The WAY to WOW Shows
Make Goals Precise
May 16, 2023
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[0:19] good day I can't say good morning or afternoon because it's split between the time zones welcome to business lessons from the military one of the way to wow shows that we feature each week I'm Kevin demmel your host and each Tuesday each Tuesday 11 A.M Pacific Time 2 p.m eastern time and an hour in for Central and mountain time we take talk about business Doctrine uh business sorry military Doctrine military history and

[0:54] great military leaders and how we can apply that to our businesses in a way to help them Prosper so whether you have your own business or whether you work for a company and are in a role where you can have an impact on how that business operates this is the place to come to get ideas that come from the military that you can apply then uh in in your organization and the fact of the matter is you could they would work equally well whether it's a for-profit business or a

[1:30] non-profit I don't think that that really matters um the the profit I mean if you can imagine you know war is not a profit motive function per se um and and and so uh that isn't necessarily embedded into what we're talking about we're really we really get into things like motivations strategic planning how to how to scale operations those those sorts of questions so for the last several weeks we've been looking at a part of Marine Corps War

[2:07] fighting Doctrine I'm going to go ahead and bring up our uh PowerPoint so that we can continue with it this is actually the final um phase of a uh Five Five Section um portion and let's go ahead and where here we go slideshow bang okay so here we go uh that business lessons from the military and uh as always everything we do on the way to wow shows relate to the three pillars of attainment there's

[2:42] other videos on that so I'm not going to spend time here so we're talking about the theory of War applied to business okay that's that's been our subject for the last few weeks and those include levels of activity actions styles generating power okay and finally uh decisive aims I am doing the right one for this time aren't I every once in a while I do the wrong lesson so hold on one second yes yes okay yes we are doing the right one

[3:18] for today so the reason I I double checked is is because um you'll see if you go on to our our Channel that I did a couple of them um out of order um but anyway all of these uh previous what did I do here all of our previous um uh lessons that I just mentioned um generating power Styles actions levels of activity if you go to our YouTube channel the way to uh YouTube at the way to wow show basically

[3:53] um you can watch those and review them um we're gonna wrap up talking about decisive aims okay so you know we we build up these businesses we hire staff we maybe put together a bricks and mortar office or bricks and mortar place of business in any event it may be a factory could be a retail um uh location uh or restaurant whatever it is and and so we've we've got all these resources ready to go and

[4:28] too often I think we dissipate all of this all of these Resources by not being focused on decisive aims okay so let's let's start as we usually do looking at this from a military perspective from a war fighting perspective so you've got your you've got your army maybe you are a uh Battalion Commander so you've got three or four companies and each of those companies breaks down into platoons and

[5:05] uh rifle teams Etc you've got them equipped you've got your supply chain ready with food with ammunition you've got your intelligence working you've got your orders from the higher Echelon and it's already there to go and the reality is in order to be successful pursuing your part of the fight you need to know what are my goals what are my decisive aims that are really going to maximize the benefit I get from

[5:41] all of the resources that are now mustered and at my disposal me being the commander right so the the reality is you could have the largest most powerful military in the world and if you spread it too thinly you're never going to win you're never going to win sorry Siri likes to get on the ACT for some reason I'm not sure why um so and and by the way we we've seen this in others in other situations in the end why did Nazi Germany lose World

[6:17] War II well one of the big reasons was because they were they they had to fight on both the Eastern and the Western Front they had to so disperse their military power that they they couldn't focus on decisive aims they they were they were constantly having to shift resources back and forth between the two fronts and and although they had a huge military it just wasn't big enough to deal with all of what they had to deal with and by the way

[6:52] that's why at the beginning of the war Hitler made an agreement with Stalin the the non-aggression pact was Stalin it was to avoid a situation where he had to fight on two fronts and so the reason he had success in the early days of World War II was he had very decisive aims so while he neutralized Russia or the Soviet Union as a threat on his Eastern Front then he could focus on on decisive AIMS in pushing West through the low

[7:28] countries and then into France conquering you know most of Western Europe after he had previously conquered really Central Europe Czechoslovakia Romania Hungary Austria Etc okay Poland is as well by the way so it was by concentrating on decisive aims that that Hitler was able to be successful in the early part of World War II likewise and I used World War II examples because I think they're most Vivid so likewise in the Pacific when

