How to run your business like the U.S. Navy with Martin Groover

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Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

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Love your brain and you want to go the extra mile to nurture it, head on over to Flowstate NZ and you can use the coupon code leadonpurpose to get 15% off. I'm incredibly excited to welcome in this week's special guest Marty groover. He's a U.S. navy veteran and partner of C5MI. With more than two decades as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. navy, Marty is a recognized thought leader in the SAP partner base. Marty has generated tens of millions of dollars for dozens of Fortune 100 companies, including Caterpillar, John Deere, and the Defense Logistics Agency. I think you're going to really enjoy today's show. And Marty's book, Speed of advance was given an incredible testimonial by the one and only Jocko Willink. And we'll talk about that in today's show. Sit back and enj.

Marty. A huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Hey, James, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this. This will be a good time.

Oh, it's so great to connect, and I want to get right into it. Speed of advance. Tell me, what does speed of advance mean?

Yeah.

So I was a Navy officer and standing watching the bridge. If the captain ever came to the bridge, the first thing you say, what's the soa? And you had to know it, and everybody had to know. And there was a reason. We had a plan, we had to be there. We were on a mission. And you have to measure that speed all the time, but you don't want to get the speed too high because then you're going to start burning extra fuel. So you're always trying to stay in the most efficient range there. And sometimes you got to make up time because you got to slow down to do drills. So you're always constantly adjusted. So in your brain, you can't just sit there and daydream. You got to constantly be thinking about that math and measure thing. And it's amazing because everything on a ship evolves around. So a what are we doing today? Can I do some drills? What happens if we hit bad weather and we slow down? We always got to be thinking about it. And so in the business world, I took that and converted it to, you got to measure everything, because what gets measured gets fixed and gets better, right?

100%. And if we go back to your time in the Navy and we look at speed of advance. So in my mind, I'm thinking the most critical element is being just monomaniacally clear on the vision. Like, we're headed there, there's our destination. So does speed of advance all start around having a clear understanding of what the vision is?

Yep, exactly. So we have a mission. Let's just say we're in the med and we've got to go over to Go through the Suez Canal. So there's a time they say that you meet right there outside of Alexandria to pick up your pilot. You can't be late and you don't want to be early. Just loiter around because that's a security thing. So you know, that time the navigator and you backward planet and say the SOA to get there by this time is this much. And then you. And you're constantly measuring yourself and managing. You may turn right, turn left, you may have traffic, you got it, you know, stop and get some fuel. So you're always adjusting and driving it and constantly measuring where you're at, which is critical, because if you don't know where you're at, how do you know if you're achieving your goals or achieving your mission or making money? Right.

If.

If you don't know what it takes to make money and how you're going to. What your business plan is and you're not measuring it, you're not going to. You're going to fail.

I think that's so critical. So rather than just jumping on the ship and going wherever I'm burning fuel and eating through all your supplies, it's like, okay, we know we've got to be here. We're going to be in Egypt by this day, and we reverse engineer everything. So in terms of business, what's the danger if somebody doesn't get clear on where they're headed and doesn't get clear on reverse engineering? What's the risk to that business?

Yeah, I mean, the more that you understand your business and what you're doing and why you're doing it, you're going to get better business outcomes. So I'll just take when I was a manufacturing quality. Quality impacts your velocity of delivering your product. It affects how much money you make because you pay for raw parts and then you got bad parts, you got to scrap them. If you don't measure that quality and understand those root causes, what happened here? Why didn't I do it? And that's something we always do in an 82 is lessons learned. What happened? What could be done better? You never just do something and don't, you know, go back and look at it. So it's really about that continuous improvement. How do I get better and better and how do I understand the impacts and to what I'm doing when I. When something happens, you know, when I have a engineering failure or, you know, availability or something, it could be anything. You know, the helicopter, you know, went out and can't land. You got to Turn around and the winds aren't right. And now, now you're behind on your. So there's just all these things you got to constantly think about, which is good, because if you're not thinking, you're daydreaming. When you're daydreaming, you're not getting after it 100%.

I love that. And when we think of, you know, not not moving forward and we're just going round in circles, essentially, you know, where. Where do we end up? What's the end product of going around in circles and dithering?

