John Grider Miller (1935–2009)
Author of QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life
About the Author
Works by John Grider Miller
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life (2001) 1,185 copies, 18 reviews
Flipping the Switch: Unleash the Power of Personal Accountability Using the QBQ! (2005) 206 copies, 2 reviews
Personal Accountability : Powerful and Practical Ideas for You and Your Organization (1998) 28 copies
The QBQ! Workbook: A Hands-on Tool for Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life (2016) 20 copies
Parenting the QBQ Way, Expanded Edition: How to be an Outstanding Parent and Raise Great Kids Using the Power of Personal Accountability (2012) 18 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1935-08-23
- Date of death
- 2009-08-31
- Gender
- male
- Awards and honors
- Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement (2002)
- Birthplace
- Annapolis, Maryland, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Maryland, USA
Members
Reviews
War is terrible, but if there is any redeeming quality to war it is its capacity for bringing out the truly exceptional. One of the last Americans left in Vietnam in 1972, USMC Captain John Ripley blocked one of the armored spearheads of the Easter Offensive almost singlehandedly. The bridge at Dong Ha was a massive US-constructed steel and iron span, and under heavy fire Ripley crawled out again and again to wire the bridge for demolition, buying precious days for the collapsing South show more Vietnamese army to reorganize.
It is almost impossible to state how brave Ripley was, and therin lies the flaw in this book (and why it gets three stars). While Miller paints excellent portraits of Ripley, his Vietnamese comrades, and the chaos of conflict, he doesn't quite manage a coherent picture of what Ripley did. I know that he crawled and swung underneath the bridge under intense fire, dragged heavy crates of TNT hundreds of feet, wired detonators with improvised tools that could've blown his head off, and then went back to rig an secondary electrical detonation, but for all that, I'm fuzzy on the physical details of how Ripley succeeded. A solid book, particularly for the single fragment of the war it presents, but one that doesn't achieve greatness.
One useful trick I did learn was that if you need to severe heavy steal beams with high explosives, place your charges slightly offset on either side like 'crooked earmuffs'. If the charges are directly across one another, the blast will cancel itself out. The more you know! show less
It is almost impossible to state how brave Ripley was, and therin lies the flaw in this book (and why it gets three stars). While Miller paints excellent portraits of Ripley, his Vietnamese comrades, and the chaos of conflict, he doesn't quite manage a coherent picture of what Ripley did. I know that he crawled and swung underneath the bridge under intense fire, dragged heavy crates of TNT hundreds of feet, wired detonators with improvised tools that could've blown his head off, and then went back to rig an secondary electrical detonation, but for all that, I'm fuzzy on the physical details of how Ripley succeeded. A solid book, particularly for the single fragment of the war it presents, but one that doesn't achieve greatness.
One useful trick I did learn was that if you need to severe heavy steal beams with high explosives, place your charges slightly offset on either side like 'crooked earmuffs'. If the charges are directly across one another, the blast will cancel itself out. The more you know! show less
I'm a little disappointed in The Co-Vans. This book was sold to me as the real story of the advisory war, and the more factual companion to Bing West's The Village, but it's basically an average memoir with only a little bit of insight in the bigger picture.
In 1970, Miller returned to Vietnam as a USMC Major, adviser to a VNMC Battalion. His previous combat tour as company commander and 3-month Vietnamese immersion course only partially prepared him for his new job. Unlike Army advisers, who show more deployed with a small team for backup, Marine advisers served alone, living on Vietnamese rations, with only the radio net and occasional trips back home as connection with the world. It's these experiences that Miller focuses on, and they're a lot like any rifleman's except a little more adult. Meals are sketchy chicken cooked by an enlisted VNMC "cowboy" servant rather than C-rations. Officers get drunk and get in trouble in Saigon, if a little less frequently than privates. There's the same political games with idiotic superiors, except that they have flag rank here.
Miller's tour overlapped a key period in Nixon's 'Vietnamization' draw-down, when the Vietnamese would have to take over fighting the war themselves. By and large, by this point the Vietnamese were experienced veterans, and Miller's duties apparently consisted mostly of coordinating logistics and air strikes, which were still American run. Most tellingly, Miller took a week off for R&R in the middle of Operation Lam Son 719; the critical test invasion of Laos by RVN forces in 1971. Only one adviser was allowed over Laos at a time, so there was little that Miller and his comrades could do aside from shelter from NVA artillery at Khe Sanh and listen to the radio, but even a professional and committed adviser like Miller seemed fairly checked out at this stage in the war.
