From Battlefield to Boardroom
Professor Andrew Kakabadse
Steve Macaulay
Hello, I’m Steve Macaulay and I am interviewing Professor Andrew
Kakabadse about a book that he has co-authored called From Battlefield to
Boardroom. Now Andrew this is the world of military, is there anything in
the military that we can possibly learn today because the old leadership
style, command and control surely isn’t relative today in business?
Andrew
Kakabadse
One of the most interesting things is that we have been learning from the
military for hundreds of years. After the Second World War there was an
interesting consulting company in Britain known as Urwick Orr, hardly
anybody remembers Urwick Orr, most people remember McKinseys but
Urwick Orr controlled the market and they were the ones that introduced
the old functional, divisional and product structures which have now been
taken over by the matrices, where did they come from? The military. The
matrix structures that we have now where did they come from? The military
and NASA in terms of getting the supply chain together for the space
programme. It was based on military lines. So the command and control of
the military is actually just warfare. The military is a massive infrastructure
that deals with soldiers, property, outsourcing, personnel, career
development, and it is probably one of the biggest property owners in the
UK so when you are talking about such a spread of interests and even in
warfare the military has been useful in diplomatic purposes the military has
been used for peace. Most of our innovations have come from the military
and at least we should do, we should look at what we are taking from the
military when we don’t know we are taking it and see whether it has value
and what we are finding is it does have value.
Steve Macaulay
Now one of the aspects of the book that comes out very clearly is the notion
of what’s called values based leadership. Now can you describe how that
applies in the military and how we can draw links with business.
Andrew
Kakabadse
Very simple, values based leadership fundamentally asks the questions,
what values are your leaders promoting? And do they live those values? And
that is the fundamental question of business today. Now the reason the
military created that is because they have had to both deal with command,
control and community development, so if you look at the two sets of values
they are in total contradiction to each other and what we are finding in
business today is you may be concerned with costs, profits, short term gain,
but then we have to look after people, career development, long term
sustainable investment, again two completely contrasting objectives. So the
values based leadership begs the questions and unless you have embedded
a series of values in your organisation and your leaders behave them what
chance have you of surviving and sustaining for the long term.
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Steve Macaulay
Now one of the interesting things that I found reading the book was instead
of a kind of very clear chain of command, kind of orders from the top and
they are getting passed down in a very clear cut kind of way, the modern
military is looking at empowered organisations with a fair degree of
flexibility to respond in the field and so on, now are there links there with
business?
Andrew
Kakabadse
Massive links and actually this idea of empowerment and getting yourself
close to the point of conflict for the military or the point of the customer for
business but it is where the engagement needs to take place is at least two
hundred years old. It was Napoleon who introduced the philosophy of
mission command and the Prussians took that on board when they were
continuously being defeated by Napoleon and then the Prussians used
mission command which is, we have a mission, but the command structure
is to enable everybody to achieve that mission without telling them. It was
the great Prussian general Clausewitz which the British military now use as
their bible who fundamentally said, as soon as you meet the enemy every
plan you’ve made falls apart, so unless you have a leaders and a leadership
group that has a set of values that people believe in that will help you
survive unexpected contingencies your command and control structures will
not work. What are we finding in business, exactly the same. Where
business survives is where you have one very simple business principle and
that is costs. So at the mature end of the market where fundamentally your
only competitive advantage is price and what you are doing is continuously
taking costs out of the business until you can trade no more so you sold and
somebody else really exercises their costs based synergies on you. All other
businesses have to deal with the cost issue, the customer issue providing
shareholder value, providing investment, looking after the long term and
also making sure that your quarterly returns are such that your investors still
have confidence in you. So ironically business has been using a mission
command approach but didn’t know it and the whole purpose of the book
was to fundamentally say, do you realise that you are doing this, and
secondly if you don’t what more can you learn that will help you get better.