You do the. You do the same thing over and over, and the outcomes don't get any better. And. And you never understand, you know, how you're going to improve, to get there. Just like. Just like, if you're working out, if you're an athlete, right. If you do the same workout every single day, you will diminish your returns incrementally. You're not going to get any better. You may maintain, but. And you could even get worse because sometimes doing the same exercise in the same muscle, the same way every time actually degrades the performance. Right? Because it just gets used to that muscle memory, and it doesn't do anything for you. So it's the same thing, you know, with the business. If you just keep doing the same things and you're not trying to change it up or get better, you're nothing static. And if you're not going up, you're going down, probably.

Right, yeah. No, I 100% agree. The way I look at it, you're either growing or you're decaying, but, I mean, you're not doing anything else. You're not just staying neutral. Like, you're either good in one or the other. Yep.

The harmonics of everything never lets you do that, Right? There's harmonics in every. Everything you do. Yeah.

And you mentioned a minute ago, just about, you know, when something does go wrong, you know, you just reflect on it. So that idea of a hot debrief, like, okay, what went wrong? Why did it go wrong? What's the root of it? In the Navy, if we go back to that, do you have any examples or you remember something where something maybe didn't go quite right, you had to debrief.

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Yeah, we had a very scary event going into Haifa, Israel one time, and I was the conning officer, and we, we were going in this channel and it was pretty fast going in the harbor. It's a huge harbor, so it's like 50 knots, which is fast for going into. And we. The. The quartermaster called the turn. So I went to make the turn, and the captain all of a sudden just said, no, don't turn. Rudder redshifts.

And I was like, what?

Because he saw another ship coming, but there was a big enough lane. The quartermaster, we would have stayed in our lane, but now we're still going, we're still advancing, and then we're keep chugging. Finally, you know, I just said, all back full. Because we were heading right into where that ship was going to go, and it just kind of frozen. You know, when you're, when you're on the bridge, if the cap makes a call like that, you really should say, captain has the con. Because nobody should be calling the con, you know, if they do. So anyway, we went all back full. It was okay. The EXO came over. You know, we didn't, we didn't do anything. The captain was shook a little bit. And then. And then we turned and went in, you know, and at the debrief, you know, we had to go back and debrief that because that could have been pretty bad, you know, and there's been some recent T bones in the Navy and those things happen because people. We call it losing the bubble. Now, the captain was a great captain. He just didn't understand, and it was probably the navigator's fault, saying, hey, there's gonna be a lot of traffic in here. They're going to be going 15 knots. And it's for a big tanker that was a big, like, oil tank or something. That gets scary. So he just froze. And then he said, well, the other thing he said, oh, yeah, rudder, left, hard rudder. He wanted us to do 180. And I was like, no, I went all back full. That was the other part of the story later. It was great because I met him at the surface Navy association somewhere. And he said, he actually told somebody. He said, this guy saved my bacon. I thought it was funny. He actually admitted it. So he remembered it. But we had to do a full debrief. And then how are we going to make sure. The navigator said, yep, I'll make sure that we, we map the traffic to that's coming out of there so we know what we're going to be looking for and actually what's the origin of it. So driving a ship, you know, 50 knots doesn't seem like that fast, but it, it can happen. Relative motions, a mind trick, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And losing the bubble, you said, what does that mean?

So that's a, that's a military term. When you, when you have the bubble, everything's running, you got it, you got it under control. When you lose a bubble, that's a sub thing, like they got the bubble where they run. If they lose the bubble, then they've lost their, you know, where they're at, their attitude. And it can be an airplane too. You lose a bubble, you don't have you, you're not on your attitude. So it's just kind of a milit. Say you lose the bubble, you kind of lost situational awareness really is what it is.

And that happens to us in everyday life. It happens in parenthood, it happens in relationships, in business, on the road, driving, going to work. So when you're starting to become aware that you're losing the bubble, you know, do you have any strategies that you've used over the years that help you to get realigned and come back to being able to be cool, calm and collected?

