0:16 good day and welcome to business lessons from the military one of the way to wow shows I'm your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Tuesday at 11 A.M Pacific time uh 2 p.m eastern time had to think about that for a minute and we talk about military Doctrine military history great leaders coming out of the military and how we can take that and apply it to our businesses in order to make them run more effectively and be more successful so for the last several weeks we've been
0:52 talking about Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine and we're we're actually getting ready to wrap up a a cycle here on the theory of War as applied to business so let's let's jump right into it and and and get going with that and here we go and slideshow there we are okay so here we are wait a while business lessons from the military which you've seen everything we do is based on the three pillars of attainment uh oops it
1:29 went backwards I'm not sure what's going on here let's try it oh there it goes okay and we're we're working here in the Pursuits pillar primarily in the finances Realm uh okay now I'm just to quickly review uh previous uh shows on the theory of War applied to business so we talked about levels of activity not sure what's going on with my PowerPoint today strategic operational Tactical and actions initiative and response
2:04 styles of warfare linear versus maneuver okay and having decisive aims okay and today we're going to wrap this up by talking about generating power now if you're interested in any of those previous discussions please go to our YouTube channel uh youtube.com forward slash I think at the way to wow show and you can see all of our past episodes but specifically look for the playlist I think three down or business lessons
2:39 from the military and you will see all the previous uh discussions we've had on this topic So today we're going to talk about generating power now in Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine we call this combat power right because the Marines are there to fight and uh and and so the idea is to generate as much combat power as possible okay and and but of course in in business we're not looking to fight per se but the idea of generating
3:16 power in our business to drive it forward to make it successful I think we can all relate to that idea and so there's two pairs of concepts for generating power the first is speed and focus and the second is surprise and boldness I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about these things in terms of these two pairs and the first thing we want to talk about is speed so the reality is
3:53 in today's business climate where Innovation is happening so much more quickly than in the past and where competitors are coming into the market pretty rapidly okay the pace of business the pace of life but the pace of business is much faster than it used to be in order for us to be successful then we have to be operating at the speed of business and in fact we want to strive to operate faster than our competitors
4:31 okay but also we want to be striving to operate not some not so much necessarily faster but at least at the speed that our clients and customers want to be moving their lives okay so that's a key part of this now speed can take place for our purposes in two contexts there's speed within time B which is rapid movement if you will
5:09 and there's speed over distance covering a lot of ground both of those can be important here's here's the challenge we can't always be operating at top speed so what we want to work on is setting up a rhythm whereby we move fast and then we move we can slow down for a little while we move fast again slow down for a while move fast slow down we want to get what in
5:45 um the military is called a babble Rhythm so we want to create that rhythm and we we need to be gearing it toward the Cycles in our own business so for example if we're in a in the retail business there are certain times of year where certain retailers will do better than other times of year okay so if we're a toy manufacturer if we're a toy manufacturer then our big sales time is Christmas time
6:21 okay but for us Christmas time itself is not going to be our busy period because by then all our goods are shipped to the stores so our time of our our time of of Need for Speed is probably in the getting Goods to retailers uh time which you know depending on how much lead time retailers need maybe our busy time is the Fall okay or maybe our busy time is
6:56 the spring when we're gearing up to produce all our toys and so we've got to be getting in all our raw materials or our supplies or whatever we need to making sure our um we have enough workers to do everything okay and then summer we can kind of we can kind of operate just sort of at a steady state as we produce things okay make sure our production process is just just stay going consistently and then as we head into fall and need to get all those goods out to retailers we're going to pick up speed again I mean I I I to be honest with you I don't know that
7:31 business I'm just speculating that it could be that way okay so in order to understand when we need to exercise speed we need to understand the cycle of our business okay and we also need to be looking at the business cycle so if if we're heading into a down cycle then that may necessitate our adjusting when we need to be acting with speed acting with rapidity okay the other then the other item
8:10 um the other item paired with with speed is focus Okay so speed is a good thing to have but if we're speeding in all directions then any power generated that speed is dissipating Okay so Siri's gonna drive me to drink okay so in order for Speed to be
