Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Hey everyone. Today I want to talk about something I think's really interesting, which is how the Warren Ukraine has taught us a lot about business. In the context for this is, of course, at this point in time, it appears that the Ukrainian army is pushing back the Russians. They're taking over car Keve, which is a critical city in the Don Boss area. They just blew up this bridge yesterday. And the more you look at what's happening, they really seem to be forcing the Russians to invoke a draft, continuously invest more money into the war, and the Russian military feels defeated, at least from the news we get. And so you kinda have to ask yourself, as a business person, as horrific as this is, what is this telling us? Well, this week I'm doing a webcast for a large population of Ukrainian HR professionals, and I'm really excited to talk to them.
Speaker 1 00:01:01 And what I'm gonna really talk about is what we've learned from the war in Ukraine and what it means to business. And in many ways, it really reinforces my book, which by the way, is available on Kindle this coming week, and it'll be available in print the third week in October. So stay tuned. You're gonna hear a little more about it. So going back to the war, I was listening to General Wesley Clark this morning, and Wesley Clark was the Supreme NATO commander, very, very highly esteemed military leader. And he made a comment, I wanna read it to you. He was asked by Fried Zakaria, the difference between the Russian army and the Ukrainian army. And he said, Well, the Russian army appears to be still using World War I tactics. We have high technology to educate the generals, but we give the peasants rifles and we simply tell them to attack.
Speaker 1 00:01:52 You have a really mean general who uses harsh discipline against them if they don't perform. And it's mostly about artillery weight of fire and the potential replacement of the individual soldier. It's not about empowerment. Well, this model of war, which probably goes back to the dark ages, is very similar to the old model of business, the industrial hierarchy where we have management and labor. And by the way, I've read a lot about this, done a lot of research on it, and many of the founding ideas of the industrial hierarchy actually go back to slavery. There's a fascinating book about slavery, which I'll put in the notes, where a historian looked at the way slave organizations were organized, and they actually looked a lot like really well run companies, jobs, specialization hierarchy, metrics, top down goals, replacement of people who weren't performing, et cetera. And the reason I hate to even think about slavery in the context of business, but the reason it's so relevant is that really is the foundation of many of the HR practices we have.
Speaker 1 00:02:57 Now, we'll talk about how they've all changed. Sure. So lemme go back to Wesley Clark. He said, Well, the United States, however, is the complete opposite military model. The way we believe wars are won is that it's the individual soldier, his character, his commitment, his training, his weapon that has the ability to deliver, to be protected, to invoke precision fire generals. Commanders can lose the battle, but they can't win it. They can set the conditions for success, but they are not the ones who win. It's the individual soldiers who win the war. Now, I think most of you understand what the difference is. On the one hand, what the Russians are doing is you're treating the soldiers as workers that can be replaced. The Ukrainians are treating the soldiers as leaders. And this is really a lot of what my book is about, is translating this into the seven practices of running a company, but really empowering people in a way that reflects the fact that in fact, most of the good decisions that are made in your company are made at the first level.
Speaker 1 00:04:02 So let me go through just a couple of the principles that I discussed in the book that are really behind the winning war for Ukraine. Number one, hierarchy versus teams. Yes, we always need a hierarchy. Somebody has to make decisions, somebody has to allocate budgets, somebody has to decide what we're gonna do and what we're not gonna do. But the real work that gets done in a company, in a business, in any organization, is at the local level, the sales team, the product team, the marketing team, the customer service team, the HR business partners, those people that are at the point of need at the point of customer interaction at the point of combat, those are the ones that are fighting the war, winning or losing. And if we don't focus our organization around the teams empowering them and training them and aligning them, then of course we're not gonna win the war.
Speaker 1 00:04:51 And in fact, Stanley McChrystal, whose book about teams I found absolutely fascinating, and it's a really important read, talked about how in the Iraq war, the reason the United States was losing because they had too much top down command and control. So he flipped that and he gave the team commanders all the information they needed, right from the intelligence systems to run their own organizations. And he connected these teams together using what he called liaison officers. And these teams got smarter and smarter and smarter and suddenly started to jump ahead of the enemy. And that is exactly what happens in a company. And I think it happens at the individual level, not just the team level. We obviously need to make teams work well together. And there's a lot of information in the book about that, but, but really every individual in the company, in your company has the power to do amazing things if they know what their job is, if they have the skills, if they feel supported and aligned.
