◗ The military appears stronger than its actual capability.
◗ Inefficiencies in application of military power.
◗ Limits imposed on regular military.
• Burdens of frontline service shifted to least-favored elements.
• Relative weakness of common knowledge in regular military.
• Those most likely to meet foreign enemies are the least capable.
Ironically, coup-proofing a government actually reduces its fighting ability. The special troops get the best weapons, the highest pay, and the deepest training, while regular troops get whatever is left. Moreover, as Quinlivan concludes, “units of the parallel military, armed with the best weapons, may not be readily available for military operations against external enemies. . . . The net effect is to present a more formidable force in the pages of military publications than can be brought to real battlefields.”
Moreover, poor performance may involve flaws that flow from an organization’s lack of faith in itself. This is clearly the case in the long- troubled Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). According to RAND’s 2003 study, the LAPD needed a new vision of police professionalism that put the emphasis on corporateness, meaning a sense of unity and purpose;
responsibility,meaning a sense of service to society; and expertise,meaning basic policing and communication skills.18Blaming much of the depart- ment’s trouble on a failure to “communicate clearly and consistently to its own officers what is expected of them,” RAND’s research team maintains that training is the key to future agility.
Current LAPD recruit training is based on a mid-twentieth-century military model. Like basic combat training, it seeks to tear down recruits and reconstruct them as LAPD officers. While this is certainly a transforma- tion, the methods employed are more akin to information transmission than to transformative learning. Yet the ultimate goal of academy training is to produce a graduate similar to the product of a transformative educational process—an individual who is skilled in synthesis and evaluation and in making informed personal judgments.
One path to a new professionalism is through problem-based learning, in which students are placed in the active role of problem solvers confronted with real-world situations. Just like many business, law, public policy, and medical schools today, as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the LAPD could use problem-based learning to forge a common sense of mis- sion among teams of recruits, even as it provides the basic skills and sense of social responsibility that are essential to a profession. Until it does so, the allegations of abuse that sparked the LA riots will continue.
Lesson 2: High Performance Is Not Always Neat
RAND researchers have seen more than their fair share of dysfunctional organizations, some of which have already been described. However, as RAND’s Frank Camm suggests, organizations can be neat and orderly and still not be high performing. Asked how long it takes him to tell if an orga- nization is working well, Camm answered, “It takes me a long time. Some people I know will go in, look around. Everything’s clean and orderly, and they’ll say ‘This place works great.’ Well, maybe. It’s not immediately clear to me.”
Camm then told me a story about how the French food-services company Sodexho runs mess halls for the Marine Corps under a nearly $900 million contract:
The contractor said, “What you’re going to see is that, right now, every mess hall is completely orderly and completely under control. In another three months after we show up, you’re going to see that things are working at the edge of chaos. The reason for that is if you want to have fresh food for people, you prepare it just before it’s served.”
You go into a place that looks like it’s going nuts and say,
“This is really out of control. It must be awful here.” In fact, it’s a good thing, because again it’s a pull thing instead of a push thing. I have a hard time going into an organization. To me, what
I find myself doing is judging it by the quality of the people I talk to. If they seem to know what they’re doing, that’s good.
In fact, the Marine Corps picked Sodexho in part because it was an innovator in not being predictable. It had become an industry leader in providing food services to universities and businesses because of its cook/chill system, in which food is cooked to the just-done point, then chilled for storage and reheated just in time to be served. Sodexho does not cook/chill just any food, however. It has also become an innovator in developing recipes that taste better using its semi-automated system.
The notion that high performance is not always neat extends across a host of RAND studies. The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza- tion (NATO) clearly proved the case in the air war over Kosovo, which began on March 24, 1999. Although the war eventually stopped the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the end came too late for thousands of Kosovars and was the product of what RAND generously calls a “disjointed war.”19
In theory, Operation Allied Freedom was a joint operation between the U.S. and other NATO countries. In principle, joint operations provide a range of options for the kind of swarming described earlier in this book—after all, joint operations bring more troops and more capability to bear on targets.
In reality, however, the operation was often anything but joint. The U.S. decided early, and unilaterally, that ground forces would not be used in the war, thereby giving Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic the oppor- tunity to accelerate the ethnic cleansing. Knowing that his adversaries would never attack on land, Milosevic concealed his air defenses, dispersed his troops, hid his tanks, and stalled for time.
