We are continuing our series based on David H. Freedman’s book entitled Corps Business (Freedman, David H. Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines. New York: HarperBusiness, 2000. Print.) in which Freedman effectively correlates the management principles that have led to more than 200 years of life-and-death success in the U.S. Marine Corps to the business world.

Organizations risk placing themselves at a disadvantage when they allow themselves to become defined by what they do, rather than by how they do it, because the environment in which almost everyone operates today has become extraordinarily dynamic. [p. 21]

Principle #3: Build a capability-based organizational mission

The Marines have targeted four primary competencies: impact, speed, versatility, and proficiency with complex situations. [p. 23]

In a great many businesses today, it is becoming less and less possible to compete based on the generic ground of products or services. It is becoming less important that you provide this or that product or service. It is becoming ever more important just how you provide your products or services.

The Marine Corps competes, if you will, with the U.S. Army and Air Force as a combat force. In theory, there is no real necessity for maintaining the USMC as part of the military in the U.S.

However, the Marines remain “the President’s ‘9-1-1’ force.” When there is an emergency anywhere in the world, the Marine Corps units are the ones that can respond within hours. And they do so with fewer people and less money than any of the other military force in the United States.

The Corps does this by emphasizing impact, speed, versatility and proficiency with complexity—the same things business enterprises and their supply chains need to compete successfully in a world full of complexity, accelerating rates of change, and increasing—rather than diminishing—levels of uncertainty.

While the Marine Corps does what the other branches of the military do—conduct combat on the ground and in the air—the key to their success is in how they do it and not what they do. Today’s competition in the business world is increasingly between supply chains and how they perform and less between individual business enterprises.

In its search for methods to improve its speed, versatility and proficiency with complexity, the Corps has leveraged the Theory of Constraints in its logistics and other operations.

Principle #4: Orient toward speed and [dealing with] complexity

Complexity can emerge from a number of factors: the need to accomplish simultaneous and multiple missions; a shortage of information (or equally disabling, a glut of raw information); situational novelty; situational ambiguity; multiple threats or obstacles; and most challenging of all, rapidly changing conditions. [p. 24]

Of course, the paragraph above can be translated by every reader into their own vernacular and applied to their own business and supply chain situations. Likely there is not one reader who cannot identify with these:

• The need to accomplish simultaneous and multiple missions – filling multiple and simultaneous demands for products or services with limited resources and potentially conflicting priorities
• A shortage of information (or equally disabling, a glut of raw information) – the unknowns in business and supply chain management are only offset by the sometimes equally confusing glut of numbers available from ERP and BI (business intelligence) systems that may show conflicting trends or results that are entirely different than the data upon which the latest replenishment orders were predicated
• Situational novelty – entirely new situations arise with a vendor, a customer or a competitor and take managers and executives by total surprise
• Situational ambiguity – sometimes, no matter where we look or how we try to decipher what we think we know, we are just not able to fully comprehend exactly what’s happening in our business, our industry or our supply chain
• Multiple threats or obstacles – this is everyday life in today’s business world where the small business in Hastings, Nebraska, is competing with a global enterprise with a plant in Thailand for the business of a firm headquartered in the Czech Republic
• Rapidly changing conditions – this, too, is an everyday occurrence in the business world and across supply chains

Speed has always been useful in the business world, but over the past decade it has become essential, and for a simple reason: almost everything else has sped up. Organizations that operate at a less-than-whirlwind pace risk being left behind. [p. 25]

Ponderous, bureaucracy-bound organizations and supply chains are doomed in today’s business world.

Though the Marines have always emphasized fast reaction and high impact, it is more recently that the Corps has added focus on mastering complexity and versatility. As a capability-based organization, the Marines have recognized that they have to keep an eye on the changing landscape and reassess the question of which capabilities provide the greatest edge. [p. 30]

The way the Marines have learned to manage complexity and increase the agility of their responses to rapidly-changing situations—situations, perhaps, that they have never before encountered—is to trust their people more, trust good training and human intuition to respond where no formula or algorithm exists to provide a timely solution.

The human mind remains, even today, the most power computer at the disposal of your business enterprise. And, agility—the ability to respond quickly to unanticipated changes—remains the strongest safeguard of your business enterprise and your supply chain’s success in today’s world.

Read the fifth and final blog in this series.