Can you see how useful standards are? Can you see how standards back up the ideals of the Flawless Execution cycle? It’s like lacing your fingers together—the fit is perfect. You orient yourself toward Flawless Execution, but you also set basic standards for everyone to fall back on. Together, this keeps us aiming toward that immovable object, but not at expense of becoming a smoking hole in the ground. When the plan falls apart, we have a system in place to make sure that everyone is still making an eight-and-a-half pizza.
Standards extend into every aspect of your business. We have a rigorous process for hiring new facilitators, and it, too, is part of our standards manual. First, without exception, to even be interviewed, you have to be recommended by one of our teammates. Why is this? Our people know what we’re looking for, what an Afterburner facilitator is. The perfect new team member is not the most tactical Navy, Marine, or Air Force aviator; the best stick in the squadron; or the hottest pilot. Yes, they have to be former fighter pilots, but more importantly, they have to be fighter pilots who can relate their tactical aviation experiences to a civilian, usually through the filter of their own business experiences (almost all of our facilitators have been or are involved in a business). Beyond that, they must be comfortable speakers who make eye contact, and they’re usually happy people—you know the type. By nature, or because they still fly for the Reserves or the Guard, they must be physically fit.
Once you’ve been recommended to us, our operations officer interviews you. He looks at your resume and gets you on a telephone interview. Then, if you pass muster, you fly to Atlanta, where you meet a partner. First, we take you to dinner and have some drinks. Did the candidate wear appropriate business casual as briefed or did he or she come under- or overdressed? Did he or she have more than one or two drinks? Could we trust this person to dine with a Fortune 500 executive and represent us?
The next day the candidate is told to report to the office in business attire at 0800—not 0745 or 0801. Once they get to the office, they’ll go through a business interview to test their basic business knowledge, and then they’ll be asked to give two three-minute presentations. One will be on a subject with which they are very familiar, regarding their flying background, and the other will be on a business leadership topic. If you get a thumbs up, you go to your first seminar. This is important. We want them to see the show, to see the seminar with all the lights, noise, and visuals up there. Are they comfortable with that? Can they handle an audience this large? If so, we hand them our standards guide. “Know it cover to cover,” we say, and then we fly them to their second seminar. We actually put them to work on this second trip. It’s a part of our training cycle we call demo/do—demonstrate to the student what you want them to do, then have the student do it. In this case, they’ve read the standards manual and know what to wear, what to bring, and what the script is for their role in the meeting. We have them follow a facilitator, watch how it’s done, and expect them to do it flawlessly on their third trip.
On your third seminar, you have an instructor flying on your wing, and you do it. It’s a three-seminar checkout process. Make it through all three, and you’re hired.
One of the hard parts about standards is that they take time to implement. In the ideal world, I’d hand out a standards manual and you’d be groomed perfectly on every trip after that. In truth, it takes time and repetition. A behavioral psychologist did some study and found that it actually takes ninety days for a human to really pick something up and make it part of his or her daily regimen. If you’ve never been a dental flosser and you’re trying to floss every morning, if you try it here and there, it’ll never become a habit, but if you give it ninety days, most likely, you’ll change you behavior permanently. What was hard at first is now habit.
No plan goes off without a hitch or a flaw. That’s the way it is. The competition is trying to beat you, the environment changes, the technology changes, a piece of equipment fails—things happen. What’s important is to make progress towards the immovable goal, the beacon, the Future Picture. That takes standards.
When the plan breaks down, you need standards to fall back on. You have to be able to rely on a minimum level of execution based on standards alone. That’s what Flawless Execution’s all about. In a sense, standards bring you full circle—they are the ultimate contingency plan. You can count on them to keep the system working. You can rely on them for a minimum level of execution until you fix the problem.
Without them, you come to a complete halt.
CHAPTER 17
Training
The foundation of everything is training. Say it again and again. Training is essential to Flawless Execution. Training is nothing less than the rock-hard foundation upon which Flawless Execution is built.
The business world has an argument with that. The CEOs say: “Well, Murph, we don’t have time to train because we’re living and breathing our mission every day.”
I don’t disagree. But they’re missing the point. No time for training because you’re living and breathing and flying your mission every day? My answer? “Well,” I say, “we’re pretty busy, too, you know. We actually call that combat.” Then I lay it out straight: “We even train during combat, because every time we have a mission, even if it’s a real, heads-up, no-kidding combat mission, we have our mission objective, we have our secondary objectives, and sometimes we even have DLOs—our desired learning objectives. Wars aren’t won in one mission; war is a sustained campaign. And if we don’t continually train during a sustained campaign, if we don’t strive to learn, to brush up on our other skills while we’re sustaining that campaign, we’re never going to get better. Worse, if our missions are the same day in and day out, we may be letting some critical skills get rusty that might be called on tomorrow. If that happens, we’re never going to get out of that unexpected problem that will kill us.”