In the meantime the senior leadership of the operation, which was headed by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, fought early and often about the choice of targets—fixed targets such as bridges and factories versus moving targets such as troops and vehicles. As R AND’s research team writes, these types of disagreements are hardly unusual in battle. However, the lack of a land option created enormous tactical problems in both tar- geting and hitting Serbian forces. Only a small number of air strikes flown during the war actually hit Serbian forces, and an even smaller percentage of those air strikes actually killed any Serbian forces or destroyed any equip- ment. “NATO’s air effort against fixed military and infrastructure targets was far more successful,” writes the RAND research team. “But even here, command and control and various air defense assets survived the bombing in relatively good shape, despite being priority targets.”
If Milosevic thought that these problems would bring the war to an end, he was mistaken. His decision to drive 700,000 refugees into Macedonia
and Albania outraged the international community and led to even heavier bombing of industrial, communication, and petroleum targets, which led in turn to his surrender on June 3, 1999, and his eventual removal from office by the Serbian people. It was a victory for NATO, but it was far from neat.
These and other cases lead RAND researchers such as Quinlivan to conclude that organizations can be highly flawed and poorly managed and do just fine. “Does it require a well-managed organization to be an effec- tive organization?” asks Quinlivan. His answer:
No, it doesn’t. Some of these positive signs are just tributes to good management, rather than predictors of whether they are effective. You can get a lot of people that have wonderful col- lective self-esteem and mutual respect, but they just aren’t very good at what they do. It’s sort of a third-place team, but a friendly third-place team. Sometimes you can find organizations that are genuinely unpleasant yet genuinely good at what they do.
I suspect the French Foreign Legion might fall in that category.
There are consequences to being nasty, however:
You can make it so bad that you hemorrhage people, so you never have the skill level you need to do the job. If you fail in that way, the organization is going to fail. . . . If your manage- ment failures actually break the critical tools for effectiveness, then you can’t succeed. If you’ve got a benign enough environ- ment, or if you’ve got nasty enough tools, you can still be effec- tive even though your management style is brutal. To my mind, being brutal is a failure of management as well. The clenched- fist style of management is really a failure to me.
Quinlivan’s colleague Susan Gates agrees. “There are a number of ways for an organization to achieve success,” she says.
Your employees could be really unhappy, but the organization could still be doing well in terms of meeting its goals. If you’d walked into Enron a few years ago, you might have thought it was very successful. Employees were very happy; their stock options were worth so much, but that doesn’t mean the organi- zation was doing very well. You’re asking what it means to be high performing, but from whose perspective?
Lesson 3: High Performance Is Not Always Efficient
Organizations that plan against multiple futures are not necessarily the most efficient organizations in their industries. They tend to keep something extra in reserve, they develop and often execute contingency plans against futures that do not come to pass, and they invest heavily in the kind of mul- tiskilled workforce that can change directions quickly. Betting the company on a single future is far easier, and is admirably efficient if and when that future actually arrives.
The inefficiencies can reside in a variety of corners, from the planning department to the supply chain. According to Christopher Hanks, a logisti- cian who defined a loggieas someone who thinks of aircraft as 10,000 spare parts flying in formation, a high-performing organization has to be able to
“rapidly apply resources where the needs arise, rapidly apply resources, the right kinds of resources, people and money and stuff in a capacity to be able to respond to variability and the demands being placed on the organization.”
As he says, organizations have to keep something in reserve at all times.
In the end there will always be a need for some level of inventory to protect you against some of the variability that you just will not be able to wring out, and no matter what level of spares you carry, unless you spend a lot of money, you are always going to face sit- uations in which you have a back order: You have a user who’s demanded something and the supply logistic system just can’t give it to him. It’s not on the shelf, it’s not even repaired yet or we don’t have any, we have to go buy one because one of these has never failed before. You know most things are always going to happen.
Other RAND researchers make the same point. “Effective organi- zations are not necessarily efficient,” says Leland Joe, echoing Quinlivan.
“In complex situations, where decisions are poorly defined or understood, or when there is great uncertainty as to the situation, efficient organiza- tional structures do not always work well.” Joe draws on his studies of high- performing combat units to make the case:
In a military context, the planning and execution of large-scale air and/or ground operations is characterized by uncertainty and complexity in addition to actions by adversaries. The military char- acterizes these effects as the fog and friction of war. An effective organization in this context is characterized by widely shared infor- mation (situational awareness) and collaborative planning and
execution (synchronization). These capabilities support a fault- tolerant approachto performance, allowing organizations to quickly adapt to changing conditions. This attribute is not necessarily efficient.
In other words, some waste and inefficiency may be essential to the fault tolerance that is needed if an organization is to survive and prosper.
An experimental physicist by training, Joe rightly notes that “organizational design and operation is all a question of trade-offs. No two high-perform- ing organizations are alike, and managers need to tailor solutions according to the individuals, the environment, and the mission to be accomplished.”
(See Joe’s briefing slide on measuring high performance.)