General Petraeus, Counterinsurgency, The Surge and Lessons for Organisations (Part 3)

The “customer experience” approach was necessary if the U.S. army were ever going to get the Iraqi people to trust them.  It’s an approach that goes back a long way as Jean Larteguy’s novel The Centurions illustrates.  The novel focuses on the experience of a number of French officers captured by the Vietminh at Dien Bein Phu in 1954.  According to Thomas Powers the French had a similar approach to the Americans in that “they believed that firepower, mobility, and professional soldiering would beat any ragtag army of guerrillas.  But Pierre Raspeguy, the hero of The Centurions if there is one, listened to the Vietminh in Camp One and absorbed their rule number one. “You’ve got to have the people on your side,” he said, “if you want to win a war.”

The People Are the Prize

In The Insurgents Fred Kaplan tells a story that describes the typical U.S. army officer mindset prior to Petraeus’s ascent. During a training exercise carried out in 1991 a captain and his officers were to enter a village in order to capture a sniper who had killed one of the soldiers.  “The captain had decided to accomplish this mission by storming the village before daylight, guns cocked, pounding down doors, dragging the local men out of their houses, locking them in handcuffs, and interrogating them harshly, all while their families watched in horror.  Of course he came up with nothing.”  When the British officer carrying out the review informed him that his approach was the type that alienates people and creates more insurgents the captain blurted “Lookit!…My job is not to deal with this people thing!  My job is to kill the enemy.”  It was an approach that was apparent on the ground during the first four years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. General Jack Keane, one of Petraeus’s main sponsors, said as much to General Ray Odierno on the outskirts of a cordoned off village in 2003: “What’s going on here Ray? We’re breeding an insurgency here.  We’ve got to see the people as part of the solution.”

While an organisational change project is nowhere near as messy as trying to counter insurgency it’s noteworthy how many of them falter as they disregard the people involved.  Throughout the course of my own career I’ve seen change initiatives falter and peter out as a result of an arrogant “Let’s Invade Poland and show them who knows best” mentality that gives little or no consideration to those on the ground.  If leaders do not have the foresight and skill to build up a groundswell of opinion across the board that what they wish to do is a good thing for all concerned they are in trouble and can expect their own little insurgencies.

Present Shock

Continuing with the organisational change theme many change managers will be aware that nowadays with shorter business cycles and executives focused on delivering good news to the City or Wall Street every quarter there is little or no focus on delivery in the medium or long term.  There seems to be no focus on the future, it’s now or nothing.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff traces the shift in focus from the future to the present to the “anti-climax of the  Millenium.”  In the recently published Present Shock (2013) he tells us that “something did shift that night as we went from years with 19’s to those with 20’s.  All the looking forward slowed down.  The leaning into the future became more of standing up to the present.  People stopped thinking about where things were going and started to consider where things were…In the financial world, for example, an investment’s future value began to matter less than its current value.  Just ten weeks into the millennium, the major exchanges were peaking with the tech-heavy and future-focused NASDAQ reaching its all-time high, over 5,100 points.  Then the markets started down – and have never quite recovered.  Although this was blamed on the dot.com bubble, the market’s softening had nothing to do with digital technologies actually working (or not) and everything  to do with a larger societal shift away from future expectations and instead toward current value.  When people stop looking to the future, they start looking at the present.  Investments begin to matter less for what they might someday be worth, because people are no longer thinking so much about “someday” as they are today.”

In their own way some members of the U.S. army seemed to be aware of this phenomenon and were able to relate it to their own precarious situation in Iraq.  Major Joel Rayburn , who served under Petraeus acolyte and counterinsurgency enthusiast H.R. McMaster in Tal Afar in 2005, is credited with this gem: “You know, house guests are like fish…They stink after two or three days.  We’ve been in Iraq for three years now, and we’re starting to stink.”  Petraeus supported this militaristic version of present shock when he stressed that “every army of liberation has a half-life before it becomes an army or occupation.”

