0:16 foreign hello and welcome to business lessons from the military I'm your host Kevin bemel and we're here every Tuesday at 11 A.M um Pacific Time 2 p.m eastern time I realize I'm sitting down I'm gonna I'm gonna stand up because that's what I've been doing lately there we go aha excellent much better so I can talk much more freely now and wave my hands around a lot more so welcome to the show glad
0:53 you tuned in and uh we are what we do here each Tuesday is we talk about military Doctrine military history the leadership of of great military leaders and how we can use that in order to build our businesses make them work better whether we own the business ourself whether we're working for another another company or for that matter it doesn't really have to be a business per se it could be a non-profit um it really even could be in in Academia or government
1:28 um but uh you know business I think is is the most obvious businesses and non-profits are the most obvious places to apply these principles so we've been working through Marine Corps doctor in as as the basis for our discussion and we're going to continue with that today and because especially because this is the military you know you have to have a PowerPoint I actually I was I was in a meeting yesterday uh evening and uh the person who was gaming was talking about
2:03 he said his there's only eight slides it's not Death by PowerPoint um it's like being right back in the military because people talk you just talk about Death by PowerPoint all the time so here we go business lessons from the military and as I've mentioned uh as I mentioned each week what we do here on the way to wow shows is based on the three pillars of attainment which is a system for helping us understand ourselves and our lives better and and and see to it that we're dealing in all the various Realms
2:38 that we we need to be involved in we're dealing within the Pursuits pillar uh and within the finances realm primarily although today especially you're going to see we're going to be dealing with uh relationships uh as as part of our discussion so we talked about maneuver Warfare and orienting on the enemy and today we're going to talk about philosophy of command now if you would if if you'd like to review these two topics and all the other ones please feel free to go to my YouTube channel uh youtube.com forward slash at the way to
3:15 wow show and you can see past episodes there's a playlist for business lessons from the military as well as our other shows which I'll mention at the end okay so philosophy of command now um in the military you'll oftentimes hear people talk about a manned versus leadership and I think it's an interesting distinction that's made so I'm going to talk specifically about the Navy and the Marine Corps because I served in the Navy and I served with the Marines I I I
3:52 can't tell you for sure that the Air Force and the Army have this similar Doctrine um but but I I I suspect even if they don't have the doctrine it operates in a in a fairly similar way so in the Navy and Marine Corps and well in all the branches of the military you basically have uh three categories of people you have enlisted you have warrant officers and you have commissioned or commissioned officers which come in a very a variety of of
4:27 categories so enlisted people are what used to be called the rank and file um they're the um the junior enlisted people do most of the work the more senior enlisted people which in the Marine Corps would be pretty much a sergeant and up or even a Corporal and up in the Navy it would be a third class petty officer up through a chief petty officer so they do the work but they also exercise leadership in the
5:04 sense that they're the front line leaders leading the so-called troops and then and and the warrant officers so their technical specialists okay and they have um I I don't want to say it's an advisory function because it really depends on the type of of Warrant Officer but they're kind of in a a middle ground between the senior enlisted and the commissioned officers the commission officers exercise command now many people in the military
5:42 might take issue with that the way I've broken that down but if you talk to especially senior uh senior enlisted um leadership here non-commissioned officers so in the Marine Corps non-commissioned officers or corporals and sergeants staff sergeant and above things like staff sergeant gunking first second and third class Petty officers are um are uh um offset a non-commissioned officer sorry I I went in your chief petty officer and master chief petty officer
6:18 those are the senior non-commissioned officers now some first class Petty officers would say that they are an essay commissioned officers especially exercise that leadership role because they're leading the non-commissioned officers as there okay the ncos are doing more sort of supervision almost okay although in the Marine Corps they would tend to exercise more of a leadership function the reason I talk about this is what we're dealing with here is the philosophy of command
6:55 not the philosophy of leadership and those are not the same thing in the military okay so command is is a commissioned officer function and so when we talk about the first principle of philosophy of command decentralized what we're talking about is pushing decision making Authority as low down the hierarchy as possible okay now there
7:30 are several reasons why that's beneficial first of all the person on the scene knows much more about what's actually happening especially in a combat situation then an officer who's you know rear Echelon or is you know maybe they're at a a command center or a fob I mean not a fob a they're not at a fob they're they're you know like back at base or something like that and so they don't have first-hand knowledge of what's
8:05 going on in the battle space okay so whatever they know about the Battle space they're either gaining by way of people who are in the battle space who are who are passing the information back up the chain of command I'm going like this but it's like up the chain of command or they're getting it from some other source they may have drones that are surveilling the area or something like that but no matter how good the Drone surveillance is and no matter how thorough Frontline people are in pushing information up the chain of
