0:15 hello and welcome to business lessons from the military I'm your host a little bit late getting started this morning here oh this morning here on the West Coast I'm your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Tuesday at 11 A.M Pacific Time 2 p.m eastern time with an hour in for mountain and Central to talk about military Doctrine military history great military leaders and how we can take those ideas and apply them to our professional lives to gain more success for our businesses whether it's our own
0:51 whether it's a company we work for whether it's a non-profit the the um venue doesn't matter so much the it's the ideas themselves that really can help Propel us forward much more quickly than we might have otherwise I'm the reason I was late is I'm coming I was coming off of a call from with a ship made a Marine Corps that veteran who started a company after he got out of the Marine Corps he sold it now he's he and his wife they're on to their next venture and one of the topics we were discussing is how his background in the
1:28 Marine Corps prepared him for the work that he's currently doing so um a little bit of a what do you call it um when you uh I don't want to say the word that first come but anyway someone who will be a guest on the show hopefully coming up in the near future and um and and he'll talk he and hopefully his wife will join him as well they'll talk about the work that they're doing and you'll see in a real world application to the ideas that we talk about each each Tuesday here on the show so we're gonna jump right into things I
2:05 hope let's see share screen here we go and there and okay so here's here's our our PowerPoint I I mentioned this uh yesterday um because uh uh I think it's it's it's it's it's it's worth noting um the reason I I do a PowerPoint is is is not because I was in the military where Death by PowerPoint is a requirement it's really because um when we uh hear and see information we're much more likely to absorb it and
2:44 so I I'd like to match or not match mesh the visual with the the the the audio um in order to help us learn as as you know as well as possible so here we go here's our I'm going to sort of Buzz through this I talk about the three pillars of attainment every week so in previous shows we've talked as we talked about the conduct of War applied to business we talked about the ideas of maneuver Warfare orienting on the enemy philosophy of command shaping the action last week we talked about decision-making thinking so I invite you
3:21 to go to um our YouTube channel um youtube.com at the way to wow and you can see previous episodes and and bring yourself up to date if you miss them so today we're going to talk about Mission tactics so Mission tactics is both a leadership style but it's also a methodology for being most effective in in in in developing the Tactical means
3:58 to achieve our larger goal okay so in a previous show I talked about the three levels at which activity happens which is strategic operational and tactical okay and if we think of strategic as being the the highest level this is what strategy are we going to apply in order to in order to meet our goal so let's say our goal is um um I've used Starbucks before let me let me use some other kind of business uh
4:35 uh okay okay so um excuse me let's say that we're um have you ever heard of a a clothing store called Scotch and Soda okay they're uh I believe a a Dutch based company the Netherlands and and they do um you know higher and not not super high-end like you know Gucci and all that but they they do kind of um above just above the middle end of of clothing both men's and women's right and I think I don't I don't know this I
5:10 haven't looked into them so I'm just speculating because because that's more fun um so I think their goal is is to be the the clothing store for people who want to dress sharply but just slightly unconventionally right so they you know they don't want that you're not gonna go there and find you know your blue suit and your reptile like you would see on Wall Street okay but you're also not going to go there and and you're not going to go there and find the sort of preppy look that you're
5:46 gonna find that you see at J crew um but you're also not going to see the sort of way out there stuff like you might see it Abercrombie and Fitch so they're sort of between Abercrombie and Fitch and maybe J crew okay um the reason I'm talking about them is uh it's a store that I I really like the the clothes there I they have they have just that little bit of a stylishness to them that that is you know pleasing for people who you know care about that sort of thing okay and I think that so that's their goal is is to fill is is to fill
6:22 that that Niche if you will be the clothing provider for people you know like me who we want to look sharp um but we don't want to look stayed you know we don't want to look like you know we're dressing back in the 1930s right okay so that's their Top Lane goal and their strategy for doing that is to locate their stores where they think they will find that clientele and to have that kind of merchandise that will attract that particular type of of consumer okay so that's the Strategic level right
6:59 operationally they've got whatever is going on now now we get down to the Tactical level that's the in-store level Okay so um having been to Scotch and Soda many times I've noticed the same thing every Scotch and Soda store I walked into which includes one in in Heidelberg Germany and includes uh two or three here in Los Angeles that is when you walk in the the the the um the people working in the store they do not immediately jump on you can I
7:36 help you like they're vultures like you know they let you kind of walk around acclimate yourself to the store they're going on with whatever it is they're doing and when you get to the to get to where they are they say you know hi hello um if you need anything you know please let me know it's like it's so nice right it's it's you you don't feel pressured tactically I think that's the right approach for the clientele that they're dealing
8:11 with they don't need to be hard sell if someone's walked into their store they're gonna look at the merchandise and either say this is for me or this is not they don't have to sell people on their merchandise because they're looking to cater to a particular clientele right um and then you know if you ask them questions they're they're very friendly I I got to know um several of the the people working in the one store that was nearby to where um I you know am frequently they got to know my name all that kind of stuff right those are the mission tactics that
