How our generals got so mediocre.

Fred Kaplan has this good article in Slate this morning:How our generals got so mediocre. – By Fred Kaplan – Slate Magazine It’s worth reading because it highlights something I think goes well beyond the military.

The mediocrity of leadership is endemic throughout America. It permeates into business and acedemia as well. The problem that Lt. Col. Yingling, the author of this provocative piece A Failure in Generalship – by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling – Armed Forces Journal about the military, spotlights is that senior managers tend to reward and promote people who are most similar to themselves. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has had the effect of progressively stifling innovation and “out of the box” thinking in business, the military, and elsewhere.

We live in a complex world and we employ complex organizational apparatus to manage that environment. That means we develop huge bureaucracies. You don’t get to be chief of a huge bureaucracy by rocking the boat. Consequently we have bred a generation of leadership whose main characteristic is anemic risk aversion, rather than aggressive risk exploitation.

The results are there for us all to see: pallid strategies; barely sufficient resourcing of projects; lack of imagination; a flight to the middle in thinking and to the bottom in performance; and. perhaps the most worrying, a complete lack of moral courage: too many of these supposed leaders have no idea about how to develop and defend moral arguments. Instead they all seem to rely on some summary that a staff flunky dug out of the Cliff Notes version of a cheap book on “How Great Leaders Think”. As if the PowerPoint version of the Cliff Notes was an adequate substitute for thinking itself!

So it should be no surprise that our military suffers from the same malaise. They probably use PowerPoint too!

If only they could articulate themselves in an essay format.

There is a crisis in leadership that won’t get solved until we all start demanding excellence from the folks who pay themselves the big bucks. We have to remember that we are consumers of their leadership. We deserve a better product.