Yeah, you gotta rise above it. And Jocko talks about this all the time. Okay. When you're down in it and you lose the bubble and, and you, you lost focus or you had tunnel vision. Tunnel vision is usually what happens. Right. The best thing you do is calm down, don't make a decision, rise above it, look around and reset. And that's, you know, one of the things, especially when you're in air warfare, you can lose the bubble pretty fast. Like that was one of the jobs I had, was being a anti air warfare commander on the Aegis Cruiser. And we would be with the aircraft carrier and we're managing the launch cycles and the airplanes checking in and out, flying out to do their missions. Every 45 minutes you're doing or 90 minutes you're doing a, a psychic. They call it cyclic ops. You cannot afford to lose a bubble. So you're looking at a 2D picture but it's a 3D world, right? So you're looking at a screen, you can lose a bubble pretty quick and. And that's when air collisions happen. Or, you know, just things go south on you or go north, depending on where you live.

Yeah, yeah. And that idea of detaching, like rising above, getting a more lateral view, I mean, I, I think most people will understand that, but some people might struggle to do that. So when you are feeling the elevated blood pressure and heart rate and your mind is racing and what's a great way that you've had for yourself where you've been able to actually remove all the craziness and all the mayhem and rise above and detach and be able to see everything clearer?

So really take a pause. And what. Sometimes you got so many things coming at you, you need to figure out what is the one thing right now that if I don't take care of this, that's going to be the worst thing. Because they all. They all could kill you. Right. They could all cause problems or have a major problem. But there's probably just pick one thing and focus on that and get that taken care of. It helps you calm down and then manage the rest of the things that you felt like you lost until you get them back into perspective, if that makes sense. So whatever the closest thing is, whatever the worst thing. All right, let's just focus on this right now. What do I need to do? And then resolve it and then just gradually get back into the mix so that, you know. Because it can be overwhelming, especially when you got a lot of plates spinning and you're doing a project and you can lose it pretty quick sometimes.

Yeah, absolutely. I've personally experienced that over the years and it can spin out of control pretty quick. So that's great advice and let's get back to speed of advance. So when we think about the world and where we're headed, we've had all these different, let's say, revolutions and Industrial Revolution was just a massive game changer for the world. Now, you talk about in the book the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what does that all mean?

So, I mean, obviously the third industrial revolution started. They last anywhere from 20 to 30 years, depending on how long they are, but the last one lasts about 30 years. Silicon age PCs really started in the late 70s, early 80s, and now. So we've been digital for a while and everybody will say, digital transformation, what, what. Where we're going to is a full common operational picture. Everything is integrated together. We got lots of pockets of digital stuff. But the fourth industrial revolution, ideally is a single version of the truth. Sort of like our iPhones are for us. You know, that's our personal single version of truth. Everything works, all the things are connected in it. You think about all the apps and what they do for you, and it's, it's a fully integrated platform. And really the fourth Industrial revolution is about how to exponentially improve business outcomes by automating things that in a lot of people are concerned that, oh, it's going to get rid of all the jobs for humans. It's not. There's not enough people in manufacturing right now. You can't hire people. It's. It's a problem. Everybody's demographics are going down. You know, we're not reproducing at the level we need to do just to reproduce our population that's around the world. I mean, China, it doesn't matter.

So it's about take. And just like the Aegis Cruiser, take the person out of the process where they don't need to do it because it's not value add for them and have them work by exception. And when you do that, pretty soon these machines can do everything and then the human just solves the problem the machine can't solve. That's the idea behind it. And when you look at the inflation that we're feeling right now and some of the deficits and things that are going on our supply chains, we're really going to need to leverage that technology to get that exponential improvement in productivity to knock down the inflation. Sort of like what we had in the early mid-80s when the PCs really started hitting hard for us.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting. So I'm by no means any expert on blockchain, but the understanding is that there's a ledger and there's no getting away from it. And it is what it is and it's black and white and it's very measurable. So from what I hear is that this next industrial revolution will essentially get all of the data, make it all very clear, and allow us to measure incredibly accurately all the different systems and processes.

