The document summarizes the author's experience as a professor at the US Army War College, where senior Army leaders are trained. Some key lessons about leadership that the author learned from the Army include: 1) The Army pioneered the study of leadership and places great emphasis on developing leadership skills through various schools and training programs. 2) Processes like the After Action Review help the Army continuously learn and improve through reflection on successes and failures. 3) The concept of "Commander's Intent" provides strategic guidance while allowing flexibility in implementation. 4) Understanding different perspectives, including that of an enemy, is important for strategic thinking and devising effective counterstrategies.

1. From: Public Manager, January, 2011
www.govloop.com/tag/georgia-sorenson/
Envisioning Leadership Beyond the Battlefield – How Do You Do It?
If public managers want to go straight to the source on cutting edge-
leadership thinking and practice, they should head for the U.S. Army.
That’s what I did in 2005 when I accepted a one-year appointment as the
Inaugural Chair and Professor of Transformation for the US Army. I was
deployed to the US Army War College, where senior Army leaders are
groomed to be generals and a number of civilian leaders from around the
world experience a year long residential leadership education.
Why the Army?
The U.S. Army pioneered the study of leadership and established the
first leadership studies department at West Point. Indeed, the chair
of that department, General Howard Prince, was the founding dean
of the first civilian school of leadership studies at the University of
Richmond.
Second, the Army is where the federal research dollars flowed.
President Eisenhower and others during the WWII and post-war
period instituted significant research moneys for military and
independent scholars at Ohio State, Washington State, Michigan,
and elsewhere to study leadership and followership, an obvious need
to keep our forces competitive. The work of Bernie Bass, Edward
Hollander, Jerry Hunt and many other seminal scholars benefited
from Army research dollars.
And the research dollars in leadership have continued to flow, with
top people studying exciting frontiers such as the “mental model of
the battlefield” (training soldiers to fight the battles they mentally
create rather than the one in front of them- the battlefield of the
mind), or how to establish coherence and trust in a mixed “swarm”
of humans and robots. And those are the unclassified studies. I was
eager to explore what the Army was funding during this wartime
period in our history.
Trust and integrity have always been central to my own leadership
brand. Leadership scholars universally agree that trust is
foundational in the art of leadership. The military has ranked No. 1 or

2. No. 2 in Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions list
(outperforming small business, the church, the news media, the
presidency, etc.) almost every year since the measure was instituted
in 1973, and has been No. 1 continuously since 1998.i
How do they
do it? I wanted to know.
Third, the U.S. Army has developed an extensive organizational
culture of leadership, including sequential and progressive schools
and courses focused on leadership, operational assignments designed
to stretch and develop leadership capacity, a focus on individualized
self-development and a system of empowering others. In short, it’s a
marriage of “Be All You Can Be” with an organizational leadership
culture of “Army Strong.” How is it that the young soldiers I visit at
Walter Reed, many without limbs, want nothing more than to re-join
their platoon comrades back in the battlefield? How does the Army
foster that kind of group cohesion, regardless of what you might
think of it?
Lastly, I wanted to discover what leadership on the edge might look like:
in an organization that cannot afford mistakes and where decisions are
often a matter of life or death – what the Army calls “leadership in
extremis.” “A situation of such exceptional urgency that immediate action
must be taken to minimize imminent loss of life or catastrophic
degradation of the political or military situation.ii
An IED or speeding
bullet has a way of sharpening the mind.
Our book, Strategic Leadership: The General’s Art (Mark Grandstaff and
Georgia Sorenson, Management Concepts, 2009) is a full account of what
I learned about these matters and more importantly, how the US Army
teaches leadership to its senior and general officers.
To begin at the beginning, general officers must learn the art of Strategic
Thinking. The Army defines strategy as “the art and science of
developing and using political, economic, psychological, and military
forces as necessary during peace and war, to afford the maximum support
to policies, in order to increase the probabilities and favorable
consequences of victory and to lessen the chances of defeat.” iii
Strategic
leadership guides operational and tactical levels, and the Army focused on
four aspects of Strategic Leadership: Critical Thinking, Systems
Thinking, Thinking in Historical Time, and Creative Thinking.
Using a model designed by Army War College faculty member Stephen
Garras and described in detail in the book, critical thinking aims to
avoiding self-delusion when stakes are high. Critical thinking is the

