Coaching and Cowpens

At the beginning of the American Revolution, the Continental armies lost more battles than they won.

No surprise. The British army was one of the best in the world. Washington's army was in the process of creation. On the day of battle colonial militia often made up a large portion of his forces. These men frequently broke ranks and fled when faced with British bayonets.

Nonetheless, colonial officers still treated these poorly trained and equipped troops as if they were well-drilled professionals. Then, when their line broke and the battle was lost, they filled their reports and letters with complaints about the militia and their cowardice and refusal to stand and fight.

The Revolution was won when Americans found generals who were willing to adjust their tactics and strategy instead of insisting that their soldiers carry out conventional orders that were beyond their training and ability.

II

Daniel Morgan was such a leader. At Saratoga he understood that his company of Virginia riflemen could have a decisive role. The key was to take advantage of their long range accuracy to disrupt and destroy British command and control. At Bemis Heights and Freeman's Farm his tactics denied Gen. John Burgoyne the decisive victory he needed to save his army.

In the Southern Campaign he first wore down British forces by avoiding battle. (His commander, Nathaniel Greene, understood as Mao did, “that there is in guerrilla warfare no such thing as a decisive battle.”

At Cowpens (17 January 1781) Morgan chose to stand and fight against the pursuing forces led by Banastre Tarleton. The ground was favorable (with the Broad river at their backs, retreat was not an option for the militia) and British troops were tired and frustrated after chasing Morgan across South Carolina.

What sets Morgan's battle plan apart is his handling of the militia which made up half or more of his army. He did not include them in his main battle line nor did he expect them to stand up to a British bayonet charge. Instead, he placed them forward of his regulars and asked them to fire two volleys. Then, they would withdraw behind his regulars.

Historian Robert Wright notes that part of Morgan's tactical genius was that he did not “ask a man to do more than he was physically capable of doing." He did not pretend that militia could stand up to the experienced troops at close quarters. At the same time he did not ignore what capabilities they did possess nor did he treat them with contempt.

The other key to the victory was that Morgan made sure that his Continentals understood that the militia's withdrawal was planned rather than evidence of an impending rout. He went from campfire to campfire the night before the battle – encouraging the men and explaining his plans.

Morgan's leadership and insight won a signal victory. In less than an hour he had routed Tarleton (over 80% casualties) and sent the remnants racing back to Cornwallis. He had shaped his tactics to fit the forces he had at hand in a rare feat of flexibility combined with insight.

It is remarkable that it was the poorly educated backwoodsman, not the better educated generals who had the insight and intelligence to get the most out of the militia.

III

When it comes to football coaches, there are few men with that capacity and courage. Instead, the prevailing ethos is “losses are acceptable if they can be blamed on injuries or a weak roster or dumb players.

From Ron Jaworski, Games That Changed the Game:

With some teams, the difference between their first-string and back-up quarterback isn't that much, but if your number one guy is a superstar, its an entirely different story. One time, Jon Gruden and I were attending a Colts practice before one of our ESPN games, and we were standing next to their offensive coordinator, Tom Moore. Tom is 'old school' in every sense of the word. He's been in the NFL for over thirty years and has signaled in every play call of Peyton Manning's career. As we watched, we were surprised to see Manning taking virtually all the reps in the session. Jon asked Tom why he wasn't giving some snaps to Peyton's backups. Moore is a man of few words, but when he talks, those words carry weight. He looked us both in the eye, paused for a moment, then said in that gravelly voice of his, 'Fellas, if "18" goes down, we're fucked. And we don't practice fucked.'

Old school coaches like Don Shula built their teams for resilience when things went badly. Shula twice took teams to the Super Bowl when forced to play most of the season with his back-up quarterback. In his undefeated 1972 season, Earl Morrall, not Bob Griese, started a majority of Miami's 17 victories.

Owners and fans now accept the idea that without a healthy franchise QB a team is doomed to mediocrity or worse. No one remembers that Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls with 3 different Qbs (two of them castoffs from other teams).

Bill Walsh created the West Coast Offense out of necessity when he coached in Cinncinnati. Lacking both a strong-armed QB and a powerful running game, he developed his offensive system which revolutionized the pro passing game.

Now coaches and coordinators are often given a pass of a year or more because “it takes time for players to learn a new system”. In a league with a salary cap, free agency, and short playing careers, why do journalists accept that a coach should insist that players adapt to his system instead of adapting the system to the players he has? To accept this excuse we have to admit that coaches are calling plays that they know their players are unlikely to execute.

Is strategy non-essential?

A provocative post by the always interesting Ad Contrarian:

The Luxury Of Strategy

Tactics can often be a matter of life and death, while strategy is often a luxury. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everyone has a strategy until they get hit."

Having spent centuries in the ad business, one thing I learned is that the tactical always seems to drive out the strategic. When the rubber meets the road, and decisions about spending money have to be made, if financial resources are scarce, the tactical always wins.

One of the most powerful and unrecognized benefits of a successful brand is the financial wherewithal to support both tactical and strategic advertising. Most businesses don't have the means to do this.

Strategy is the advantage of the wealthy.

He's not exactly wrong, but the weight of history seems to be on the other side of the question.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In the end, competence in strategy and policy is the most important component in the success or failure in the conduct of war over the past 400 years. As the author and his colleague, Allan Millett, have noted about the first half of the twentieth century, “it is more important to make correct decisions at the political and strategic level than it is at the operational and tactical level. Mistakes in operations and tactics can be corrected, but political and strategic mistakes live for ever.”

