Being woken to make life-or-death decisions confirmed my role as a leader, and made me feel important and needed—something most managers yearn for. But it was not long before I began to question my value to the process. Unless I had been tracking the target the previous night, I would usually know only what the officers told me that morning. I could ask thoughtful questions, but I had no illusions that my judgment was markedly superior to that of the people with whom I worked. As much as I would like to think otherwise, I only rarely had some groundbreaking insight. Most of the time I would
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