Mission focus, adaptability, and speed—key traits for today’s complex and volatile world. That’s why I am hiring military guys.
Outing yourself as a military guy is not always well-perceived in the business world. Nevertheless, I do it. I am an active reserve general staff officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, and at the same time, I am the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.
I am not the only military guy in the company. One of my co-founders was an active reserve officer in the National Emergency Operations Centre, and our employees include a former infantry platoon leader and an RAF Tornado navigator.
The parallels between business and the military are often discussed in the business media, but I want to focus on two very specific aspects that I believe are most relevant in a company of 20 people: mission first, and surviving in a complex world.
Mission First
Both business and the military have clear strategic missions: Businesses should make money, and armies should bring home victory.
Mission Command
These strategic missions are broken down into operational and tactical missions, which are executed by the subordinated leaders with as much freedom of action as possible. This is referred to as mission command. Therefore, every leader needs to know his mission by heart, and always put it first. The mission is non-negotiable, and the ways to achieve it are.
Once internalized, the mission command philosophy often stays with a person for life. It is an integral part of military training and doesn’t magically disappear once a person transfers into civilian employment. This is where startups can take advantage of hiring military guys: do whatever it takes to achieve your mission.
Here is a real-life statement I heard in our company:
“We’re time-on-target for the go-live.”
This was said a few days before a major customer go-live when the team was working day and night to make the go-live successful. One of our military guys skillfully synchronized all activities to ensure all go-live relevant tasks were finished on time, and everything else was shifted to the post-go-live phase. The go-live was very successful and achieved with strike precision.
Reality vs. Ideal World
Legend has it that Winston Churchill called military planning a “necessary evil”, and experience shows that no military plan survives the first shot. This is the same in business — create as many business model spreadsheets and as many Gantt charts as you like, you will always need to adapt them when problems surface.
I am not talking about internal problems here, I am talking about external factors that lead to changes to the original plan: delayed deliverables from the customer side, corrupted data, etc. Military guys are used to adapting to new situations and remembering their mission.
Here is a real-life statement I heard from one of our military guys when customer inputs for a major work package were delayed by several weeks but the original deadline stayed unchanged:
“If I get the inputs by Thursday end-of-business, I can do it until Friday morning.”
We don’t brag about working day and night, but if night shifts are required to accomplish the mission, we do it.
Survive In A Complex World
The entire world talks about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) In the military context, the VUCA world is often associated with hybrid warfare. In the business context, digitization in all its facets and external factors such as COVID-19 do their part to create a VUCA world. In today’s business environment, light and shadow are very close, and reality often changes much faster than your business plan.
Situation Assessment
Therefore, constant situation assessment is key in a complex world. While this is normal in the military, businesses (and the military administration!) still tend to stick to budget cycles and approved plans. When the situation in our company changes abruptly, I usually initiate situation assessment with the callout “new situation”. I learned this expression in the military, and I use it to inform everybody in the company that planning will start all over again, irrespective of the budget cycle, previous plans, or personal plans for the weekend.
In this way, we reorganized the entire company when COVID-19 struck and our pipeline in the aviation industry collapsed. My co-founders and I used the planning processes we knew from the military — instead of panicking, we used our judgment and a clear methodology to assess the new situation, develop options, decide on the new course of action, and communicate it to our team.
The result? Since COVID-19 struck, we significantly enlarged our customer base in the aviation industry and added additional customers in a new industry.
Agility
Even when using structured planning processes, the situation tends to change faster than approved operational plans. Therefore, employees on the tactical level need to adapt to new situations already before new plans arrive. This requires a combination of mission command and agility: employees need to remember their mission and use their full creativity to adapt to the changed circumstances. As stated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”
On one hand, agility means quickly adapting to a new situation. On the other hand, it means not replanning the entire operational plan on the frontline. I usually remind our employees about this with the following statement:
“Let’s cross the bridge when we get there”.
Agility and structured situation assessment go hand-in-hand, the one cannot substitute for the other.
Conclusion
If I had to summarize my statements about “mission first” in a complex world in one sentence, this is it:
“If everything seems under control, you’re not fast enough.”
Speed and surprise are well-known tactical principles in the military, and they also work in the business environment: whether you have to outmaneuver an enemy or a competitor, the tactics are the same. That’s why I see clear benefits in hiring military guys.
