Join the Conversation - Harvard Business Publishing Launches Frontline Leadership Forum

I am excited, honored and humbled to have been asked to participate in a project that has just been launched by Harvard Business Publishing. Frontline Leadership is an on-line forum for discussing how the leadership lessons being learned in Iraq and Afghanistan can translate into leadership in the business world and beyond.

Frontline Leadership - "A new generation of leaders is coming of age on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, where various combinations of counterinsurgency, urban combat, and nation building require unprecedented levels of innovation and flexibility. In Frontline Leadership, young veteran leaders and military leadership experts discuss the changing nature of leadership in war and what civilian managers can learn from it.”

I am pleased to introduce the group of commentators that has been assembled, under the leadership of Katherine Bell of Harvard Business Publishing.

Meet the distinguished team of commentators who anchor the Frontline Leadership discussions hosted by Harvard Business Publishing:

Rye Barcott is the president and founder of Carolina For Kibera, an NGO that has fought poverty and promoted ethnic and religious reconciliation in Nairobi, Kenya since 2001. After establishing CFK, Barcott served in the U.S. Marine Corps and deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq. He is currently a joint MPA and MBA candidate at Harvard University. Captain Barcott is a member of Harvard University's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, and he serves on the UNC NROTC Board of Directors and the World Learning Board of Trustees.

Donovan Campbell is currently a Zone Sales Leader Designate working for Frito-Lay in Dallas, Texas. He returned to Frito in September from a year-long involuntary military recall, during which he helped Special Operations Command Central start its Tribal Engagement Initiative in Afghanistan. After four years as a Marine Corps infantry officer, intelligence officer, and sniper platoon commander, including two tours in Iraq, Campbell graduated from Harvard Business School. His book about his Marine platoon and their 2004 Iraq tour together, Joker One, will be published in 2009.

Al Chase is the founder of White Rhino Partners, an executive search firm specializing in placing entrepreneurial leaders who have had a distinguished military career and/or are service academy graduates and hold MBAs from top-tier business schools.

Nathaniel C. Fick is a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He served as a Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance officer, including operational assignments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. In 2007, Fick was a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Bullet Away. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPA in international security policy from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

David Gowel graduated from the United States Military Academy in 2002. His military experience includes graduation from the US Army Ranger School, combat leadership as an armor platoon leader in Iraq and his position as Assistant Professor of Military Science at MIT. Currently, he is a US Army Reserve Captain serving as adjunct faculty at MIT, President and CEO of Clearly Creative, a marketing company, and he is earning his Master's Degree in Management from Harvard University.

Colonel Tom Kolditz is Professor and Head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. Kolditz has served in an array of military tactical command and technical staff assignments worldwide, commanding through battalion level, and as a leadership and human resources policy analyst in the Pentagon. His most recent book is In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended on It.

Doug Raymond manages several of Google's advertising product teams and works on the development and testing of new advertising formats in markets around the world. He is a former Army officer and served in the 1st Armored Division and 66th Military Intelligence Group, both based in Germany. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Principal of the Truman National Security Project. Doug holds a B.S. from the United States Military Academy and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Scott Snook is currently an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. He served in the US Army Corps of Engineers for over 22 years, earning the rank of Colonel before retiring in 2002. He has led soldiers in combat. Among his military decorations are the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Master Parachutist badge. He has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Organizational Behavior. His most recent book is Friendly Fire.

Everett Spain is currently a White House Fellow in Washington, DC, and just returned from Baghdad, where he served as the aide-de-camp to the commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, General David Petraeus. Earlier in his career, he was an assistant professor at West Point, where he taught Leading Organizations through Change and developed the degree granting partnership between West Point and Columbia University. As a US Army Officer, Everett served in Germany, Kosovo, and across the US with various outfits, including the 82d Airborne Division. Everett is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and earned an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Maura Sullivan, a former Marine Captain, spent seven months as a logistics officer in Fallujah. She is currently an MBA/MPA candidate at Harvard's Business and Kennedy Schools. Last summer she worked for McKinsey in Singapore; this summer she worked at PepsiCo in New York.

Leonard Wong is a research professor in the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College who focuses on the human and organizational dimensions of the military. He is a retired lieutenant colonel whose career includes teaching leadership at West Point and serving as an analyst for the Chief of Staff of the Army. His research has led him to locations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Vietnam and has been highlighted in media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Yorker, CNN, NPR, PBS, and 60 Minutes. He holds a B.S. from West Point and a Ph.D. from Texas Tech University.

I am deeply grateful to Harvard Business Publishing and to Katherine Bell for their leadership, foresight and initiative in serving as catalyst and host for this project. I encourage you to log onto the site and join in the conversation. Already, in the first few days of dialogue, it is clear that there will be a wide divergence of opinions expressed. Add your voice to ours in exploring the limits of leadership.

FrontLine Leadership Link

Enjoy!

Al

Finding New Patterns in Familiar Things - Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"

The thing that I love most about the writing of Malcolm Gladwell is that he enables me to see familiar things in new ways. For that reason, he is one of three writers of “business books” whose works I frequently re-read. The two other writers are Jim Collins (“Good to Great”) and Seth Godin (”Tribes,” “Purple Cow,” etc.) As a result of reading “The Tipping Point,” I no longer look at familiar objects in the same way – graffiti, subway turnstiles, broken windows. In the same vein, after reading “Blink,” when I attend an orchestra concert, I wonder about the process of auditioning prospective musicians behind a curtain to prohibit the jury from being swayed by gender prejudice.

Gladwell’s latest offering, “Outliers,” raises the curtain and reveals hidden patterns in such diverse realms as math learning, blood feuds in Appalachia and plane crashes. It is a fascinating study into the hidden factors – often cultural and anthropological in nature – that explain extraordinary levels of success. In the most simple form, Gladwell’s premise – beautifully told in gripping vignettes and mini-biographies – is that hard work is necessary for success – but more is required. He makes a compelling case by finding the same pattern of cultural antecedents occurring in widely disparate enterprises and parts of the world.

Early in the book, Gladwell talks about the rare longevity and health of the inhabitants of tiny Roseto, Pennsylvania.

“Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and family were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.” (Pages 10-11)

And Gladwell succeeds spectacularly in his mission to illuminate the topic of success. Later in the book, as he addresses the patterns of connectivity that have led to the spectacular success of some Jewish lawyers in New York City, he identifies the recipe that makes work satisfying for an individual:

“Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. . . Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning” (Pages 149-150)

This book has great practical value. The cultural component of the communication patterns learned from studying the cockpit recording from plane crashes impacts the way in which one should communicate cross-culturally in a business setting. I am rushing to write this review this morning so that I can race to the airport to hand my copy of the book off to a friend as he prepares to head to Nicaragua for a business trip. I want him to have the advantage of Gladwell’s insights before opening his mouth in his first meeting in Managua tomorrow morning.

I am rushing to Logan Airport; I encourage you to rush to a bookstore or an on-line book source and pick up Gladwell's landmark work Outliers.

Enjoy!

Al