8:42 command they still don't have the direct feel for the battle space and for all the issues that are going on how chaotic it is how ordered it is The Temper of the people how dispersed the enemy may be in in a in a much more um defined way it's Etc so by decentralizing command we're putting we're empowering the people on the scene to make decisions because they have the best information and they have the best
9:18 overall view of what's Happening that's number one number two they can respond much more quickly okay so they don't have to wait for information to go up the chain of command and then be um you know analyzed and discussed and decisions made and then the decision passed back down the chain of command they don't have to wait for any of that okay they can they can see what's going on on the scene and they can execute toward the they can execute the mission and and work toward
9:54 achieving the objective most directly okay so that's that's the first aspect of um of philosophy of command is decentralized and and the same is true by the way for businesses so if you think about a retail business I mean if a customer if an upset customer comes into a store I mean you know we would never think of well let's see he's got to get he's got to gather all the information maybe we have a drone flying around the store right we're going to send all that information at least up to the vice
10:29 president of customer service to find out what no no we would never do that people wouldn't stand for it it would take way too long right so we Empower store managers to deal with that situation but maybe what we need to do is Empower Frontline employees to make a decision or a decision at least up to a certain you know dollar level based on certain criteria that we set and that way they can adjudicate a customer situation right there on the spot hey
11:04 that may from a philosophy of command sort of decision making if you will decentralizing it may be the best way to go for our business that's number one that's one reason is because it may serve our customers our clients better number two think about what it's like to be and maybe you've been in this in this situation where you're an employee you you really feel like you can handle these things but no you're not permitted to you've gotta you know bump it upstairs
11:39 how motivated are you to stay with that company you're you're like aching for more Authority more ability to have an impact and these days especially young people from younger younger workers younger people in the in the workplace I guess is probably the best way to put it they they want to have impact that's very important to them okay so by decentralizing command we Empower them to really grasp and and take an active part in our
12:14 business and and that will marry them to the business much more closely okay now you say well well they don't have the experience they don't have this they know that that's why we set you know set certain boundaries okay here's the box within which you can work and then if it goes outside of that okay then you need to go confer with your you know your your you know next Echelon up supervisor okay and and that goes for the surprise as well look you know a a store manager is not going to make a decision to close a store I mean to
12:50 close it permanently okay they're not going to do that they may not even make a decision to close a store temporarily even though it might be you know absolutely warranted by the circumstances that the manager can see right there on the scene right so by empowering our employees we are gonna or our our co-workers I guess is maybe a better way to put it we're we're we're we're probably gonna they're probably gonna make some mistakes but they're gonna grow and become better better people for our business over the long
13:25 term okay so so that's decentralized okay next exploit human technology we use uh in in in in in in battle in in preparing for supporting our our combat Readiness or whatever it doesn't happen on a on a um um Henry Ford with the been in a a logical fashion war on spools all of the human traits that we have okay it's being
14:01 Guided by human beings so with whether we're fighting a war or whether we're operating on our businesses we want to take advantage of we want to exploit those human traits we want to use them in order to advance our businesses so so these traits include boldness and initiative there's no amount of technology that we can put that we can establish that can use boldness and initiative in the same way a human being can because the use of
14:37 boldness and initiative there's no way to plan when the right time is per se because what we're doing is we're being opportunistic we're looking at the whole overall situation and we're saying if we're in a battle this is what um Ukraine is doing right now and fighting Russia they're pro-being Russian forces to find where do we find a point of weakness and when they find that weakness bang they're working to blow through it okay that's that's exploiting a human trait okay that's using that's using their
15:13 boldness and their initiative to take advantage of the fact that as humans it's it's virtually impossible for us to be strong everywhere okay now with respect to business it's the same thing we we want to we want to decentralize our Command and then encourage our people be bold take initiative okay so how that might play out in business well so so let's say that you know we've got a uh you know a junior employee um who
15:48 uh let's take a real estate business here's here's a good one we'll take a real and you've got you know brand new real estate agent he's you know newly minted licensed you know shining it up there right and he happens to be um I don't know you know at a Starbucks right he's getting his coffee and he hears the person behind him talking to someone else about some real estate what we want to do is we want to train him to be bold turn around and say I I couldn't help overhearing you're talking about real estate uh blah blah
16:24 blah blah and engage in that conversation with those people right rather than say gosh you know I heard such and such talking about real estate oh really did you happen to catch a name yeah his name was you know Bob Jones or whatever oh well let's let's you know let's track him down no no too late too late okay engage with them right now so we want to use boldus initiative we want to use our personalities in our business okay especially today business is so competitive we've got to be able to distinguish ourselves from our
