“How Our Generals Got So Mediocre”
May 17, 2007 at 12:59 | 
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A superb piece in Slate today by Fred Kaplan on the failure of leadership in the U.S. military and its political leaders. One of many gists:
The “tendency of the executive branch [is] to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals,” he writes. But, he adds, the services “are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. … In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to … expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.”
(A side note entirely, but could one not say the same about Bell?)
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That may be true in many bureaucracies (government or business) where process, conformity and consistency are in effect rewarded more than innovation.
That’s why large companies that need to be shaken up bring in outside CEO’s. Even they can have a hard time turning things around. (Someone in an old traditional organization recently told me they have long standing employees that they would be better off paying to stay home so they don’t get in the way of progress.)
The wrinkle in the military of course is that its hard to bring in outside management.
Agree, David. Human nature, but very troubling. The article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling is superb, by the way.
Not a side note, Rob - this is precisely how Bell, and many other organizations, both large and small, behave. Moreover, it is precisely how the modern organization has been designed and constructed, as first described 100 years ago by people like Frederick Taylor, Max Weber, and Henri Fayol. These are the Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, Hierarchical - or BAH - organizations. The problem is that they were created to serve the industrial age, and we are no longer in the industrial age.
I would suggest that this is not human nature, but rather socialized and acculturated behaviour that has been with us for so long (arguably for about 400 years or so) that it feels like human nature.
What is needed, in my (not so humble) opinion is a new theory of organization and a shift in organizational and management thinking in order to be consistent with the 21st century. Not-so-coincidentally, that happens to be the topic of my research.
A fascinating comment, Mark. One of the very interesting takeaways for me from the article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling was the notion that these organizations could never accept the promotion of someone to a position several grades above their rank - far too disruptive an event - even though disruption would be the point. Disruption presumably being a critical component of teaching the adaptability needed in the post-industrial age?