Power to the edge…
Spoiler alert: the military runs differently than you’ve been led to believe.
If you are reading this from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the answer is no – “Rick” did not give me classified information. Although… it felt like every third sentence from him was, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
One of my top five favorite conversations I’ve ever had took place on a small hill, overlooking Nellis Air Force Base. Colonel “Rick” and I were enjoying the afternoon, watching a variety of aircraft, from A-10s to F-35s, run patterns over the desert. I felt like a little kid, watching the cool toys in awe as Rick gave me a play-by-play of what the pilots were doing and why. At the time, I was COO of a company doing about $80M in revenue, and he was involved in an unnamed drone program at Indian Springs. Initially, I was excited to talk to him about AI and the future of drone warfare, but I got way more than I expected. He had been a part of a variety of programs he couldn’t tell me about and I had been an executive in a company so it was a cool opportunity to trade notes on our experiences as leaders
As we watched a C-5 Galaxy lumber down the runway, our conversation turned to how fascinating it is to watch the efficiency of the US military. I noted how hard it is to strike a balance between the authoritarian, automated, and operational nature of organizing humans and the organic, messy, and intangible nature of actually being a human in an organization. Having just gone through some major challenges with getting alignment at work, this “balance” was fresh on my mind. I recounted some of Maslow's assumptions and how crazy it was that 40 years later, we still struggle with fear-driven, pseudo-authoritarian company cultures.
“It’s taken the military decades to get out of that; they are still working on it, but a lot of progress has been made to remove the command-and-control mentality of the 1900s-2000s,” Rick said.
This surprised me. Much of our corporate power structures were taken from military command-and-control structures. I didn’t realize the military was in a deep, active restructuring of its combat mentality.
“Things are very different now,” Rick continued. “Things started to change a lot around the release of ‘Power to the Edge.’ (published in 2003, the book studied operational efficiency in the information age vs the outdated methods of the industrial age) “The military has a lot of data on dynamics that lead to operational success and has been optimizing for years. That optimization has led the military to increase the quality of care and resources for the individual serviceman.”
That statement got my full attention and turned I away from watching the E-3 AWACS that were taking off…
“That’s exactly what we are seeing in high-performing businesses that we run our GRM product on. Operations that optimize company systems for the benefit of each individual contributor have higher group performance. To build the team, you build the individual,” I said.
Rick agreed, “In the old way, middle management used to be viewed as unnecessary bloat. The goal was to have Commanders or Generals make all operational calls, and the boots on the ground were just executors. This largely kept decision-making at the top, which usually required robust information systems or time management that was not always realistic. Slight deviations in mission dynamics would change the context too fast for effective decision-making.”
“In the new way,” he said, “there are fewer people at the top and far more resources in middle management. When we have a soldier in the field, they have the ability to adapt their resources and tactics to achieve a result. For instance, a drone operator might have a cultural expert from Kansas, a Commanding Officer halfway around the world, a climate expert in Colorado, etc.all within immediate reach to help the operator make the best call. In most cases, outside of the objective, the mission decisions are up to the soldier. This gives a lot more decision-making power to the person who has the best context.”
“So you’re telling me the job of middle managers is to be a constant support mechanism for the boots on the ground. That’s their job?” I asked.
“Yes,” Rick confirmed.
I continued: “What I’ve seen is: the way that small business owners position middle management has become a huge issue. Too often, managers are previous executors who were promoted because they have great hard skills, but are under-developed as leaders to give that support to their team. They revert to being task-oriented, more highly paid executors. They usually become too busy executing or jockeying to provide the clarity, direction, training, information, context, authority, or support for their direct reports. They are unintentionally under-resourcing their teams.
“Staff then report this as being overworked. It’s usually not that they are overworked; it’s that the work is now more tumultuous than it needs to be with way more barriers to communication and resourcing. Executors have to spend time managing their managers.
“The first biggest cap to organizational effectiveness is in the CEO’s capability to hand decision-making to their team. The second biggest cap is leaders under that CEO who haven’t been properly trained in how to manage, much less manage within their scale.”
Rick nodded along: “Yeah, that’s about right. There are still organizations within the military that operate in that old model, mainly because the leaders don’t want to change. Fortunately, they are phasing out, though.
“That’s happening in corporate management as well. We now have enough data to show that the top-performing groups have unlocked the best possible psychological advantages for the individual contributor and have built systems to sustain these advantages”
***
Here are the top 7 factors to deploy in your company from a “Power to the Edge” mentality.
Decentralize Decisions
Shift decision-making authority to lower levels of the organization. This empowers employees to execute based on real-time information. It’s faster. It’s more adaptable.
Transparency = Awareness
Make everything more transparent. This ensures that everyone has a common understanding of the business environment. It fosters alignment and reduces misunderstandings.
Shared Organizational Awareness
Fostering an environment where leaders are encouraged to have a high degree of awareness of what is happening in the business and sharing a common understanding of SWOT of the business.
Be Agile. Be Flexible.
Businesses must be able to rapidly adjust to changing market conditions, employing agility in both strategy and execution to remain competitive and innovative.
Self-Synchronization
Teams should be capable of coordinating their activities independently, without needing constant oversight, by relying on shared goals and up-to-date information to align their efforts.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Promoting collaboration across different departments, units, and external partners reduces silos and improves overall business performance by leveraging diverse perspectives and skills.
Empowerment of Front-line Employees
Your executors are closest to your customers and to market trends. They should be empowered to make decisions and take action, based on their direct understanding of the situation and available data.
Continuous Innovation and Experimentation.
To stay competitive, you must enable the business to test new approaches, technologies, and processes that drive growth and transformation.
***
Rick and I talked for another two hours about what organized groups of people look like when they optimize for the advantage of the front-line employee/soldier. For the sake of your time, I am going to condense some of the points of the rest of our conversation into bullets (hah):
The military found that by providing housing, education, hospitals, and services to the families of servicemen, their combat effectiveness increased. Their minds weren’t worrying about their families being in trouble; they could completely focus on their work.
The importance of corporate benefits lies in minimizing the amount of time people spend in worry. The goal isn’t to eliminate stress; it’s to optimize the type of stress people are under (actualization over survival stress).
A soldier is not always supposed to be in battle. Pushing your people is okay periodically, but living in battle is destructive.
The iceberg of ignorance is real (look it up).
An organization with internal chaos cannot solve external chaos. An organization with internal structure can solve external chaos.
You can never push the right information to the right person at the right time. It has to be pulled. Information availability is one of the most critical resources for any productive group of people.
The best leaders are the quickest to acknowledge gaps in their context and assign decision-making to the person with the best context, no matter the rank.
The end result of the best work is a culmination of the resilience built in battle and the passion built in peace.
Nice guys don’t finish last. That’s just a lie propagated by people who aren’t nice, are alone, and are not invited to anything meaningful.
In my head, the math makes sense. We say that profit (or winning) is the most important goal in business. We will expend a ton of resources, including people, to dominate, win, profit, etc. At the end of the day, you might have some success, but you also have a higher chance of failure. When you make a million dollars, it’s easy to brag about how good you are rather than realize you left nine million on the table. Alternatively and ironically, when the goal becomes the care, quality, and management of the team, the chance of success rises. Focus on building a team that does the best work of their lives creates profit.