3. deliberate, conscious, and appropriate application of reflective criticism to
improve judgment.
One aspect of critical thinking is the continuous learning process. The
Army has a sophisticated process becoming familiar in other settings --the
After Action Review (AAR) – to facilitate ongoing reflective learning. The
U.S. Army is one of the few organizations to have institutionalized these reflection
and review processes, and are now standard Army procedure. In practice, this means
that all participants meet immediately after an important activity to review their
assignments, identify successes and failures, and look for ways to perform better the
next time around. The discussion always revolves around the same four questions:
What did we set out to do?
What actually happened?
Why did it happen?
What are we going to do next time?iv
These reflections are gathered and in some cases posted on line with the Center for
Army Lessons Learned (http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/ll-links.asp) an
amazing portal open to the public of learning and wisdom gathered in
routine AARs.
Systems Thinking involves the impact of strategic leadership on a system
of activities and actors. Most of us are pretty well schooled in systems
concepts. George Reed, a USAWC faculty member and now a professor
at the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of
San Diego, outlines the major influences of system thinking on the US
Army in Systems Thinking and Senior Leadership.
Of interest to leaders and leadership scholars like myself is the impact of
the leader’s guidance on the system as a whole. The concept of
Commander’s Intent (CI) is attributed to the military genius of Napoleon
and his corps d’armee system. Combat orders, often a source of confusion
due to their subjective interpretations and iterative nature needed a sharper
focus and precision impact, without infringing on the creative
implementation of the “boots on the ground.” CI’s are the commander's
personal expression of why an operation is being conducted and what he
or she hopes to achieve.
CIs are increasingly used in the private sector and good ones are simple
and take considerable thought. In the One Laptop Per Child initiative, for
example, "...to empower the children of developing countries to learn by
providing one connected laptop to every school-age child" says it all. CI’s
are usually written, between 41- 450 words, and provide strategic
guidance needed at all levels. How the CI is implemented is entrusted to
everyone involved in the activity.
Those of you leading efforts at the federal level are no doubt aware of the Offie of

4. Personnel Management’s Executive Core Qualifications v
ECQs describe the
leadership skills needed to succeed as strategic leaders in the Senior Executive
Service, and identifies five executive core competencies.vi
1. Leading Change
2. Leading People
3. Results Driven
4. Business Acumen
5. Building Coalitions
The Leading Change ECQ requires senior federal executives to
strategically identify and concisely articulate their vision, mission, and
strategic objectives, using methods introduced in the Commander’s Intent
process.1
President Obama has modeled strong CI. (Hint, Obama’s CI is
usually preceded by the statement: “Let me be clear.”) For example, in
the first interview after his inauguration, his directive about terrorist
strategy was “Let me be clear: we need to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden” – and was cited 253,000 times on Google.
The fog of war or indeed the fog of economic recession demands shifts in
consciousness and accessing new neural pathways -- in short, Creative
Thinking. Napoleon was a master of what is known in military science as
“coup d’oeil,” an intuitive and inspired situational awareness to solve
battlefield dilemmas.vii
Creative Thinking can peel away mental models, fixed beliefs, and
limiting mindsets. Interesting enough, because of the United States long
history in warfare and reconstruction in the Asian Pacific Rim (Japan,
China, Korea, Philippines, Viet Nam) we have a fair number of Buddhist
and Zen practioners at the senior level of the military. Some of the
creative thinking at the War College takes the form of sophisticated
mental jujitsu and its amazingly creative.
As a Quaker and Buddhist myself, I gave myself a personal query to turn
over in my mind during my time with the War College and that was “to
1
From George Reed: “Prussian military theorists, specifically Gerhard Johann David Waitz von
Scharnhorst (1755–1813) and Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891) devised the Commander’s Intent. Von
Moltke believed in providing only the most essential orders and encouraging subordinates to exercise
initiative and flexibility within them. This was known as Auftragstaktik and we have come to refer to this
approach as mission command as opposed to detailed command. While there is a place for detailed orders
to address the myriad technical and logistical requirements of modern warfare, thus the encyclopedic nature
of many military planning documents, many argue that the most important part of the modern five
paragraph operations order is the commander’s intent that is typically expressed in the commander’s own
hand. It clearly establishes the desired end state and major parameters that subordinates are expected to
follow. It addressed the “why” question more clearly than the “how.” It recognizes that there may be many
ways to achieve success and it provides latitude to deviate from specifics so long as the intent of the
commander is satisfied.”