8:49 support their strategic Vision that supports their goal what it is they're looking to achieve they're they created a relationship with me they got to know more specifically what I liked um and and they made it a pleasant place for me to come and sometimes I would drop by into the shop just to say hello to the folks that worked there and I wasn't intending to buy anything and that was fine with them walked in hey how you doing how are things going you know how's business been and they tell me okay hey I gotta run but I'll I'll
9:25 see you next time they're like great see you later you know kind of thing right um so that is that's the idea in business of mission tactics now the Marine Corps which is where the conduct of War applied to business we're talking about Marine Corps Doctrine the Marine Corps Doctrine in this is you assign the mission okay so in the case of scotch and soda your mission is to sell clothes to people who like the
10:03 kind of garments that we're selling that that's the mission okay now they may give them some ideas on how to do it like how the the general approach they want people to take but they couldn't possibly specify things like okay here's how we want you to create a relationship with Kevin right they may specify by the way as part of the mission create a relationship with customers but how that's done is left to the individual and that is smart because the
10:42 individuals are the ones interacting with the customers and so they are in the best place to know how do I create these relationships and by the way the way they create a relationship with me is probably different than the way they create a relationship with somebody else so I can go in there and I can talk to them about you know Alan Flusser and and Bruce failer these are men who have are well known in in the men's uh clothing uh world they've written numerous books etc etc I
11:19 can talk to them about other stores and and styles and all this kind of stuff so the kind of conversation we're going to have is going to be different than the you know a guy who walks in there who he doesn't know a whole lot about clothing he wants to look sharp he knows that um but but you know he doesn't really know much more than than that so they're gonna have a different kind of relationship with with that fellow um and and so their ability to be versatile and interact with a range of customers with a range of interests is is really important and they were the
11:54 reason I I picked out scotch and soda is what I found is they were the the I guess whoever manages the stores they're very good at finding people who do that and they're quite good at retaining them because I used to see the same people over and over and over again over a period of years which is kind of unusual in the retail business okay so um this this is an example of how you assign a mission okay but you don't specify the tactics you don't specify
12:31 how the mission will be achieved okay what you do is you give your people now in the Marine Corps what they do is they train a lot okay so they'll in training they will give a squad of Marines or a platoon of Marines or a company of Marines whatever whatever size whatever the size of the group is they will give them their objective okay and then they will count on the training that those Marines have received they'll count on them to use
13:07 that to figure out okay how am I going to achieve this objective and then afterwards after the training they'll they'll do an evaluation and say okay how did it work what went right what went wrong what could have been done better okay and then they'll send them out into training again and they'll do another exercise and they'll they'll give them an opportunity to take the knowledge they've gained to improve on the tactics that they use okay but they don't Define the tactics okay that's
13:44 that's inefficient okay because in fact I was just talking if you've been watching the show you've heard my favorite expression by Von multi right no plan survives first contact with the Enemy right it just doesn't so it you have to have a plan because you have to have a sense of knowing what you're going to do but once you start getting into the thick of it you're inevitably going to have to make alterations and if you've got to you know contact uh you know higher echelons to clear your alterations you can't move
14:21 nimbly you can't take advantage of opportunities that are in front of you and in short you impair your own ability to be successful and your your commanders are impairing your ability to be successful by micromanaging you okay so what we want to do is is give our people a lot of opportunity to learn and even make mistakes okay we'll learn more from making mistakes than we will from getting it right because just because we got it right in this instance doesn't
14:57 mean that we're going to get it right in the next instance it may work because the particular situation is what it is and so these tactics work for that but then if we're faced with a different situation we've got to have the ability to to Pivot our tactics to alter our tactics in a way that will still allow us to achieve our objectives so um I I was in a a I don't remember if I mentioned this last week I was in it I was in a business training I'm not going to say who the organization was because I I don't want to cast aspersions on
15:34 them I think they were doing um very good work um so they started it was a training for people who um hadn't been involved in entrepreneurship before or at least very much and the person running the training started out by saying why do you think most businesses fail okay and the answer she got most frequently was the businesses were trying to sell something that people didn't want well that's probably true
16:11 very it's not very often that a business is able to figure out in advance what people really want hey you can do all kinds of market research you can do focus groups you can do surveys And yet when you launch a product or a service for that matter you you're not really going to know if it's what people want the successful businesses are the ones who can pivot and the reason most businesses fail is not necessarily because they've launched
