The Unconventionals: True Stories about Outsiders Who Changed the World
Author Interview with Seth Bush
Book Description:
The Unconventionals: True Stories about Outsiders Who Changed the World examines four military commanders, Alexandre Dumas, Sir John Monash, Orde Wingate, and O. P. Smith, who did not fit neatly within the institutions they served. Each confronted a different form of resistance: prejudice, professional convention, institutional skepticism, or pressure from higher headquarters. Yet each also demonstrates why unconventional thinking must be judged by results, preparation, and professional judgment rather than celebrated simply because it is different. Through their stories, the book asks a broader leadership question: what happens when the person who does not fit the mold is exactly the person an organization needs?
Tell us about your book.
The Unconventionals grew out of my interest in people who succeeded despite not fitting the model their institutions expected. The book tells the stories of Alexandre Dumas, Sir John Monash, Orde Wingate, and O. P. Smith. They came from different countries, eras, backgrounds, and military traditions, but each challenged some assumption about what a successful commander was supposed to look like or how a commander was supposed to think.
I did not want to write four conventional biographies. I wanted to use their lives to explore a larger question about leadership and institutions. Military organizations require hierarchy, standards, discipline, and shared ways of doing things. Those qualities are essential, but they can also make organizations suspicious of people who think differently. Sometimes that skepticism is justified. Sometimes it causes an institution to overlook exactly the person it needs.
The four men also keep the book from becoming an argument that outsiders are always right. Wingate, in particular, shows the danger of confusing unconventionality with wisdom. The book is ultimately about judgment: knowing when convention represents accumulated wisdom and when circumstances require someone willing to challenge it.
What leadership problem or gap does this book address?
The leadership problem at the center of the book is the difficulty organizations have distinguishing productive dissent from mere contrarianism. Large institutions naturally reward people who understand their rules, language, processes, and expectations. Over time, however, institutional fluency can be mistaken for competence itself. The person who looks, speaks, and thinks like previous successful leaders may appear safer than the person asking whether the accepted approach still makes sense.
That creates a problem for both organizations and individual leaders. Institutions need enough conformity to function, but they also need people capable of recognizing when established assumptions no longer match reality. Individual leaders, meanwhile, must learn that disagreement alone is not courage and originality alone is not competence.
Dumas, Monash, Wingate, and Smith provide four different ways of examining that tension. Their careers ask leaders to consider how organizations recognize talent, how professionals disagree with superiors, how innovation earns legitimacy, and where the line lies between necessary independence and destructive certainty.
How did your military or professional experience shape this work?
My military experience shaped the questions behind the book more than it shaped the conclusions. I served for more than a decade as a U.S. Army officer in staff, command, and operational assignments. Much of that experience took place in staff environments where information, assumptions, institutional processes, and senior-leader decisions intersect.
That made me interested in the gap that can exist between what an organization believes and what conditions actually indicate. Military professionals are trained to work within systems for good reason, but they are also expected to exercise judgment. Those two responsibilities can come into tension. When does persistence become stubbornness? When does dissent become necessary? When does experience become an obstacle to seeing something new?
Professional development through the West Point Junior Officer Fellowship, the Special Operations Campaign Artistry Program, and the Strategic Broadening Fellowship also encouraged me to think beyond individual battles and examine institutions, assumptions, culture, and decision-making. Those questions became the connective tissue among the four stories in The Unconventionals.
What historical figure, event, or book most influenced your thinking?
Of the four figures in the book, O. P. Smith most clearly crystallized the question I wanted The Unconventionals to ask. During the advance into North Korea, Smith faced pressure from higher headquarters while becoming increasingly concerned that assumptions about the battlefield—particularly the possibility of Chinese intervention—did not match the conditions his division might face. His response was not theatrical defiance. He prepared, created options, and exercised professional judgment while continuing to operate within the chain of command.
That distinction matters to me. It is easy to romanticize the leader who ignores everyone else and is eventually proven right. Smith’s example is more useful. Professional dissent does not require contempt for the institution or the people above you. It requires competence, preparation, humility, and the courage to act on a well-founded judgment when the consequences of simply accepting the prevailing assumption could be severe. His story helped shape the book’s larger distinction between being unconventional and simply being contrary.
If a junior officer or enlisted leader could take only one lesson from your book, what would you want it to be?
Being unconventional is not the same thing as being right.
If there is one lesson I would want a junior officer or enlisted leader to take from The Unconventionals, it is that professional courage requires more than simply disagreeing with the people above you. Every leader in the book challenged convention in some way, but their stories also demonstrate that unconventional thinking has value only when accompanied by competence, preparation, judgment, and a willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences.
Organizations need people willing to ask whether the accepted answer is actually the right one. But the burden falls on the dissenter to understand the problem deeply enough to offer something better. There is a tremendous difference between principled professional dissent and simply believing you are the smartest person in the room.
The lesson, then, is not ‘challenge authority.’ It is to develop the competence and judgment necessary to know when authority needs to be challenged—and the character to do it professionally when that moment comes.
Why is reading important for today’s military professional?
