0:16 foreign hello and welcome to business lessons from the military I'm your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Tuesday at 11 A.M Pacific time 1 p.m no wait 11 12 1 2 p.m eastern time sorry a little a little bit off this morning and we discuss military Doctrine history great leaders and apply the things we learn to the business world to improve our companies those either that
0:51 we that we have ourselves or that we work for and for the last quite a number of weeks we've been talking about Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine and we've been applying principles of War fighting to the business world so today we're going to wrap up the latest segment of that and so I'm going to jump right into it by sharing my screen and there we are and let's see where is it here we go slideshow okay
1:29 so business lessons from the military here's our our handy dandy uh uh PowerPoint which every good military presenter has the three pillars of attainment um for those of you who are not familiar with this um I invite you to go to our YouTube channel and I've got a a show that talks about this as a system for organizing our lives and understanding where we need to have our Focus from from time to time okay and so we've been talking about the
2:04 conduct of War applied to business and in uh previous shows which again are all available on our YouTube channel we talked about maneuver Warfare and then we talked about orienting on the enemy philosophy of command shaping the action decision making Mission tactics commanders intent and then last week well actually two weeks ago because I was out sick last week uh we talked about main effort and we're going to wrap up our discussion on the conduct of
2:39 War applied to business talking about combined arms now this may sound like something completely unrelated to business um and and I think you will see that that nonetheless this is one of the most important aspects of how we manage our businesses how we lead our businesses so what I'm going to do first is talk about what combined arms means in in terms of how the Marine Corps
3:15 operates so you can understand it under in its original context and then I'm gonna going to apply it to an example in business so you can see how it works in practice here in the civilian World okay so when we talked about combined arms we're talking about the full integration of all the forces that a military can bring to bear so the Marine Corps is the epitome of this
3:50 because it operates in the water on land and in the air all within the Marine Corps okay so um you have something called a magtaff that's an acronym m-a-g-t-f and it stands for marine air ground task force and what happens is you're you're taking all of the abilities of the Marine Corps and you're using them in order to attain
4:26 a particular military objective okay it works at the top level the Strategic level it works at the Tactical level the lowest level okay and and the reason the Marine Corps follows this Doctrine is they're looking to create what they call a no win situation for the enemy so in other words no matter what the enemy does no matter how they react or respond to the attack by the Marine forces they have no good
5:02 options only bad ones okay so let me give you an example that comes straight out of this is this is the document that we're working with by the way this is the Marine Corps War fighting uh Doctrine so let's say you've got a small unit like a rifle team or maybe a full platoon okay and within that you have Marines armed with automatic weapons okay M16s most likely okay and you have some
5:40 Marines who have uh grenade launchers or maybe even uh you have a a mortar team okay so the way there the Marine Corps are going to use combined arms is they're going to use this the the automatic weapon fire and concentrate that on the enemy so that the enemy it has to stay low has to stay behind whatever um uh barricades they may have making it hard for them if not impossible to react
6:19 in any kind of coordinated Way by pinning them down with constant automatic weapon fire that then gives their grenade launchers or their mortars the ability to bring heavier fire onto that position that the enemy cannot respond to okay and and that puts them in that no win situation if they try and move during the automatic weapons fire while they may not get killed they're probably gonna get hit and that's going to reduce
6:55 their effectiveness on the other hand if they don't move they're going to get slacked With Grenades and or mortars and they're and they are going to get killed they're going to get wiped out there's there's nothing they have no good option at all okay they may be able to retreat okay and if they Retreat well then the Marines win okay so do you see how they're using this now another example would be when the when Marine Aviation is flying close
7:34 support for Infantry okay so up above you've got Jets most likely well nowadays it's going to be the Joint Strike Fighter um but they're going to be providing close close support in in terms of either strafing or maybe low level bombing of various positions keeping the enemy from being able to respond keeping them probably within the combat zone and then in the meantime Marine forces can