Yeah, they, they're starting to call it the third Internet. Right. Or W W3 or something like that, with just being all blockchain. It is interesting technology, but that's it. The democratization of data. And it's there and streaming constantly everywhere. And then you use it as you need it to put things together. And you know, in the military, that's one of the things we had is called a cop. And I never Realized that we had, you know, the. What it was. We had cloud computing back then in 2004. And this is a perfect example of what the power of the Industry 4.0, if you had your whole supply chain and everything fully connected. So I sat on a John F. Kennedy. I was on the Admiral Strike Group. In the past, an F18 would launch, it would go out of radar range, and then it would be gone. You wouldn't see it. Right. And they would come back and have to check back in.

And then.

And then it's back in the. In the link with you. And a link being nothing more than just like the Internet. I'm reporting my, you know, positional data and whatever data sets that I need to report, you know, who's on board and weapons and things like that, and just like your cars do these days. But then we. We were able to. That. I watched the airplane go all the way over to Fallujah. We were doing the battle Second Battle of Fallujah. I saw a pairing line, which is a Troops in contact, come down from the airplane electronic pairing line to a Humvee and watch that airplane pickle off a. A bomb and support. And I. I was absolutely amazed. I was like, are you kidding me? Because when I first came in, you might be able to see just your radar on a ship, and that's all you saw around you. The rest of it was all, you know, somebody just reporting or something out here. And you never knew if it was really there or not to go into where. Everything around the world is in the cop. And it's just like now, you know, like us, I mean, we're being tracked in our cars and the world. The metaverse is the cop, right? Common opportunity, 100%.

And what does that mean for business? So for businesses that are preparing, and I'm probably feeling the pinch right now with inflation and economic depression. So what does that mean in terms of getting ready for this next revolution? What should you be engaging with and considering?

So I didn't write this book to try to tell you how to do Industry 4.0, because that would take a lot of chapters, right? There's a lot to it. But what it really takes is a strategy and thinking about how am I going to converge my people, my process and my technologies, and codify, digitally codify these processes so they run all the time without having to rely on that human. Like they say, the factory of the future will have two people in it, a man and a dog. The dog will be there to bite the man if he Touches the machinery and the man's there to feed the dog. So it's a funny joke, but that's not the reality. But I love that, that, that story. But it's, it's really about how do you automate things and make it self healing, self breathing. So like every bit of your supply chain from raw material is totally tracked. Like you said in a blockchain, you know where it is, you know where it came from, you know when it's going to get there. The lead times are there, automatically adjusts lead times based off what it's sensing as it's going through the supply chain. You know, when I first started working at Caterpillar, every day we would go out there and we have a lineup. We're going to build 25 tractors today, right? And then we would start getting into the missing parts. Missing parts, missing parts. We never could tell if we were going to miss a part that day. So we might only build 20 tractors or we, we had a defect apart and all that. You know, in the future everything's going to be connected. Today we'll say, don't build this one, I don't have the part. Don't even try, you know, don't, don't, don't do it. And it will automatically readjust and these things will all be self compensating, if that makes sense. So once it's all connected, pretty soon this situation, this situation, this situation now gets into machine learning AI and go, wait a minute, this, this and this equals this and it automatically adjusts for it before it ever hits you.

It's amazing.

The worst thing was that's we like this term live factory. I need a live factory at the end of the day. I would go at the end of the shift. If I didn't get my build today and I didn't know about it, I couldn't do anything. If someone would have called me and said, hey, we got a quality defect or we got this, you know, I could throw some engineers at it and solve it in the moment and. But once that epic time is gone, I've lost it. And all I did is lose money. You know, now I got to try to make up for it in the past. So it's really about never, never dripping, never losing, never leaking, whatever you want to call it. It's like perfect productivity.

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It's incredible. And what do you think are the greatest obstacles for us to get to that point where that's actually happening and functioning in real time?

