War and Corporate Training

Co-written with Kanishk Bhardwaj.

The value of war-related analogies in business and politics is that they put things in context. They work like magic in Marketing. "Avoid your competitor's strength. Attack their weakness. Price war. Overcome the competition." But how do they translate best in Learning & Development and corporate trainings? We’ve discussed three points with pros and cons of each point.

Point One. Relevance.

Tim Minchin, a sublimely talented and witty comedian of our time, kicked off an inauguration speech at The University of Western Australia with the following comments: “I did a corporate gig at a conference for this big company who made accounting software. In a bid to inspire their salespeople to greater heights, they’d forked out 12 grand for an Inspirational Speaker who was this extreme sports dude who had had a couple of his limbs frozen off when he got stuck on a ledge on some mountain. It was weird. Software salespeople need to hear from someone who has had a long, successful and happy career in software sales, not from an overly-optimistic, ex-mountaineer. Some guy who arrived in the morning hoping to learn about better sales technique ended up going home worried about the blood flow to his extremities. It’s not inspirational – it’s confusing. And if the mountain was meant to be a symbol of life’s challenges, and the loss of limbs a metaphor for sacrifice, the software guy’s not going to get it, is he? Because he didn’t do an arts degree...”

You can probably tell that his talk takes a left turn towards a more comedic tangent from there on but his point is pretty clear. For a while now it has been common practice to invite, or play online talks of, speakers who are not relevant to the field of the audience.

When you’re dealing with topics such as Change Management, Leadership or Resilience, you would be hard pressed to find someone more suited to address these topics than an army commander. Audience member 1 (the majority) would agree that the strategy, leadership and resilience metaphors do serve as a dopamine dose of motivation and life lessons. However, there is audience member 2 (the minority) who maintains that while the analogies are intelligent and the topics concur, the context rarely does. Not unless your work involves a tank and a sand dune. The sessions link the analogies back to an employee’s everyday job but it can sometimes feel like a stretch. “How is an example of a covert Ops mission supposed to increase my efficiency in modelling quant projections on Microsoft Excel.”

An interjection would be to ask, why use any analogies at all then? Don’t use sports or music analogies. It’s about lateral thinking. Some of the best trainings leverage the brightest minds from all sorts of diverse fields!

We agree. So let’s get to the meat of it.

Point two. Sensitivity, risk and offending sensibilities.

There could be employees from affected or damaged countries in the audience. Statistically thinking, this has already happened countless times. What if there’s someone in the meeting room who has a friend, relative or parent from the country that has suffered casualties and the presentation is glorifying a leadership strategy executed by a country that did the damaging? As companies are now more diverse than ever this is a high possibility – one that isn’t often actively discussed.

Employees may have a strong alternative opinion how on how a war should have been handled. One of many examples is the widespread use of talks given by Stanley McChrystal who led multiple operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Post retirement, he has taught leadership at Yale University, serves on corporate boards and runs a consultancy.

His TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmpIMt95ndU

Even though TED talks such as this one are compelling and draw great leadership parallels, people may not buy in because of the root cause of the war itself. In this case they might say leadership skills exhibited by a country’s general don’t matter if the country should not have been there in the first place.

In this particular TED talk, if we zoom out for more context, we also listen to the same general who pressed for an expansion of targeted killing campaigns of High Value Targets in Afghanistan and Iraq, snatch and grab operations, night raids, all of which resulted in many botched missions due to faulty intelligence and ultimately civilian deaths. What else can we learn from the broader context of this Ted talk? Ignoring leadership, not building consensus and lacking diplomacy. These two wars are a perfect example of blatant disregard for international law. To enter another country with force, you need authorization from the UNSC (United Nations Security Council). No country signed off and neither did the UNSC. In 2004, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on behalf of the UN, declared the Iraq War, which has birthed countless talks, presentations and trainings, to be “illegal”.

We can discuss the second most commonly referenced war, Vietnam, and the issue of violating basic human rights.

Corporate culture loves war analogies. The military can give you more life lessons, arguably, than other field. We get to hear about high stress tolerance, discipline and adaptability, how to be a leader without being a boss, change management and motivation to name just a few. And these are why certain trainings need to tap into the veteran. The veterans in turn tap into their own personal experiences to bring presentations and concepts to life. However, these experiences and analogies are not coming from World War 2 where there was clear right and wrong from a global context (those experiences can be provided by the Traditionalists who came before the Baby Boomers and have now retired). The majority of experiences and examples we are given today stem from extremely controversial events such as Vietnam, the Gaza Strip and other Middle East issues, each of which need to be handled with sensitivity and care.

One employee may tell you intervention in Syria was absolutely necessary to stop the horrific use of chemical weapons and a second will point out that post intervention, there was no Syria left. “Who actually funded ISIS?” a third may ask. And by now we’ve also gone off topic from the main point of the session. Global audiences have varied opinions on how these crises should be handled. If a presentation using a war analogy is packaged in Washington or Germany and deployed in an offshore office in the Dubai the desired outcome could be sticky. 

The interjection to point two would be to ask - So do we avoid war analogies completely? Surely not! There are serious lessons to be learned.

Yes.

Which leads lead us to a more specific question and our final point to ponder.

Point Three. Does the world over rely on Western analogies? 

Remember watching Independence Day? Not the new one, the good one. Aliens attack. Almost everyone and everything gets blown up. And then the American President stands up on top of a truck in front of an old airplane hangar (the same one that housed the Enola Gay which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) and he addresses his troops: “Should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice: We will not go quietly into the night!”

Later there’s a fun montage of foreign countries. The Africans come with sticks.

The film made over $817 million worldwide.

Hollywood has dominated and influenced the global film industry because it’s one of the best. The American military has had its share of influence on Hollywood, and through it, on the world.  If you’re too young to remember this movie or the Pentagon assisted Top Gun, think about more recent films such as American Sniper and the Hurt Locker. Both phenomenal but unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of infrastructure crippling sanctions or cultural genocide.  If you think about it, we’ve been watching the same film for sixty five years.

Historical accuracy is not the subject in question. It is about perspective and the interest in providing two of them. One perspective is not wrong but reality is more ambiguous.

Now let’s shift gears back to our air con offices across the world. Similar to how Hollywood has dominated the film industry, the US corporate sector has dominated much of the world because, without doubt, it’s one of the best there is. As of 2019, the United States had 121 companies in the Fortune 500 (almost as much Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined). As companies span across continents and enter new markets, its employees become more diverse. While it’s important to link trainings back to the nerve centre of operations it’s equally important to think diversely, and we have in most spaces expect perhaps one.  

For the next veteran led presentation, let’s hear from a Viet Cong! Rice planters from paddy fields adopting Guerrilla warfare techniques to best the words most advanced army is an equally stunning case study for innovation and teamwork.