[8:03] Once the United States realized that it didn't need to capture every single Island that the Imperial Japanese held rather they could choose specific ones an island hop to get closer and closer to the Japanese Mainland the war of the Pacific became much more successful it it it it um Advanced much more rapidly and it was because of this idea of decisive aims okay so although this is a Marine Corps warfighting Doctrine it it's it's it's a

[8:39] a it was applied and and by the way what I'm talking about in World War II predated the codification of of this version anyway of Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine but you can see that it it this Doctrine was informed by what happened in in past military operations Okay so there are essentially two types of military of decisive aims one is centers of gravity and the other is critical

[9:14] vulnerabilities okay so I'm going to continue to talk in a in a uh War fighting uh context for a few more minutes and then we'll we'll apply this to the business world so a center of gravity is where the enemy has strength okay where the enemy has strength okay so set that aside or just hold on to that for a minute a critical vulnerability is where the enemy is

[9:50] particularly weak okay so they're opposites but they're also complementary okay the enemy it can't be strong everywhere okay that that would dissipate their forces too too much no matter how big they are they're gonna be they're gonna be vulnerable somewhere now and they're going to be stronger in other places now the difference between areas of strength and areas of vulnerability are a center of gravity is

[10:25] a particular area of strength that really is important to the enemy's warfighting ability okay so and by the way these don't necessarily have to be physical they can be mental they can be moral okay so let's let's go back to our example of World War II a center of gravity for Nazi Germany was its submarine base on the northern coast

[11:02] of France okay that submarine base where most of the North Atlantic submarine operations were you know went out from okay represented not just as an area of strength but a a center of gravity okay and and one of the reasons why it was a center of gravity is because it allowed the U-boats to have much longer range well not much longer range to to be able to stay at Sea longer because they could

[11:37] sail from breast on the North Coast of France rather than having to sail from Germany which was a longer a a longer distance okay and so um all of a sudden I went up on the name of the uh Nazi Germany submarine command um Colonel uh I mean Admiral Donuts when once he was able to base his submarines at breast he he was able to pursue the the North Atlantic battle much better

[12:14] the flip side is if the Allies had been able to destroy the submarine base at rest and they tried mightily hard to do that it would have represented a major setback for the Nazi war effort now the reality was breast was built so strongly although the Allies could damage it through bombings they never were able to put breast out of commission and indeed the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic through other means but they never were able to destroy that particular center of gravity

[12:51] okay now so that's a center of gravity and a center of gravity for the allies was the morale of the British people so despite the bombings in the early part of the war conventional bombings and later the u1s and the u-2s the sort of missile bombings that Germany pursued you Nazi Germany pursued against England Great Britain and more largely Great Britain the fighting spirit of the British

[13:27] continued they you know and part of that I think was due to the inspired leadership of of Winston Churchill and part of it was due to just the the the the British character perhaps but there's there's no doubting that um uh Adolf Hitler tried to break British morale through his bombing campaigns that was the point and he was not able to do it so that that's a different kind that's not a physical center of gravity that's more

[14:03] of a mental moral center of gravity okay and by the way sometimes these mental and moral centers of gravity are even stronger than a physical center of gravity because with enough Firepower we we may be able to destroy a physical center of gravity but oftentimes the reverse happens when it comes to moral and and mental center of gravity so the Allies pursued

[14:40] essentially Around the Clock bombing of German cities in an effort to break the morale of the German people it actually had the opposite effect so things like the the bombing of Dresden for example that basically wiped out that City it didn't cause the German people I mean we we the Allies thought it did during the war but after the war when when these issues were studied it it had the opposite effect on German morale those bombing runs tended afterwards the Germans tended to be more committed to

[15:15] the war effort not less okay so okay so so that's from a military standpoint that center of gravity now critical vulnerabilities these are not just weak points but we very weak points that either the enemy may not be aware of or they are but they just don't have the ability the ability to um to protect them okay so um let me let me think of a a critical

[15:51] vulnerability um okay okay with with with due respect to um to Italy and and the Italians so for Hitler Italy turned out to be a critical vulnerability the fact of the matter is although Mussolini wanted to fight in World War II in general the Italian people were not really on board with being allied with Nazi Germany that that

