Corps Values

Tweet

The end state is a critical concept for the marines because outside of training, marines don't as a rule tell their subordinates how to do things; they merely specify what the situation is now and how they want it to end up, leaving the details of the execution up to the doers. If a corporal wants a private to stack a bunch of pallets, the corporal won't tell him or her to get a forklift or grab two other privates; the corporal will simply say to make sure the pallets get stacked. The reason is that in an environment where events unfold quickly and unpredictably, a particular means to an end can suddenly become unfeasible; but if the end is well understood, then other means can be enlisted.

Most business managers, of course, prefer to spell out exactly how they want employees to do a task, and with good reason: if you don't, you face the risk of having the employee carry it out in an inefficient or even disastrous fashion. That's a risk the marines take consciously. Failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a marine, and it's not even necessarily treated as a bad thing. True, managers like to say they give their subordinates a certain measure of room to fail, but the marines practice failure tolerance to a degree that would raise most managers' hair.

One marine told me how shortly after being promoted to corporal, he took a squad out on a live-fire drill, in which he decided on the spur of the moment to let a relatively inexperienced private run one of the teams. But the private promptly missed a cease-fire signal, and in the few horrifying moments before the corporal realized the slipup, the private's group continued to fire, while other marines had put down their weapons and were preparing to come out from their cover. There are few mistakes that have more serious repercussions in training; marines are injured or killed every year in accidents. The corporal quickly found himself explaining to his lieutenant what had happened, even while picturing his career going down the drain. But the lieutenant said that since no one had gotten hurt, it was a good learning experience. The corporal went to the private and told him much the same.

Having specified an end state, the group's last responsibility is to propose three (of course) alternative missions that might achieve the end state. Moore will make the final decision among the three, though he not only allows disagreement but practically demands it. This is standard marine thinking; enlisted men and women and officers alike are expected to express concern about questionable decisions and orders, and one of the biggest mistakes an officer can make is to ignore or squelch such questioning. Moore recounts the time a second lieutenant pointed out during one exercise-planning session that the plan Moore had picked would subject a covert landing party to a high risk of discovery. Moore acknowledged the concern but overruled him; what Moore couldn't explain was that as one of the people who had devised the exercise, he knew that the landing party wouldn't be discovered at that point. The second lieutenant objected again, and Moore again overruled him, but more brusquely. When the second lieutenant objected yet a third time, Moore finally realized that the young man was right. "I had been 'fairy-dusting' the exercise--using information I wouldn't have had in the real world to make decisions," Moore says. "I was wrong, and here was a second lieutenant calling a full-bird colonel on it in front of the entire group." Moore let the landing party use a different approach.

Pushing the Envelope
The marines' commitment to decentralized management and bottom-up thinking has evolved gradually over the corps' more-than-200-year-old existence. It's come about for a simple reason: high-risk, high-speed, high-focus assaults tend to be unforgiving on bureaucratic or autocratic management styles. The pressure to decentralize has increased in recent years as the shadow of military downsizing has forced the marines to further differentiate themselves from the army to stave off steep cuts--and that means gearing up for even faster, more-effective responses to an ever-wider range of scenarios.

To do it, the marines are trying to invent entirely new forms of decentralization based on new technologies. One series of experiments run by the two-year-old Marine Warfighting Laboratory, in Quantico, had 18 squads of marines fanning out over 1,500 square miles of desert. Normally, squads remain within sight and radio range of one another, avoiding the disaster of inadvertently calling in artillery fire on another squad's position. But these squads were equipped with handheld computers into which enemy positions could be typed, as well as global positioning systems to track their own locations. The data from each squad were sent to a single command post, where officers could put together a coherent picture of the entire battle scene. The goal of a new computer system, says experiment leader Colonel James Lasswell, is to get enough of this information back to the squads so they can make better decisions about where to call in fire. "It allows the squads to act like ground sensors for all the precision weapons we have coming on line," he says.

Lasswell has also arranged for officers to visit traders on Wall Street to get a lesson in how to make fast decisions based on information flowing in through banks of monitors--which may be exactly the way colonels operate in future conflicts. While the experience has been helpful, Lasswell notes there's a limit to how much the marines want to emulate the traders, given a fundamental difference in the way they view end states. "The traders are happy as long as they win more than they lose," he says. "When losing means you bring home bodies, that's not good enough."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT 

Read more:

David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: