How to make a killing

Business has much to learn from the armed forces

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Readers' comments


Antidot Nyarlat

Military spending is another form of digging holes in the ground and wasting money. It´s exactly what most conservatives don´t like. But if they hear the words patriot and defense they loose all their brains and riot for more spending.
Militay is about wasting money (energy and resources) for destroying the "foe"s infrastracture and people. It´s just madness and reduces the net wealth of humanity.
(You still have to have some weapons and tropps to deter your neighbour from attacking you if "you" is a nation.) Today both sides loose even if one side wins. A lesson the world learned after WWII.
Phobos and Deimos are the followers of Mars, not because those names are so lovely, but because they are true. Humanity has still to become enlightened.
Phobos |ˈfōbəs; ˈfōbäs| and Deimos |ˈdīmäs| The sons of Ares in Greek mythology, the names means literally ‘fear and terror’.

umghhh in reply to Antidot Nyarlat

and of course you do not need a well organized force dispensing violence if asked to in a modern state? I really understand your sentiment - when I was young my country asked me to serve as every other relatively health boy - fortunately they went broke almost at the same time so I did not have to waste my time. I can imagine however that there are professional armies where waste (intentional as well as due to incompetence) is less visible than in an average corporation. At the same time I do not see how in modern world you can have a state that does not have some sort of military even for internal use - or what do you call anti-terror units of any police force in the west? Or SWAT units in USA? Do you deny their usefulness? I may doubt if they are always used to the right cause but I also know that there are evil individuals out there that need an efficient, fast, well equipped, well trained force that is able to strike with decisive and overwhelming power. I do not like the idea that we have to have such force but I do appreciate the fact that we do.
Talking about humanity - NK's military is part of humanity as John Lennon is - do you really want South Korea to disarm itself? The point here being that there is always an rogue individual that is able to amount power etc to wreck havoc lives of innocent people.

Antidot Nyarlat in reply to umghhh

I agree that we need to have an army and special forces to a) defend against external threats and internal threats. But we should have them tightly under control as a society.
We don´t want to have a warrior caste that deems itself worthy to rule. I still think the concept of rule by"We the people." is the best. But only if the population is one that has acquired knowledge and wisdom and is not bullied into war by mass media and "terrorist attacks".Today people get dumbed down by work and mass media (esp. FOX). Most people on the streets don´t have a clue what is going on in the world and how human societies work. They know just the trash News and Sportsnews. I still hope humanity can get better and better like we did in the last 2000 years. But this will depend mainly on our usage of energy and how we fix the climate change/global warming problem. I don´t see that happening at the moment.


One thing that the military has that business tends not to is a little thing called loyalty. How can you motivate or expect loyalty from employees expecially the lower level ones when that courtosy will not be returned and they can and will be fired at the drop of a hat, or in this case share price. The best orginazations are the ones that can give loyalty to employees and let them be part of a conflict with another business. Most dont do that, essentially what exists is nothing more than mercinaries who are only loyal to the higgest paycheck, business has nobody to blame but themselves for that.


I am a USAF Pilot. I've got hundreds of hours of combat flying time over Afghanistan. I'd caution civilian readers about taking too many notes from military operations. The author is correct in that we do a very good job of training our people. I think that's primarily due to the fact that you cannot simply hire a Colonel from another military, like a company could with executives. Our future leaders have to come from our current junior officers, and the same thing is true on the enlisted side. So a military career is an almost continual cycle of preparing for the next job.
We also do a lot of things poorly. The USAF, for example, is roughly a half million people in size when the guard and reserves are included. As you'd expect, that means we're a massive and lumbering bureaucracy that does not innovate well at all. If we were a private company, we'd go out of business tomorrow. The lack of a profit incentive and the nature of government financing means that we are run by a stagnant set of rules and procedures that leave little room for innovation and change. It can honestly be very frustrating at times to deal with.
So I'd recommend that you learn what you can from former military members, but do not assume that the military way of doing things is necessarily better. In some cases it is, but in other cases it is not. Although I can assure you that you will never regret a military hire.


killing people and satisfying customers are 2 such distinct activities it is ludicrous to even start finding any common ground.