[16:26] was not what they wanted to do okay and so when it came time for the Allied invasion of Sicily and then the Italian Mainland okay the Italians themselves did not fight particularly tenaciously because the reality was their heart really wasn't in it okay this is not a comment on The Bravery of the Italian uh military not at all but but I mean if if you're if you don't want to be fighting what is your incentive to fight and indeed if you

[17:03] view what you're supposed to be fighting for as detrimental to your country again why would you want to engage in a vigorous fight you know the Italians were as likely to see the Allies as their liberators as they were their enemy and that's why in the you know Hitler ended up having to devote a lot of reinforcements to Italy in order to keep Italy in the war and in the end he couldn't okay by 1943 Italy was out of the war and and the Italian people by and large

[17:38] were happy about that okay so for Hitler Italy represented not just a vulnerability but a critical vulnerability because once Hitler lost Italy he lost any ability to have an impact on what happened in the Mediterranean and now Great Britain was able to re-establish their dominance of the Mediterranean that they had held prior to World War II and before and and that made it easier for the Allies to pursue their War aims okay so that's a

[18:16] critical vulnerability in this case it was again it was more of a moral mental critical vulnerability now there are there are um uh physical critical vulnerabilities as well just just like there are with centers of gravity but oftentimes the more important ones are mental and moral okay so how do we how do we then translate this how do we apply this to business okay so in any business we have choices as to how we spend our

[18:54] time okay and how we how we focus how we use our resources so we can use our resources and sort of squander them in a bunch of things that in the end don't have a lot of meaning to making the business successful or we can identify our decisive aims and pursue those decisive aims and they break down in this in in a similar way to centers of gravity and critical vulnerabilities only in this

[19:30] case we're not looking at our enemies we're looking at our customers and clients so if our customers and clients have a particular center of gravity an area of power we can make one of our decisive aims to enhance that center of gravity for them to help them make it even stronger okay and then another thing we can do is we

[20:05] can look for a critical vulnerability among our customers and clients and say how do we protect them from their critical vulnerabilities okay now you can see that it in some ways it turns military Doctrine on its head because instead of taking advantage of a critical vulnerability or seeking to destroy a center of gravity in business we're looking to help protect a critical

[20:43] vulnerability and enhance a center of gravity and we're gonna do at least one or the other of those now we may have more than one decisive aim but of course we if we have you know five centers of gravity and eight critical vulnerabilities we'll work with we're probably dissipating our effort and we're not going to do very well okay now where do you see this in practice in the business World well one one place that comes to mind pretty quickly is how Elon Musk runs his

[21:18] companies right so when he took over Twitter for example he paired down the the Staffing a lot I think he got rid of what about 60 percent of the Staffing at Twitter and for the ones that remain he basically said get ready to work hard get ready to work fast to innovate okay what he was looking to do and I don't know that he would describe it this way but what he was looking to do was find centers of gravity and critical vulnerabilities among Twitter users that

[21:56] he could then either enhance or help them protect themselves from okay that's what he's looking to do it's a client focused a customer focused way of pursuing a business and in the end all successful businesses are doing one or the other of those let's just take a a really mundane example cake mixes okay so when cake mixes were developed back in what probably I think I think

[22:33] the 40s I want to say so one of the things that was going on is and women mostly were were Housewives back then is women didn't have as much time as they wanted in order to make food for their families and they they really you know they they didn't want their families to miss out on dessert and so the idea of a cake mix was developed that you could you basically got the box with a cake mix put it in a bowl add some water stir it put it in a baking dish bacon and

[23:08] you're done as opposed to having to get the the flour and the eggs and the salt and the baking soda and the flavoring and you had to do this one step that step whatever and all that stuff you could do a you could make it which might take you 30 40 minutes you could do a cake from a cake mix in just a few minutes okay now here's you know here's and what it was doing was women felt vulnerable because they couldn't provide their family with dessert without just being completely overworked okay and that made them feel you know

[23:46] not as good wives and mothers frankly okay so by addressing this critical vulnerability Pillsbury and Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker were able to develop a product that initially actually didn't sell very well because they misread the critical vulnerability okay the women didn't want to just provide dessert for their families they wanted to feel like they had done the work to provide dessert without it