8:45 maximally effective it needs to be coupled with Focus so that where where we're being speedy is most effective for our business okay so excuse me to go back to our toy manufacturer that's why he was saying it may be that speed is most important during the development of new products because we've got to we've got to develop them we've got to test them we've got to see
9:21 if there's demand in the marketplace for them okay and we need to do that rapidly to make sure that we find the products that are going to sell the best speed and production may not necessarily be a particularly important thing okay where can there it may be consistency is more important okay where we keep our production Lines Moving all the time so there's no downtime in them but the idea of speeding them up isn't isn't particularly important but then getting the goods to the retailers that may be
9:58 another time where speed is or when speed is important because the retailers they they don't want to have a whole bunch of inventory stocked up sitting in their stores on the other hand they have to have them in time for the Christmas season okay so we need to couple speed with Focus so that as we're generating the speed it's being put to the best use okay hopefully that that makes sense right again
10:36 if there's no if we're if we're focused on everything we are not focused on anything okay so I don't know if you if you recall or if you've been following sort of the The Saga of Twitter since Elon Musk bought it but one of the things he did when he was reworking how many people were were going to be employed by Twitter and all of that is he basically said people get ready to just work hard work fast all that kind of stuff and essentially what he was what he was
11:11 it's saying it sounded to me like I'm gonna take you on this Marathon Sprint and and we're gonna you know change Twitter very rapidly um and and change everything about Twitter very rapidly now maybe that's just how it sounded like to you know those of us on the outside um the the reality though is if we're moving fast everywhere we're creating a lot of Chaos okay and and again and basically we're
11:46 also creating situation where probably a lot of the people we're working with just aren't going to be able to keep Pace if anyone can okay so the so the key thing is not to be stepping on ourselves by having everybody moving fast all the time and constantly it's too much the human mind can't keep up with it so we need to decide where can when and where can speed be applied most effectively for example for for
12:22 um for driving the progress of our business forward that's what we need to look at okay all right so that's speed coupled with Focus that's the first pair the second pair then is surprise coupled with boldness now surprise is important in real in relation to our competitors okay and maybe in in relation to our
12:59 clients and customers okay so in terms of our competitors we want to surprise them so that we can get ahead of them okay it's a way to use our Speed most effectively is by surprising them now there's there's basically three ways that surprise can be employed okay one is I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna double check my notes here to make sure that I'm oops what happened
13:34 here see I lost my notes oh yeah here we go Okay so surprise can be created through deception okay it can be created through ambiguity which isn't the same thing okay and and it can also be created through stealth okay so deception ambiguity and stealth those are the three ways we can use surprise so deception is really saying
14:13 I'm doing this when in fact I'm actually doing this right that's deceiving them okay so maybe we you know announced that we're working on this particular initiative and and maybe by the way we we are a little bit but the real big thing is actually happening over here but we get our competitors so focused on this that they don't realize this whole other bigger thing is going on over here that's deception ambiguity is when we have a lot of different things going on and it's
14:48 unclear if any of which of any of them is our our Focus right and so they can't really understand what what's going on with us and then stealth is keeping things so quiet they have no idea what we're up to okay now any of these could be um used to for first for example for a new product launch so I again I'm going to take an event from history
15:23 um for those of you who are my vintage you may remember something called New Coke okay so new Coke came out and and it was It was supposed to be a better competitor against Pepsi it was basically sweeter than the historic Coca-Cola now it appeared at the time that that was just a valid product new product launch right and they were doing they were actually doing it in order to um take Coca-Cola in a different direction what they quickly found out was there
15:59 was a huge backlash among Coke drinkers of which I was one at the time and we didn't like the new Coke so very quickly they launched classic Coke which was the old formula brought back okay and then over time they got rid of New Coke and classic Coke just became Coke again now that you could you could that could have been I don't think it was frankly but it could have been a deception right so Pepsi and and other competitors
16:34 got deceived into thinking oh Coke is is taking its formula in our Direction what are we going to do about this oh my gosh and get them all you know worked up about we got to find something new to do and spending a whole lot of time and effort in this thing over here meanwhile Coke was planning all along that that was more of a publicity stunt and they were just going to bring their original Coke back like I said I don't think that's actually what they're doing I think it was a mistake on their part but but it's a deception like that could work in order to create more uh publicity if