Much of the current corporate American culture is a by product of military men entering the work force and the ranks and files of management post WWII. Project Management, Strategic planning, resource planning, product management and many of these concepts were wholeheartedly borrowed from the military. Even the means of communication with much acronyms was borrowed from the Military.

Who ever thinks that military strategy, leadership and training has no value in business today, needs to have their head examined.

Michael Dunne in reply to hommer_simpson

Also linear programming and supply chain management arose from the military.
In fact, what made Walmart a success was just reversing what the military was doing the prior decades with operations in Asia:
Instead of shipping tons of war material abroad to frontline states of the cold war (Korea, Vietnam),
Walmart applied the same practices to ship stuff from special economic zones back over the Pacific to consumers here...

J. Kemp

In dealing with executives at some of the more successful firms in professional services over the years I noticed a pattern of a very high level of success among those who had in their background active (combat) military service. I found these individuals to be completely unflappable under any and all circumstances, as well as always having the most urgent and correct priorities clearly focused in mind and on the active task-execution list, easily dispensing with non-critical "issues" which might bog down others with endless debate.
My surmise was and remains that their unflappability derived from them having a totally different definition from most people of what it meant to have a "bad day". Active combat service redefines the term "bad day" such that no day in the private sector even qualifies.
I concluded that their extraordinary ability to prioritized and focus on the right priorities derived from having survived in a realm where pressures were enormous to not waste time, talk or resources in a context where the stakes were indescribably high.
One cannot purchase training like theirs in any university, and one is well advised to choose such individuals in any undertaking where the stakes are high.

Qualis Artifex Pereo

I write this, by the way, with a reflective yellow belt around my torso on a base in Kuwait, which hasn't seen war since the early 90s, yet I still receive hostile fire pay.

Qualis Artifex Pereo

No. I remember the McKinsey Quarterly article you're referencing because I was so shocked by what a fantasy it depicts. Military service teaches all kinds of lessons and offers almost an unofficial cultural masters degree, but in terms of organizational models, scrap it ASAP. The most paranoid, conservative thinkers are encouraged and entrepreneurial thinking is like a foreign language. It is of a different, more primitive era and offers more lessons on how things should t be done than anything else.

jouris - old account

...a commander defines the overall mission but then leaves the officers on the ground to decide how to execute it.
Which is hardly a new concept in the military. Long, long ago, there was a test for aspiring junior officers:
Q: "You are in the middle of a featurless desert plain, with no trees, no rocks, no nothing. You have one sargeant and squad of troops, and a flag pole lying on the ground. Your mission is to raise and emplace the flagpole. Give, in detail, all of the commands that you will give to accomplish this mission."
The correct, and complete, response was:
A: "Sargeant, get that G*ddamn flagpole up."
In short, the idea of empowering your troops/staff is far from new, and far from limited to the Special Operations folks. As anyone who has actualy been in the military (as opposed to merely watching them on a parade ground or in a movie) could tell you, the rigid heirarchical structure is a fall-back of last resort, not the way things routinely get done.

The correct, and complete, response was:
- Nice. But let me now put on my management consultant hat and tell you how we'd do it...
Step 1 - Draw up a project proposal for getting that flagpole up
Step 2 - Present that proposal to your sargeant and the troops. Make sure its in Powerpoint and that you've used at least a couple of maps and diagrams
Step 3 - To raise the flagpole, let's get to the heart of the matter. Identify the reason why that flagpole is on the ground. For this conduct interviews with several troops.
Step 4 - Once the reason has been identified, draw up at least 5 different plans on how the flagpole could be raised - e.g. you could pick it up, wait for a sandstorm to raise it, pray to God for him to do it etc etc
Step 5 - Draw up the pros and cons of each proposed solution. Shaded Harvey balls or red vs green flag icons are very useful here. In the absence of a computer, use hand puppets.
Step 6 - Now present each option to your troops
Step 7 - Your troops may then ask you "Yes but Officer, what solution do YOU think is best?" Here's where your soft skills from your "consultant toolkit" - in the manner that has been tried and tested by thousands of your fore-bearers , you should throw up your hands in the air and say "On one hand...X works like this...but one the other hand...Y works like that" Whatever you do, DON'T take a stand - you may be held accountable for it! Remember to always CYA (cover your a*se)
Step 8 - Now everyone is confused. Here's where you pitch the next project proposal - "How to prevent flagpoles from falling in the first place!"
Step 9 - Take away all your soldier's rations as payment for your analysis. And make sure to take their guns otherwise one of them might shoot you in anger.

