Tom Guarriello argues that rigid corporate plans are obsolete. He points to the U.S. military, which sets clear principles but lets soldiers in the field make their own calls. Companies should do the same: give employees guidance, then trust them to adapt when reality changes.
Well, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, another consultant, and we were talking about some of the realities that are facing corporations today. The kind of realities we were talking about are the ones that said, you know, it used to be that companies would make a plan and they would follow that plan. The plan was usually a 1-year plan, or if you had a kind of a Soviet sort of mindset. It was a 5-year plan, but you know, you would follow the plan just like you would, you know, also use the plan to help you to write contracts, you know, contracts with suppliers and contracts, uh, you know, for space and all. And we were talking, this friend of mine and I were talking about the fact that, uh, as somebody said to him You know, the contract is dead on day 2. You know, that's not a very reassuring reality for people to realize that the day after you sign a contract in a business today, it's probably no longer valid. Why is that? Well, because everything changes so dramatically and so radically in business circumstances today that you can't really count on the plan making sense sometimes a week after it's written. As we were talking about this, I said to my friend, "You know, the best place to learn about this today is from the United States military." Now, I'm not a military veteran. I did not serve in the military. I didn't have a lot of respect for the military for much of my adult life. But I have a great deal of respect for the military now. Part of that respect comes from the leadership challenge that faces the leaders in a military situation. Here you have leaders who have to be able to write plans, and they have to be able to write plans for people who are in many instances not particularly militarily minded. You know, they're reservists or National Guard people who have lives that are not really dedicated to military behavior, to doing military things. You know, they're plumbers and they work in factories, or they have, you know, people who have real jobs, but then they go serve in the military. And now many of those people are serving in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now those plans have to be written for people, modern people. Who have questions about, you know, authority and the remote, uh, kind of authority figure who gives orders and then isn't there, right? That's a natural kind of baseline for so many of us today. But most importantly, these military leaders have to write plans that will survive the realities on the ground that they can't possibly foresee. So the plan has to have some very important orienting principles to it, around the kinds of things that we want to get done and some fundamentals about the behavior that we need to use in order to get those things done. But it also has to enable a great deal of freedom on the part of the people who have to execute those plans on the ground. So, you know, if I'm going into a village in Iraq and the plan is to engage the civilian population in a in a friendly, enabling manner that helps to present the United States as a messenger of democratic values, respect for humanity, and ways to stabilize this territory that we're working in. And at the same time, I don't know who the enemies are because of the way the wars now— wars are now fought. I have to have a great deal of judgment on the line in the moment to be able to execute those plans. And no matter what you think about the war, our service personnel, our military, American military personnel are extraordinary at using judgment at the point of engagement. Now, in the business world, we need to have the same kind of mindset for people to have overall plans and yet be able to exercise a good deal of judgment in carrying those plans out. Sometimes getting to the point of saying, "You know, the plan no longer applies. I'll have to speak to the brass at some point to explain why the plan no longer applies, but as of this moment, the plan no longer applies." So why am I talking about this? I'm about to, to be involved in a very large project with a very large client where these issues are extremely important to the success of their business. And I think that looking at the way the military does this is one important way for corporate leaders to learn how to exercise, how to use that balance that's so important today between planning and freedom that really makes it possible for intelligent agents on the ground, people working for a common purpose, to be able to actually use their decision-making, use their intelligence, use their intuition to actually carry those plans out. So, Um, that's what I'm thinking about today, and I hope you all have a great weekend and see you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.
