tics, including senior leaders in DOD, leading academicians
in logistics and supply chain management, and senior executives in many commercial firms. We’ve been looking at
best practices and listening to ideas on how to
develop logisticians capable of successfully
managing in the future. We’re working to
develop both innovative approaches to
education and improvements to tools,
processes, and systems that will provide
our community with the ability to effectively and efficiently support future
operations and meet any
challenges we might face.
We need leaders—
both now and in the
future—who are
able to understand
logistics and supply
chain theory and
conceptual approaches, and translate them
into useful principles and
practical applications.
QWhat sort of oppor- tunities have you
found?
AWe have looked at mili- tary education along
career paths, from pre-commission-ing to high-level executive management programs. Our efforts so far have focused on the mid-career and senior manager levels; we refer to them
as intermediate and senior service college levels of
education.
At the senior service college level, there are three areas
where we see great opportunities to enhance the educational experience for our leaders. The first is an understanding
of supply chain management: the defense supply chain,
how it operates, and how it might operate to be more successful in the future. Second, there is hardly any instruction
at all about life-cycle systems management as a culture, a
philosophy, and a way of doing business. Finally, we believe
we should help develop a stronger understanding around
the nexus of resourcing, readiness, and national security
outcomes to help answer the question “How can you best
resource national security strategy under conditions of
uncertainty and constrained resources?”
QWhat about the intermediate-level officers with 10 to 12 years of experience?
AWe’re convinced that our major focus area at this level of education should be on joint logistics planning. We
aren’t doing a good enough job with our mid-career professionals in helping them understand how to effectively plan
joint logistics operations. Keep in mind that we don’t deploy
as the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, or the Marines. We blend
together as a joint force under a joint command structure.
That opinion—that we need to do a better job teaching
joint logistics—was formed by what we found in observing
and training units headed into Iraq and Afghanistan. This
skill is very challenging to develop in the classroom environment because it requires extensive practice and interaction
with experienced planners who are comfortable discussing
planning, coaching, and assessing students in an interactive
learning environment. It is my belief that you can’t teach
planning effectively using a stack of PowerPoint charts.
QIf you had to pick one skill that all future leaders need, what would it be?
AI believe the most important skill for future leaders to possess is the ability to influence people they don’t control. That will require developing skills in negotiation, mediation, and facilitation—skills that today are underserved in our
educational system. An uncertain environment also requires
leaders who see things as they are and can find unique ways of
applying the capabilities they have at their disposal.
It is also important to note that in order for us to be successful in uncertainty, we will often need to have different
relationships between organizations and people than we
have today. In some cases, we may need completely new relationships with people and organizations that may not even
exist today. We want to develop the kind of leaders who can
make these relationships grow and actually bear fruit.
QHow do you foster a collaborative mindset in mili- tary leaders who grow up in a command and control
environment?
AI think we have to focus on unity of effort as our guid- ing principle. In the military, we have talked about
unity of effort without unity of command for a long time,
and I think today’s students, students who are coming out of
multiple assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, get it. We need
to reinforce that in our classrooms and help the military
institutions adapt to what the students have already learned.
Unity of effort is really driven by a few, very key components, one of the most important of which is finding common ground. Is it possible that we can all agree on what we
are trying to accomplish? Can we all see the same picture?
Are we sharing information that allows us to see the same
thing? Having agreement on the common outcomes
becomes the key to getting unity of effort.