Wm. Murray, War, Strategy and Military Effectiveness

This is not to underestimate the importance of the short-term and the tactical. Successful leaders have always understood the need to balance the short-term and long-term.

Any statesman is in part the prisoner of necessity. He is confronted with an environment he did not create, and is shaped by a personal history he can no longer change. It is an illusion to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience. As I have said, the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstances.

Henry Kissinger

What distinguishes leaders who have attempted to develop and execute a grand strategy is their focus on acting beyond the demands of the present. In other words, they have taken a longer view than simply reacting to the events of the day. Nor have they concentrated on only one aspect of the problem. Instead, in times of war, while they may have focused on the great issue confronting them, such as Lincoln's effort to maintain the Union in the great Civil War that enveloped North America, that vision has recognized the political, economic, and diplomatic framework within which the conflict was taking place.

Thus, those who develop a successful grand strategy never lose sight of the long-term goal, whatever that may be, but are willing to adapt to the difficulties of the present in reaching toward the future.

Williamson Murray, The Shaping of Grand Strategy

Lincoln critically assessed costs, neither brushing them aside – like Napoleon in Russia – nor dreading them to the point of immobility –- like Union army generals before Grant. He relied on experience, incrementally accumulated, to show what worked, not on categories, professorially taught, to say what should.

John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy

Related:

Making strategy in the real world

Smart talk on strategy

So how can we reconcile these two propositions? How can Ad Contrarian's analysis be on the money if strategy is not a luxury but absolutely essential?

 
Part of the answer can be found in an old Borscht-belt joke. To restate it for our purposes:

To the client you're a strategist, to the agency you're a strategist. But to a strategist, you're no strategist.

We know that they are not strategists because their solutions ignore the short-term imperative that their clients face. A strategy is a map from here/now to there/future/better. What matters is the path forward. Too often advertising strategists ignore the path and just emphasize the beautiful, desired end-state.

That isn't strategy--- it is hope repackaged as sales hype.

Conquest's Law definitely applies.

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Training versus education

In this talk by Tom Ricks he offers another explanation for why America can no longer win wars:

Many of our generals are well-trained, but not well-educated.

He gives a very good explanation of the difference between the two:

You training for the known; you educate for the unknown -- for uncertainity, for the chaos of war.

In World War Two the Army school system was critical for Gen. Marshall's build up of the US Army from 1939-1945. The Naval War College played an even greater role in preparing for the Pacific War. Sadly, the schools fell out of favor in the 1950s, and the generals in charge in the 1960s were not prepared to deal with the complexities of Vietnam.

Related:

Why bureaucracies fail: Politics and enforced solidarity

Military Schools and Business Education

Military Education IV

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“Dollars can't buy yesterday” (II)

(Part I is here)

Mahan's dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz's thoughts .
Ian Toll, Pacific Crucible

In the previous post I noted that the US Navy fought the absolutely critical; battles of 1942 without the benefit of the new ships built under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. This was, in itself, a remarkable achievement. As FDR said in his 1943 SOTU address:

This past year was perhaps the most crucial for modern civilization. The Axis Powers knew that they had must win the war in 1942 – or eventually lose everything.

It would be wrong, however, to discount the Navy's performance in 1943-1945 by ascribing it solely to the numerical preponderance produced by America's industrial base.

Numbers count in war but they are not everything. Note that the Royal Navy entered the war with a tremendous advantage over the Kriegsmarine. Yet it took nearly four years for Britain to secure it vital lifelines against a numerically inferior enemy. That is, roughly, the amount of time it took the US Navy to sweep the far more formidable Japanese navy from the whole of the Pacific.

Norman Friedman details just how remarkable an accomplishment that was:

To win the Pacific War, the U.S. Navy had to transform itself technically, tactically, and strategically. It had to create a fleet capable of the unprecedented feat of fighting and winning far from home, without existing bases, in the face of an enemy with numerous bases fighting in his own waters. …

If it seems obvious that any naval officer aware of the march of technology would have developed the massed carriers and the amphibious fleet, the reader might reflect that the two other major navies failed to do so. The Japanese did create a powerful carrier striking force, but they made no real effort to back it up with sufficient reserves to keep it fighting. They developed very little amphibious capability useful in the face of shore defenses: They could not, for example, have assaulted their own fortified islands, let alone Normandy or southern France. The British built carriers, but accepted very small carrier air groups because, until well into World War II, they saw their carriers mainly as support for their battle fleet. Like the Japanese, they did not develop an amphibious capability effective against serious defense.

Norman Friedman, Winning a Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War

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When it came to experience, the USN trailed Japan and Great Britain. It had not been at war with a great power since the War of 1812.

Its last conventional naval war had been fought against Spain in 1898, before nearly all the weapons and ships of 1919 had even been conceived. Its World War I experience was limited almost entirely to anti-submarine warfare,

Correlli Barnett called war “the great auditor of institutions”. The Pacific War showed that the USN, as an institution, led the world's navies in technological innovation and operational excellence.

Clearly, the USN had done a lot of things right in the eras of Normalcy and Depression.

Friedman has an idea of what the most important thing was:

What set the U.S. Navy apart? War gaming at the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, seems to have been a large part of the answer. The games played by students there were a vital form of training, but at least as importantly, the games served as a laboratory for the U.S. Navy. It seems to have been significant that, until 1934, the Naval War College was part of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) rather than part of the naval school system. Gaming experience fed back into full-scale exercises (Fleet Problems), and full-scale experience fed back into the detailed rules of the games, which were conceived as a way of simulating reality as closely as possible. Game data were also fed to the U.S. Navy’s war planners, all of whom had graduated from the War College and thus had considerable game experience. The successes and failures of simulation give some guidance into what is needed in current and future games.

