Company management affects profit and loss, while military management affects life and death. The U.S. military is not an army that moves audiences to tears in variety shows, but one that writes itself into MBA textbooks for business elites to learn from.

In May 2014, the University of Texas at Austin invited alumnus William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL officer who helped command the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, to deliver the commencement speech.

McRaven's speech was titled: "What the SEAL training story can inspire in young people about to enter the workforce." This speech was thought-provoking and may eventually have an impact comparable to Steve Jobs' famous "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" speech at Stanford's commencement in 2005.

This deserves our attention—a military officer giving a commencement speech at a prestigious university is not the military learning from college students, but college students learning from the military! Does this mean that beyond weapons, the military now has more advanced ideas than universities?

For the U.S. military, it truly does.

We used to say that weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; the main factor determining victory or defeat is people, not things.

The organization, management, and training methods of the military—these "human factors"—have always changed with the times. The U.S. military has been exploring and innovating in "human factors." Weapon upgrades are easy to see, but progress in "human factors" is hard to measure. Could we be overlooking the "soft" innovations of the U.S. military in this area?

I'd like to introduce some of the U.S. military's explorations in "human factors" through a few books. In my view, these innovations are not uniquely American but are methods forced by modern warfare, worth learning from by all armies. Even ordinary people are learning from the military—these new ideas, tested in real combat, have been widely applied to the organization and personnel development of ordinary American companies.

Developing People Through Extreme Environments

McRaven shared some lessons from SEAL training.

One simple lesson: every morning when you get up, you should make your bed. So the U.S. military also makes beds—why? He said that by making your bed, you achieve a small accomplishment. If you start each day with a small accomplishment, you'll develop a habit that motivates you to achieve more that day, cultivating a sense of accomplishment.

This sounds a bit like chicken soup. But if a piece of chicken soup can be executed militarily, it's no longer just chicken soup.

Every training may have some spiritual significance. Sometimes soldiers are severely punished for very small mistakes. For example, a slight uncleanliness in attire might result in a whole day of physical punishment.

Actually, this unreasonable approach is not mainly to teach people to be neat in appearance, but to make them realize that life is unfair.

McRaven said that in real life, you often encounter unreasonable things that feel unfair, but you still have to keep moving forward. This is a tempering of character.

Similar examples include being given two extra hours of training if you fail to meet the day's training targets—such punishment is designed to break you and make you quit, but those who were frequently given extra training and didn't break became stronger and stronger.

The SEALs encourage lower-ranking soldiers to innovate and take risks. A slide obstacle record stood unbroken for a long time, and finally, a soldier broke it by using a risky head-first sliding posture. In the final stage of training, soldiers are required to swim alone through shark-infested waters at night, and are told that if they encounter a shark, they must not flee or show fear—if you stay still, the shark may swim away on its own; if the shark actually attacks you... you punch it on the nose.

Safety is not the primary concern of the training officers.

Traditionally, we think Americans like individualism, but the SEALs place great emphasis on teamwork, such as small-unit kayak training. Through various collective actions, they convey to soldiers that you must cooperate with your teammates. Under the brutal conditions of special training where you must fight together, your skin color, education, family background, and social status don't matter—this is the environment that best embodies collectivism and equality.

We can imagine that a fresh graduate preparing to compete in society, though not risking their life, might still benefit from these SEAL lessons.

In fact, the SEALs' contribution to American success literature also includes management. In 2015, a bestseller called Extreme Ownership (editor's note: literally meaning "extreme ownership") was written by two former SEAL officers, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who after retiring founded a company that trains teams for commercial companies. The book discusses many team management principles and was well received. One interesting argument in the book is that a leader "owns" all the mistakes and shortcomings of their team—hence "ownership"—meaning that when something goes wrong, they must take the blame for the team.

Training the heart first, emphasizing unity and equality, unleashing the creativity of grassroots soldiers, and requiring leaders to lead by example—these are not unfamiliar to us. But the U.S. military seems to have gone a step further: mobilizing greater "initiative" and giving soldiers more autonomy—and even forcing soldiers to learn to make decisions on their own.

The Marine Corps prides itself on being no ordinary force, taking pride in being the first to arrive on the battlefield and the last to leave. It particularly emphasizes that soldiers must be able to make decisions on their own when encountering situations. The quality of U.S. military recruits is generally average; many are idle troublemakers from society, but the Marine Corps has a way to teach these people to control situations. "Obey orders and follow commands" is not the entire doctrine of this force.