8:10 move in behind the air attack and wipe the enemy out so they work together in that way okay um and or by the way you can also use the error element to come in behind the strafing or whatever immediately drop Marines Into The Hot Zone they can spread out and wipe out the enemy that's been subdued by the Air Attack okay and all of this is coordinated closely okay in a way that makes it extremely difficult for the enemy to respond
8:49 okay so that's what they mean by combined arms using whatever combat power the Marine Corp brings to bear in a coordinated way to make to meet their objectives okay so you may say well wait a minute we we don't want to wipe out our customers no you do not and you probably don't want to literally wipe out you know your competition either okay so now let's apply this to an example in the civilian world I'm going to use a recent example
9:27 where was used I think very effectively so if if you've been on this Earth in the last month you have been and actually probably the last what two or three months you you I don't think could have escaped hearing a promotion for the Barbie movie okay I haven't seen it candidly not interested my my point of bringing it up is there was nowhere you could go without hearing about it
10:03 it was everywhere it was on television I'm sure it was being promoted in movie theaters it was on radio it was in print media it was being promoted by numerous other products as tie-ins everywhere you went there was some kind of promotion for the Barbie movie as a consumer especially and I I say this you know tongue-in-cheek you were in a no-win situation I know Escape situation
10:39 we'll call it okay there was nowhere you could go unless you were gonna bury yourself I guess in an underground shelter with with you know no contact with the outside world where you weren't going to hear about the Barbie movie it was a saturation okay and I'm sure that that was by Design okay and I suspect that that was part of the plan from the beginning from the time that Mattel got together with I don't remember which uh Studio made the Barbie movie does it doesn't matter but by the time but
11:15 from the time that Mattel got together with the studio that produced the Barbie movie and they started planning it I I would be willing to bet that that they were combining all the different areas in which they had influence in order to enlist them in the success of this movie okay so it it wasn't none of this happened by chance it all happened through a coordinated effort of the initial license or Mattel the studio
11:51 okay all of the other companies whether it was um there was some insurance company I know that did uh Barbie tie-ins I still see them um um on occasion um I mean so many other companies all working together to bring their efforts to the success of this movie okay that's on if you will sort of the Strategic level okay and then on the chat more of the Tactical level right within the studio that produced the movie again I suspect that as they
12:30 developed the movie itself and and again I haven't seen it but I suspect that there were certain things in the movie that the marketing and advertising people at the studio lobbied to get in order to make the movie more easily promotable okay and and again they're you they were using you know the story Department the art Direction Department the marketing department probably you know the the apart the department that deals with
13:06 exhibitors movie theaters all of the various Departments of that studio were working together in order to create a movie that would be highly promotable and therefore very likely to have the kind of box office gross that the Barbie movie had what a billion dollars in I think it was what a week and a half or two and a half weeks something like that okay over a billion dollars worldwide gross I don't know where the gross stands right now but I think six you know significantly
13:41 um more more than that probably at this point okay all of that happened by Design now um compare and contrast that with um the other movie that came out I I think it was the same weekend that's why they had this old you know sort of uh what do they call it Barbie Heimer or something like that the Oppenheimer movie came out um I I think on the same weekend um and it had nothing like the promotion that the Barbie movie had okay first of
14:18 all they weren't promoting a toy God forbid you know nuclear weapons right Robert Oppenheimer was a famous scientist who was instrumental in the creation of the atomic bombs so there was a a real life figure there not you know a toy that a you know that a company had been making for decades and decades okay second of all um while there was kind of the standard movie promotion for Oppenheimer there was not this broad-based marketing campaign where you had you know everything from insurance companies to probably you know beer
14:54 companies or whatever all promoting Oppenheimer and they were all promoting promoting Barbie right they were busy doing that um I mean I'm not sure what those tie-ins might have been for Oppenheimer but um you know if they had gotten more creative they could have thought of some so for example um universities might might have gotten involved with promoting the movie okay to their students perhaps or you know organizations uh Caltech there were
15:29 other there were universities involved in the Manhattan Project so there could have been tie-ins there I you know I I don't know I'm just thinking out of the box here so Oppenheimer could have done a combined effort to promote it it they just didn't for whatever reason they didn't decide to do that they they used a fairly typical movie promotion scheme okay and that's the difference between the two and you can see it reflected in the box office now Oppenheimer was lucky I