Adm. William Sims made war-gaming central to the NWC's mission. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy Department used the NWC as a quasi-think tank and R&D lab. A generation of captains and admirals grappled with the pareticular challenges of war with Japan as well as the evolving nature of sea warfare.

At the same time Newport inculcated a “common command culture “ in the navy's senior leaders and helped breakdown functional silos and mental blinders.

This paid off in the four critical carrier battles of 1942:

During World War II, U.S. non-aviators such as Admiral Raymond Spruance and Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (both War College graduates) successfully wielded carrier forces. Non-aviators in other navies do not seem to have done nearly so well.

In the “improvised war” the NWC grads and their common command culture bested Yamamoto and his battle-hardened samurai. They did this without the benefit of numerical or technical superiority.

Friedman suggests that the wargames at Newport were the ideal tool to prepare the navy for the Pacific War:

Perhaps the fairest evaluation of military judgment versus gaming would be that in areas in which considerable full-scale experience had been accumulated, military judgment was much more likely to be accurate. Gaming offered insight into wars that had not yet been fought, involving new weapons—particularly aircraft. As we look back, the shift in War Plan Orange—a shift which proved extremely beneficial—was one of those areas.

The Japanese navy also used wargames (as did the Prussian/Germany army which essentially invented military gaming). Why did the USN derive so much more benefit than Japan? Three key differences seem to stand out.

For one thing, the Japanese were focussed – even obsessed – with the idea of a Mahanian decisive battle against the US Battle Fleet in the western Pacific. Like the pre-1914 German General Staff they devoted their wargaming efforts to refining a single strategy. This tunnel vision led the IJN to ignore the problems that came with long campaigns and wide-ranging operations.

Another significant difference was the role of logistics in game play and discussion. In the IJN, logistics officers – if they were even included in the gaming sessions – were to see but not speak. Their role was limited to observing and noting the requirements of the planned operation.

Finally, the NWC wargames were played out by mid-level officers. They were free to explore new strategies and tactics and the faculty could referee the games with no concern about alienating senior admirals. The top officers in Washington were free to analyze the results of the games without implicitly committing to any particular course of action.

Japan's wargames precluded this sort of free-ranging exploration. Their games, like all their planning exercises, were fraught with tension caused by political rivalries, considerations of rank and seniority, and prickly concerns about personal honor. https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/12/pearl-harbor-clausewitz-and-path-to.html

In 1942 – FDR's “critical year” – the Pacific War offered two strategic inflection points. The first occurred after the dazzling Japanese victories at Pearl Harbor, Malaya, and Burma. The second came in the wake of their crushing defeat at Midway. In both cases, the IJN reacted tentatively and with a complete lack of focus. In the spring, Yamamoto sent his carriers to attack Darwin, Australia and then against the Royal Navy in the Bay of Bengal. Meanwhile, he drew up plans for offensives against New Guinea, the Solomons, the Aleutians, and Midway. After Midway he seems never to have settled on clear plan for the defensive war Japan would have to fight. Guadalcanal was seized as an airbase but the island as not fortified and work on the airfield progressed slowly.

In both victory and defeat Yamamoto and his staff seem confused when confronted by sudden changes in the strategic situation.

One cannot ignore the simple fact that not a single [Japanese] operation planned after the start of the war met with success

H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

The USN presents a completely different picture. Despite the shock of Pearl Harbor, which crippled the battleship fleet and rendered the existing warplans obsolete, the Navy moved swiftly and with strategic focus. Steps were immediately taken to secure the sea-lanes to Australia. Carrier operations began to harass the Japanese bases and blunt their offensives: Lae, the Doolittle Raid, Coral Sea, Midway.

When the tide turned, the USN seized the initiative. Marines went ashore at Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Unlike the Japanese, they quickly put the airfield into operation. At a stroke they essentially eliminated the threat to Australia's lifeline. They also gained a foothold for a campaign against the key Japanese base at Rabaul.

This was not the war the USN had expected to fight; it bore little resemblance to the campaigns gamed out at the War College in the 1930s. Yet it was the war they had to fight in 1942. They fought it, won it, but were not diverted from their overall strategy when the new ships were completed and the Central Pacific campaign could begin.

The, IJN, in contrast [syn] improvised and extemporized their way to a strategic disaster:

Japan reached its level of incompetence, where it fought with all its power and to the death. The battlefields of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were simply too large and too far forward to suit its tiny logistical and transport capabilities....Japan was fighting precisely the war which least suited its material resources, a prolonged and costly battle of attrition beyond easy reach of its supply system.

Michael Handel and John Ferris, "Clausewitz, Intelligence Uncertainty and the Art of Command”

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“Dollars Can't Buy Yesterday”

In war, time (speed) usually is critically important in determining success or failure:

“The difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds…”

Commodore Arleigh Burke, the second commander of the storied Little Beavers of Destroyer Squadron 23, first uttered those words shortly after taking command of the squadron in October 1943. He came to this conclusion after studying the Battle of Tassafaronga and validated it through his own observations of combat at sea. The same thinking that led to future Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Burke’s conclusion, echoes today in the words of current CNO Admiral John Richardson, who states in the Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, “The margins of victory are razor thin – but decisive!”