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Steve Macaulay
Now I’d like to explore the issue of teamwork. One of the things that came
out in the book was how teamwork is very, very tightly controlled, you know
you have got to be in a position where everybody will help each other, you
know where everybody can kind of second guess each other and so on. Now
in business there’s lots of talk about teamwork but does that really happen
to the same extent?
Andrew
Kakabadse
You will find in the military also a lot of the teamwork that is talked about
doesn’t occur either so likewise in business it doesn’t, but the principle is
that if you really are going to engage and engage well and we don’t have to
talk about fighting here the teamwork could be about developing
communities, we could be in Kosovo protecting communities, we could be
undertaking a massive sales campaign where we are addressing a number of
community interests. If you don’t have channels of communication across
the team members, if you don’t have a sharing of information, if you don’t
have a sense of humility that you are constantly going to learn from your
colleagues then the customer suffers, the community suffers, and ultimately
as a business you suffer. So teamwork as a principle is vital, the difference is,
and this is the bit that the military I believe has not fully addressed, is that
there is a difference between teamwork more lower down the organisation
and teamwork at the top. Teamwork lower down is exactly as you said Steve
it’s cooperation, it’s sharing, it’s working together, teamwork at the top is
about making decisions about resources, so there the issue is not sharing,
the issue is advocacy and ironically the challenges of advocacy and some of
the dissention that takes place in terms of advocacy this is where the
military could learn from business because business has been more
advanced on how you handle high performing, often conflict oriented,
stakeholder driven top teams and the military has more of this simplistic
model of sharing at the top which doesn’t take place so there are bits that
the military can learn from business and that is at the strategy level.
Steve Macaulay
I’d like to pick also the issue about commitment, now it seems to me that in
the military you have got a very high degree of commitment, I mean there’s
people’s lives at stake here, now you are never going to get that kind of
commitment in an organisation surely.
Andrew
Kakabadse
That’s true because you have a more immediate concern in the military and
it’s also a very particular sort of culture and at the end of the day we only
have one Ministry of Defence and we only have one army and we have a
whole number of different corporations all competing with each other often
across the same space. Of course you can’t have that, but what you do have
in business in terms of commitment is how do we work if we don’t have
commitment, you still have the same questions they are just more difficult
to address, so in business the issue is how do you work when an
organisation is actually cutting costs, it’s talking about a long term
investment they don’t mean it, it’s also talking about career development
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and they don’t mean it and they don’t invest in people but somehow that
single manager running a team, running a department, running a whole
division, who is not responsible personally for having created the dissention
in the organisation they still have to create a culture of commitment so that
the leadership they offer will benefit the people that follow the person, the
person themselves and the business. Now ironically today with the cuts in
the MOD it’s exactly the same situation. How do you build commitment
when so many soldiers are being made redundant as you have seen, costs
are being cut, services are being outsourced, even catering has been
outsourced, so one part of just feeding an army is no longer an army
responsibility, it’s now driven by targets and this is a bit of a joke. I’ve been
to one particular mess where the number of sausages you have on your
plate are counted and you can’t have more than two sausages, so imagine
you have just been in some conflict oriented situation and you walk into the
dining room and one says “oi mate you can’t have more than two sausages
because they cost too much” probably that more than anything else is going
to destroy commitment. The challenge today is the same we are still in a
cost driven environment we have to achieve objectives those objectives are
of higher order and we are constantly dealing with strains, so this point I
believe both the military and business can learn from each other.
Steve Macaulay
So if you were to leave a clear message from this book then Andrew what
would it be?
Andrew
Kakabadse
It’s mission command. Where today in such complexity that to think you can
command something is impossible, you have to work on the mission and the
purpose and the values behind that and how the leadership is going to lead
those values and behave those values so at least the command structure can
work and mission command by its very nature says, no matter what you
prepare for if you don’t make your organisation and your people resilient
when you do meet the enemy the whole planning is going to fall apart. So
it’s the two words, mission and command and today we have learned that
you have got to bring the two words together.
Steve Macaulay
Andrew, thank you very much.
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