5. know my enemy’s enemy.” (Of course in this age of collaboration no one
has an enemy, but I take the wording from The Book of Five Rings by the
samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi, circa 1645 -- Buddhist sword
scripture, which in itself is both practical metaphorical but well before the
collaboration trend hit the news stands).
So how to begin: The Army first focuses on Socrates dictum: Know
Thyself. Each soldier engages in self-assessment, testing, self-reflection,
360-degree feedback and much else.
The Army also demands that a warfighter leader knows the enemy
intimately, whether through intelligence, research, profiling, or regional
experts, (in the corporate world, scans, spies, and competitive analysis are
comparable, and of course the political world is rife with opposition
research).
Although the Army does not explicitly use the sword fighter’s challenge
of “knowing your enemy’s enemy” like I did, there is intense
gamesmanship between nations, and military leaders to understand how
we are seen by the enemy, with the assumption that if we know how we
are viewed, we will be able to predict their strategic maneuvers. Makes
sense.
It was assumed that during the Gulf War, for example, Iraqi analysts
accurately hypothesized that the US leaders would not bomb children,
mosques, or other cultural iconic structures, and thus housed their
munitions and military operations in the basement of schools and religious
institutions. They closely assessed their enemy (the US) and acted
accordingly. (Apparently, they assessed us as a predominately
fundamentalist Christian country, which isn’t accurate, but in terms of
strategy implications, it still worked).
As Sadaam increased his reliance on his “human shield strategy” US
actors had to creatively use the Iraqi assessment of us to create a counter
strategy. The result: more” smart bombs” and precision munitions were
used to “surgically” eliminate enemy targets and avoid civilian targets in
schools and mosques.
Knowing yourself is hard work. Knowing your enemy is equally
challenging. Knowing how you are seen by others and devising a counter
strategy based on this profile is a vastly more complicated enterprise. And
if you happen to master this feat in real time, you can always work on the
strategic implications of your enemy’s enemy’s enemy enemy ad
infinitum.

6. I have to admit, despite a rich intellectual environment and many good
friends at the War College, after a year my brain hurt. I joined the faculty
at the University of Maryland School of Law with a Fetzer grant that
focuses on transforming legal education with a focus on leadership, love,
and forgiveness.
ii
Saad, Lydia, Americans Confidence in Military Up, Banks Down, Surge in
confidence around presidency reflects new administration, June 24, 2009,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/121214/americans-confidence-military-banks-down.aspx,
Accessed September 28, 2010.
ii
See Army Field Manual, FM 100-5-1, http://www.fas.org/man/dod-
101/army/docs/fm101-5-1/f545-i.htm, Accessed October 1, 2010.
iii
iv
David A Garvin, “Learning In Action, A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work” (Boston:
Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 106-116.
v
Guide to the SES Qualifications June 2010
vi
I do believe the ECQs need to revisit the concept of courage, an increasing difficult in bureaucracies that
tend to stifle individual conscience. As Thomas Jefferson reminds us, “One man with courage is a
majority,” and Winston Churchill observed, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities...
because it is the quality which guarantees all others.” In the military I learned to use the “Permission to be
candid, Sir” approach, which I am employing here with respect to the ECQs.
vii
I once walked the Gettysburg battlefield with a group of colonels and generals in a
leadership exercise known as the Staff Ride. I asked if coup l’oiel might be akin to
“women’s intuition” and men asserted that it most certainly was not.