It's data. It's data every, every time we go work with customers, say our data is clean, not so much. But once you do get the data cleaners, a lot of tools for it and you get it running and the data is, you trust the data, it's consistent, it runs through, you know, and we have hundreds of protocols around, around the world for machinery and different things that, that converts maybe a local, you know, proprietary machine language into a protocol that everybody can read and use. And it means this, it's sort of like the language, you know, this means this and it all means the same, you know, thing. And once those protocols are working and running now, you can really run at a hard speed. And, and really consume a lot of material or a lot of data. And then compression will be, is the next thing is how do you compress all that data? And that's where we're getting with in memory computers, computing now in the cloud that you can compress data 20 times what you used to be able to do it. So you can do a lot more with the data, you know, chugging through the lines and, and doing the algorithms on them and, and managing things at, you know, a very small detail of, of time. And it's, it's really about understanding what do I need to measure when, how do I put it all together, how do I make the schemas of the data contextualize. The data is the other piece, once you get the data, what does it mean? What's my failure modes that I'm looking for? What's the thing that's not working right, that I gotta see that if I see it before it happens, or maybe there's three conditions and based on that I want this thing to happen without anybody doing anything. So then, you know, there's a whole maturity curve. You got to have your digital core with your base engine data, your transactional data or whatever, and then you've got to visualize it. You gotta, you know, make it adaptable and then you're gonna make it predictive and at the end you got full autonomy. And that curve is very important because there's stages and you don't go, you know, it's not linear, obviously you build it out, but you really got to think about as you build that platform, you just keep building it and it's a continual thing. Use sensor devices IoT. I'm sure you've heard of that Internet of industrial Internet things. So if I need to know this bearing is, is getting hot because it's very critical to my process to put a sensor on it. And then I predict it's going to fail before it fails. And you know, it's, it's a, it's a big task, it's daunting. That's why the strategy of how you're going to do it is more important than how you do it. If that makes sense.

Yeah. And that strategy, like developing that strategy, you know, if you were tasked with that and you were trying to help a company, let's take a, you know, an Apple, like, let's say Apple want to engage with you and you're tasked with helping them develop a strategy that gives them a clear pathway. Where do you start?

The first thing we do Is say, don't even think about the technology. Everybody just wants to go straight to the technology. I need this, this. But wait a minute. If you just get the technology and you don't know the true capability that you need to make this business outcome or to see something or to visualize it or predict it, the first thing you need to say is, I'll just take the Apple. I need to be able to set an alarm and it will wake me up consistently on time. That's a capability. And then you build that capability in. And then, you know, as you, as you go, you say, well, I need the capability that if I do this, this and this, you know, with the alarm, it will automatically turn on my lights at my house. Right? So now I just added capability. I built a foundational capability that the alarm went off, but now I want my watch when the alarm goes off to automatically start my coffee or do whatever. And that's how you build those layers of capability. And then you have to, you know, then it's all about the data and connecting things the right way.

Yeah, that's great. And keep bringing it back to people. And you know, I understand, like we're going to get more and more focused on digitizing, on, you know, becoming more autonomous. But people, as you mentioned earlier, are going to be such a crucial factor to making this all work. So how do you empower your people to go above and beyond and engage with this?

So I'll use a great example of what we did in a factory in Athens, Georgia. We had a problem with hot parts every day to our assembly line, 50 hot parts. So now you got the regular parts getting the line, you got hot parts competing. So now your material handling equipment, people even running, I mean, it's just pandemonium. And it was really devolved during the day. And so what we did is we started tracking the forklifts, the material handling equipment. We already knew the people because we had badges swiped to do the OSHA safety thing. And then what we did is we took their, their tickets, their pick tickets, and digitized them so that they would see them on their scanners. And we had dashboards so they knew what they were supposed to do. And it was amazing because everybody was said, oh, these people aren't going to do this. They feel like you're watching them. Well, we gamified it and said, hey, the best users, this or the best people closing their tickets out the fastest, always closing them out, moving the material, you know, would win extra rewards or something, you know, they might get a Free meat lunch or whatever. But we kind of made it where it was fun. And then we started learning, hey, why is this person so much better than this person? And then we took those lessons learned, and they started helping other people. This is what I do. And we changed processes continually. All of a sudden, we didn't have hot parts anymore. Everybody was actually happier because then they said, oh, this is what you want me to do? I understand it. And now you're giving me my meter, so to speak, that's helping me know that I'm doing it better. And I. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think people want to do a good job, and I think if you give them that type of recognition, but you also give them, you know, this. The data to see what they're doing, and they understand it. They have clarity. It empowers them. And then they have better job satisfaction because they're not just doing this mundane task over and over, and they don't understand the impact if they don't, you know, get this done sooner than we have these hot parts. And we would go, you know, we'd go a week without ever having a hot party. And we actually got rid of the expediting group because we didn't need them anymore. It was. It's just amazing when you think about it. But everybody was so concerned that, oh, you're measuring me. It's going to be a negative thing, and it was a positive thing.