Military professionals routinely make decisions about situations they have never personally experienced. Reading allows us to borrow experience. History cannot provide a checklist for the future, but it can expose us to decisions, failures, personalities, institutions, and consequences beyond the narrow limits of our own careers.
Reading also creates intellectual friction. If we read only material that confirms what our branch, service, generation, or professional community already believes, we are not broadening our judgment very much. History is especially valuable because it reminds us that many ideas that once seemed obvious eventually proved incomplete or wrong—and that many successful decisions were made under uncertainty rather than with perfect information.
For military professionals, reading should therefore be more than professional credentialing. It should make us harder to surprise. A well-read leader has encountered more problems, more failures, more forms of human behavior, and more competing ideas than personal experience alone could ever provide.
What book would you recommend to someone preparing for increased responsibility?
I would recommend Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Increased responsibility usually brings more authority, but it also brings more uncertainty, criticism, frustration, and circumstances outside a leader’s control. Meditations is useful because it repeatedly returns the reader to the distinction between what we control and what we do not: our judgment, conduct, preparation, and response remain ours even when outcomes, personalities, and circumstances do not.
I also think the book becomes more valuable as responsibility increases because leadership can make self-importance dangerously easy. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the Roman world, yet much of the book consists of reminders to himself to remain disciplined, useful, humble, and focused on duty. The exact circumstances are ancient, but that internal struggle is timeless. Increased responsibility should produce greater self-command, not merely greater control over others.
What do you hope this book contributes to the broader military community?
I hope The Unconventionals encourages military professionals to think more carefully about how we identify talent and how we respond to people who do not fit our preferred model of a leader. Every military institution needs standards, traditions, doctrine, and hierarchy. The argument of the book is not that these things should be discarded. It is that institutions should remain conscious of the difference between standards that preserve effectiveness and conventions that simply preserve familiarity.
I also hope the book encourages a more mature understanding of professional dissent. We sometimes reduce the subject to slogans about speaking truth to power. The reality is harder. A leader must know when to challenge an assumption, how to do so professionally, when to comply after making the case, and when conditions have changed enough to demand renewed judgment.
If the book causes a leader to look twice at an unconventional subordinate—or causes an unconventional subordinate to examine whether an objection is grounded in competence rather than ego—I think it will have contributed something useful.
Is there one short story from your book you would like to share?
One of my favorite examples comes from O. P. Smith during the advance toward the Chosin Reservoir. Smith was concerned about the pace and assumptions driving the movement north and about the possibility that Chinese forces represented a much greater threat than higher headquarters believed. Rather than simply refusing to move, he took practical measures that preserved options for his division. He slowed where he could, worked to keep his forces connected, and prepared positions and logistical support along the route.
Those preparations became extraordinarily important once Chinese forces struck in strength. What makes the episode valuable is that Smith’s leadership was not dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. His unconventionality appeared in preparation. He could not control the assumptions being made above him, but he could control how ready his division was if those assumptions proved wrong.
That is one of the themes I return to throughout the book: sometimes professional courage is not a grand act of defiance. Sometimes it is quietly creating options before everyone else realizes they are needed.
What else do you want your readers to know?
I would want readers to know that The Unconventionals is not intended as a celebration of rebels for rebellion’s sake. I became interested in these four men because their stories complicate the easy leadership lessons we often draw from history. Institutions can be shortsighted, prejudiced, overly rigid, and resistant to change. Unconventional leaders can also be arrogant, reckless, and wrong.
The interesting territory lies between those two truths. Dumas shows how prejudice and politics can prevent institutions from fully recognizing talent. Monash demonstrates how expertise, preparation, and methodical innovation can overcome skepticism. Wingate forces us to confront the limits and dangers of unconventional thinking. Smith demonstrates the value of disciplined professional judgment when higher-level assumptions begin to fail.
I hope readers finish the book asking not simply whether they are conventional or unconventional, but a harder question: are they developing the judgment necessary to know which approach the situation actually requires?
Top 5 books every military professional should read:
1. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence by Dr. Norman F. Dixon
2. The General by Thomas Ricks
3. Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
4. Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
5. Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen
One book you gift often:
No Death No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh
Find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G4T167Q3
Author Bio:
Seth Bush is a former U.S. Army officer, author, and military-history writer with more than a decade of experience in intelligence, staff operations, and command. His professional development has included the West Point Junior Officer Fellowship, the Special Operations Campaign Artistry Program, and the Strategic Broadening Fellowship.
He is the author of The Unconventionals: True Stories about Outsiders Who Changed the World, a work of military history examining four commanders—Alexandre Dumas, Sir John Monash, Orde Wingate, and O. P. Smith—whose careers illuminate the relationship between unconventional thinking, military institutions, professional judgment, and command.
His research on O. P. Smith examines Smith’s leadership before and during the Chosin Reservoir campaign, including his relationship with higher headquarters, concerns regarding Chinese intervention, preparations for the advance into North Korea, and the professional judgment that helped preserve the 1st Marine Division when assumptions underlying the campaign proved incorrect.
Seth’s broader writing focuses on military history, leadership, institutional culture, professional judgment, and the challenges organizations face in recognizing unconventional talent.
Substack: https://sethbush.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bush-325a5286