Col. John Boyd put speed at the center of our thinking on the tactical and operational levels of war. It is an important factor at the strategic level as well, but things get a great deal more complicated there.

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In 1940, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act which funded a massive increase in the size of the US Fleet. While testifying on behalf of the bill, CNO Adm. Harold Stark warned that “dollars can't buy yesterday.” He wanted the lawmakers to understand that it would take years for the new dollars to translate into new ships and crews; simply passing a law would not undo a decades of austerity budgets.

Stark was absolutely correct. War came to America before she had her two ocean navy. The US Navy would fight the critical naval battles of 1942 without the new ships Congress authorized in 1940.

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The French army in 1940 faced the opposite problem. They had the material they needed: The Allies surpassed the Germans in tanks, planes and artillery. What they lacked was an effective doctrine for modern war and the requisite training to fight it.

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

UCLA coach John Wooden 

The Fall of France shows that top to bottom organizational learning can be a decisive factor in war – fully as important as material factors. Yet this is immensely more difficult difficult to accomplish than simply buying equipment.

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In 1917 Britain and France believed that they had learned the lessons of trench warfare. By the end of the Battles of the Somme and Verdun they had successfully combined overwhelming, accurate artillery fire with careful infantry attacks to seize ground from the Germans and then hold it in the face of the inevitable counter-attack. In 1917 they believed that they could put those lessons to work on a large scale and win the war.

Unfortunately, the German army was also a learning organization. By the the spring of 1917 they had developed new defensive tactics which largely negated those of the Allies. As a result, the Nivelle Offensives did nearly end the war – not with an Allied victory but with a near-collapse of the French armies.

Learning from from your enemy is a devilishly difficult task as the British experience shows.

A committee of British generals attempted to adapt the German defensive tactics for British use, but the resulting instructions denied junior commanders any choice about where to defend or when to counterattack. Although the British defenses were laid out in a manner similar to those of the Germans, they failed due to the absence of local initiative and counter attack, coupled with the British determination to defend hard-won ground even when the ground placed them on forward, rather than reverse slopes.

Jonathan M. House, Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century

(This calls to mind GM's experience with NUMMI. The venture proved that American workers and managers could apply Japanese automotive methods successfully on US soil. The venture failed, however, to be a catalyst for the revitalization of the whole of GM. The executives could not, or would not, take advantage of the insights from NUMMI.)

Jeffrey Liker, author of “The Toyota Way,” (McGraw-Hill, 2003), says that GM couldn’t figure out how to absorb company-wide the positive cultural lessons it was learning in Freemont.

“I remember one of the GM managers was ordered from a very senior level, a vice-president, to make a GM plant look like NUMMI,” says Liker in the radio story. “He said, ‘I want you to go there with cameras, and take a picture of every square inch, and whatever you take a picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.’ Immediately this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy and play motivation, we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy. You can’t take a photograph of it.”  

In the Spring 1918 Offensives British soldiers paid a heavy price for their leaders failure (refusal?) to learn. To make matters worse, their German opponents had not stopped learning.

What is interesting in the preparations for the spring 1918 offensive was the ability of the German army, having only in fall 1917 established the new offensive doctrine, to implement training on a consistent and coherent basis throughout those attack divisions that would launch the coming attacks. This was done with a massive, intensive, and thorough program that schooled divisional officers and then worked up the attack divisions for the great western offensive.

Williamson Murray, German Military Effectiveness (1992)

The result was another disaster which once again brought the Allies to the brink of defeat.

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Related:

Why Organizational Change is Hard I

Why Organizational Change is Hard II

If the German Army excelled in organizational learning (at least at the level of tactics and operations), the same cannot be said of their brethren in the Luftwaffe. In the Battle of Britain they were completely outclassed by Britain in doctrine, intelligence, and the “wizard war.”

Victory in the Battle of Britain, -- and Dowding;s claim to be one of the few great captains of the twentieth century -- resulted from the fact that he built an effective air defense system that altered the entire context of within which air forces operated. What is crucial in this example, as Beyerchin suggests, is that while Germans may have possessed better equipment and even tactics, the British operated in a broader framework of contextual change. By doing so they created a new logic within which the Luftwaffe was incapable of winning.

Williamson Murray, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period

What is interesting here is that the Germans still excelled in the technical and tactical spheres of the air war. In France, as part of a combined arms campaign, that had been enough to seal a rapid and decisive victory. When the strategic context changed – the Luftwaffe was now tasked with winning air supremecy over distant island-- they needed something more.

Thinking through (or rather among) the implications of fundamental change requires an interaction of practical and philosophic bents of mind.

A. Beyerchin, “From Radio to Radar”

In Hermann Goering's thoroughly Nazified Luftwaffe, few senior officers possessed minds with a philosophical bent. Britain, fortunately, found just enough such men and found them when it really mattered (1934-1939).

Related:

Understanding innovation  

The forgotten man who saved the world

Sometimes fate is fickle and speed is not rewarded. I've discussed how Britain's army modernization left them critically vulnerable in Malaya and Burma in 1942. Something similar happened with carrier aviation in the Royal navy. In 1936, as part of her military build-up, Britain authorized the building of a new class of aircraft carriers. These ships were woefully outdated by the time they were launched during World War Two. This was not the fault of the designers or of the politicians who approved their creation. What neither group could know was that Japan and the United States would radically advance the state of the art in carrier operations and naval aviation in the years the ships were under construction.

Strategic plan or bureaucratic exercise

It has become de rigueur for corporate strategic plans to include a list of “mission-critical” initiatives that promise to transform the business, “disrupt” their industry, and drive “world-class performance” through innovation.