According to Charles Duhigg's 2016 book Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, the Marine Corps has a recruit training exercise where a squad is suddenly assigned to clean the barracks kitchen, but they are not told what specifically to do or how to do it. The recruits have never done this work—they don't know where things should be put away, how to use the large dishwasher, how clean is clean enough, or even where to get cleaning tools. They have to figure it out on their own.

After the squad finishes cleaning the kitchen through trial and error, officers come out to critique the decisions they made during the process. Those who break through their personality limitations to actively make decisions are especially praised, such as a normally shy, small soldier who was commended for figuring out where the ketchup should go.

Marine recruits are paid very little, but their identification with the military and job satisfaction are very high.

Soldiers do not see service as a sacrifice, but rather as a rebirth.

"Deliberate Practice" Style Combat Training

The U.S. military has a training method called "after-action review" (AAR). Someone at West Point said that in the past 25 years, AAR has completely transformed the entire Army.

"After-action review" means that after training or real combat, all soldiers and officers discuss together the gains and losses of the operation. Regardless of rank, everyone must speak freely—for example, subordinates must frankly point out errors to superiors, telling them where they commanded incorrectly.

Isn't this immediate feedback? Isn't this the "deliberate practice" concept popular in psychology over the past decade? The U.S. military learned this "mass line" approach at a great cost—and has taken it to the extreme.

AAR originated during the Vietnam War. In World War II and the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force had a strong advantage, with air combat exchange ratios reaching 5:1, sometimes even 10:1—meaning they shot down five to ten enemy aircraft for every one of their own lost. But during the Vietnam War, the U.S. F-4 was clearly superior in performance to the MiG-21 used by the North Vietnamese, yet the exchange ratio was only 2.3:1. Unable to sustain such losses, the U.S. was so intimidated despite its advantage that it actually halted air combat for an entire year in 1968.

During that year without air combat, the Navy came up with a new method to train pilots, but the Air Force did not adopt it. The old training method had F-4 pilots fighting F-4 pilots—both pilots thought the same way, with no specificity, and they didn't know how MiG pilots thought.

The Navy's new method had three principles.

First, all actions and results must be recorded. Second, the training's mock enemy—the Blue Force—must be specific, as realistic as possible, and ideally even more capable than the Red Force. Third, after-action reviews must be conducted. In the review, every action could be questioned: Why did you make this move? What were you thinking? What would have happened if you had done it differently?

As a result, when air combat resumed a year later, the Navy's air combat exchange ratio improved from 2.4 to 12.5. The Air Force, sticking to the old training method, saw their ratio drop from 2.3 to 2.0.

From then on, this training method was promoted throughout the U.S. military. The Army also adopted it and learned it well. Now, all U.S. military training camps use the most realistic methods to simulate enemy situations, and AAR is thoroughly implemented. The Navy's training base that first used AAR was even featured in a movie—the famous Top Gun.

In the 2015 book Humans Are Underrated (editor's note: Chinese translation available), author Geoff Colvin elevated the U.S. military's AAR to the philosophical level of "the race between humans and machines."

AAR, as deliberate practice, trains not just adaptation to weapons and battlefield environments, but most crucially, adaptation to opponents and teammates! You have to learn to judge what the opponent is thinking, and also know what your teammates are thinking. These are not rigid tactics; they are human thinking.

Under high-tech conditions, the value of veterans is even higher—if a fighter pilot survives five or six air battles, they become invincible from then on; statistics show they would need to win another 50 to 100 times before being shot down. That is, the speed at which humans improve in real combat far exceeds the speed of improvement brought by weapons development. This is significant! In an era of machines, where is human value? It lies in the experience of those battle-hardened veterans.

So combat is not just weapon against weapon; ultimately, it is a struggle between people. Isn't this the "human factor"?

Delegating Authority to Grassroots Soldiers

An article circulating online says that in today's information age, a U.S. squad leader can call in air strikes within five minutes, a single soldier can call in artillery support within two minutes, and the U.S. high command can directly command individual soldiers.

This so-called "informationization" is not about the U.S. military's communications technology being remarkable—can't other countries' militaries also connect their high command directly to the front lines? There is a more advanced philosophy here: giving grassroots soldiers greater autonomy.

The U.S. military learned a profound lesson in the Iraq War. In the early stages of the Second Gulf War, the U.S. advanced with overwhelming force and captured Saddam. But later, during the occupation of Iraq, the situation deteriorated, and it could be said they were mired in a people's war. Often, Rumsfeld would devise a plan, simulate it on a computer, with terrain and everything correct, and have the military execute it strictly according to the script. But when they got to the scene and fought, they found the situation was completely different.