That's incredible. And you're right. Like, we all, I believe, want to do a good job at whatever we're doing. We don't want to do a poor job. It's not part of our nature. Right?

It's like this Undercover Boss, right? Iceberg ignorance, really. And that. Why is that important? Because if you empower those people at the lowest level to run your business and they understand how to do it, your business outcomes are so much better. And you're not going back trying to figure out why they're failing. Because now Undercover Boss always goes to the lowest level in the jobs, right? Because they want to see what's happening down there. Like, what is going on down here with this tool and with these Tools in Industry 4.0, you can codify, and this is what I talk about in the book, the processes down at the lowest level. And now these people are running your business, and who better to know it than the people that do it every day? They. They understand it. And once you get them into that do loop of improvement where they go, hey, this is Good. But if I had this, it could be better. Pretty soon they're running your business and now your leaders aren't working two levels down, your leaders are working two levels up. How much can they do when they're really looking at how to improve? Control the process instead of trying to measure it and understand why it's failing?

It's amazing. And it's interesting to talk about the leaders and where they're sitting. And right now, certainly in this part of the world, in the antipodes, a lot of business owners are feeling a little bit vulnerable in terms of leaders. They find that they're very hard to replace. Those leaders, those leaders have a lot of say, a lot of leverage and it's causing some challenges with the culture. So how do you create a culture or an organization where actually your leaders are replaceable and you can build a great team under them?

Yeah, I think that's a critical piece too. And I know exactly what you're talking about. In the military, we're not worried about someone taking our job. In fact, my only job is to train myself out of a job. So everybody's a trainer. We have very deep training plans. Watch team replacement plans, what we call, it's in the book. So I always know that next person and I'm, and I'm not waiting until I need them. I'm training them and they're getting reps in the job. Because once one person's already qualified to do the job, bring the next one and start training them. So they may not be the full time person doing it, but you've got to get them ready to go. And I think as a leader you should always look at knowledge is power. Yes. But if you're afraid that if you give that knowledge away that you're not going to be as powerful, that's where you see that happen with a lot of leaders. And ideally the best results you're going to get is if I have to solve the problem. Everybody used to say, well, when you're an officer, it must have been great. You just told people what to do and they did it. I was like, you don't understand how the military works. If I'm out there telling them what to do, we're failing because they know what to do. Command by negation, these different tools that we had along with the capabilities. They know what to do, they react to it. They do it without me ever telling them I'm there for when the S hits the fan. Something doesn't go right or, or to do my job in the war fighting scenario, that's my job as a planner, you know, those type of things. And ultimately, you know, doing the financial stuff and things like that. I'm not executing the mission every day, those people are. And if, if I'm, if it requires me to go down to drive the mission, we're going to fail, we will fail. And you see it, you see sometimes, you know, some command units have culture issues where, you know, they're not, they're not firing on all cylinders. And nine times out of 10, it's just because they forgot that you know how to empower the people at the lower level and let them drive it.

And when you talk about command by negation, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, that's an awesome thing that we have in the military. So basically what we do is whether it's at the ship level, the strike group level, whatever, there's pre planned responses, answers, communications, reactions to whatever happens and what a commander's intent is. For instance, as it says, if this, this and this happens, you do that, you don't have to ask, I expect you to do it. Here's the procedure. Or if this, this and this happens, you, you communicate. This, this is the data. I want to know about this event, already telling you what to do, already telling you how to do it so that things are automated and you don't have to worry about it. And for quick reactions, you can't turn around and go, hey, what do you want me to do about this aircraft? We already train them, we already know what it is and they already have permission to execute this pre planned response if that makes sense. And then if your leader falls out and you're the next person in line, you just pick up and go, you just take command and you go. And that's command by negation. It's like you already know what to do. You just execute it. You don't even ask. And that's a powerful tool if you understand how to do it. Especially if you have the procedures and the training, the processes are codified. That's how we win wars. That's when you look at what's going on in Ukraine and the Russians, if one of their leaders get killed, the troops behind them are nowhere near as effective for us. The next guy takes over, picks up whatever and moves and we just keep going. That's how we're trained.

