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Data Combined with Anecdote to Tell the Whole Story Numerical data become more powerful when combined with real-life customer stories. The Dive Deep leadership principle states, “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
But neither belligerent was eager to exchange bombing raids, and although nightly blackouts added inconvenience and apprehension to the wartime burden of the people of both nations, the implicit truce held until mid-May 1940. Then within a week two events triggered British action. German raiders targeted for French airfields at Dijon lost their way and bombed the southern German city of Freiburg instead, killing fifty-seven people; the German Ministry of Propaganda brazenly denounced the bombing as British or French and threatened fivefold retaliation. Blacker and more violent non sequitur destroyed the city center of Rotterdam. Dutch forces were holding out stubbornly as late as May 14 in the northern section of that old Netherlands port. The German commanding general ordered a “short but devastating air raid” that he hoped might decide the battle.1347 Negotiations with the Dutch advanced, the air raid was canceled, but the abort message arrived too late to stop half the hundred Heinkel lll’s ordered into action from dropping 94 tons of bombs. The bombs started massive fires in stores of fats and margarine. The first official Dutch statement, issued from the embassy in Washington, placed casualties in the devastated city at 30,000, and the Western democracies responded with outrage. Actual deaths totaled about 1,000; some 78,000 people went homeless. The British retaliated on May 15 by dispatching ninety-nine bombers to attack railway centers and supply depots in the Ruhr. Busy with the Battle of France, Hitler did not immediately strike back, but he issued a directive that prepared the way. He ordered the Luftwaffe “to undertake a full-scale offensive against the British homeland as soon as sufficient forces are available.”1348
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Back at headquarters for the Twenty-third, when Colonel Freeman heard that the patrol had been hit by a major Chinese force, he immediately ordered up an air strike. He was told by the spotter plane that at least two battalions of Chinese, perhaps even a regiment, had struck this small patrol. That made it a fight of quite possibly two to three thousand against sixty.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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