16:04 guess to come out the same weekend as Barbie and and and people went you know made a big thing about going and seeing both movies even though they were very very different movies and presumably they um uh were designed to attract different types of audiences okay so it did benefit from that but I don't think that was planned in the sense of the people who produced and marketed Oppenheimer thought well let's bring it out on the same weekend as the Barbie movie because um we're gonna get a big Boost from the Barbie movie they may have thought well we'll sort of counter program it to
16:40 Barbie and so everybody who doesn't want to go see Barbie will come see us but I I would bet you they did not plan on people seeing both okay especially if they were putting it if they were scheduling it as a counter programming ploy to to get you know non-barby viewers to go see Oppenheimer okay so one the Barbie movie is is a civilian life example of how to use combined arms or combined efforts we might call them in in the civilian World okay
17:17 Oppenheimer much less so all right so how do we apply this to our own businesses well the first I the first lesson hopefully is now obvious whatever it is that we're offering to our clients and customers we want a whole of company approach to doing that so the sir so the services that we offer okay when we tailor those Services we
17:52 want input from the marketing people on how to best tailor them so that they can be marketed the most effectively you know that doesn't mean that we necessarily give the marketing people veto over what the firm does I don't mean that at all what I mean is we develop our marketing plans in close coordination with the people who are going to be doing the work okay the more the marketing people understand what a company does the more
18:30 effective they can be in putting that message out okay and it's it's marketing shouldn't be an overlay marketing should be an integral part of how we craft our business that's what in in many ways branding is all about Okay so if we're in some kind of professional business whether it's law accounting real estate Financial Services okay how we present our business to the
19:05 public is as important especially these days as how competent we are in performing those services okay if we cannot present ourselves um uh what's the word I'm looking for um compellingly to to our potential customers and clients it to a large extent is not going to matter how well we perform our services or how well we make our products nobody's going to hear
19:41 about them nobody's going to buy them nobody's going to engage us okay now I I've I've been talking mostly from a combined you know marketing impact because that's what spreads the word but I would say to that there's a broader way of looking at combined efforts in our businesses so one of the key aspects of a business is how are we presenting ourselves to the public in terms of
20:16 our standards our ethics what what we believe in okay there's been a lot of controversy um over the last couple of years especially about companies taking political stands for example and there's and they've gotten a considerable amount of blowback from both sides of the spectrum okay if you've looked at the examples of um Bud Light and Target okay it wasn't just a matter of one side of the spectrum you know lambasting them and and that was it
20:51 it's it's then they they tried to Pivot and then the other side lambaz and they try to Pivot it's it's like they became a ping-pong ball okay now I would argue one of the reasons that's the case is they have not integrated fully enough what it is they really stand for what is really important to them okay you may have heard the term rainbow washing right which is what a lot of the people in the sort of lgbtq community call what companies do
21:27 they their contention is that that companies who are marketing to that group is just doing so in order to you know expand their customer base but there's no real commitment to the ideology of these groups okay now maybe there is maybe there isn't I don't know I'm not I'm not I'm not commenting on that aspect of it what I'm saying is you can avoid becoming a ping pong ball especially in things like social issues
22:03 by deciding where are we really going to be in with respect to these are we going to take a stand and if we get blowback are we gonna still stand there because if the answer is no then you're not taking a stand okay or are we going to take the attitude that our primary purpose is Commerce and we're not going to get involved in political issues especially hot button political issues okay and and if we take Flack for not getting involved are we going to stand on our
22:40 principle okay if you're going to stand on your principle whatever it is to get involved not get involved or be involved only to this whatever it is once you've affirmatively made that decision and combined it into the strategy operations and tactics of your business then if there's any kind of blowback it doesn't matter because you've thought it through you've made your decision and if any statement needs to be made it's not going to be any different than any statement you've had to make before