Almost none of these “critical initiatives” ever really come to fruition.

I think this helps explain why:

Stars Come Out in a Crisis; Don’t Let Them Fade

Naturally, great performers are who you want when launching any business-critical assignment. Yet, how many frustrated managers have identified a rock star to lead a critical strategic initiative only to struggle to break them free from the less essential role they already occupy?

One common workaround is to position the new role as a great “step up” opportunity that should only require 10% of the star’s time. Excited about the work and committed to getting results, the star and his or her team make great progress at first. But as time passes, progress slows, and energy and focus start to wane. Employees, piled with work, struggle to keep up and even burn out.

What happened?

Every company has to simultaneously run its business and change its business. But when it comes to human capital, those “change the business” growth projects more often than not are denied the resources they need. Ten percent of the time of a star employee who already has an important “run the business” job is not going to cut it. When push comes to shove, “running the business” always feels more urgent. No surprise then that these “change the business” efforts rarely do.

Bedrock truth about grand strategy

From James Lacey:

Battles are won on the battlefield. Wars are won in the conference room.

Related:

Coalition strategy and strategic fantasies

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Higher education

Variations on a theme:

Calling for the disruption of liberal arts colleges—in order to save liberal education

Small liberal arts colleges are feeling the brunt of demographic changes and America’s declining faith in the higher education system overall, as evidenced by recent closures and mergers. That the situation is boiling over despite correlations between degree attainment and higher lifetime earnings shouldn’t just be chalked up to learners being short-sighted. Financial risk is indeed growing, and increased earnings 40 years post-graduation don’t pay next week’s student loan bills.

Education, Disrupted

Michelle Weise, the senior vice president of workforce strategies at Strada Education Network and the chief innovation officer for the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, has written that although 93% of CEOs surveyed by PwC recognized “the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent,” a stunning 61% revealed that they hadn’t yet taken any steps to do so. Employees seem to agree. According to a recent survey by Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning and Degreed, nearly half of employees are disappointed in their employer’s learning and development programs.

But there are some notable exceptions to this prevailing trend. For instance, in July 2019, Amazon announced that it would “spend $700 million over six years on postsecondary job training for 100,000 of its soon-to-be 300,000 workers.” For now, Amazon says it intends to outsource that training to traditional colleges and universities. But once Amazon has begun to provide the bridge for that training, it’s not hard to imagine that it will be well positioned to create that training itself — without the “middle man” of colleges and universities — in the future.4 Although Amazon’s competitors will undoubtedly keep a close eye on its training moves, perhaps the education industry ought to keep an even closer eye, given that those moves may herald a total transformation in the landscape of learning, from college through retirement.

Could micro-credentials compete with traditional degrees?

Pearl Harbor: Failed deterrence

Throughout 1941 Britain and the United States attempted to deter further aggression by Japan. They failed. The reasons for this deserve careful study.

FDR explained his policy toward Japan as “speak softly and build three ships to their one.” He wanted to play for time while his military buildup swung the strategic balance decisively in America’s favor.

Tokyo could read trend lines too. If the choice was between a risky war in 1941 and a hopeless war in 1943, then Japan would move in 1941. Soft words could not obscure the rising threat to Japan’s position in Asia.

Although I feel sure we have a chance to win a war right now, I am afraid that the chance will vanish with the passage of time.
-Adm. Osami Nagano Chief of the Naval General Staff September 1941

FDR’s deterrence policy was also based, in part, on an illusion. Much of official Washing was in the thrall of bomber madness. They believed that if war did come a few dozen B-17 bombers in Luzon could tip the strategic balance in the western Pacific.

Japan knew better. They had high quality intelligence about Britain’s strategic bombing campaign against Germany. They knew that in 1941 the B-17 was not a war-winning weapon.

Britain’s policy was not so much deterrence as a desperate bluff. Pressed to the wall in Europe, the North Atlantic, and North Africa, she had few resources to spare for Malaya. Churchill confronted Japan because he felt compelled to support FDR’s hard-line.

Churchill’s policy was doomed from the start. British forces in the Far East were handicapped by uninspired leadership, doctrinal backwardness, poor training, and low morale.

The PM was largely unaware of this; the Japanese were much better informed. In addition to their own spies they benefitted from the USSR’s penetration of the British government. Before June 1941 Stalin shared intelligence with Hitler who shared it with Tokyo. After Germany invaded, the Soviet Union had every incentive to provide Japan with the intelligence that would convince them to strike south rather north into Siberia.

When the time came, Japan would not hesitate to call Churchill’s bluff.

Significantly, Japan also engaged in a policy of bluff and deterrence in 1940 and 1941. The advocates of an alliance with Hitler were convinced that it would force the US to rethink its support for China and the European colonial powers.

The historically isolationist United States would not try to counter the powerful German-Italian-Japanese alliance by siding with Britain, whose moon is already waning.
RAdm Oka Takazumi

The Japanese leaders, rather like modern American Neocons, believed that deterrence was best served by frequent bellicose pronouncements.

[Foreign Minister] Matsuoka's misunderstanding of America's national character seriously clouded his vision, wedded as he was to the notion that only defiance would garner U. S. respect.
Eri Hotta, Japan 1941

The net result of this deterrent strategy was to squander Japan’s one slim hope of avoiding war and economic strangulation. If the US and Britain saw Japan as an “appeasable nation” they might accommodate her while they focused on defeating Hitler. The Tripartite Pact and Tokyo’s hostile, unyielding public posture destroyed this possibility.

