As the
Marine Corps ends over a decade of sustained combat operations and is reduced
to its lowest force structure in recent history, leaders at all levels need to
be more adaptive than ever. The Marine Corps has faced similar problems in the
past but still managed to drive excellence and innovation in the process (i.e. amphibious
warfare doctrine in the 1930s). Facing tough challenges ahead, it is an ideal
time to think seriously about the ways the Marine Corps will ensure it continues
to identify and spread excellence throughout the organization.
Two Stanford professors, Bob Sutton
and Huggy Rao have written a thought provoking new book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More
Without Settling For Less, that addresses this problem. The term “scaling”
is not a Silicon Valley buzz word; it is something that our most innovative
leaders do as a matter of course. It involves spreading excellence from those who
have it to those who do not. An easy example to conceptualize this term is
entry level Marine Corps training. The Marines start with the same basic raw
material as any other service, but those who emerge afterwards are completely
unique in their beliefs and actions. Another example of a scaling effort would
be the efforts of the Marine Corps Center
for Lessons Learned to take the best practices of units fighting in Helmand
Province and spreading them to other Marines across the organization.
Scaling
Up Excellence thoughtfully examines both success stories and failures in
the battles to spread excellence. Pulling no punches (United Airlines takes
quite a beating), the authors demonstrate that rolling out snappy PowerPoint
presentations or conducting one-off “training stand-downs” will not work (these
quick-fixes are equated to dropping a few “smart-bombs” and declaring victory).
As the authors say in the first chapter this is more like a ground war than an
air war. Scaling is a long-term effort requiring tremendous energy and
perseverance.
Sutton and Rao have distilled
the hard learned lessons of scaling into five crisp principles and seven mantras
that are elaborated on through very interesting case studies.
One
principle, described by the authors as “cutting the cognitive load”, describes
the need to relentlessly cut complexity during these endeavors, but in doing so
sometimes cuts go too deep. Consider the route that some organizations take to
eliminate middle managers as an organization grows. While cutting what may
appear to be unnecessary levels of supervision may seem like a good idea at first,
this often results in employees being unable to function effectively. The authors
cite good data on why managing teams (without sub-team managers) that grow past
seven and into double digits becomes increasingly ineffective (for more on this
see George
Miller’s magical number concept) Large enterprises are often too complex to
operate in with unstructured teams.
To
elaborate on this point the authors use the example of the Marine Corps fire team.
As described by James Webb in a 1972 Marine
Corps Gazette article, the smallest Marine fighting unit in World War II
was the infantry squad, which Webb referred to as the “12-man mob” because one
leader could not provide adequate control over so many people in combat. To fix
this problem the squad was broken down into three, four-man fire teams, each
with their own leader. Battlefield performance improved because the squad
leader was able to focus on his team leaders instead of trying to direct all of
the members of the squad.
The complex
issues facing the military are not abating. The need for continuous innovation
and adaptation to face these challenges and threats is paramount. For all
Marine leaders, be they at the fire team or general officer level, reading Scaling Up Excellence is an excellent
starting point to deepen your understanding of this process. The authors end
with practical advice on how to scale effectively and demonstrate that
organizational success depends not on how good some of its people are, but how
those with excellence can spread their beliefs and actions to those that need
them.