Which would seem to demonstrate why you not only want to be very wary of bringing in management consultants to your company. But also why you definitely don't want to make any of those consultants into your management. That way lies death.

umghhh in reply to jouris - old account

This is interesting because it assumes that you and your fellow soldiers know why things are done in certain way and when to change the way of doing things. This seems to be 'agile' yet after years of facing gurus of agile in software development (esp. in big corporations) I refuse to use that word to describe flexibility in choosing your tools.

jouris - old account in reply to umghhh

All it actually assumes is that, if you want to propose a new way of doing things, you have to know why it was done the old way. Whether (or not) the reasons behind doing it that way still apply, and how the new solution meets those requirements which remain, as well as producing better results.
That is, you cannot just decide to change things because you like the new way. Or even because you just want to try something new. (Both being things that I have seen all too often in the software world, "agile" and otherwise.)

Darwins Toothpick

Few businesses can topple Western armies when it comes to wasting precious talented people and (society’s) resources. And all this done because of the pursuit of flawed ideas like building multicultural societies inhabited with … our enemies. It has cost US dearly.
However these now ingrained ideas have been shaped very much so by our business elites. Just think of The Economist’s “Immigration, Immigration …” mantra.
But while businesses only serve the interests of their bosses, armies are supposed to serve the (perceived) interests of their countries and civilizations. Yet when the selfish interests of the “captains of industry” are confused with the interests of our communities disaster follows.
If the generals in the armed forces truly understand warfare they should advise their governments in a businesslike manner that implementing certain ideas in our societies will only result, and has resulted, in our armies fighting one wasteful, if not losing, war after another. Clearly they do not understand their own business else they would not have let our sorry armies of patsies get used to solve the problems caused by the selfishness of the very few.


One of the reasons that esprit de corps is possible in the military is because personnel can be reasonably sure they won't be downsized at the drop of a hat when the share price dips fractionally and thus reduces the CEO's net worth by more than the price of a Maserati - a catastrophe that must immediately be rectified by bolstering the bottom line through layoffs. Furthermore, although military organizations have their share of political problems, such contretemps are minor in comparison with the often Byzantine back-stabbings and perpetual low-level unpleasantness typical of most corporations. Finally, although the military is subject to "oversight" and meddling by politicians this is a mild embuggerance in comparison to the way in which most executive teams focus endlessly on the moment-to-moment fluctuations in share price because of its impact on analysts' sentiments. In short, it's nearly impossible to build any kind of positive corporate culture in an environment where loyalty merely means you can be taken advantage of even more easily than otherwise, where "strategic" means "until we change our minds five minutes from now" and where "colleague" means "back-stabbing rival."
Perhaps these simple truths are why so many ex-military personnel yearn for the good old days once they've spent a few discouraging years in civilian life. Perhaps it is also why more and more people are choosing to work for small dynamic companies instead of moribund behemoths.

OneAegis in reply to CA-Oxonian

Exactly. Training "two rungs up" in a corporation means to management, over-qualified and likely to go elsewhere.

Dead time? Go home, we don't need to pay you right now. Or, you're fired because we're overstaffed. How to learn from experience? There is a saying, "Generals are always fighting the last war." Is there a similar corporate slogan? Root-cause analysis is a large part of corporate culture.

Walmart has a military-style leadership academy, yet its workers must rely on food stamps and Medicare.



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