17:09 you will around an existing product wait you're gonna change it no you can't change it plug your back bring it back okay okay our customers have spoken we're going to bring it back that's deception right and that generates a lot of Market power because all of a sudden everything's focused on what's going on with you know Coca-Cola in this case okay uh and um uh okay so so that's that's deception ambiguity is just throwing out a lot of
17:45 um different things so that people really don't know what's going on so maybe we put out a feelers on a bunch of new products and and again our competitors don't really know uh what's what's what's what's going on so um excuse me I'm this is my daughter calling me from school hey baby what's going on okay okay I can I can be there in about 15 minutes
18:21 okay okay it yes it is it is okay bye okay A little bit of an interruption because uh a sick daughter at school so I'm gonna have to wrap this up and go uh pick up my daughter at school unfortunately Okay so um and the other thing is again the other third type of surprise is stealth where we keep things really really quiet so nobody knows what's going on with us
18:57 now boldness is an aspect of surprise it allows us to spring surprise on our competitors especially but also surprise our customers in a good way so if we go in some really bold New Direction or take some bold new Step okay it may really Delight our customers okay now we have to be careful because we need to use good judgment when we exercise boldness we don't want to be bold in a way that causes us to
19:35 stumble over ourselves or alienate our customers that we don't want to do okay but timidity in the marketplace today is just not a viable strategy we need to be bold we need to be taking risks okay now we can hedge our risks by using speed using focus and using surprise if we're using those three aspects of generating power in the marketplace our
20:10 boldness is more likely to succeed okay so again we want to couple these pairs so that we are generating as much Market power as we possibly can the other thing about generating power using speed Focus surprise and boldness is if we make a mistake we want to be able to recover quickly enough from that mistake
20:46 so that our competitors can't take advantage of it okay and that's you you saw that like using the coke example okay there was a huge Fury and and very quickly classic Coke was was brought out okay to correct it so in the end I don't think the other Cola companies really made that much if any ground against Coca-Cola because Coca-Cola was bold and launching this new product it turned out to be ill-conceived and they quickly brought the old uh product back
21:22 in order not to lose market share I think the I think the idea at that point was well we'll have both these products out there and the reality was New Coke just never caught on because Coke drinkers they liked the you know age-old formula and they eventually dropped it okay so so things worked out for Coca-Cola okay the same is true for us okay we we need to using good judgment take bold action to advance our business and quickly look at is this working how is it working out what shifts need to be
21:59 made in order to keep our Focus where it needs to be okay so how you apply this to your business will depend on what your business is whether it's a product business whether it's a service business these ways of generating power work for across the board for any kind of business okay it just it takes figuring out what are the times when speed is necessary where is the territory over which speed can be used most effectively
22:35 where do I know in other words where do I need to focus my speed then how do I use surprise to give me a competitive advantage and generate more Market power Marketplace power do I use it through deception through ambiguity or through stealth so I can take these bold moves using prudent judgment okay to the best advantage of my business all right I'm gonna I'm gonna end a few minutes early today
23:10 um so just wanna so that that wraps up the theory of War applied to business and here here we go if you have any if you want to have any questions need any help these uh links will be in the show notes once the show posts on our YouTube channel so feel free to contact me through these okay you can post a comment on any of the shows on our um social media you can send me an email at the way to wow show at bummel.com okay happy to take any questions any comments that you have good or bad okay and you
23:48 know here's all the the legal stuff of course um and and I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen all right so starting next week we will be on to a new topic within Marine Corps warfighting Doctrine so I hope you'll tune in next Tuesday 11 A.M Pacific 2 p.m Eastern for a half hour each each session business lessons from the military tomorrow is our our third show of the week it's people making money where we talk about career issues and finance and and personal finance issues Building Wealth that's at
24:24 12 30 Pacific 3 30 p.m uh eastern time that's an hour-long show so I hope you'll join me for that you can always go to Eventbrite and get a free ticket to join me live or watch me on social media whether it's YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Twitter I'm glad to have you join in and watch the show and then next week starting on Monday is our our next round of shows and Monday will be Trust the states weekly at 10 A.M Pacific 1 p.m Eastern and for a half an hour we talk about how you can work with trusts
25:00 and Estates and enhance your and grow your businesses so thank you so much for joining me today I apologize for having to leave a little bit early but I hope you enjoyed the show any questions let me know and I'm wishing you a wonderful rest of the day Marie you're still my