23:16 this is our position our position is we want to be the um I don't know beer company for everybody and we we don't want to alienate anybody we don't want to give special preference to anybody we're here for enjoyment okay which is presumably what um Bud Light is is is gonna say now okay now have they thought that through I don't know I I don't work for Bud Light my my point is is that if we think these through if we talk about what can
23:51 happen as a result of whatever position we're taking okay then what we're actually doing is we're placing our potential um detractors in a no-win situation because they'll start throwing verbal bombs at us or whatever and we'll sit back and say you know we've already as a company thought this through talk this out this is the position we're taking and we respectfully disagree with the groups
24:28 criticizing us um and that's the end of it and let them you know let the furies spin around or whatever but we know where we're at and in that way we're in and we can only win situation best case scenario okay and that's what we're trying to do so again we want to have as much of our as many parts of our company involved in as much of the decision-making process as possible okay
25:05 in order to be as fully integrated in the way that we're operating and leading our businesses and that will give us the best chance at getting through the vicissitudes of of business life okay and by the way the same thing applies to our own lives okay I'm not going to get into that in in this but we want to be as holistic as possible okay in how we deal with ourselves and
25:40 our businesses so I'm going to go back real quickly this is the idea now coming back to what motivates all the shows of the three pillars of attainment it's to get us thinking about holistically Our Lives okay and by the way you could take the three pillars of attainment and you could apply it to your business what is the identity of your business what is the mindset of your business what is the health of your business what are the relationships your business needs what
26:15 are the finances how is your business growing how is it providing an outlet for your employees okay you could take these and and again a business in many ways especially if it's Corporation is a creature of its own okay so the idea is to think of it holistically so that everything is operating together as well as possible now that doesn't mean that some parts are going to that doesn't mean that there there won't be some parts that are taking precedence over others there will be always okay this idea of operating in Perfect
26:52 Balance I think there's more stress trying to achieve balance than there is in moving forward and rebalancing and periodically okay that's certainly the best investing strategy it's the best strategy for ourselves our lives and it's the best strategy when we're talking about combined arms we're going to want to work as holistically as possible with the various parts of our business recognizing that at times we've we've talked about this before there's going
27:27 to be supported aspects and supporting aspects and those may change depending on the circumstances okay so that is the conduct of War applied to business and these Concepts do um um build on each other so if you haven't seen the other shows or you've only seen a few of them I do encourage you to go to my YouTube channel and look at the past shows that are within the same grouping there I believe there's a total
28:02 of eight of them okay and see how they interrelate and that will give you the firmest grasp on the conduct of war and applying it to your business so that's what I've got for you today here you see on the screen this is where you can get help you can ask questions you can make comments good bad I you know always um always interested in hearing your thoughts okay these links will be in the show notes okay here's the legal stuff okay and let's go ahead and stop the
28:39 sharing so next week we're going to start on another topic within um Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine we're actually going to be talking about how cultural issues impact warfighting and therefore how we can translate that into running our businesses so I invite you to tune in a week from today at 11 A.M Pacific time for the next edition of business lessons from the military tomorrow at 12 30 PM Pacific is my show
29:15 business lessons from the military and we're going to be talking about what kind of insurance do you really need okay there's lots of incentive on behalf of financial service people to sell you insurance but what do you actually need to carry okay so we're going to talk about what insurance is how it works when it's needed we're going to talk about all of those issues tomorrow so I invite you to tune in again 12 30 p.m uh Pacific time Wednesday tomorrow and then next week uh
29:51 starting on Monday with trust and Estates weekly at 10 A.M Pacific time we'll have the next set of uh of episodes of the way to wow shows so I thank you very much for joining me today hope you found it useful as I do all the shows that we do they're all here for your benefit and one last thing before we go and that is if you're not a subscriber to my YouTube channel do consider doing so that way you can be notified anytime a new episode is posted and you won't miss
30:27 out on any of the information that we have to offer you so thanks again for joining me and signing off Marie darling You Are My Bell see you soon folks