0:08 hello and welcome to business lessons from oh the way to wow Show Business lessons from the military I'm your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Tuesday at uh 10 30 a.m Pacific time uh 1 30 p.m eastern time and then an hour in for Central and mountain time and before I forget I'm gonna try and mention this a couple of times during the show starting next week we're going to move to 11 A.M uh Pacific time that would be 2 p.m eastern time and
0:43 then an hour in for each of uh mountain and central time we're push I'm pushing it back a half an hour um I think it'll you know perhaps make it a more convenient time for for you to join me so um we are here each week to talk about various military Doctrine history great leaders and how we can use the uh this these different sources of information to improve our business life to make our businesses run better to be better
1:18 leaders and um and and in general Advance our professional lives and so we're here for about a half an hour on on Tuesday Morning slash afternoon depending on where you are in the country and uh that that is our purpose so we've been for I'm going to go ahead and and share my screen if I can find the right button oops one second okay and here we go you would think
1:53 after all this time I would have the technology down pat wouldn't you okay so um slideshow and here we go Okay so we've been talking for the last uh few weeks about the nature of of business based on Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine talking about the nature of war and as as I've mentioned uh at every um show there are obvious differences between
2:30 business and War um hopefully we're not killing anybody in business nonetheless there are many parallels between the two it's it's one of the reasons why the Art of War is such a popular book among business people so oh well let's see if this will advance there oh there we go so this is all part of the three pillars of attainment we're dealing here in the Pursuits realm uh I mean the Pursuits pillar and the finances realm information that we talk
3:05 about though will also apply to to other uh pillars and Realms within the three pillars so uh two weeks ago I talked about uh fiction and uncertainty that was that was kind of a lead off in terms of the nature of business and then three weeks ago and and if you want to know why go back to our go to our YouTube channel you can uh watch those episodes you'll find out why I I inadvertently uh uh did them out of order but then we talked then we talked
3:40 about fluidity and disorder and then last week we talked about complexity and the human Dimension so to today we're going to wrap up our discussion on the nature of business as it relates to war fighting Doctrine by talking about violence and danger and physical moral and mental forces excuse me now I just got done saying that War I mean that business is is not an existential Enterprise the way war is the reality is
4:17 in fighting a war where we've gotten to the point in international relations where one country or a group of countries or a group of of organizations may be the wrong uh uh term but anyway a group has decided that they're going to use Force against another country or group of countries or not other groups in order to attain their objectives and the result of that is is among other things
4:54 um potentially death to the par some of the participants the wounding and even the long-term wounding of the participants as well as destruction of of territory property um etc etc um and and the violence doesn't necessarily only extend to military personnel and or military facilities oftentimes um especially the way War uh was was fought starting in well
5:31 I'm I'm for sure starting in the early 20th century and and perhaps even before that um civilians were um oftentimes um frankly more than collateral damage to use a term of art sometimes civilians were specifically targeted and we see that still today and so business is not like that you know we may Target the competition but we're not there to kill maim or destroy them
6:09 or hopefully not but what I want to talk about in terms of how this relates to business is what how violence and danger impacts people because that I think does have a connection to the nature of business and that is people in a war whether they are military people or whether they're civilians working for the military or whether they're just civilians un unrelated to the military living but living their lives
6:46 the violence and danger of War causes fear and in order for the war or the battles to be successfully pursued that fear has to be overcome okay now most of the time we're talking about fear people fearing for their lives fearing for their safety fearing for their loved ones safety and lives and and perhaps fearing for
7:21 um their their their property okay that those are the fears of warfare now even in business people have fear it may not be as deep as a as an existential fear but it's still present and the kind of fears that people face in the business environment it could be fear of a loss of a job and the ability to support themselves and their families
7:56 it could be a fear of loss of status so someone who's in a high position um ends up losing that job or or getting getting fired um you see this happening in companies going through turmoil like Bed Bath and Beyond which filed for bankruptcy uh this week so fear is an element that we deal with in business and sometimes we may be dealing with a situation where