The level of autonomy is incredible. And I guess in a business or in the military, developing the culture and the trust to get to that level of autonomy must be challenging. So what must happen for an individual to be trusted to make those decisions and to understand the processes so that they can actually move forward without having to be told what to do every five minutes.

Yeah, this is the beauty of some of these digital tools. So when I was factory manager, I had team leads. I run 24 7. Why can't be in that factory 24 7. I have one section manager which is like my junior officer running it. And then I have team leaders. So in the past, they always had to go up to the section manager to do things. I empowered the team leaders at their level to go into SAP to, to make if there was an issue, to fix it, taught them how to do it. But we created standard work and process maps that showed them how to do it. We trained them and then we tested them and then we let them do it. And then when they did it, if they made an adjustment to the inventory, which a lot of times they don't let people make adjustments inventory. They only want certain people to do it. But I trust these guys because they know what was going on. They were running the production orders and they, they would do things with quality, but the system was there. I could always see it. But then they were empowered to go so they could do up to a certain level of inventory adjustment. And then it empowered them. And then they had gain sharing metrics. And this is how you really win. The metrics for them was to get these counts right on these parts. Because if they got good quality and got the counts right, we made more parts with the same money. They would get a percentage of gain share. And so we had goals off from it. And that's, that's kind of how you use, you know, the carrot and the stick, so to speak, and engage people and give them, you know, the power to do it. It's, it's just amazing how it happens. And then, you know, they take, they take that authority and run with it and pretty soon it's just a natural thing and you don't have to worry about it anymore. And now all that time you spent trying to go back and do things because you didn't trust people to do it again, you just keep pushing that authority down to the lowest level you can.

Yeah.

And I like that it's at a overarching level. What I hear a little bit is like, hey, collectively we were unified and we know where we need to get to. However, we're not being told by Leadership High, we need to get there. We're given some level of autonomy, some level of creativity and There's a trust there to go, hey, we're going to meet you there. And how we get there, like you guys are going to figure that out. We're not going to tell you, but.

We give you the tools and the training to do it. You use your brain and you get there. Sometimes it's not going to be right. That's okay. Figure out what happened. Do the lessons learned. I had an admiral that was so good at that. He would be like, I'm not going to tell you guys how to suck eggs, but this is what we need to do with the egg. It's got to be, you know, done this way. It's kind of a funny way of saying it.

Yeah, I love it. And look, speed of advance. You wrote the book, and it's already number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. Also Amazon bestseller. Like, it's incredible. So when someone picks up the book, who's the person that's going to be really impacted by this book? Who's the ideal person that will go, wow, this will transform my company, my business?

I think anybody that's been involved with some of this technology stuff where they've seen, we call it the Valley of Despair of, you know, you get something slammed on top, you get SAP, erp, name whatever done to you, right? And, you know, if someone just would have had a strategy on how to do these things, it would. It really helps you think about how these. For instance, what does safety really have to do with quality? And I've got a banner on my wall that we went 14, 30 days without a recordable injury, which is unheard of, you know, in a manufacturing facility. But we focused on safety first, then quality came right behind it because we were already focused on safety. It works the same way. I have a failure mode. And so it's really about how to think about people and then how do you converge the processes? And it's a lot of. It's common sense. Most people said, man, when I read this, it's common sense. And then technology. How do you really use the technology and think about it? And ideally, when I go talk to customers, they go, I know I need to do something. I just don't know where to start and I don't know how to do it. And hopefully this will help people. I tried to, you know, I tested it out on my mom. I said, my mom always said, I don't understand what you do. You talk about all this stuff. I really don't get it. I said, mom, read my book and see if it makes sense. And she goes, you wrote this at the perfect conversational level instead of so technical. So I tried to write it in a way that relates and you could see how we did it in the military and then how I applied it to the civilian world and was very successful using what I learned.

