A new cadet at West Point learns four basic responses: “Yes, sir.” “No, sir.” “No excuse, sir.” “Sir, I do not understand.” In 1981 the Christian Science Monitor listed nearly the same four, ending with “Sir, I did not understand.”
E + R = O
The first principle in Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles is “Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life.” Canfield puts it in a formula: “E + R = O stands for Event + Response = Outcome.”
He draws the conclusion for his readers: “So what you have to do is change your response to get the outcome you want.”
Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” contains these lines: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
Extreme Ownership
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin served in Navy SEAL Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq. In their book Extreme Ownership (2015), Willink describes a friendly-fire incident during an operation there. He concluded: “there was only one person to blame for everything that had gone wrong on the operation: me.”
The book’s rule is: “The leader must own everything in his or her world.” Another of its principles is “No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders.”
A Message to Garcia
In 1899 Elbert Hubbard published a short essay about a U.S. Army officer, Andrew Rowan, sent during the war with Spain to carry a message to García, a leader of the Cuban rebels. Its key line: “Rowan took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?'”
Hubbard set Rowan against an office clerk who answers a simple task with questions: “Who was he?” “Which encyclopedia?” “Was I hired for that?” The New York Central Railroad reprinted the essay in huge numbers, and it was used as promotional literature by Wanamaker’s, the Boy Scouts of America and the U.S. Navy. Hubbard claimed “Over forty million copies.” A 1977 estimate put the figure at about 4 million.
The story itself is largely false. Rowan’s real orders were to gather intelligence, and there is no evidence that he delivered a letter to García.
You Are What Your Record Says You Are
“You are what your record says you are.” The line is credited to the football coach Bill Parcells. In January 1994 a newspaper column credited it to “a wise man with a bad football team and a Super Bowl ring.” That man was Parcells, then in his first year as coach of the New England Patriots.
The column’s point was that nobody wants to hear excuses about injuries, bad luck or a hard schedule. The line is older than Parcells’s use of it. The San Diego Union printed it in October 1978, under the headline “Chargers Get Foes’ Praise, Not Victories”: “You are what your record says you are, and never mind how you got that way.”
Absolute Responsibility
The 2002 edition of US Navy Regulations states: “The responsibility of the commanding officer for his or her command is absolute.” A captain may hand authority to subordinates. But the regulations say this “shall in no way relieve the commanding officer of his or her continued responsibility.”
On June 17, 2017, the destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a merchant ship. Seven sailors died. In August the Navy relieved the commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson. The Seventh Fleet cited his “absolute accountability for the safe navigation of Fitzgerald.”
In Case of Failure
On June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote a note to release if the landings failed. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. … If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
He crossed out “This particular operation” and wrote “My decision to attack” in its place. He misdated the note July 5. It is kept at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.
Mistakes Were Made
William Safire called it “a passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” Ulysses S. Grant used a version in 1876. Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler used it in 1973, Reagan in his 1987 State of the Union, Bill Clinton in 1997 and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2007.
The political scientist William Schneider named the grammar the “past exonerative” tense. An NPR headline called the phrase “the king of non-apologies.”
The buck stops here
Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office reading exactly that, and used the phrase repeatedly to describe the presidency. The buck is passed, in American usage, from one person to another. The sign announces where the passing ends — at a named individual, in a specific room.