where you are, adapt to the new
circumstances and have the courage to make the right choice.
Your time in captivity was a horrific ordeal. How did you keep going day after day?
Well, of course the situation can be overwhelming, the scale of the ordeal seemingly insurmountable. But, if I had thought about
the walls and the beatings I would have given in. I have no more attributes than anyone else; it would have been overwhelming.
But I visualised where I would be in the future: a better world of family holidays, I planned businesses and transported myself
to the places where I would be on my return. By ‘seeing’ where I was going to be, the starvation and degradation just became
things to overcome in my journey to where I wanted to be.
Many businesses with whom I have worked have vision and value statements. This is all very well, but very often not even the
Board can explain what it means in simple pictures. Go down through the organisation and no wonder achieving change and improved
performance fails: people cannot see a better world. An increase in shareholder value may mean something to the Board, but what
about the middle manager or the clerk? Performance improvement just becomes a pressure: a dark, dank prison wall.
If leaders cannot create an image of the future state that truly relates to each level, why should anyone follow them?
Everyone at every level should be able to visualise the future: they have to ‘see’ a better world.
This is the key driver to inspiring change or improving performance.
You describe your Gulf War as a failure. Why do you see it as such and how did you cope with this realisation?
My war was not about dropping bombs, and I have to accept the failure, learn from it and move on. The interrogators tried to
dismantle my willpower by focusing on failure at the same time as beating me, burning me, depriving me of sleep and applying
psychological pressure. Within that environment you cannot control everything and you will make mistakes.
The key to winning is accepting the mistakes you make, learning from them and projecting yourself forward. Too many people try
to hide failures and then dwell on them, which ultimately will make them lose. Accepting failure, learning from it and projecting
the lessons towards the future, ensures you win.
It takes courage to admit mistakes, but consider this: you know intimately the weaknesses of your own boss, so how come you think
that you can hide your mistakes from those who work for you? Leadership is transparent and through admitting your own mistakes you
will develop trust and respect. This, in turn, creates the right culture in which learning and innovation can flourish. And that
can have powerful effect on the bottom line.
So you can apply the experience to the business world?
Yes, I believe so. And it is not just the experience itself. My life has broadened immeasurably because I was a POW. For instance,
I followed Nelson Mandela on stage in South Africa, which was a huge privilege. How do you follow Nelson Mandela? But I found real
empathy in his words on his captivity. He was clear on leadership: "A good leader is one who knows when their attributes match the
occasion; a great leader is one who knows when to step aside and let others lead".
Mandela is without doubt a great leader, if you could sum it up, what would you say is the key to great leadership?
It is about trust. Belief and trust in people’s motives both up and down the organisation. Like any other young professional in any
organisation, I led many things in my career, most of which can be attributed to experience and competence. But true leadership, when
someone trusts in you to lead him or her where they dare not go: that takes trust. I had one experience in captivity where I led
someone through an ordeal because they believed in me. Now, with my conference experience, I hear many organisations introducing dynamic
new initiatives, transformational leadership programmes, new customer relationship management processes, change programmes and such like.
Yet, if you read the academic literature supporting such initiatives, the key foundation to them all is trust. The mother of all
initiatives is trust and, yet, I have never been to a conference on trust. Trust is the key to moving anyone: do they trust you? It is
a question I would challenge anybody in any organisation to deliberate. Do your people trust you? Leadership is not about position, it
is about personality.
What have you learned from your experiences that have helped you to be successful?
I’m stronger for the experience; I’m a lot more confident. I realise that one can go way beyond the limits one sets oneself. They didn’t
break me; I did not give in. If you told me 12 years ago that I would be running my own company and would have restored an old house
(all promises I made to myself in prison) I would probably not have believed you. But here I am having done both; they took nothing
away from me. In fact, my life has broadened because of the experience.
People understandably look at the whole experience – the beatings, the solitary confinement as a black box - as very negative. Actually,
I gained huge power from the experience. When was the last time you sat alone, without interruption, even a cup of tea, and thought about
your life, your philosophy and your sense of where you are? In normality, it takes practice and time to build that focus, but in the
abnormal world as a POW, I had 7 weeks, 24 hours a day sitting in a black box. The actual time I spent thinking about where I was and
where I wanted to go and truly reflecting upon my life was exceptionally powerful and too few people nowadays spend time to think without
interruption. It is the clarity you gain from that reflection that gives you power.
