Posted on Jul 2, 2015
"What you can learn from studying military incompetence"
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From: Financial Post
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What can tragic military disasters teach you about business leadership?
Successful business depends on leadership. But how many entrepreneurs learn anything substantial about leading organizations until they suddenly find themselves running their own business?
You can, of course, get a great leadership education by reading classic business books on the subject: Jim Collins’ “Good to Great,” Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” John C. Maxwell’s “Leadership 101,” or even “Leadership for Dummies.”
But some of the best lessons on leadership come from a book you won’t find on many executive bookshelves: Norman F. Dixon’s 1976 classic, “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.” Born in 1922, Dixon is a veteran of the British Army’s Royal Engineers (wounded, he says, “largely through my own incompetence”) who went on to become an award-winning psychologist and university professor.
Through clear and vivid writing that draws on both psychology and military history, Dixon explores the character flaws and organizational dysfunction that regularly recur across more than a century of British military disasters, from Crimea to the fall of Singapore in 1942 (with occasional references to U.S. adventuring in Vietnam).
Borrowing from information theory, Dixon notes how difficult leadership in battle can be, with insufficient information and overwhelming “noise” combining with logistical challenges and each leader’s inherent psychological flaws to render sound decision-making almost impossible. But not even these impediments explain the blindness of the officers who ordered the doomed charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, ignored sanitary conditions during the Boer War to the point where two-thirds of British casualties stemmed from disease rather than combat, or failed to build anti-tank defences in Singapore for fear it would reduce civilian morale.
While I would never argue that the trenches of business in any way equal the horror of war, these military debacles throw significant light on the challenges of leadership in many kinds of organizations. Seeing things clearly, creating a strategy, sharing a vision, and encouraging action throughout an organization are all hallmarks of strong leadership – and studying military incompetence can provide many insights into how not to lead, and how to get it right instead.
http://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/on-the-psychology-of-military-incompetence
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What can tragic military disasters teach you about business leadership?
Successful business depends on leadership. But how many entrepreneurs learn anything substantial about leading organizations until they suddenly find themselves running their own business?
You can, of course, get a great leadership education by reading classic business books on the subject: Jim Collins’ “Good to Great,” Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” John C. Maxwell’s “Leadership 101,” or even “Leadership for Dummies.”
But some of the best lessons on leadership come from a book you won’t find on many executive bookshelves: Norman F. Dixon’s 1976 classic, “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.” Born in 1922, Dixon is a veteran of the British Army’s Royal Engineers (wounded, he says, “largely through my own incompetence”) who went on to become an award-winning psychologist and university professor.
Through clear and vivid writing that draws on both psychology and military history, Dixon explores the character flaws and organizational dysfunction that regularly recur across more than a century of British military disasters, from Crimea to the fall of Singapore in 1942 (with occasional references to U.S. adventuring in Vietnam).
Borrowing from information theory, Dixon notes how difficult leadership in battle can be, with insufficient information and overwhelming “noise” combining with logistical challenges and each leader’s inherent psychological flaws to render sound decision-making almost impossible. But not even these impediments explain the blindness of the officers who ordered the doomed charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, ignored sanitary conditions during the Boer War to the point where two-thirds of British casualties stemmed from disease rather than combat, or failed to build anti-tank defences in Singapore for fear it would reduce civilian morale.
While I would never argue that the trenches of business in any way equal the horror of war, these military debacles throw significant light on the challenges of leadership in many kinds of organizations. Seeing things clearly, creating a strategy, sharing a vision, and encouraging action throughout an organization are all hallmarks of strong leadership – and studying military incompetence can provide many insights into how not to lead, and how to get it right instead.
http://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/on-the-psychology-of-military-incompetence
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Leadership
Posted 9 y ago
Responses: 5
This is really good. I have read some of the leadership books you have mentioned. We often look at a situation as being linear. This is the biggest failure of our military. There are factors that contribute to the success of a mission that aren't easily taught. I try to always stress the physiological aspect of what we do. Different leaders can attain various levels of success with the same men performing the same task. The issue at hand is that we fail to realize the impact of limiting our actions to linear thought. As you mention the blindness of officers who ordered the doomed charge. All they knew is that to win you have to charge. As I mentioned there are various factors on both sides of the battlefield that contribute to the success of your actions. The leader that is critical is the one that will find success in even the abominable of conditions.
What we fail to gauge so often is the adaptability of one's leadership. There are really few ways to attempt to truly test a soldier on this. But this is the driving factor in true leadership. Schools like the US Ranger School tests this by putting soldiers in complete chaos and forcing them to figure out how to achieve their mission. This goes for just about all of the Special Operations Forces in the military. They have his ability more so than the average soldier and this leads to their high mission success rate.
But so often we overlook what this really means. If we see a soldier fail when they were implementing what we are led to believe works we blame the person implementing the plan and not the plan itself. Then the next person will try to implement the same bad plan thinking they will some how achieve success. This is truly incompetence at it's worst.
The only way to address this is to achieve a sense of enlightenment. To find that if we stay in the box we will also be limiting our success to how tall the box it. We need to step out and try to achieve what hasn't been done. If we fail, so be it. As last we didn't fail do the same odd thing that we knew was going fail from the beginning. But this type of logic is questionable at best or dangerous as worst to those that are committed to the ways of the past. The real question is why do we develop these type of leaders?
What we fail to gauge so often is the adaptability of one's leadership. There are really few ways to attempt to truly test a soldier on this. But this is the driving factor in true leadership. Schools like the US Ranger School tests this by putting soldiers in complete chaos and forcing them to figure out how to achieve their mission. This goes for just about all of the Special Operations Forces in the military. They have his ability more so than the average soldier and this leads to their high mission success rate.
But so often we overlook what this really means. If we see a soldier fail when they were implementing what we are led to believe works we blame the person implementing the plan and not the plan itself. Then the next person will try to implement the same bad plan thinking they will some how achieve success. This is truly incompetence at it's worst.
The only way to address this is to achieve a sense of enlightenment. To find that if we stay in the box we will also be limiting our success to how tall the box it. We need to step out and try to achieve what hasn't been done. If we fail, so be it. As last we didn't fail do the same odd thing that we knew was going fail from the beginning. But this type of logic is questionable at best or dangerous as worst to those that are committed to the ways of the past. The real question is why do we develop these type of leaders?
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A phrase I have used is that every leader is an example. Some are examples of what to do. Some are examples of what not to do.
Absorbing this knowledge from personal to institutional is essential for a military.
I guess I've found my weekend reading book.
Absorbing this knowledge from personal to institutional is essential for a military.
I guess I've found my weekend reading book.
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