The U.S. Marines are trained to make split-second decisions based on incomplete information, in life-or-death situations. Can they provide clues to running a faster-reacting business?
Cover Story
The U.S. Marines are looking for the few, the proud--people who can scale walls, strike hard with lightning speed, and make life-or-death decisions in the heat of battle. You want a fast-reacting, adaptable organization? Look no further than the marines
The wind rips through the open bays of the CH-53E Super Stallion; the crumpled-tinfoil, cloud-shadow-burnished ocean streaks by below. Conversation is impossible over the thunderous drone of the convenience-store-sized helicopter, and it's beside the point, anyway. Seated shoulder to shoulder in two facing rows are 15 mostly young people in casually neat dress, looking as if they're on a trip to a museum, though that wouldn't explain the several duffel bags stuffed with assault rifles. The job in front of them is a delicate one: upon landing, they will have to thread their way to the U.S. embassy without attracting the attention of unruly mobs and set up a communications center that will support the deployment of a few hundred of their colleagues.
At this moment many of those colleagues are just below decks from the helicopter's departure point on the USS Tarawa. Some are trying on the black ski masks they will wear when they storm a terrorist weapons cache. Others are checking the mortars they will use, if necessary, to defend a food supply intended for the starving locals. Still others are going over the maps that will help them locate and rescue the pilot of a downed jet.
The marines are coming.
It's only an exercise--these marines are invading a portion of the vast tracts of Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego. But no one is taking the missions lightly. For one thing, many of the marines have been up half the night making plans and preparations. For another, this exercise will provide the challenges of a real mission, down to the smallest detail. The marines don't know what awaits them on shore, but they are confident that six hours of planning and preparing have left them better equipped to face it than most military units would be after six months. If past experience is any guide, they're right.
The art of a hard strike drawn up and delivered at lightning speed may once have seemed as far removed from the domain of business as a moon shot. But with monthlong high-tech-product life cycles, just-in-time manufacturing operations, and overnight global currency crashes, the business world might just be coming around to the marines' point of view. Conventional business processes and management practices can be fatally logy on the new high-speed playing field.
Can the marines provide clues to forging a faster-reacting, more adaptable organization? The military, with its legendary hidebound command-and-control habits, might strike some as the last place to look for nimbleness. As any marine will tell you, though, the U.S. Marines are different.
Robert E. Lee (no relation) was a second lieutenant in the marines in 1975, when he was shipped over to Vietnam during the end-of-the-war evacuation, a month before the fall of Saigon. His first order: to take a dozen marines, board one of the merchant ships packed with refugees, and secure it from the bands of deserting South Vietnamese soldiers who were seizing ships and killing the crews. He was given no word on how he was supposed to go about boarding and securing a ship, something the marines hadn't made part of their repertoire for about a hundred years. Just do it, he was told. After necessarily brief reflection, Lee hit upon the following insight: the ship had several decks, so why not treat it like a big building with many floors? That he had been taught to secure: you start at the top, so that gravity works in your favor--you can drop down on opponents faster than they can climb up to you, and you don't have to worry about hand grenades bouncing back down. Deck by deck, he and his men secured the ship.
Lee, now a trim, blue-eyed colonel, might be considered the marines' top trainer. He tells this story, among many others, to the hundreds of newly minted, twentysomething second lieutenants who come under his care and feeding each year. It's what the marines call a "sea story," and it is their preferred means for transferring wisdom. This particular story is especially useful, not because it teaches young officers how to command a boarding party but rather because it gets straight at two of the marines' most closely held beliefs. Namely:
1. War is chaos, confusion, and the unexpected.
2. Because of that difficult fact, the only way to succeed as an organization is to push the ability and authority for decision making down to the marines who are on the spot.
Decentralization: The Rule of Three
In business, decentralization and organizational flattening typically involve gutting several layers of management, often leaving managers overwhelmed with as many as a dozen direct subordinates. The marines, on the other hand, have pushed out decision-making authority while retaining a simple hierarchical structure designed to keep everyone's job manageable. In a nutshell, the rule is this: each marine has three things to worry about. In terms of organizational structure, the "rule of three" means a corporal has a three-person fire team; a sergeant has a squad of three fire teams; a lieutenant and a staff sergeant have a platoon of three squads; and so on, up to generals.
The functional version of the rule dictates that a person should limit his or her attention to three tasks or goals. When applied to strategizing, the rule prescribes boiling a world of infinite possibilities down to three alternative courses of action. Anything more, and a marine can become overextended and confused. The marines experimented with a rule of four and found that effectiveness plummeted.
Of course, the rule leads to an organizational hierarchy that might seem appallingly narrow and tall: there are typically six full layers of management in between an infantry private and the colonel commanding his regiment. But when the action starts, the layers collapse on an as-needed basis. Marines at all levels start making decisions in response to fast-changing situations, without so much as consulting the chain of command; even privates know they're expected to take whatever initiative is necessary to complete a mission. "If your decision-making loop is more streamlined than your enemy's, then you set the pace and course of the battle," says Major General John Admire, who commands an infantry division at Camp Pendleton.