That’s why there’s always time for training, even on a combat mission during war.
If you’re in it to win, if you’re to transfer the concepts of Flawless Execution into a daily practice, you can’t look at training as a problem. It isn’t a hindrance. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. You have to have training, and, believe me, you have to have ongoing training, even while you fly a combat mission.
Sometimes that answer isn’t enough, though. I understand that. But there’s another way to look at training, and it is salient to the pressing demands of the fast-changing, hypercharged world of business today. We don’t quit training and you don’t quit training. Your environment and my environment are changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up, much less jump ahead. Everything in life is in a continuum, and that continuum is called change. If you’re going to get ahead and win, you’ve got to be able to create change at a faster rate than the rate at which the environment is changing. Colonel John Warden, one of the planners of the Desert Storm air campaign, said it best in his book, Winning in Fast Time: “You won’t win in the twenty-first century by merely reacting to change or making incremental improvements to maintain your current position. To win, you must decide what you want your tomorrow to be, and then make it happen faster than the rate of change in your competitive environment” (John A. Warden III and Leland A. Russell, Winning in Fast Time, Venturist Publishing, 2002). How can you stay ahead of the rate of change if you’re rusty on your basic skills? How can you stay ahead of the rate of change if you don’t have any idea what your sales data mean? How do you counter the tendency to get soft, to relax, to ride on yesterday’s skills? You train. You train just like an NFL football team trains. You throw 1,000 passes to that same wide receiver on that same route until the two of you can connect with your eyes closed. Dull knives don’t cut. Rusty keys won’t open locks. You train the essential life skills that you have to use in your competitive environment until you can complete that pass with your eyes closed. You study the competition (a form of training). You plan contingencies (another form of training). You practice your execution. And you r
epeat it and repeat it time and again until your skills are not only sustaining you but have you accelerating ahead of the pack.
That’s the secret to real training. You sharpen the knife. You oil the pliers. And when your tools are at their peak performance, you often jump ahead of the pack. You turn faster, you react quicker to a missile, and maybe you do something that no one has ever done before, and viola! You just jumped ahead of the rate of change. I can’t count the number of innovations that came from trained soldiers smart enough in their essential skills to leap ahead with an innovation that forever changed tactics. In World War II, a Marine Corps fighter pilot in the Pacific named Pappy Boyington came up with deflection aiming. Some soldier on the ground in France modified the tanks to break through the hedgerows. And, as amazing as it sounds, during World War II, someone actually came up with the idea of having a direct communication link between the ground forces and the air forces. It had never been thought of before! Preparation meets opportunity, and innovation is its birth child.
The reason our fighter pilots are better than any other fighter pilots in the world (and I’m not talking about technology—some of the new Russian technology is almost as good, if not better, than the stuff we have) is that our pilots are trained at such a high level.
People with sharp fundamental skills are invariably the catalysts. It’s that simple. But there’s training and then there’s Training. So it should come as no surprise to you by now to learn that fighter pilots have a four-step process that accelerates training and maintains life’s essential skills. That process is this:
Step 1: DLOs (desired learning objectives)
Step 2: Demo/Do
Step 3: Discipline
Step 4: Continuation Training
DESIRED LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In the Air Force, pilots are told that they’re responsible for their own training. As an Air Force pilot, this was repeated to me time and time again. “You keep track of your book time and you keep track of your simulator time. You’re responsible for your own training. If you’re going to get better, you’re training cycles will get better, but it’s up to you.”
One of the most effective ways to penetrate the brain and reach wherever it is that we store our experiences and actually learn is through hands-on training. Fighter pilots would start their training cycles with DLOs—desired learning objectives. My training officer would stand before me and say: “Go study this, Murph. This is how you do this maneuver—the Cuban eight. I want you to read about this tonight. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to come over to the squadron, and I’m going to brief you on how to do a Cuban eight. Then we’re going to go demo/do.”
Each block in our training begins with a DLO, and each DLO has with it a specific question: What do we want to learn today? What are the desired outcomes for today? The desired outcome may be to learn a Cuban eight or maybe how to navigate by compass alone or maybe how to lay sixteen pieces of pepperoni on a pizza. DLOs are very, very clear, measurable, specific desired learning objectives with exact parameters. The whole mission is built on one outcome—to learn it—and the whole debrief will focus on that outcome. “Did we meet our desired learning objectives in this area?” Yes? No? If not, why not?
Begin the training process like any mission: by stating a clear, measurable, achievable objective, and then executing your mission. In this case, execution may be to hit the books or to attend Pizza University or to rehearse a presentation before you stand before the client, but the secret of the learning process, the success ingredient in the fighter pilot’s way of training, is to take it in steps, to take it one by one with clear, exact DLOs. Then, my friends, you do it, hands on.
