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Ask HN: Real Life Examples of “Burn the Ships”?

7 points by iamgopal ↗ HN
In management & startup advises, one of the repeated mantra is "Burn the ships", i.e. remove alternative and focus on singular goal with all might. Example given to support these claims are usually centuries old. But are there current world example of someone doing the same and succeeding ?

5 comments

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chrisjack
"In 1519, Captain Hernán Cortés landed in Veracruz to begin his great conquest. Upon arriving, he gave the order to his men to burn the ships. As I imagine it, someone then laughed and Cortés promptly thrust his sword into the man's chest. After which, the rest proceeded to get hammered on rum by the glow of the blaze." That the real life example where this expression started...
shoo
Wikipedia disagrees. Same outcome, different method:

> Men still loyal to the governor of Cuba planned to seize a ship and escape to Cuba, but Cortés moved swiftly to squash their plans. Two leaders were condemned to be hanged; two were lashed, and one had his foot mutilated. To make sure such a mutiny did not happen again, he decided to scuttle his ships.

> There is a popular misconception that the ships were burned rather than sunk. This misconception has been attributed to the reference made by Cervantes de Salazár in 1546, as to Cortés burning his ships. This may have also come from a mis-translation of the version of the story written in Latin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Azte...

"scuttle the ships" is as equally alliterative as "burn the boats"

rajacombinator
No, it’s just one of those sayings that sounds good and makes the reader feel cool. Burning the ships is almost always a bad idea in a business context, where the goal should be to reduce risk, not increase it.

Edit: it’s also not a credible threat in a fungible labor market.

afarrell
I think if you're going to apply this strategy, you have to think about the reason why "the ships" actually harm you. In the historical example, it is because when you are fighting in line of pikemen and one group decides to flee, it exposes the rest of the formation to danger and leads them to flee...causing a rout.

In business, to prevent an analogous situation, you need some way to prohibit people from quitting the company in the face of poor morale. How does one do that ethically?

Instead, think about the nature of the 'distraction' and find a tactic that works for that. Maybe that means prohibiting the CEO trying to go fundraising until X target is met?

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