Yesterday, during his trial where he is accused of covering up for Roman Catholic priests who sexually abused children, Monsignor William Lynn said: “I did the best I could within the parameters that were given to me.” He claimed that he was doing as he was told and complying with diocese policies.
Monsignor William Lynn did "best he could."
Monsignor Lynn isn’t charged with sexual abuse himself but he is on trial for helping sweep accusations under the rug and continuing to transfer priests with records of abuse while serving as secreatary for clergy for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2004.
How many times have we heard this defense before? I was just doing what I was told? From Nurnberg to today’s war criminals this is brought up as a valid excuse for doing the wrong thing. But this is only a valid excuse within the broader context of leader-follower. In a leader-leader organization, everyone is responsible for their own decisions, their own actions. Accountability can’t be passed off by claiming to just be following instructions. As society adapts the leader-leader structure, responsibility and accountability will more firmly rest with each individual. We will see fewer attempts to claim following orders as an excuse.
That will be a good thing.
Are your people doing “the best they can,” following directions and policies or are they thinking about the right, the best thing to do, and doing that? In today’s complex world, an environment of “doing what we’re told” just isn’t good enough.
How is it that the United States can spend almost as much as the entire remainder of the world in defense spending and still military leaders still complain that they are not spending enough? Simple answer, because we have the wrong strategic approach to defending the country. In response to the challenges of command and control we’ve chosen control over command.
This chart from The Economist shows how US defense spending eclipses the next 14 countries combined — and 6 of those are in NATO.
US military spending eclipses the next 14 countries combined.
In a nutshell, we’ve chose technical solutions — a ubiquitous never-can-fail communications net — over leadership. We can take lessons from the successful response of the Dutch to the introduction of gunpowder in Europe 500 years ago. Here’s how the story goes:
1. Forces distribute themselves into smaller groups over wider areas in response to the increasing lethality of firepower. Victory will accrue to the societies and forces that can disperse their own forces, both tactically and strategically, while coordinating their effects.
2. As forces become more widely distributed, the challenges of command and control increase. Their are two basic formats for the response: emphasis on command or emphasis on control. In the US, we have chosen to emphasize the control side and build increasingly complex and vital communications networks. During most of the time, like peacetime, these networks are so capable they enable centralized decision-making relying on the forces for execution, allowing over-control, and lack of planning on the part of the disbursed forces.With such an architecture, and a network that is by necessity “continuously available,” execution and responsiveness to higher authority are valued. These are the traits described in almost every fitness report and biography – as we extol deployments made, weapons fired, and hours flown. However, this architecture traps us into the following…
3. The enemy, seeing the critical reliance upon these networks, invests money and energy in attacking them.
4. We, seeing the enemy plan to attack the network, defend it.
The cost of defense, however, is significantly higher than the cost to attack.
5. The enemy, encouraged by the high return on investment, continues.
6. Finally, despite vast investments on our best efforts, the network will at some point fail.A better approach would be to acknowledge that the network will likely fail, but develop doctrine, thinking, and commanders with the personal attributes to succeed in that environment.
6. Finally, despite vast investments on our best efforts, the network will at some point fail.A better approach would be to acknowledge that the network will likely fail, but develop doctrine, thinking, and commanders with the personal attributes to succeed in that environment.
The benefit of this approach is that it builds upon a historically powerful characteristic of American armed forces. Who else would be better in such an environment?
I suggest the traits necessary here would likely value agility over responsiveness and decision-making over execution, and initiative over compliance. This approach would ensure success and much more effectively use our defense dollars.
Cool infographic from Keas.
Comments at Leadership Seminar, AFCEA/USNI West Symposium
by David Marquet on Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 11:58am
On VADM Konetzni’s leadership panel at AFCEA/USNI WEST on 12 February titled: “Leaders, How Do We Find, Develop and Promote People with the Right Stuff?” we had the following discussion.
The number of officers serving aboard ships is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the total officer billets. This is because of the following:
1. The US Navy ratio of active duty end-strength to ships, which had been relatively stable since WWII at 1000:1 has recently crept up. Today, with 332,000 Sailors and 283 ships, it stands at 1170:1.
2. Officers manning, as a proportion of total end-strength, has also crept up. This is in response to demands for specialties and joint commands.