DEMO/DO
After I’d studied the manual and understood the maneuver, the next step was to demo/do the maneuver. The training commander would probably stand up again and say to me: “I understand what the manual says, and that’s what you think it means; but here’s really why we wrote that. Let me show you.” Demo. “I’m going to demonstrate the Cuban eight for you. I’m going to show you how to do it, and then I want you to do it. And we’re going to do it over and over again. We’re going to demo/do, demo/do, demo/do.”
And I did that for a year, on every single maneuver. I read about it, I briefed it, I got it “demo-doed,” and then I did it. I did it over and over again. And pretty soon, when I did these maneuvers 1,000 times over two years, out popped a fighter pilot. I hadn’t been in an academic or theoretical training environment; I’d been doing things, doing them myself, touching the controls, feeling the G-forces, so when I had it down, I really had it down. My DLO was no longer something I had to think about. It became second nature. It was like an old glove.
How does demo/do work in the business environment? In many ways, big and small, as I learned the hard way. During the second year of Afterburner’s being in business, I was speaking in front of 10,000 people in the Los Angeles Convention Center. We had a new software program. Our videos were streaming right off our computer hard drives so we didn’t have to use separate VHS or beta tapes. Now, we always hire a local AV production company to handle the tricky timing of the audio CDs and the video images. This day was no different, but as it happened, things were rushed, and we were unable to do a compete dry run with the new outfit and with our new presentation software. Of course, the audiovisual company we hired tried to reassure me that they were professional and could handle the script and did this all the time. Well, we learned, even then, in our second year of business, that our Macintoshes are different from most PCs, and, a lot of times we have interface problems. That day we had just a ten-minute dry run, and right away we had interface problems. We got over that but the time was up so I handed the technician the script with his audiovisual cues and said, “Follow this.”
Of course, the AV guy had five other presentations that day. He had his professional pride on the line, so he said, “Okay, great. I’ll just read the script. I do it all the time,” and I walked out onstage. Boy, did I learn to practice what I preach.
I followed a pretty famous comedian, and the whole place was just rocking and rolling. After thunderous applause and waves of laughter, he introduced us. He said: “Now, we’re going to bring up some top guns, some real, red-blooded, American fighter pilots,” and the anticipation he developed was intense. So, to our stirring music, I walked onstage in my flight suit. I was walking left and right before 10,000 people with images of F-15s and F-16s flashing behind me as I started my intro when all of a sudden the screen went szchwew! and a video segment not due for five more minutes started running. The AV guy misread the cues. It started playing in front of 10,000 people. I said over my microphone, “Can you hit the return button real quick and play that in just a minute?” This poor fellow hit return, and the whole program crashed.
Luckily, we always travel with a primary computer and a backup computer, so we switched to the backup. The seminar went on without a hitch, but for three agonizing minutes, I was on the stage in front of 10,000 people with a video screen that was sputtering with almost nothing happening. I had violated my own rule of demo/do. My fault. But it was a huge lesson learned. No matter how rushed, always demo/do. That’s the way training works in even the sharply compressed time frame of everyday business. You use the process even on a quick hand-off.
Nowadays, I never hand anyone a script. Rather, I demo/do. I make them write down, in their own notes, in their own handwriting, their own script. Yes, I get complaints all the time: “You don’t have a script for us to follow? You know, a timeline, or anything with your slides or pictures?” I say no. In fact, it’s our standard to say no. Demo/do, right? I want them to look at the script themselves, and I want them to write down, in their own notes, with their own words, what to do when, and I want them to visualize the presentation. Then I have them advance slides and trigger some AV. That’s how you train on the fly—train even in the middle of the workflow. You fall back on the process. They have to take my presentation and make it th
eirs. I have to make that happen. Demo/do works best. You can’t do it any other way. Demo/do.
Training is an art. You can tell people all day long how to do something, and they can read about it and study it, but they have to live it. You have to put the paintbrush in their hand. They have to sit down in front of the computer and work their way through the commands until they’ve mastered the new reservation system or the new CRM software. They don’t watch. They have to do. And then, when they’ve got it mastered, they have to have the discipline to use it.
DISCIPLINE
The third step in training is discipline. In our model, discipline is the discipline to carry out the process, to prosecute the standards, to fall back on good training. I’d have assumed you’re trained and you’re a killer if you showed up at my squadron. But would you have the discipline to execute within the standards of our squadron? Maybe we found out that operating in the Middle East is little different from operating in North Carolina, and you’re from North Carolina but we’re about to redeploy to the Middle East. With the experience of squadrons that have deployed before us, we have a set of standards and they’re different from your home base’s squadron standards. We’ve all been trained the same way and we’re all in the same company. Would you be disciplined enough to fly in my squadron with my standards? Could you stay on the process? Could you stay on the plan? If you didn’t have that, then you couldn’t move on to the next level.
Flawless Execution Page 16
