6: Jocko Willink - The Way of the Violent Intellectual: Difference between revisions

You don't think it's more profound...

I don't know if it's more profound. There are some really dynamic companies out there that have very, very deeply rooted cultures. And those are probably in some cases even more distinct than what you have inside the military. One thing that's interesting about the military Sure, there are some military traditions that go back hundreds of years. But the military people come and go in the military all the time, you know, as an officer in the military, you might spend two, maybe three years at an individual unit, and then you're gone and someone's gonna take your place. So it's not like a business or a company where sometimes you go to a company, I work with companies where there have been people there for 28 years, you know, throughout the chain of command, maybe it's a frontline worker that's been running some machines at a company for 27 years, or maybe it's the CEO who's owned the business or started the business or inherited the business or bought the business but he's been there for a long time. So those cultures can have kind of a more unified way about them because there's that continuity of, of human beings in it, whereas the military people move around and they get stationed they get out they retire. But so there's there are cultures I think, in, in everywhere in the military, certainly has a culture button, depending on what you're into. You know, if you go to a Grateful Dead show, you'll see a strong culture there that everyone dresses the same, everyone looks the same. Everyone probably thinks very similarly. If you go to a Metallica show, same thing, you know, people are going to dress very similarly. So I guess it just I think everyone's got a culture and it's present in the military, for sure. But I think there are cultures everywhere.

Somebody that was in the military once said to me that you have to understand that the military values interoperability in place of continuity. That because people are constantly being moved around the culture is almost defined by a kind of mental flexibility of a certain kind, and that person went on to say that American companies used to move people around and have stopped doing that largely so that it used to be in his estimation, that our companies like Procter and Gamble or an Exxon would be much more like the military, and that they would have an expectation that you would be posted to a particular place for a couple of years there would be sort of a Welcome Wagon. There was a way of absorbing families and that had actually been given up and that the military had retained some of that, but that that was in fact also at risk. I don't know whether that resonates at all?  

Well, certainly in the military, you have to be adaptable.

Right.  

And when you take different people all the time, and you cycle them into different military units, you learn to work with different people, that's for sure. And you can't get used to working with one type of human being, because even though that human being has been through Boot Camp, and they've been indoctrinated, they've still got all their own personal emotions and drives and personality and idiosyncrasies and things that are going to drive you crazy. And things that work well, and things that don't work well. And you've got to deal with all those things.

And so it is that that does happen in the military, and it happens in the civilian sector. Now, what I find interesting about that statement is, I think nowadays people change jobs a lot more than they did when I was a kid. When I was a kid, all my friend's parents worked at the same company for 29 years...

Yeah, but you might move around from company I need a company.