8:33 fear is present and we don't know it so people within our organizations may be fearful the fear actually may not be coming from their association with our organization it could be coming from something outside the organization that's now impinging on their ability to do their work so let's say that someone someone's spouse is very sick and the
9:08 person is afraid that they're going to lose their spouse okay that is very likely to change their performance at work okay and so that's that's an outside influence and inside influence I I imagine many of the people working for Bed Bath and Beyond have been working under the burden of fear for quite some time the company has been in a lot of turmoil it's had it's had big big ups and downs as it sought financing to help it
9:45 survive it was a mean stock for a while so its stock seemed to be going up and I can imagine people were thinking oh we're saved and then you know bang you know the for the floor fell through again um I believe yesterday the stock was trading at 29 cents a share right so that kind of turmoil within an organization causes people a lot of fear and then just difficult Economic Times can cause fear in people especially if they don't know what's going on in the
10:21 business so they may be afraid they're going to lose their jobs they're going to get laid off or whatever um even if the company itself seems to be relatively sound look at look at the Disney Company I mean it's the largest entertainment company in the world it it still makes you know billions of dollars every year and yet um they just announced the second round of layoffs I believe yesterday or today so people within Disney are could very well be afraid that fear
10:56 excuse me makes maximum productivity focused work to achieving the objectives of the organization much much harder to achieve and so the response to well the violence and danger of War which which creates fear and the various um situations that cause fear in business is to create
11:31 an atmosphere of Courage now primarily this comes through leadership so if if the leaders if the senior Executives of a company are confident and despite their fear they're able to go on with their work and work effectively work efficiently that that will rub off on other people in the organization and there are several ways
12:08 that this this kind of Courage can be conveyed to other people so let's let's let's take an example uh where um a company um has has has done something um let me think about this uh oh okay so um if you recall this is quite a number of years ago uh J and J which makes Tylenol
12:43 um they had a big problem with people getting Tylenol that had been poisoned oh my gosh right I've got a headache I'm gonna take Tylenol and oh my gosh it makes me sick or kills me right um no one no one expects that it was a huge huge uh nightmare for jnj Tylenol is a very trusted product and now all of a sudden people would not buy it at any price right they probably couldn't have given it away so the leaders of J and J I'm sure we're
13:22 experiencing some fear and the rank and file people in the company probably were as well if if the product Tylenol you know collapsed as a viable product think of the loss of Revenue and therefore the loss of employment Etc that that jnj would have had to have gone through okay so in this case it took moral courage to come out and and say you know we don't know why this is happening
13:57 we're we're going to investigate it but in the meantime we are pulling all of the Tylenol off the shelves until we figure out what's going on now you might say oh my gosh it sounds like a retreat if I were working for jnj I would I'd be even more afraid but but that that moral courage that was demonstrated by senior leadership in jnj I I I I think pause people to realize hey we're working for a good organization an
14:34 organization that cares about its customers and and its reputation and therefore we can have confidence in what they're doing to solve this problem and we can take courage from these positive steps that the organization is taking Okay so whether it's exercising moral courage in that kind of um disastrous situation or whether it's a situation where let's say the company
15:09 is having to lay people off the way these decisions are made the way they're conveyed the way the individuals are told that they're being laid off all of this can be done in a way that either inspires courage in the other people in the organization or exacerbates the atmosphere of fear right so all of these all of these come down to leadership how
15:44 are we going to navigate through these fearful times so that people can feel confidence in the organization and its leadership and then do their best in order to Soldier on as we say in spite of the fear right so some people have the mistaken impression that courage is the lack of fear that is not true a even George Patton who I I mentioned
16:20 quite often was afraid courage is the ability to act even though you are afraid that's what courage is and in a business many times we have to take actions even though we're uncertain what the results will be or maybe we know what the results are going to be and they're not going to be good okay either people are going to dislike us for what we did or we're going to take a big Financial loss for taking a particular
16:57 step which which may raise anxiety because now we don't have as much income as we have to run the business all of these things can instill fear however if we act with resolve if we take the time to explain why a decision is being made then we can dispel some if not all of the fear and and replace it with a sense of courage and faith in what the leadership of the company is doing right