[24:22] taking a tremendous amount of time and that's why with most cake mixes you add both eggs and water to the cake mix that simple additional ingredient made women feel like the K they were making the cake not the mix and after that take mcsales took off and and the rest as they say is history right and I'm you know do people still make cakes from scratch I mean I I assume Bakers do but at home I mean my daughter is a big time Baker but she

[24:58] uses cake mixes because what she's found is she can make a cake from scratch but in the end the cake mixes are are so good you it's it's hard to match the quality um that she gets from a cake mix making it from scratch plus it takes so much more time to make it from scratch okay so in the in the same way now we can also look at well where's where are centers of gravity in business being addressed so let's say that you have [Music] um

[25:35] okay so uh let's look at Financial Services Okay so for most people okay when they invest in financial services they they tend to invest in mutual funds okay because a lot of people invest through their retirement accounts whether it's Iris kios you know those kind of things 401ks okay and mutual funds are ideally suited for that that though me that type of investing is

[26:13] a center of gravity in financial services okay so what can we do to enhance that center of gravity and what we've seen in the mutual funds industry is more and more options for different kinds of funds that allow people to have ever more diverse mutual fund portfolios to choose from to be able to more closely align their

[26:49] investing with their goals and there we've they've developed fund families so you could have Fidelity you can have uh um what is it Franklin Templeton what what all these various mutual fund companies and they have a large number of different funds and and and that gives people the ability to uh to diversify within the same fund family okay and so then from

[27:24] there how do we make it an even stronger center of gravity well we reduce fees or get rid of fees so if you in many for many mutual fund families you can switch between different funds within the same family without having to pay commissions okay now I'm not good I'd want to get into a big tax thing but you don't want to be switching stuff around especially in your in your retirement accounts without checking to make sure that you're doing it in a way where there are no tax consequences so that's something for you to talk to your accountant about or your financial advisor whatever so I'm not like I said I want to get into

[28:00] tax stuff I just do want to note that but I'm not saying you should do this I'm just saying mutual funds have evolved to the point where we can do these things so they looked at particular center of gravity for their customers investing in retirement accounts they expanded the offerings they made them more interchangeable if you will all to the benefits of customers giving them ever more enhanced ability to meet their retirement investment objectives okay so we could do the same thing

[28:36] with virtually any business if we want to examine how can that business identify its decisive AIMS in a way that will help the business grow and be stronger okay so uh that was good timing so that's that's our final lesson on the theory of War applied to business with respect to Marine Corps War fighting Doctrine so let's just take a real quick moment to uh to again look at the five so levels of activity actions styles generating power

[29:14] and decisive aims okay so if you look at those five aspects of the theory of war and apply them to business I think you will find that you will be much more focused on how to gain success and how to motivate your people how to deploy your people more effectively in meeting your decisive aims and you'll you'll you'll waste a lot less time a lot less energy by following these principles so if you have any questions or any

[29:49] thoughts on any of these shows these links will be in the show notes my email address various um uh social media sites you can always leave a um a message or a note there oh I gotta change this LinkedIn there is a way to wow show page on LinkedIn um better to go there although if you want to contact me personally through through Linkedin feel feel free and oops I want to went backwards okay and uh that just leaves us you know with with all the the legal stuff so there it is um gonna go ahead and close out well

[30:26] actually I'll just stop the sharing um so that that is our show for today we spend a half an hour each Tuesday talking about military principles and history and applying them to business so I hope you enjoyed Today's Show and uh look forward to seeing you next week in this time slot as we continue with our discussion of business lessons from the military tomorrow is my show um uh people making money that's at 12 30 p.m Pacific Time 3 30 p.m eastern time and then next Monday

[31:01] um which you know yesterday was was that show but now looking forward to next Monday is trusts and Estates weekly in which we focus on how can we expand our businesses how can we make money dealing with helping people work with their trusts and Estates so that's a more specific one um this show and the show tomorrow are are more General I invite you to join us all three of those shows and if you missed any of them please go to our YouTube page and our YouTube channel and all of our shows are there for you to

[31:36] watch On Demand so thanks very much for joining you again I'm Kevin bemel your host looking forward to seeing you tomorrow and next week and Marie darling you are my Bell have a great great rest of the day