A globalised and social media dominated society exacerbates this sense of present shock.  In The Accidental Guerilla David Kilcullen describes this phenomenon when he writes of the impossibility for governments and organisations to achieve “message unity” due to the fact that “under globalised conditions the media space is a domain, an ecosystem, or even a battle space, filled with dozens of independent, uncoordinated, competing, and conflicting entities rather than a single actor or audience…almost all of them outside the control of governments and media corporations.”

Long-Term Commitment

This need for an almost immediate impact must be balanced against an equally important need to demonstrate long term commitment as the population are unlikely to support the counterinsurgent unless they are sure that he is going to hang around until it’s all over.   The population are worried about retribution for collaboration with the occupier.  The dilemma was spelled out by one intelligence officer in Iraq when he said “we secure a town but after we leave, some of our informants are killed by the insurgents; that is a problem.”

David Gallula

Lieutenant Colonel David Gallula served in China, Greece, Indochina, and Algeria for the French Army.  His book Counterinsurgency Warfare is regarded as a classic of the genre.  Here he describes the dilemma encountered by the occupied population as both insurgent and counterinsurgent battle for hearts and minds.

“Contact with the population, is actually the first confrontation between the two camps for power over the population.  The future attitude of the population, hence the probable outcome of the war, is at stake.  The counterinsurgent cannot afford to lose this battle…The battle happens because the population, which was until recently under the insurgent’s open control and probably still is under his hidden control through the existing political cells, cannot cooperate spontaneously even if there is every reason to believe that a majority is sympathetic to the counterinsurgent.”

For change managers it’s worth considering how to build trust in the communities they are working in and also how to protect those who support their initiatives, especially if the project is in danger of being shelved.

Dogma

Petraeus took command of operations in Afghanistan in July 2010.  This time he was unable to work the miracles he had in Iraq.  According to Fred Kaplan this  was down to the primitive nature of the country, which had a scattered and rural population which the corrupt Karzai government could only govern through political patronage, a primitive economy which arrested the rise of an entrepreneurial class, and a long border with Pakistan whose leaders were assisting the insurgency.  Kaplan points the finger at Petraeus for being over-prescriptive in the application of counterinsurgency doctrine when it really only was “a technique and not a grand strategy.”  Through hubris and inertia Petraeus, he feels, allowed the counterinsurgency doctrine to become a one-size-fits-all universal dogma.

How many leaders have ruined organisations or projects because of their overriding and toxic belief that there is only one way to get things done?  On that final note it’s worth remembering what the political activist Saul Alinsky said of dogma in Rules for Radicals (1971).

“I detest and fear dogma.  I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on.  That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic.  Dogma is the enemy of human freedom.  Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.  The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”

General Petraeus, Counterinsurgency, The Surge and Lessons for Organisations (Part 2)

It’s incredible that the U.S. army still had the same culture in 2003 that it had at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975.  The soul searching that went on in its aftermath failed to address the fact that not all battles would fit the head-on conventional model that had existed in the leadership’s mindset since the end of the Second World War.

The Learning Organisation and Culture

In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2002) John A. Nagl states that “the organisational culture of the U.S. army permitted no doubt in the army’s leadership about the essence of the organisation: its core competence was defeating conventional armies in frontal combat.  The organisation never developed a consensus that change to its procedures and to its definition of its responsibilities was required by the nature of the revolutionary war it confronted in Vietnam.  An unshakable belief in the essence of the organisation precluded organisational learning and has continued to prevent the formation of a consensus on the “lessons of Vietnam” and on changes required to make the army more capable there and in future conflicts.”

How many organisations today are hamstrung with leaders who have mindsets that are not equipped to deal with faster business cycles, a seemingly endless need for change, an “always on”  consumer who wants an answer right now, and if he doesn’t get it, well you’ll “get it” on Twitter. A year ago I sat aghast when a business executive I had agreed to implement a social media strategy for told me that he only wanted to “tweet” twice a week, completely missing the “in the moment phenomenon” that is social media.  Can a leader of a “steady as she goes” utility adopt the frame of mind required to thrive at a fast moving and innovative telecommunications giant that may introduce a number of new products or services each month?