Speaker 1 00:05:44 So that's number one. Number two is this idea of culture versus rules. And that's the phrase in my book, but let's translate that into the military. In the Ukrainian army, there's a lot of mission and purpose. First of all, they're defending their country. They love their country. In fact, the president of Ukraine, Andre Yack, who actually heads the country for the president, made a comment this morning that they love their country because it is a beautiful country and they simply love it. And in some sense, the same things true in business. Do your employees love your company? Do your employees love your products? Do your employees love the mission that you're invoking or endorsing or adopting? Do they love their team? Do they really care about their jobs? I mean, this is cultural stuff. Will they be supported or are they pitted against each other?
Speaker 1 00:06:35 Are they asked simply to drive the numbers? Or are they expected and asked to grow? Does your company build its solutions around partners and teams, or is it around individual contributors and competition? Many cultural differences manifest themselves in the behaviors of individuals. In fact, Andrew Fastow, who's the CFO of Enron, and I've talked to him at least five times, has talked to me extensively about the fact that in Enron, one of the biggest business disasters you can read about the culture was very individualistic, very competitive, very financially based, and not at all aware of ethics or fairness or psychological safety. And it bankrupted the whole company. And he went to jail for this. So he's thought about it a lot. So that's number two, Culture versus rules. And as I talk about in the book, and as you can read about it in a lot of our research, your culture is something you have.
Speaker 1 00:07:33 It came from the beginning of your company. It's not something you have to invent from scratch, but you need to refine it, reinforce it, talk about it, discuss the behaviors, point out people that are off the culture and use it for power. Because in the case of the Russians, I don't know what their culture is, appears that most of the people in the Russian army aren't really sure why they're there. They've been lied to. And so at the point of contact, they're not really that resilient. That's why they're drinking a lot. That's the reason they're running away. That's the reason they're committing these atrocities. Number three, going back to the book growth versus promotion. Now, I had a wonderful opportunity in my career to work for a guy who used to be an admiral. And this was during a startup that was quite troubled at the time.
Speaker 1 00:08:17 The company had a lot of problems and we fixed it eventually. But he used to say to me, The military only does two things. We fight and we train. And when we're not fighting, we're training. And for those of you that have worked in the military, I have not. But Bill has, you understand what this means. Everything that happens every day in the military is a learning experience. And they push decision making down to the bottom. And they let young soldiers make very large decisions early in their careers and let them make mistakes and learn and develop them continuously. They have after action reviews, they have simulations, they have training, they have compliance. They have many, many ways. They teach people to deal with the adversity and in uncertainties of war by educating and training people and preparing them. We don't do nearly enough of this in business, let's face it.
Speaker 1 00:09:08 I mean, despite the 60 or $70 billion that's spent on training around the world, the average company spends $1,200 a year on training. That is a tiny, tiny number. I actually had an interesting conversation with the head of a VC firm, pretty big one. And they're actually more of a private equity firm now, and they buy software companies to fix them and turn them around. And they've bought a lot of companies in our industry, I won't mention the name of the firm. And he said, You know, we have a playbook. We know what to do when we buy a software company. And he said, one of the very first things we do is dramatically increase the budget for sales training. He said they never have enough sales training. And you know, I, I have to agree with that. If I look at the great sales organizations that I've been in, or I've learned from ibm, Cisco, WebEx, Tmy, others, even Skillsoft, LinkedIn, they spend a lot of money on sales training.
Speaker 1 00:10:03 They really bring salespeople together. They talk about deals, they talk about what works. They talk about what's going on with customers. They really work on value propositions. These are not easy things to do that an individual salesperson would figure out on their own, but at when brought together into a training group, they can do this. This is growth, not promotion in a hierarchical organization like the Russian military. I understand there's only a week or two of training when these guys get thrown out into the battlefield. I don't think they get much training at all. I think they're kind of picking people outta Siberian, throwing 'em into the war. At least that's certainly what the press says. And I would venture to say that in the Ukrainian model, there's much more focus on training, much more focus on development, much more focus on problem solving. Number four, coach versus boss.
Speaker 1 00:10:50 Now, I don't really need to beat this one to death. We've talked about it in a prior webcast, but in a coaching model of leadership, management knows, as Wesley Clark mentioned, that they are not the ones winning the war. It is the individuals. It is the individuals in sales and product and marketing, in operations, in distribution, in the retail stores that are delivering the solution at the point of contact. Because if there's anything I know about business, it's all about value, adding value to the customer in some unique way that is done by the individuals, working directly with the customer, directly with the client. Those people don't like to be bossed around. Yes, they need to direction, yes, they need support, but they really wanna learn how to do their jobs better. And that's what coaching is all about. I actually have a very good friend who was working for a startup, and this particular person is a highly esteemed, very successful salesperson, overachieved quota in every role she had prior.