3. Finally, officer billets aboard the ships we have has been trending down. As an example, the Baltimore had 61 officer billets, Leahy 27, Ticonderoga 24, and Burke 23. The trend continues with LCS.
While I use at-sea billets aboard ships as my metric, the trends are true in aviation as well: 4-seat aircraft are replace with 2-seaters; 2-seaters by single seaters; and single seaters by UAVs.
Why does this matter? The Navy continues to act as though service at sea is the litmus test for competence as an officer for the unrestricted line. Navy has difficulty properly valuing the contributions of officers in “other” billets. Thus, more and more officers are being passed through fewer billets, resulting in shorter tours, sub-optimization of performance, and execution-based (or worse, presence-based) assessment of capability. Further, the body of operational knowledge among a typical officer dealing with the vagaries and risk that comes with operations at sea, is reduced. [I don’t like using the word experience because that gives credit for simply occupying a billet.]
I suggest that a coherent Navy strategy needs to:
1. Embrace the reality of this trend and learn how to value non-seagoing contributions; or
2. Reverse the trend and return to a more maritime-focused service.
The USS Baltimore cruiser from WWII had 61 officers. Current ships of the same size have less than half that many officers.
World War II continues to fascinate us. The scale of human drama, suffering, cruelty, heroism and compassion is unparalleled. Here are some reviews of recent books on that story.
Five Best: Books on the Beginnings of World War II – WSJ.com.
Book review: Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General – WSJ.com.
Hitler’s Endgame: a review of the third volume of Richard Evans’ trilogy – WSJ.com.
Book Review: The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany by Ian Kershaw – WSJ.com.
The siege of Leningrad: 900 days of solitude | The Economist.
Measureless Masterpiece. On the Battle of the Atlantic – Forbes.com.
Book Review: The Battle of Midway – WSJ.com.
War heroes: Born to live. An experience of war as a POW in the Pacific | The Economist.
Book Review: Freedom’s Forge – WSJ.com. by Arthur Herman.
Five Best Books: Max Hastings on War Memoirs – WSJ.com. These are first person accounts of war, not necessarily from WW2.
Craig Symonds' recent book on Midway is one of a number of interesting recent reads on World War II.
Ever wonder what an HR manual would look like for a company that gave their employees large doses of responsibility and decision making authority and backed it up with a clear sense of organizational purpose? Well, here it is.
Ever hear of the computer game Prospero? No? That’s because it was killed by Valve before it was ever released. We know about it because it’s in the handbook. That’s just one of many enlightened parts to this manual.
Let’s start with control. How much decision making authority do Valve employees have? Well, a lot. They can not only pick the projects they want to work on, they can pick the projects the company works on, and can decide when to ship a product. The mechanism for allowing employees to choose their projects is to provide desks with wheels that can be easily moved by the desk owner. Here’s are the instructions for doing that:
The manual advises company personnel who are interviewing potential hires that they need to ask themselves whether the potential hire is capable of running the company, because they will be, literally.
…telling [people] to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.
Organizational clarity is achieved by clearly and repeatedly stating the company’s purpose. The first words in the manual are that the company makes great games. The primacy of the customer experience is repeated again and again as are the criteria for working on and shipping products. All told, it’s clear what Valve is here to accomplish.
Technical competence is achieved in the hiring process by only taking the very best software engineers. There’s no mention of company sponsored training but self study, improvement and learning are strongly stressed. One of my favorite parts of the handbook states that mistakes will happen and when they do, learn as much as possible from what happened.
Employees are encouraged to fashion themselves into “T-shaped people.” T-shaped means your skills run broadly across many disciplines and very deep in a few. This idea is also espoused by Tim Brown of IDEO as the best way of developing interdisciplinary teams.
…and who wrote this manual? The founder? No. The HR department? No. In keeping with the content, the manual was written and is available for editing by any employee.
I’m not a fan of focus groups as a means of soliciting feedback from customers. An obvious flaw in this era of 24/7 social media is that they are an infrequent mechanism for listening to a small subset of your customer base. Compare that to the ability social media provides of listening in to what your customers, and indeed what customers of other companies, are saying in real time and they seem a poor substitute.