Perfect plans do not exist; fighting is always about frontline soldiers feeling their way forward. There's a saying that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So you can't rely on plans in war.

The U.S. military realized that relying solely on senior commanders' arrangements was not enough; victory required grassroots soldiers to make on-the-spot decisions based on frontline conditions. The classic decision-making method—first having a big-picture view, then executing layer by layer—no longer works.

Later, soldiers summed up experience in actual combat and even learned to develop relationships with local Iraqis, using "close ties with the masses" to counter the people's war.

This shift in U.S. military thinking even caught the attention of philosophers. In the 2012 book Too Big to Know (editor's note: Chinese translation available), Princeton philosophy professor David Weinberger specifically interviewed Anthony Burgess, the head of West Point's organization and leadership research institute. It turned out that this leader, besides military affairs, also had professional knowledge in cognitive science and education. He specializes in studying military command and leadership under modern warfare conditions, focusing on how a combat unit can accomplish tasks in unpredictable environments.

Burgess's new idea is that leadership is not derived from a single individual in the combat unit, but is an overall attribute of the unit.

What is leadership?

Leadership is whether the team remains loyal to the mission and can persist in completing it under any circumstances. Leadership is whether the team can find new ways to accomplish the mission if objective conditions change. Leadership is whether others can continue the mission if someone is injured and loses combat capability. Leadership is whether the team can proactively shift to new combat objectives after completing the mission.

In the movie Assembly, a small squad is ordered to undertake an almost impossible blocking mission, paying the price of nearly all being killed, and finally completing the mission through the persistence of company commander Gu Zidi. But the U.S. military's current requirement for leadership is that even if Gu Zidi dies at the start of the battle, the remaining soldiers can still complete the mission, and each of them believes the mission can be accomplished.

Such leadership indeed does not come from a single excellent leader; it can only be distributed throughout the entire combat unit.

The U.S. military has taken this to the extreme: soldiers can not only make suggestions in advance, but also have decision-making power during operations. Everyone must exercise their organizational ability, with power distributed within the team, resulting in team decision-making.

We can think about what this means for companies. Decentralization, letting frontline personnel decide on their own, has the greatest benefit of enabling rapid response to new situations. This decentralization is precisely the most popular trend in current corporate management theory, and almost every book on decentralized management uses the U.S. military as a case study.

What Should Soldiers Be?

Media around the world love to report on various U.S. military misdeeds, such as prisoner abuse, sexual harassment, and rape of women in Japan. The impression is that you're just good with weapons, but your "human factor" is lacking.

In fact, the U.S. military is an army that writes its lessons into MBA textbooks for business elites to learn from.

The biggest inspiration from SEAL training is not the spirit of sacrifice, but specific training techniques. Accumulating a sense of accomplishment bit by bit, maintaining equanimity toward unfairness, equal cooperation within the team, and the leader's sense of responsibility—these are all very useful competitive abilities. Developing these abilities relies on imitable, operable training methods, not on being moved to tears.

American business circles should learn from the military because military experience comes from the battlefield. Company management only affects whether you make money, but military management directly determines life and death.

War is the most extreme competitive environment, and the military must be the most powerful and innovative force. The U.S. military may be the institution most willing to study human organizational methods, placing more importance on management science than any business school.

As a result, major companies like to hire retired military officers for management positions. Senior project manager roles are well-suited for soldiers—a commander who can organize young soldiers to complete complex missions can lead an engineering team to get the job done.

Another example is the Chief Information Officer (CIO), a position with a median annual salary exceeding $160,000, which is also often filled by retired military officers. In the military, information exchange is more important than direct combat, so soldiers naturally excel at this job.

Soldiers should be role models for inspiration, not just objects of sympathy.

Being especially able to endure hardship and sacrifice are fine qualities, but such people may not necessarily become role models for young people. If you are especially capable of fighting, especially capable of getting things done, and especially capable of mobilizing all means to achieve victory, such abilities are more attractive. A soldier who survives in extreme environments by killing the enemy and returning alive deserves our respect, not our tears.

Long-lasting peace, without the need for war, is of course the best. But on the other hand, having a military that frequently fights, is good at summarizing combat experience, and is willing to share that experience with society seems not bad either.

Especially if these wars are fought abroad.

The military academy reform led by five-star generals cultivated more than 160 generals for the WWII U.S. military.

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