I was really hoping for some sort of insight into the advising relationship across cultural barriers, but aside from some awkward moments of "He speaks our language?" from both Vietnamese and Americans, the details of the advisory relationship remain opaque. I was also hoping that Miller would rebut, confirm, or at least expand upon the common charges that RVN forces were cowardly, corrupt, and incompetent, but his assessment of the Vietnamese military is confined to about 10 pages at the end of the book, where he notes that Vietnamese officers tended to run their units out of their hip-pockets as personal fiefdoms, so for example a battalion was more of an over-sized company. This worked on light-duty counter-insurgency missions, but the absence of a command structure made it impossible to coordinate combined arms missions across multiple units in battle, making the VNMC less than the sum of it's parts. Commanders' personal charisma mattered a lot, the phrase 'mandate of heaven' is invoked, but units tended to fall apart if their commanders broke or became incapacitated. The worst criticism is reserved for ARVN General "Old Bloody Hands" Lam, who ordered the VNMC to act as a rear-guard for Lam Son 719 without a plan for their extraction except 'die to a man', apparently as the end-stage of some decade-long political feud in the RVN armed forces.
Anybody with a passing interest in the Vietnam War knows that the advisory system never really worked, and that in the end ARVN was defeated by the NVA. But this is not the book to provide much context for why that happened, except that by 1970 it was probably too late for everybody concerned. show less
In 1970, Miller returned to Vietnam as a USMC Major, adviser to a VNMC Battalion. His previous combat tour as company commander and 3-month Vietnamese immersion course only partially prepared him for his new job. Unlike Army advisers, who show more deployed with a small team for backup, Marine advisers served alone, living on Vietnamese rations, with only the radio net and occasional trips back home as connection with the world. It's these experiences that Miller focuses on, and they're a lot like any rifleman's except a little more adult. Meals are sketchy chicken cooked by an enlisted VNMC "cowboy" servant rather than C-rations. Officers get drunk and get in trouble in Saigon, if a little less frequently than privates. There's the same political games with idiotic superiors, except that they have flag rank here.
Miller's tour overlapped a key period in Nixon's 'Vietnamization' draw-down, when the Vietnamese would have to take over fighting the war themselves. By and large, by this point the Vietnamese were experienced veterans, and Miller's duties apparently consisted mostly of coordinating logistics and air strikes, which were still American run. Most tellingly, Miller took a week off for R&R in the middle of Operation Lam Son 719; the critical test invasion of Laos by RVN forces in 1971. Only one adviser was allowed over Laos at a time, so there was little that Miller and his comrades could do aside from shelter from NVA artillery at Khe Sanh and listen to the radio, but even a professional and committed adviser like Miller seemed fairly checked out at this stage in the war.
I was really hoping for some sort of insight into the advising relationship across cultural barriers, but aside from some awkward moments of "He speaks our language?" from both Vietnamese and Americans, the details of the advisory relationship remain opaque. I was also hoping that Miller would rebut, confirm, or at least expand upon the common charges that RVN forces were cowardly, corrupt, and incompetent, but his assessment of the Vietnamese military is confined to about 10 pages at the end of the book, where he notes that Vietnamese officers tended to run their units out of their hip-pockets as personal fiefdoms, so for example a battalion was more of an over-sized company. This worked on light-duty counter-insurgency missions, but the absence of a command structure made it impossible to coordinate combined arms missions across multiple units in battle, making the VNMC less than the sum of it's parts. Commanders' personal charisma mattered a lot, the phrase 'mandate of heaven' is invoked, but units tended to fall apart if their commanders broke or became incapacitated. The worst criticism is reserved for ARVN General "Old Bloody Hands" Lam, who ordered the VNMC to act as a rear-guard for Lam Son 719 without a plan for their extraction except 'die to a man', apparently as the end-stage of some decade-long political feud in the RVN armed forces.
Anybody with a passing interest in the Vietnam War knows that the advisory system never really worked, and that in the end ARVN was defeated by the NVA. But this is not the book to provide much context for why that happened, except that by 1970 it was probably too late for everybody concerned. show less
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller
Quick and easy to read - it can be done in one sitting. This is not Five Why -- going deeper in the questioning to find a root cause. Rather, this is about personal accountability, taken personally. That is, asking How.../What... questions that include "I". There are many brief examples and bits of thought-changing logic.