According to Nagl, due to adapting to the needs of its politicians for a flexible military in order to fight its imperial wars the “organisational culture of the British army allowed it to learn how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign during the Malayan emergency, whereas the organisational culture of the U.S. army prevented a similar organisational learning process during and after the Vietnam war.”  He goes on to say that “military organisations that are unable to learn can substantially damage the ability of their states to influence the international system; the United States suffered appreciably during and after the Vietnam war because the military was unable to learn how to counter insurgency.”

This begs the following question: How does the culture of the political class affect the ability of governments – regardless of the parties in power – to learn and implement change.  The performance of the Fine Gael / Labour coalition in addressing Ireland’s economic crisis doesn’t appear to have differed in any way from that of the craven Fianna Fail / Progressive Democrat coalition that made the mess in the first place and suggests that the culture of the flaccid Irish political class is not disposed to making any alteration to the status quo.

The domino-like effect of General Petraeus’s remarkable career progression in the final quarter of his military career saw a change in army doctrine, a change in the profile of the people holding senior military positions, and finally a more “flexible and adaptive” military that could be classed as a learning organisation.  Maybe the building of more flexible organisations and governments requires a similar sequence of events.

T-Shaped People

The need for soldiers to have skills outside of the pure military domain was recognised as far back as 1945 when Rhodes scholar, Brigadier General George Arthur Lincoln wrote “I’m beginning to think that what we need is a type of staff officer with at least three heads – one political, one economic, and one  military.”  This would resonate decades later when Petraeus reasoned that he needed “pentathlete” soldiers who could carry out offensive, defensive and stability operations simultaneously.

This “three-headed pentathlete” soldier is similar to the T-shaped person that IDEO CEO Tim Brown introduced in Change By Design (2009).  A T-shaped person is someone who develops a particular expertise and skill-set and then adds to it by developing a number of other skills to complement the core skill.  The core skill forms the shaft of the T while the complementary skills form the top of the T.  Speaking to Warren Berger, author of Glimmer (2009) Brown says that  “to respond to the complexity of design problems today…we’ve found that if someone has an enthusiasm or curiosity about many different subjects and disciplines, then they can be more flexible, more empathetic, and more engaged with the world.”   Petraeus with his military background and academic curiosity fits the T-shaped mould whereas General William Westmoreland clearly did not.  Westmoreland was not known to be a reader, and when asked what it took to defeat an insurgency answered with one word: “Firepower.”

Customer Experience

It may seem trite to compare the interaction between these T-shaped soldiers and the communities they are interacting with during an insurgency with the customer experience strategies pursued by many of today’s top service providers, but let’s take a closer look.

Organisations can no longer rely on routinely fulfilling a set number of requests with a small number of stock responses read off a crib sheet. Good companies that provide great service have recognised that there’s been a shift from passive consumption to active participation.  They  know they can no longer treat people as passive consumers.

Zappos is a shoe company that place its confidence in Autonomy over Technique.  Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer service employees’ call times or require them to use scripts.  The reps handle calls the way they want to.  Their job is to serve the customer, and how they do that is up to them.  The turnover at Zappos is minimal and although it’s still a young company Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the US ahead of better known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple, and roughly equal to brands like Jaguar and Ritz Carlton.  What Zappos is doing is part of a small but growing move to restore some measure of individual freedom in jobs usually known for the lack of it.

Four Seasons Hotels are famous for their quality of service as much as for the luxury of their properties.  They are also recognised within the industry for having a staff-training system in which staff members learn how to anticipate the needs of their customers and build on the ideas of their colleagues.  Creating an experience culture requires going beyond the generic to design experiences perceived as uniquely tailored to each customer.  Unlike a manufactured product or a standardised service an experience comes to life when it feels personalised and customised.  The designers in head office set the stage for the experience, but they cannot anticipate every opportunity.  This is why the training programme at Four Seasons includes improvisation rather than drilling the staff with prepared scripts.

