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No five-hundred strivers from a single graduating class at Princeton, Harvard, or Yale have professionally achieved what the Hanoi Hilton POWs achieved after their release. And the POWs did it after up to eight years of isolation, deprivation, and torture. Collectively, the POWs spent thousands of man-years behind bars. You learn a lot of things in that amount of time under those severe conditions. Many lessons are personal. Some are universal.
Collectively, Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: Six Characteristics of High-Performance Teams represents more than 50 years of research into those universal lessons. My co-author, Taylor Kiland, has been working with the POWs for more than ten years. James Bond Stockdale II, who also collaborates with us in speaking and consulting, has devoted 40 years of his life to understanding what his father did in the Hanoi Hilton as the senior ranking naval officer.
For seven years, Taylor and I talked, listened, traveled, interviewed, wrote, thought, debated, re-wrote, and combed thousands of pages of other writings and research. We interviewed POWs, behavioral psychologists, sports psychologists, Navy SEALs, Ivy League professors, military researchers, and even a Vietnam-era military intelligence analyst who had been a POW himself in WWII.
The lessons these men learned in the Hanoi Hilton changed their lives. Most of them say it changed them for the better. They would not want to go through it again, but they would not trade what they learned for anything in the world. All three of us believe deeply in the lessons about high-performance gleaned from the courageous men who spent up to eight years in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp. We believe you will agree when you read what they learned inside their prison cells.
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