Of course another significant issue is whether your customers actually know what it is that they want. I mean really know. For instance I know how to ride a bicycle pretty well, but if you asked me to describe how I do it I’d probably struggle to do so in any detail. Likewise it’s pretty common for people to say they want or need one thing whilst deep down their demands are somewhat different.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the focus group was applied by some new research published recently in the journal Psychological Science. The research monitored brain activity in subjects that were shown three different anti-smoking adverts. By directly monitoring the brain the researchers hoped that they would get the most accurate insight into what was working and what wasn’t.
The researchers gathered 30 smokers together. They had all shown a strong intention to quit the habit and were shown a series of television ads designed to help them do so. At the end, each participant was asked to fill in a questionnaire about the effectiveness of each ad.
So far so normal. What made the research stand out however was that each participant also had fMRI scans to monitor their brain activity whilst watching the ads. The scan specifically monitored the ventral subregion of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in Brodmann’s area (BA) 10. This region was selected because it was the cluster most highly associated with individual behavior change in a previous independent study.
The research then took to the field, broadcasting each advert for a month in different states. The call to action in each ad was a phone number for the National Cancer Institute’s Smoking Quitline. This allowed the researchers to determine the effectiveness of each ad by virtue of the number of calls the quitline received.
They could then compare these real results with what the focus group had predicted to see whether the brain scanning or the questionnaire was more effective. You can probably guess the answer. The brain scan triumphed quite emphatically. What’s telling is that the brain scan results also beat the predictions of public health experts.
Now this is cool for a couple of reasons. Firstly it obviously allows us to run much better focus groups. That’s a given. Secondly it should allow us to more accurately predict the response of entire populations by monitoring the brain activity of a small group. Finally it should provide yet another reminder to us all that hubris in leaders is not a good thing. The wisdom of crowds has shown the limitations of so called experts, and this research provides yet another reminder.
Thinking you know all the answers is a dangerous place to be in. If you don’t want egg on your face I’d strongly advocate testing things with your market so you know for sure rather than relying on your best guess, no matter how educated you think it is.
Adi Gaskell is Head of Online at the Process Excellence Network
Matt Ridley on Maestripieri’s Games Primates Play | Mind & Matter – WSJ.com @WSJ.
‘Eisenhower in War and Peace,’ by Jean Edward Smith. Eisenhower knew how to lead without appearing to. @NYTimes.
Bell Labs and innovation: The organisation of genius. @TheEconomist.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. By Jon Gertner. Penguin Press; 422 pages; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com“MY FIRST stop on any time-travel expedition”, Bill Gates once said, “would be Bell Labs in December 1947.” That was the time and place of the invention of the transistor, which powered the technology revolution that built today’s connected world. The handful of scientists who gathered in downtown Manhattan to witness the first demonstration of this transformational technology understood that it was special. The transistor was, one observer noted, “a basically new thing in the world” (other Bell Labs discoveries would earn the same astonished praise). The breakthrough was so big that William Shockley, the boss of the two scientists who made it, spent the next weeks in torment until he designed a better version. In doing so he broke a sacred Bell Labs rule—“absolutely never to compete with underlings”—for which he was never forgiven.The men of Bell Labs (the scientists were overwhelmingly male) are brought to life by Jon Gertner in “The Idea Factory”, his wonderful history of the most influential corporate-research lab the world has seen. A writer for the New York Times Magazine…
9 Timeless Leadership Lessons from Cyrus the Great. Forget 1-800-CEO Read. The greatest book on business and leadership was written in the 4th century BC by a Greek about a Persian King. Yeah, that’s right. Behold: Cyrus the Great, the man that historians call “the most amiable of conquerors,” … @Forbes.
The unconscious mind: Hidden depths | The Economist.
Stories of resistance: Shades of grey | The Economist.
Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller’s ‘Great Leaders Grow’ – Leadership Books – The Washington Post.
Games Primates Play seeks to explain human behavior from an evolutionary perspective.
The employee handbook for the software company Valve has been pushed around as an example of a new organizational model. I love it. There are a lot of things that are really good in it. They were the ones who developed the wildly successful and clever half-life.
In general, any company can achieve the kind of flat organization that Valve has. Here are the steps:
First, flat organizations have divested control (decision making) to employees in an way hierarchical organizations haven’t.
Second, in order for employees to make appropriate decisions, they need two things: technical competence in their jobs and clarity as to what the organization is trying to (really) accomplish.
Technical competence is solved with training (and learning).
Organizational clarity is achieved with honesty and communication of goals.
For a complete list of “don’t do this, do this” click here.
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