This echoes with one of Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Crane’s paradoxes of counterinsurgency.  At a conference to promote the U.S. Army’s official Field Service Manual 3-24 on Counter-Insurgency operations Crane asserted that “’most important decisions are not made by generals (this is a block-by-block war; lieutenants and even corporals must make ‘strategic’ decisions – hence the importance of this manual).”  This was supported by a speech made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the convention of the Association of the United States Army shortly after he assumed control at the Pentagon.  Gates, according to Fred Kaplan, made the point that the “future of the army lay not with gold-plated weapons or sweeping tank manoeuvres but rather with some junior officer who’d struck deals with Arab sheiks.”

This piece looked at how the culture of organisations impacts on their ability to implement change, the need for multi-disciplinary people to cope with the frantic demands of today’s society, and how there are parallels between the customer experience movement and a counterinsurgent’s interaction with the  public.  Part three will deal with the final four lessons.

General Petraeus, Counterinsurgency, The Surge and Lessons for Organisations (Part 1)

“Tell me how this ends” asked David Petraeus of a reporter embedded with the 101^st Airborne Division as the U.S. army rolled through Southern Iraq en route to Baghdad.  It was March 2003 and a few weeks later President George W. Bush famously stood in front of a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished” on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln which was sitting off the San Diego coast and had just returned from the Persian Gulf.

General Petraeus was in the 30^th year of a military career much of which was spent reading and theorising on counterinsurgency warfare.  His PH.D thesis focused on the U.S. army’s shortcomings in Korea and Vietnam, and without pointing the finger surmised that “America’s doctrine, tactics, and perennial practices were inappropriate.”  The army, as Petraeus saw it, was incorrectly constituted to fight the unconventional war it found itself fighting.   While the army won every head-to-head battle in Vietnam the “Search and Destroy” tactics espoused by Generals Westmoreland and DePuy were useless in vanquishing the Vietcong who kept on coming.  America’s approach in Vietnam was similar to that used during a conventional and open war across the rolling plains of Europe.

According to Fred Kaplan in The Insurgents (2012) Petraeus ghost-wrote an article for General John Galvin where he observed that the military had a tendency “to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war, a theatre with battlefields we know, conflict that fits our understanding of strategy and tactics…that fits our plans our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas.”

As he stood there musing with that embedded reporter Petraeus understood  that the conventional war that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had planned and banked on would be anything but and would disintegrate into a messy quagmire that would mirror the army’s previous experiences in Vietnam and Korea.

In a paper called “Twenty-Eight Articles” published in Military Review in May 2006, David Kilcullen provided a simple definition for counterinsurgency:  “Here it is in a nutshell.  This is a competition with the insurgent for the right and the ability to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population.”  He went on to stress the need to strike the correct balance between nation building, protecting the population, giving them a stake in the society’s future and the use of firepower.  “Injudicious use of firepower” Kilcullen said “creates blood feuds, homeless people and societal disruption that finds and perpetuates the insurgency.”  Prominent commentators feel that an 80:20 ratio in favour of the political and social is about right.

During the first year of the Iraq war Petraeus’s intellectual approach and inquiring mind stood to him as he was the only U.S. general to have a successful tour of duty as a division commander.  In The Gamble (20009) The Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks tells us that as head of the 101^st Airborne Division, Petraeus “laid down three rules for his subordinate commanders: We are in a race against time, give the locals you deal with a stake in the new Iraq, and don’t do anything that creates more enemies than it removes.”  According to Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books (March 2013) “at the top of his to-do list were money, politics, electricity, and jobs – all the daily grind of getting a city up and going after war had turned the country upside down.  In the background there was plenty of shooting, soldiers on patrol, night-time raids, and the like, but Petraeus’s effort was mainly  – say 80 percent -  devoted to buying and talking peace.”