Three nations sought to avoid war in 1941. All three pursued a policy of deterrence. All three failed. These failures deserve careful examination just as we have spent decades studying appeasement and learning the “lessons of Munich.”

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Was Yamamoto a military genius? Or just a reckless gambler who got lucky?

His claim to genius rests on one masterpiece: Pearl Harbor.

On the "just lucky" side of the ledger, we have some serious failures.

1. He completely misread his opponent. He dismissed the US Navy as “a social organization of golfers and bridge players.” He expected the shock of Pearl Harbor to bring the US to the negotiating table. Failing that, he counted on his initial onslaught to buy Japan 12-18 months of US inaction that would let her solidify her gains.

The much-maligned Adm. Nagumo was much more astute. He argued against the Pearl Harbor raid precisely because it would preclude the negotiated settlement that was Japan’s best hope. No matter how brilliant it was operationally, it represented a grave strategic error.

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.
Clausewitz, On War

The operational success also produced smaller short-term gains than Yamamoto promised. Defeat at Pearl Harbor did not paralyze the US Navy for 18 or even 12 months. Nimitz’s forces were conducting carrier raids against Japanese bases by February 1942.

2. Like many Japanese officers he was quick to believe that his enemies would act as he needed them to act for his plans to work. Hence, Midway.

Too much of the Japanese plan hinged on its flawless execution and too little margin for error was left to absorb the unexpected friction. While it is possible though inadvisable to to make such assumptions in the opening phase of a war against an unsuspecting victim (as in the case of Pearl Harbor), it is practically suicidal to assume that any complex plan can be executed perfectly in an ongoing war.
Michael Handel, Intelligence and Military Operations

3. He showed no real skill in the improvised war of 1942-1943.

"One cannot ignore the simple fact that not a single [Japanese] operation planned after the start of the war met with success
H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

4. He had no sense of what Clausewitz called “the culminating point of victory.” Japan’s grand strategy called for victory through determined, protracted defensive warfare to force the US to accept a compromise peace. Yamamoto never really turned his mind to preparations for this phase of the war. He looked always for fresh opportunities for conquest: Midway, the Solomons, New Caledonia, Ceylon…

Japan reached its level of incompetence, where it fought with all its power and to the death. The battlefields of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were simply too large and too far forward to suit its tiny logistical and transport capabilities....Japan was fighting precisely the war which least suited its material resources, a prolonged and costly battle of attrition beyond easy reach of its supply system.
Michael Handel and John Ferris, "Clausewitz, Intelligence Uncertainty and the Art of Command”

These hopeless adventures and impossible fantasies squandered irreplaceable forces and delayed preparations for the defensive struggle that would decide Japan’s fate and even her survival.

5. Japan launched the war to acquire vital raw materials. Yamamoto, who served as Deputy Navy Minister before he took command of the Combined Fleet, never developed a doctrine, a strategy, nor the forces necessary to protect the sea-lanes that carried those resources to the Home Islands. This failure left Japan practically helpless against US submarines. From 1943 onward, the Japanese war machine was slowly strangled even as her admirals dreamed of the “decisive battle” that would win the war in a day.

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Pearl Harbor: Clausewitz and the path to imperial suicide

In the summer of 1941 the US Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Stark met secretly with Japanese ambassador Kichisaburô Nomura. The envoy was a former admiral and the two naval men were trying to prevent a wider war in Asia. The discussions led nowhere. Nomura had nothing to offer because his government was adamant that the “China Incident” could only end with a Tokyo victory.

Adm. Stark ended the conversation with a warning about the danger Japan faced if she persisted in her aggressive course. A war with America could only end as a disaster for Japan. Even if Tokyo won some initial victories, her destruction was inevitable:

You will be unable to make up your losses, while we, on the other hand, will not only make up our losses, but will grow stronger as time goes by. It is inevitable that we will crush you and break you empire before we are through with you.

Ambassador Nomura did not reply. How could he disagree? He understood the correlation of forces as well as Adm. Stark. War with America meant almost certain doom.

Yet, in December 1941 that was the course the leaders of Japan chose.

In On War Clausewitz writes that any war is shaped by the interplay of three forces: passion, reason, and chance. In his era the major challenge for a government was a deficit of passion; the populace often remained detached from the war and uncommitted to the cause. Government policy and military capabilities were constrained as a result. When a government could harness patriotic passion as Napoleon did in France the war-making power of the state made a giant leap forward.

Always, though, passion was harnessed by the state (reason) and military professionalism.

In the decade before Pearl Harbor, passion broke free from nearly all constraints in Japan. Military officers took it upon themselves to murder politicians and senior officers who were insufficiently supportive of military adventures. The Navy was forced to deploy tanks and machine guns to protect its headquarters against radical officers. Yamamoto was himself a target because he opposed the Tripartite Pact with Hitler and Japans invasion of China.

Army officers actually initiated hostilities in China and Manchuria with no notice to, let alone approval by, the government in Tokyo.

A pattern had been set: a hopelessly passive government accepting military aggression that it had neither initiated nor endorsed.
Eri Hotta, Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy

It is not strictly accurate to say that Japan’s leaders chose war. They chose to drift along and avoiud hard choices.

Eri Hotta:

There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision.
…
Having talked themselves into believing that they were victims of circumstances rather than aggressors, they discarded less heroic but more rational options and hesitantly yet defiantly propelled the country on a war course.