16:48 a product or service that people don't want it's because they're not flexible enough to get the market feedback that allows them to make the changes in tactics operations or strategy that will take them down the path to success which is never straight it's always like I've been doing with my hands it always weaves right and it's just like fighting a battle okay while an army May generally be going in this direction like if you think about the battlefronts in World War II for example okay you you had you had um
17:24 uh Montgomery's Army group um Coming kind of from the North and then you had Bradley's Army group coming from a more Central southern route as they converged on Germany right well okay so those two directions they weren't going to change but within those broad movements were armies uh cores divisions um regiments battalions companies most of which were not moving in a linear
18:00 Direction they were having to figure out the path through and the smaller the unit the more deviations they were probably having to take to get to their eventual objective which was ostensibly Berlin right capture the capital and and Germany is conquered okay Nazi Germany was conquered so when we talk about Mission tactics since it's at the Tactical level that we're most likely going to have to make detours and and and contingency plans
18:35 and and figure out a new path to get there we want to give the people especially the leadership at that level the maximum of flexibility that they can have okay so that's where this idea of mission tactics comes in assign the mission okay we want you to do X okay we're going to train you with as much training as we can and then you're gonna figure out how to get where it is that you want to go and then my watch is going crazy okay I I started a little
19:10 bit late but I I'm gonna do my best to end on time okay so um by the way I haven't shown this for a while this let me I'm going to go ahead and and uh close out of the close out of the the screen share so you can see this so this is the Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine this is book one okay and and and this is where all of this comes from so you can find this online by the way okay um so uh so I just want to take a minute
19:45 and you can see I've I've highlighted various things in here so I want to take a minute to just read you a couple of sentences that I think really get to the heart of it okay um assigning a subordinate Mission without specifying how the mission must be accomplished that's the core idea that that I've been talking about here okay here's the key thing and this is where it gets difficult especially if you're in a more senior leadership role right the senior intervenes in a subordinates execution only by exception okay
20:23 so it's a rare situation where you're going to to intervene okay let me okay all right so that is the idea behind Mission tactics and you can you can see this in in a number of organizations so so for example um so I've a very close friend who's involved with exp Realty it's the fastest growing real estate company in the United States um and and he's he's shown me a lot
20:59 about how exp Realty works what's interesting is the Top Line objective is to serve customers real estate needs as well as possible that's that's the mission of exp realist Realty okay and they have enormous amounts of training they have online training they have um uh face-to-face training they have um uh video training they have Affinity groups all kinds of opportunities to get
21:35 trained okay and to practice things okay the tactics that an individual agent uses to meet that objective are largely within that agent's control so as long as they're not illegal or immoral it's up to the agent to figure out tactically how they're going to achieve the objectives that are necessary to support the company's overall goals and I think this is one of the reasons by the way that exp has been so successful because
22:13 what they focus on is training their people on how to figure out for themselves the tactics they need to execute in order to meet the company's Top Line goal okay and that's what we want to do as business owners that's what we want to do as people working in other people's businesses it's what we want to do in non-profits I I would say it's what we want to do in Academia and government as well right we don't want to micromanage we want to see that our people get excellent training that then
22:50 they can use creatively in order to obtain in order to achieve the goals of the organization all right so that's what I've got for you today a little bit shorter than normal that's okay it was it was a short topic with really just that one single point to make tomorrow my show people making money begins at 12 30 PM Pacific time I'm going to be talking about how you quickly analyze an investment property using a technique that I learned from
23:25 many several decades ago from a a fantastic teacher by the name of William golden I've since modified it a little bit well not a little bit actually quite a bit um and and it's it's just I I think you will find it a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're going to be um doing anything with real estate the fact of the matter is it would work for also um analyzing uh an investment in a business um although businesses typically aren't broken down the same way that real estate is so you there'd have to be some
24:01 different terminology and that kind of stuff that that you're you would have to use but I invite invite you to join me tomorrow at 12 30 p.m and then next week we're back to the beginning of the way to wow shows on Monday at 10 A.M Pacific time is trust in Estates weekly um and Tuesday we'll we'll be back again for the next edition of business lessons from the military at 11 A.M Pacific time so I thank you very much for joining me if you have questions comments please feel free to send me an email or to drop
24:37 a comment into any of our social media Outlets they'll all be in the show notes after this after after we end this this meeting um and it posts on YouTube um they'll all be there for you and I mentioned several well a couple of times anyway um my YouTube channel I would have sure appreciate if you would consider uh subscribing to my YouTube channel you'll be sure to get notified anytime a new show posts and so you'll never miss an episode and um I would love to have you um as a subscriber and that wraps it up
25:14 only to wish you a wonderful rest of the day and to give my sign off Marie darling you are my bell thanks so much look forward to seeing you tomorrow