Actually, this recalled to me speech pathologist Wendell Johnson IFD cycle's I encountered reading The Use and Misuse of Language: "I": unrealistic expectations and ideals, show more lead to "F": frustrations, which "D": discourage us, and may delude us with even less realistic expectations or ideal; the IFD can quickly become viciously circular. Probably the IFD cycle affects almost everyone to some degree it has been used to analyze blues songs from W. C. Handy, Bessie Smith, etc. However, we can a"D"apt to and "D"irect the situation to a better place, which is what Miller here is encouraging us to do through taking positive, proactive action toward bettering a situation.
While very good, I think if Miller wants to sell books in Louisiana, he should reconsider this analogy from Chapter 16 of the QBQ! book:
Actually, this recalled to me speech pathologist Wendell Johnson IFD cycle's I encountered reading The Use and Misuse of Language: "I": unrealistic expectations and ideals, show more lead to "F": frustrations, which "D": discourage us, and may delude us with even less realistic expectations or ideal; the IFD can quickly become viciously circular. Probably the IFD cycle affects almost everyone to some degree it has been used to analyze blues songs from W. C. Handy, Bessie Smith, etc. However, we can a"D"apt to and "D"irect the situation to a better place, which is what Miller here is encouraging us to do through taking positive, proactive action toward bettering a situation.
While very good, I think if Miller wants to sell books in Louisiana, he should reconsider this analogy from Chapter 16 of the QBQ! book:
My father, Jimmy Miller, was head wrestling coach at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., for more than 25 years. When he sent me out to the mat, he’d always remind me I had three people to beat that day: my opponent, myself, and the referee.show less
That I had to beat my opponent was obvious. By “myself” he meant I had to overcome the fears any athlete naturally has. About beating the ref, he’d say, “It doesn’t matter how close the match is, John. Even if you lose in overtime by one point, even if he makes a couple of questionable calls, you cannot blame the man in black and white.” He’d conclude by saying, “If you want to win, you must be good enough to beat the ref!”
Good enough to beat the ref. That means being a salesperson who has the maturity to say, “I was outsold,” instead of complaining about product, price and the lack of advertising. It means serving as a team member who never says, “Why don’t others pull their own weight?” It means being a manager who doesn’t complain, “Why aren’t my people motivated?” It means being people who don’t complain about management saying, “Why don’t they tell us what’s going on?”
Who is the “ref” in your life? What person or situation beyond your control is standing between you and success? Could it be a supervisor who over-manages, making it difficult for you to do your job, or inefficient systems built into your organization that waste a lot of your time? Or maybe it’s a personal situation that saps your energy.
No matter what we’re trying to accomplish, there’s always a barrier of some kind to overcome, and it’s often something over which we have no control. Instead of focusing on the barriers, let’s work to become so good that we’ll succeed no matter how many bad calls the ref may throw at us.
If you want to win, don’t complain about things beyond your control. Just be good enough to beat the ref.
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller
Previous reviewers here on LibraryThing got this one right. Miller takes a commonsense idea -- that of personal accountability - and proceeds to go way over the top with it. While some of the underlying concepts may have some validity, this comes across as a diatribe against workers who have legitimate concerns and complaints, who (according to these philosophies) should just accept their lot in life and not question or show concern about idiocy foisted on them from farther up the food show more chain.
Sorry...but in addition to espousing philosophy that is sophomorically simplified, and using supposedly real-life examples to support the arguments which are patently unrealistic, the physical production itself of this book is something of an affront. Blandly and smarmily written, the size of the font used in the book, combined with egregious amounts of white space, create a work that is truly a tree-killer.
Can't recommend this one at all! show less
Sorry...but in addition to espousing philosophy that is sophomorically simplified, and using supposedly real-life examples to support the arguments which are patently unrealistic, the physical production itself of this book is something of an affront. Blandly and smarmily written, the size of the font used in the book, combined with egregious amounts of white space, create a work that is truly a tree-killer.
Can't recommend this one at all! show less
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- Works
- 13
- Members
- 1,758
- Popularity
- #14,638
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 23
- ISBNs
- 51
- Languages
- 3