Clausewitz:

No one starts a war-- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so-- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

Admiral Stark’s warning to Nomura was prophetic. Before the war the war ended Japan weas crushed and her navy was destroyed. The Pearl Harbor strike force was not spared. None of the twenty surface ships survived the war. By July 1944 the Kodo Butai ceased to exist as a meaningful force. Japan, which once led the world in naval aviation, no longer possessed a modern navy.

The US Navy did grow stronger by leaps and bounds. At Pearl Harbor Yamamoto massed all of Japan’s naval airpower: six carriers and less than 400 aircraft. By February 1944 the US Pacific Fleet could send nine carriers and nearly six hundred aircraft to strike Truk.

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Should we be surprised that we were surprised at Pearl Harbor?

The “intelligence failure” that wasn’t

Maybe the real failure is in our understanding of how intelligence works and what it can do

Puzzles and mysteries

Risks and Riddles

There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable--an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age.

It is tempting to reduce all intelligence questions to puzzles. It is appealing to think that Benedict Cumberbatch can single-handedly defeat the Nazis by breaking their unbreakable Enigma ciphers.

Unfortunately, life rarely imitates art when the stakes are highest.

If our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials. Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.
Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

In 1941, the commanders at Pearl Harbor thought they were solving a complicated puzzle. In reality, they faced an insoluble mystery. Tragically, as the US got better at solving the known puzzle, we became more vulnerable to strategic surprise at Pearl Harbor.

Without a theory, the facts are silent.
Friedrich Hayek

Every puzzle is grounded in a theoretical framework; that is what makes it challenging yet solvable. Intelligence work looks like a puzzle when analysts and officers can uncover new pieces of information which when fitted into an existing and valid theory provide timely warnings and actionable estimates.

With an invalid theory, facts are not always silent sometimes they become positively misleading. That is why we were surprised on 7 December 1941. Contra Wohlstetter, in the last half of 1941 we no longer had a “complete intelligence picture of the enemy.” We were blind and deaf.

This was not a failure of US intelligence. The Japanese Navy had invalidated our theories with series of sweeping, even revolutionary advances in their capabilities. Yamamoto then harnessed these new capabilities to overturn twenty years of Japanese strategic planning. And it all happened with almost perfect secrecy.

In 1941 our “Theory of Japan” was anchored on a few key premises:

1. In the event of war with Britain or the US, Japan would have to quickly secure access to the resources of the Dutch East Indies. Without these, her war economy would be strangled in a matter of months.

2. Given the distances between Japan’s bases and her targets, Japan would have to depend on her aircraft carriers to provide fighter cover and close air support for the invasions and land campaigns.

When Japan moved to occupy southern Indochina in July 1941 the carriers went south to support the invasion thus confirming this premise.

3. Strategic logic compelled Japan to engage the US Navy in the western Pacific. The long voyage of the Battle Fleet to the Philippine Sea would afford the Japanese submarines and land-based bombers plenty of opportunities to reduce the US strength prior to the decisive battle. Perhaps most importantly, this “home waters strategy” would conserve precious fuel (see point #1).

US analysts knew that Japanese war plans had been based on this logic for two decades.

4. We expected Japan to seize the strategic initiative with surprise attacks. In the Philippines and Malaya, surprise might be decisive. Such an attack on Pearl Harbor would amount to little more than an annoyance: Japan lacked the forces to mount a strategically meaningful attack that far from her bases. One cannot fault the US high command for focusing on the more dangerous and more probable threat.

All of these points were true and valid in January 1941. All of them had been falsified by 1 December 1941.

The puzzle had become a mystery. Worse, this transformation left few traces for the intelligence services to investigate.

The only way that the US could have known this is to have placed a spy on Yamamoto’s staff. That was their only hope of unraveling the mystery.

Paradigm Shift

Pearl Harbor's Overlooked Answer

Japan’s carrier force--known as Kido Butai--was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities.
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Kido Butai was a truly revolutionary weapon system for its time because it embodied the conceptual leap from single-carrier to coordinated multicarrier operations. Kido Butai ’s ascendancy would last only about six months before it was permanently mauled at the Battle of Midway, but during that time there was nothing else like it. The U.S. Navy would not acquire a similar sophistication until roughly late 1943--more than two years later.

No matter how many Japanese messages our code breakers read, we were never going to discover the secret. None of the important and useful information was included in diplomatic cables; Yamamoto’s new strategy was not broadcast to the nation nor was it shared with Japan’s allies.

There was no signal -- only noise.

Actually it was worse than that. Under the old, now outdated theory, the Japanese movement toward Malaya meant that the risk to Pearl Harbor had actually decreased.

All prewar assumptions about Japanese aggression had been based on the belief that Japan lacked the strength to mount more than one invasion attempt at a time.
H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

Finally, underpinning all the risk assessments and intelligence estimates was one bedrock assumption: Japan was a nation-state and nation-states behave rationally. Launching an unprovoked surprise attack on US soil would drag Japan into an unlimited war with a country that had twice her population and 10 times her industrial capacity. In short, a war she was sure to lose.

No rational actor would do such a thing.

Management, leadership, culture

A bunch of interesting points here:

Drucker Forum 2018: Post-Bureaucratic Management At Vinci And Haier

Need to find out more about the Vinci Group. Their radical decentralization is quite the departure from the norm.

Vinci’s Energy Division for instance has some 75,000 workers in 50 countries and annual revenues of $13 billion. This division is split into 1,600 business units. Yet the Vinci head office is just 50 persons, and it hasn’t grown over the years, even as the business itself has quadrupled in size. “Decentralized management,” Huillard said, “is the only way to grow without becoming fat and strangled by increasing processes."