And that's honestly, that's why you're sitting as a best selling author. So I find, you know, some people will write very scientific books. They're almost like manuals. The everyday leader just can't connect. But I mean, that's such a skill to be able to take some really high level detail and data and break it down into something that's very powerful. And in fact, I want to share with the listener right now. Here's a testimonial from Jocko Willink. And I know many of you listeners will know Jocko. He's a retired US Navy SEAL and New York Times bestselling author. Jocko said, marty has translated and codified his understanding so civilian corporations can apply his proven methodologies and excel in their businesses. Now, I have to say that's a pretty epic testimony on blurb there coming in from Giaco. So how does that feel when you get someone of his caliber really reinforcing and saying that your work is incredible?

So what's amazing is Jocko, I met him when he just started, you know, Echelon Front. We had him at Caterpillar. His book was just out, I think like maybe six, seven months. And I got time that I would never get now with him then. And he really inspired me. And I said, well, I want to, I want to write this book. I've got something in me. And he told me how he wrote his and what he did. I kind of thought a little bit about what he did, but not the consulting piece, more about what I did. But the cool thing was when I got a hold of him and he's a. I mean, if you ever track this guy, I don't even know how he does it. He's super busy, man. He's got so many businesses going. Jocko Fuel, he's got a factory in Maine for boots and you know, everything that he's doing. But I sent the stuff to him and his and Jamie Cochran, who's the coo, they remembered me. And, you know, I said, hey, will you do a blurb? Yep. Jocko says, whatever Marty needs, I'll do it. And it was a while and I'm trying to get all my blurbs, you know, and trying to get the book together. And I said, you don't want to bug them. Right. And what was amazing, I just said, I said, hey, not bugging, just checking in, trying to, you know, figure out when I'm going to be able to finish this up. And she goes, jocko didn't want to give a blurb until he actually read the book. He's almost done with it. I was like, wow, that, that is, that's the kind of guy he is. So it was, it was pretty impressive. And then cool enough this weekend I was at the Army Navy game and, and we were at an event and he was there and I got to go up and shake his hand, say, hey, Jocko, thanks a lot for doing the blurb for my book. He goes, yeah, Marty, no problem. How's it going? And you know, that's the kind of quality character. He's, he's just an amazing person.

Yeah, he's a stand up guy, incredible leadership, facilitator and author. And you know what, he obviously sees the same in you as well. And you know, the book that you've written has been very impactful already. And I'm going to encourage the listener right now. I know you're listening on your phone, majority of you are. So please go to Amazon right now and search up Speed of Advance, written by Marty Groover. Download it, check it out, share it with a friend. And also the audio version is coming very soon as well. So by the time that you're listening to this, in fact it may very well be out. So definitely search for the audio if that's your thing. If you prefer to listen rather than read.

Yeah, and I won't be reading. I have, I had a reader for me. I just didn't have the time to do it. I think people would want to listen to me read it. But one thing I do ask too, even if you don't like the book, hey, you know, it really helps. Believe it or not, when you buy stuff on Amazon, help, help me and drop a review. It makes a difference.

Yeah, 100%, definitely. And Marty, just before we wrap up, I'd love to ask you. So if we were to fast forward way into the future and you knew it was your last day here on earth and someone very, very young in your family was to say, hey, how.

Do I lead my life on purpose.

What would your advice be to them?

Just like Speed of Advance, create a vision where you want to be. Put that on. I love vision boards. I've got one, I'm getting ready to update it again because I've already achieved a bunch of stuff on it, but always have that vision in front of you, where you want to be, how you want to do it. Because if you're just wandering, you're not gonna. You're not gonna achieve your goals. And everything I've ever achieved was because I had a vision in front of me. Whether it was becoming an officer or going to Caterpillar and being the best manufacturing guy out there, or even writing a book, you got to have that vision and then you'll achieve it.

That's incredible. Thank you for sharing that advice with myself and for the listener. And speed of advance is on my read list for the early 2023. I'm sure it will be for every listener as well. So I just want to wish you all the best with it and where it goes from here. And I look forward to our next conversation.

Hey, thanks for having me on the show, James. It was a lot of fun. Enjoyed it.

Absolute pleasure.

Thanks for tuning in and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders. It's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.