17:00 competitors and we can do that through personality okay I mean one of the reasons why it's like I have my my um Navy uh um seal not not seal as in Navy Seals the Navy SEAL the department of Navy SEAL is back here right it distinguishes me from someone else you might be viewing now you may not be able to tell what it is because it's I'm looking at this it's only a teeny picture but military people when they see that they know immediately what it is and I connect with them immediately right I also keep the three pillars of
17:36 attainment right over here because that's an integral part of everything that I do okay so those are all coming from my personality now a couple of others strength of will okay there's no machine that can just that can decide to continue even when you know the oil has drained out of its uh you know uh engine block if it's a car or you know the the electricity has
18:12 been shut off the the no machine is going to go oh well I have no electricity anymore but I'm going to keep on going no that is a human trait okay and most of us do not know just how great our potential is how large our potential is um and just to digress um there's a a great A A A friend of mine by the name of uh Andy Walsh who's a human potential expert we did a show with him now gosh
18:47 going back a couple couple years ago maybe maybe almost three years ago and he did he he this is when we were I was doing my more elaborate show we cleared the lit my you know we cleared everything out of where we were shooting and my uh colleague and I uh did an exercise with Andy where he showed us that our potential was greater than we thought it was so I invite you to check out the episode with Andy Walsh we all have much more potential than we think and so we want to use that when when the
19:24 crunch comes we can push ourselves to move forward when the Machinery can't because it doesn't have any more electricity it ran out of gas it all the oil drained down and it seized up okay those things those are the limitations of non-human um actors we'll I'll call them but human beings we can push on even when it seems like we've got nothing left we can dig deep down and keep going that strength of will finally imagination human beings can come up with things solutions that didn't exist before and
20:02 from and I haven't read frankly a lot about Ai and all of that but from what I've seen of it and read about it AI doesn't have the same kind of imagination that human beings do AI can gather tons and tons of data and repackage it and according to what it's you know been designed to do but it's not going to create something new not in the sense of the way human beings do okay so um you know we want to use that imagination in our business I was at a meeting last
20:38 night and we were talking about how uh parents of of the of the school uh school children are are too disengaged from what's happening with their children in school and perhaps with what's happening with their children in general and and they were talking about how do we solve this and we say well we need to get them to the school and and I I said to them you know rather than trying to get them to come to us why don't we go to them why don't we go out where they want to be
21:14 and and interact with them there so for example there's this cigar smoking Club where I know the last time I was there where there's probably like 200 people or more there um and people want to be there right so let's go there where people want to be or let's do an event there where people want to be and people look at me like wow you know they never they never thought of of that as a solution right and and now now I'm not immersed in the you know sort of running of schools and such I'm I'm looking at it from a
21:49 different perspective so I can take something from my world and repurpose it into their world and and create something that they hadn't thought of before right AI I I don't know that AI could do that maybe it can or maybe some future version of it can okay but we need to exploit the human trait of imagination in our organizations in our business okay next we want to communicate implicitly okay now there's several aspects of this and this is where relationships are most
22:24 important okay first of all we want to use well understood phrases okay so that we can communicate as quickly and efficiently as possible now of course the danger for that is if I don't know the other person well I couldn't say something to them and they can interpret it in a way that's very different than what I mean okay so what we want long-term relationships
23:00 so that when we so that the the when we communicate we can do it very efficiently and very effectively okay now this may seem kind of counter to the way business is these days where people don't seem to stay with organizations very long and I I think that's a shame because High turnover is is a real detriment to creating a truly creative integrated organization and so we you know organizations our businesses non-profits
23:36 whatever should be working on creating the the environment the conditions where people will want to stay will want to develop long-term relationships we'll want to keep building so that they can build really good communication and and and and get to the point where they can even anticipate each other's needs okay now you can appreciate why in combat this would be so important combat is chaotic uh it it you know and so we need to be able to communicate as quickly as
24:11 possible but be very clear about the communication and and and even anticipate needs so if we've got two platoons that are converging on objective okay if the two commanders of those platoons know each other well okay and they spoke beforehand about what they're going to do and what what might go wrong or what might go right Etc they're going to be able to anticipate each other's needs and be more successful in jointly achieving that objective so the same thing goes in our businesses if we have long-term