Denning points out that it is not technology or a new management “theory” that allows them to pull it off:

People are “pulled” by culture and values, not “pushed” by process and procedures.

The role of Vinci’s management is to have the courage to stick to these principles at a time when markets are shaky and external forces are pushing the firm to recentralize and optimize. Sticking to the principles is particularly important in tough times.

This reminds me of something the great advertising man Bill Bernbach used to say:

A principle is not a principle until it costs you money.

I would argue that when it comes to culture and strategy NOTHING matters except management’s behavior when risks are high and pressure is increasing. Everything else is just empty speeches and hollow gestures.

See, for example, Admirals Halsey and Nimitz:

Lessons in Leadership: Admiral William Halsey

Halsey and Nimitz: Leadership and loyalty

The essence of strategy

This is a succinct piece on strategy that is packed with insight.

The Big Lies of Strategy

The first thing to keep in mind about strategy is that it is not all that complex. You should keep it simple and always remember that, put simply, strategy is about choices.

RTWT

Related:

Strategic problems and the problem with strategy

Before Immelt at GE, there was Doug Ivester at Coke

Following a legendary CEO is hard

Robert Goizueta at Coke was another superstar CEO of the 1990s whose hand-picked successor failed.

What Really Happened At Coke

A couple of things distinguish this case from GE’s epic fall.

1. Warren Buffet and Co. pulled the trigger more quickly than the stockholders at GE. They did not fight the problem, they made a decision.

2. The succession plan at Coke failed, at least in part, because of the unexpected illness and premature death of the outgoing CEO.

How could so brilliant a CEO as Roberto Goizueta have dialed such a wrong number? Simple. Goizueta was planning on living a long life, stepping back into the role of chairman, and letting Ivester run the company with his discreet guidance. It probably would have worked. Ivester was indeed a brilliant No. 2.

In a very real sense, Ivester’s stumbles should be a warning for other CEOs and Corporate America in general. He was the very model of the modern CEO in the era of Big Data:

Analytical and data-driven, Ivester spent heavily on technology for the quick and efficient delivery of vast amounts of information. His goal was to make Coke the ultimate Learning Organization, and he made his case convincingly. A year and a half ago FORTUNE conjectured, "Ivester may give us a glimpse of the 21st-century CEO, who marshals data and manages people in a way no pre-Information Age executive ever did or could."

Peter Drucker was quite astute in perceiving the false promise of Big Data (even though he died before the term reached buzz word status for fad-surfing CEOs.)  In a 1998 article for Forbes ASAP (“The Next Information Revolution”) he noted that the various computer revolutions had ended in disappointment for one simple reason:

For top management tasks, information technology so far has been a producers of data rather than a producer of information-- let alone a producer of new and different questions and new and different strategies.
…
It can be argued that the computer and the data flow it made possible, including the new information concepts, actually have done more harm than good to business management. They have aggravated what all along has been management's degenerative tendency, especially in big corporations: to focus inward on costs and efforts, rather than outward on opportunities, changes, and threats. this tendency is becoming increasingly dangerous considering the globalization of economies and industries, the rapid changes in markets and in consumer behavior, the crisscrossing of technologies across traditional industry lines, and the increasing instability of currencies. The more inside information top management gets, the more it will need to balance it with outside information-- and that does not exist as yet.

MORE DATA will not turn a private sector bureaucrat into a dynamic entrepreneurial leader.

MORE DATA will not create innovations.

MORE DATA is rarely what is required to decide thorny problems at the strategic level.

MORE DATA will not prepare an organization for Black Swan events.

To the contrary, the demand for more detailed data will let executives continue to fight the problem and avoid deciding it. MORE DATA all too often means delay and squandered opportunities. (In every competitive market, time is a critical though often ignored dimension.)

The blue-est of the blue chips is looking pretty faded

GE slashes dividend, takes $22 billion charge in 3Q

The precipitous fall of GE seems like it deserves more attention. This is not your average corporate failure. This is a story with Shakespearean drama and a host of important questions.

Under Jack Welch GE was the gold-standard for corporate performance and management practices. It routinely appeared at the top of the lists of the Largest, the Most Admired, and the Most Profitable companies. Then, his hand-picked successor led it to ruin.

Jeff Immelt ‘destroyed’ General Electric: Ken Langone

GE CEO feud: Welch vs. Immelt

Questions worth investigating:

Is Immelt’s failure a reflection on the management training system Welch instituted and made famous?

Does the hiring of an OUTSIDE CEO (the first in company history) reflect on Welch or Immelt? Is it further evidence that the Welch system was flawed or did Immelt gut/destroy/burn down his predecessor’s legacy?

What does the crash of GE say about business journalism? Did they over-praise Welch? What did they miss about Immelt and his strategies?

A case study on organizational learning

Great interview with the author of a new book

THE U.S. NAVY AS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION WITH TRENT HONE

Hone examines how the so-called New Navy of the twentieth century managed innovation and transformed doctrine in an era of rapidly changing technology, first emphasizing a centralized fleet's massed gunfire, and later the coordination of dispersed aircraft carrier task forces. He argues"the Navy's surface warfare doctrine in the first half of the twentieth century was an example of sustained and repeated innovation" and uses this evolving doctrine to examine "organizational development through the lens of complexity."

This is a subject of great, long-standing interest to this blog:

Military Schools and Business Education

Tarawa II: Learning and doing

Coping with a VUCA world