Speaker 1 00:11:51 And in this new job, her boss was micromanaging her and she pushed back and she tried to remind him that she didn't need that much help, but he insisted, and eventually she had to go to hr. And through a whole series of dysfunctional processes that happened, she ended up quitting. He ended up losing his job, and the company had a major turnover problem in the sales organization. And I think it simply comes back to this idea of coaching versus bossing. And then in that particular company, I don't think the CEO understood. We act. And we have lots and lots of examples of this and what this means to your management model and to your company. The last one I want to talk about is experience, not output. You know many of the things that are written about the military, and they're all over the place in the internet, and you can read books on it, talk about the need for sleep, rest, good food support, communication equipment, guns that are clean and accurate and work and support for the frontline soldier.
Speaker 1 00:12:53 Let's face it, if you've ever gone on camping trip and your tent broke or you couldn't get your campfire to start, or your matches were wet, or your socks were too thin and they gave you blisters, it's a miserable experience. <laugh>, and I've been on a lot of camping trips, and every time one of those pieces of equipment fail, you go home and buy a better one for next time. Well, think of what it's like in the military where you're in a life or death situation confronting a mortal enemy and your equipment or your sleep or your eyesight or your uniform or your food isn't up to par and you just don't feel very good, you could lose your life. And that's about what we now call employee experience. Employee experience is a big complicated topic, and we're just about to publish a big research report on employer experience technology.
Speaker 1 00:13:43 But let me just bring this back to the business setting. If your employees are finding it hard to go to work, if they can't get their emails done easily, if they can't find things on their website, if their equipment is outta date, if their commute is too long, if they're not getting paid fairly on and on and on, it slowly whittles away on what I call straws that break the camels back. You can throw a lot of stuff on people and they'll deal with most of it, but after a while, they wake up one day and say, You know what? This isn't worth it. I'm not gonna do it anymore, or I'm gonna come in late, or I'm gonna quietly quit, or whatever's gonna happen. It's not gonna make your company successful. And so just like the military as to constantly think about the experience of the individual soldier and all of the things they have to do to support them, as Wesley Clark mentioned, we have to do the same thing for our employees.
Speaker 1 00:14:34 And don't assume that they're having a good time all day. You should probably assume they're not. And ask them what you can do to make their life better. I've talked a lot about the process shredder that Pepsi did to identify the things they were holding up Pepsi, and you can read about that on our website, but you should be doing this regularly. You should be asking people for suggestions, constantly iterating and simplifying the work environment and redesigning work to make it easier for people. And I think the final thing that I'll maybe talk a little bit about is another of the chapters in the book called Purpose Not Profits. And in the case of the military and Ukraine, the purpose of the war to the purpose of the war, to the Ukrainians is to save their country, to save their freedom, to save the beautiful cities and artifacts and countryside and farms and food and resources they have.
Speaker 1 00:15:27 It's a big deal. The purposes big. What is the purpose of the Russian attack? I'm not really sure any of us know exactly what it is and what purpose not profits is all about, is that if you're clear on the purpose of your company and you do the other six things that I talk about in the book, you will be profitable, you will win, your shareholders and stockholders will be happy. So just like the Ukrainian army is building alliances with all the countries in the world, in fact, one of the things that Andre Yak talked about this morning was his pride and admiration of the United States and other countries for flying the Ukrainian flag. These allies that have joined Ukraine are there because they believe in the purpose. And if your purpose of your company is clear and real and value based, your customers will come to you and they will make your company more profitable.
Speaker 1 00:16:25 They will allow you to charge higher prices. They will see a greater value out of doing business with you because God knows every company in the world seems to drift to becoming a profit center, stock, price oriented business at some point and loses the focus on its purpose. So you have to constantly revisit your purpose and make sure it's clear and it's being articulated in everything you do. Okay? A little bit much for one podcast, but you're gonna hear a little more about this as the book comes out. I really encourage you to get it. I spent almost a decade of my life on this book. I'm very proud of it, and I of course would love to hear your feedback. So let's think about what Ukraine means and what lessons we can learn. And I'll tell you next week a little bit more about what I learned from all the HR professionals in the country of Ukraine. Thank you.