What’s remarkable about General Petraeus’s approach in Mosul is that he did it without asking for the approval of his superiors.   When he moved on from Mosul all his work was undone as his successor adopted the conventional approach approved by General Casey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Petraeus’s success in Mosul was brought to mainstream attention by Thomas Ricks in Fiasco (2006).  Fiasco is an account of the numerous strategic blunders that eventually led to the U.S. administration to acknowledge that they were on the wrong path.  Donald Rumsfeld had never planned for the stabilisation of Iraq post-invasion and refused to acknowledge that an insurgency was unfolding across the nation.  He even went as far as banning the use of the term “counterinsurgency” in the Pentagon.

Petraeus was assigned to head up the army’s “engine of change” in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  Fort Leavenworth was responsible for writing field manuals, running schools for officers, and penning military “doctrine”.  He took the opportunity to write the U.S. Army’s official Field Service Manual 3-24 on Counter-Insurgency operations.  The task took a year and the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates as Secretary of Defence set the scene for Petraeus being awarded a fourth star and appointed Commander of U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq by President Bush.

Petraeus presided over the successful troop surge of 2007 that was instrumental in quelling the insurgency and set the stage for the withdrawal of U.S. troops which was completed in December 2011.  His efforts and successes has brought a lot of attention to counterinsurgency works such as David Gallula’s classic Counterinsurgency Warfare (1964), along with John A. Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2002), David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla (2009) and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922).

Organisations and their leaders can learn as much if not more by studying some of the themes that emerge from these writings and Petraeus’s experiences than they will from a typical business leadership book.  I will look at a number of these themes in subsequent posts

The World's Smallest Ramones Museum @ La Sirena, Malahide

Reblogged from idiabolo:

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They were the world's first genuine punk rock band.  It's tempting to surmise from the omnipresent t-shirts, name checking, and countless rip off merchants that the Ramones were one of the most successful bands of their time, but apart from near god-like status in Latin America, and a punk-crazed late 70's United Kingdom, they never rose above club-status at home in the United States.  

Read more… 1,164 more words

Will Elvis Costello Make Good on His Promise?

Whatever about the platitudes and tributes to Margaret Thatcher, I’m really only interested in one thing.  Will Elvis Costello make good on the promise he made in the song “Tramp the Dirt Down” off 1989′s Spike. 

Well? Will ya Elvis?

Presentism: Douglas Rushkoff on Chronos and Kairos

Reblogged from idiabolo:

Douglas Rushkoff's interview with FastCompany gives an interesting insight into the message behind his new book, Present Shock.     I found these quotes particularly interesting:

 "Presentism is the acknowledgement that human beings exist in a unique temporal landscape in which not all moments are the same. We’ve been taking digital technology and pushing it into service of the old, but working in an increasingly digital environment means forcing our digital operating systems to conform to human time, rather than the other way around."

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You’ll Fail to have a Great Career like Jesse “The Devil” Hughes unless…

In one of the more irreverent and entertaining TED talks I’ve seen recently Larry Smith tells us that you’ll fail to have a great career, unless….you do all those things that hold us back: taking risks, being afraid to look like an idiot, giving yourself completely to what you’re doing, and building relationships – the messiest and most intimidating thing of all for many – with people.

One man who seems to have built a great career in rock ‘n’ roll later than most is Eagles of Death Metal front man Jesse “The Devil” Hughes.  His performance at last summer’s Lowlands festival in the Netherlands is remarkable and shows why they were one of the most eagerly anticipated and popular acts at this year’s South by Southwest.  As Jesse says himself, “there’s nothing new under the sun” in anything the Eagles of Death Metal do. “it’s all recycled” – listen out for all the Rolling Stones and Steely Dan rip offs, but he does all those things that Larry Smith tells us we don’t do to pull it off with some style.  Is there a better rock ‘n’ roll front man alive?

On another note, having seen two former colleagues, pass away with cancer in the last month, it’s worth celebrating Brian “Big Hands” O’ Connor’s return to bass duties with the band, having been  diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer in 2010.  Bravo!