17:34 just like now on the battlefield sometimes you know a commander is not going to have time to go into a really deep explanation of you know why we need to take this objective and this and that you know when when the ordinance is flying and and and they're and they're in the midst of the chaos of the battlefield so sometimes leadership has got to be just standing up and moving ahead so to speak and in that case uh we talk about leading from the front sometimes that's what leaders have to do even though that exposes them to the
18:10 most danger because showing that courage that willingness to March forward toward the objective despite the danger inspires courage and others but in business rarely is it a case where we have to act so quickly that we we don't have time to sit down with our our colleagues explain to them what's going on explain to them why what this what the decisions are that were made why they were made etc etc and giving them a chance to ask
18:45 questions so and by the way being open about decisions and and being open about the fact that the decisions sometimes are going to negatively impact some of the people in the organization be being willing to confront that openly and honestly is also a statement of courage and so when we're faced with these these difficulties in business we can Inspire Courage by acknowledging the situation that we're in
19:20 acting calmly thinking clearly and conveying as as much information as is reasonable to everybody else so that they can get a sense of Courage as well from from what we're doing right so that's how violence and endanger leading to fear I think connects directly to the nature of business so the last item under the nature of business I want to talk about is physical moral and mental forces so we've I think it's it's easy to to
19:56 imagine that that that business is really a a physical phenomenon so we're dealing with products we're dealing with services that are rendered to people we're dealing with money which is a a really kind of the embodiment of physicality in many ways and so when we go to do business whether it's launch a new marketing initiative or launch a new product we're very aware of the physical forces or what we might call resources that that the business
20:32 has so if we're launching a new marketing campaign we've probably put together uh maybe some videos it may be different uh static media that we're going to post on social media all of it is although it's it's it's we're not going to pick it up like uh you know like like a business card right it's still physical in that sense right so it's it's it's easy to understand the physical forces available to us in business I think it's less obvious the moral and mental forces
21:08 that we have at our disposal and if you were to talk to uh uh military commanders I think that they would tell you that the moral and mental forces are actually more important more decisive in Victory than the physical forces right how many times have we seen where a very small force was able to hold out against a much larger Force how could that possibly be it's got to be because their moral and
21:46 mental Center was so strong that they were able to withstand all of the terrible things going on around them and prevail so the same thing is true in business I would argue that the moral and mental forces that we Marshal in business are a much better indicator of whether we're going to be successful so look at a recent example the launch of um uh the heavy rocket by uh SpaceX right it got
22:25 25 miles off the launch platform and and by and blew up right and he said wow and a lot of people have been commenting oh it was a failure it was it was this it was that and and certainly on the face of it you could say well yeah the rocket didn't get to you know outer space or whatever but the reality is that the the while the physical rocket maybe didn't do as much as the SpaceX people hoped there were moral and mental forces at
23:01 work in that test that were absolutely Vindicated by what happened so the mere fact that this rocket that's I guess it's roughly 500 feet tall taller than a 40-story building got off the ground and flew for any length of time at all it's the largest man-made object ever to fly that is a moral and mental victory that I don't think we should underestimate
23:37 as well um when when you when you think about it the the need to do multiple launches and make mistakes and continue on in the end is what's going to make this rocket successful assuming that it is in the if you for those of you who are not around in the early days of the Space Race in the in the 1960s primarily there were lots of rockets that blew up on the launching pan on the launching pad shortly after being launched and there
24:14 were some horrible uh tragedies um as as well including one where astronauts were killed in a in a rocket blowing up there was the the shuttle disaster which wasn't the early days but it was the early it was you know early on in the sort of reusable vehicle um idea for space and all of and and and one can imagine if you know if if you're an astronaut right and you just saw the previous Mission blow up on on the launch pad and your colleagues killed I mean the the physical forces are are
24:52 relatively easy to recover in the end it's really just a matter of of time and money and material and you can rebuild the launch pad you can rebuild the rocket um you can find more astronauts the moral and mental forces that's different right if you're an astronaut going up on that next mission and you're thinking about what had happened before how much more difficult is that you've really gotta muster those mental moral