24:49 very solid deep relationships with our people we can develop that kind of of um implicit communication that will give us the opportunity to move more quickly move more effectively toward our goals okay so we want to create that and the communicating placement you say favor long-term relationships okay so how do we build long-term relationships now I'm going to talk at this point purely from
25:24 uh a warfighting Doctrine perspective there's lots of ways to build long-term relationships but some of the ways that that uh Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine looks at it that that are directly applicable to to us as as people in business and non-profits Etc is first of all we want to talk directly to the other person as opposed to through Messengers or intermediaries or whatever get that direct communication going okay
25:59 and this is most important when you find it difficult to deal with the other person because we need to move beyond that situation that conflict it needs to be resolved and it won't be resolved by communicating with other people or communicating through other people it'll only be resolved by working directly with the other person and talking with that person dealing with that person so that's number one number two it's best to communicate in person
26:35 okay it's you we can talk over the phone we can talk over Skype we can talk up over Zoom okay and and certainly in most cases something like Zoom where we can see the other person is better than talking on the phone okay but in person is the best because when we when we communicate in person we're not only understanding what the person is saying we can we can comprehend how they're saying it what their body language is saying what the tone of their voice well the tone of
27:11 their voice we can hear you know over the phone but but sort of the looks on their face and and how that matches or not with the tone of their voice okay so in essence we want to immerse ourselves in the other person to get to know them as well as possible right there are people out there they they talk with a lot of energy all the time it has nothing to do with whether they're upset or not upset or excited or not excited that's just how they are right right as opposed to if if if if we're working together and I call you up
27:47 and and I'm like spewing a lot of energy at you okay something's up believe me because most of the time I I take a pretty even feel okay I mean I I take it up a notch for doing my show to to engage you know to engage you but if if I call you up and say look do you have five minutes I really want to talk to you about something okay or if you you know if we met in person you would know that meant more than just hey do you have a few minutes so we can chat that's diff those are completely different okay um and and so we want to communicate
28:23 orally and in person as often as possible okay and this gets to a an issue that's going on right now where so much work is being office work anyway is being done remotely and and companies are trying to bring not all companies but many companies are trying to get their people back into the office right and one of the reasons they're doing that is because they've realized that the ability to build relationships is much greater when we can interact face
29:00 to face we can mentor people better informal interactions can happen when we're in the office that just cannot happen when we're working remotely we can we can have Skype meetings or all that but they're they're not going to happen in formally we're not going to pass someone in the hallway and and because something's on our mind and maybe the person is senior to us but we think they can give us some guidance go oh excuse me you know Jim do you have a few minutes I I wanted to run something by you that's not going to happen when we're working remotely okay so for example I have a friend who's a partner
29:35 in in one of the big accounting firms they they brought their people back in the office I don't think it was five days a week I think it was at least initially three days a week but what they saw what they wanted was to bring back the informal interaction between their their especially the senior partners and the more Junior people who had who needed to learn from them needed the mentorship and that's necessary in order for the firm to best serve its clients and for the firm to grow okay so you see this is a philosophy of
30:10 command this is the way in which decisions should be made and the things that will support making the best decisions so first of all we want to decentralize the decision making the command we want to exploit human traits okay and and part of the way we do that is by decentralizing and and and then being able to take advantage of traits like boldness like taking the initiative like the purse individual personalities strength of will okay then we want to
30:46 communicate implicitly so we don't have to have elaborate policy documents and and long emails or or anything that we want to have direct conversations where the person we're communicating with can quickly understand what we're saying based on our using well understood phrases based on us knowing each other and how we deal with certain things certain issues or problems or whatever and then finally that will come through long-term solid
31:23 relationships okay so you can see all of this builds up to a philosophy of command that will Empower more people in our organization to make decisions for the good of our organization and therefore be able to more quickly achieve our goals and objectives all right so that that is what I have for today I went a few minutes over um gosh you know this is such a great topic I think we could talk for a long long time go ahead and stop my sharing here see now now you can see my uh my Navy thing better right okay
32:01 um so I thank you very much for joining me today I really appreciate it tomorrow um is uh my show uh people making I think I have a guest tomorrow I think I think Brett Henderson is going to be on the show tomorrow uh of Strategic Wealth um and worry and its perspectives on how he built a successful wealth management um Brett is a Marine Corps veteran next week we we start over again on Monday morning at 10 A.M Pacific with uh trusts and Estates weekly and and then next week's at this same time 11 A.M Pacific
32:37 time will be the next uh edition of business lessons from the military so I invite you to to join with me uh for every show um and if you can't make a show please