25:27 and mental forces to to see to it that this next mission is successful and the same is true in any kind of business business the nature of businesses you're going to have failures there's going to be setbacks and the people who Prevail are the ones who not only can can pull together the physical resources to keep going of course that's important but it's also the moral and mental fortitude that despite the setbacks despite the
26:03 failures right they keep going oh I should say the moral the moral fortitude to keep going and the mental fortitude the mental agility to learn from the mistakes that were made that cause the failure and reorient the Enterprise in a way that makes success more likely right and so I think just like in in war fighting the moral and mental forces that we pull together for our businesses are more important than the physical uh forces that we pull
26:40 together now it it it you know one can say well but I mean I've got the mindset to succeed I just can't find the money to do that well so here's the thing if you truly have a mindset to succeed and money is what you lack then you will succeed because if you talk to enough people if you refine your ideas well enough you will eventually pull together the physical forces that you need for most people who lack money
27:17 um and and the other re-physical resources to succeed the reason they fail is they give up morally and mentally before they're able to pull the resources together either because they just they just give up they get exhausted by it or they're unable to find the path through changing what they're doing in order to find the path to success so I can tell you when I started my real estate company back in 1986 what I thought it was going to be when it started out and what it turned out to be um when I when I became successful were
27:53 very different okay and I I I'm not going to sit here and tell you oh I I knew all about this sort of nature of business stuff when I I didn't I knew nothing about any of this stuff I mean my dad was not a businessman my mother was not in business um I I figured it out you know along the way and and and the reality was I had to you know probably I tried this and it didn't work and I tried this and it worked a little bit and I tried this other thing and it started working better and it was a matter of figuring it out and
28:28 you know I I was uh fortunate enough to be able to maintain enough physical forces um to you know so that I had the time to make the mental mental shifts in order to become successful and I had the the sort of moral fortitude to just keep going and and for many people and perhaps all people who are successful in business that that is really the path to success and we talk about you know overnight successes rarely is that the case very
29:04 rarely is that the case most people were years if not longer becoming successful in their businesses and they were successful because they marshaled all three of these kind of forces physical moral and mental well so that uh I that that's that's it in terms of our uh slide so um I always I'll just put this up here and and and so if if there's if you have questions if you uh need help with anything with respect to your businesses or your careers uh or you have an idea
29:40 of something you'd like to see discussed by all means feel free to contact me my um uh email address is there the way to wow show at vemble.com you can also contact us through Facebook Twitter and Linkedin um uh show Pages actually there's I that's that's my LinkedIn profile but there is a LinkedIn page for the way to wow show as well so you can contact me through that and would love to address anything uh specific that you have on your mind and then here's all the you know legal stuff uh and and my you know
30:17 way to well logo and there we go that's that's the that's the end of this particular segment so we've talked about eight points relating to the nature of business that we drew from Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine and next week we will take up with our next subject so I invite you to tune in next Tuesday at 11 A.M Pacific 2 p.m Eastern and an hour in for Central and mountain time we're here every week tomorrow I I want
30:53 to let you know I have a guest on the way to allow people making money Scott A lender is going to be on to talk about his book The Enneagram of emotional intelligence it's a it's a fascinating topic I've been reading the book and and and I will tell you it's it has great information to ponder so I'm looking forward to talking to Scott tomorrow the way to wow show people making money starts at 12 30 P.M Pacific 3 30 PM Eastern Time and Again an hour in for the other time zones it's you can watch
31:29 live joining us uh here in the zoom um by going to our event by Page and getting a free ticket or you can watch us on social media LinkedIn Twitter and Facebook and uh if you join us live you'll be able to ask Scott some questions but in any event I encourage you to tune in and and hear what Scott has to say about this really interesting topic so that's what I have for you if you've missed any of these shows and
32:04 want to go back please do visit our uh our YouTube uh page it's uh YouTube slash at the way to wow show I think that gets you right there and we have um we're in our third year of the way to wow show so I think you will find much there that will be very useful for you in advancing your professional in business life so thanks again for tuning in enjoyed being with you today and look forward to seeing you tomorrow and next week and just want to sign off by saying Marie darling you are my bell so you all
32:41 have a great afternoon and look forward to seeing you tomorrow and next week