Warfighting Book Club – Week Three

This is Week Three in the Warfighting Book Club, relating the Marine Corps doctrinal publication Warfighting to business agility.

This section is not my favorite, but raises a lot of good questions to consider organizationally.

Warfighting Week Three Leader’s Notes and Questions

[Page numbers and quotes are taken from Warfighting, MCDP 1, 2019 Edition]

• Sections:  Force Planning – Organization – Doctrine – Professionalism – Training – Professional Military Education – Personnel Management – Equipping – Conclusion
• Questions:
  • If you saw this chapter’s section headings in a table of contents, with just a couple of words changed (maybe “Force” for “Team”, and either remove “Military” or focus it more on your craft), what kind of book would you think it was?
  • What is the non-military equivalent of force planning?  How often do we do that?
  • Can someone summarize the “organization” section for us?
    • We could camp out in “Organization” all day and have a great discussion, but we won’t.  But the second-to-last paragraph caught my eye.  3-5 “Operating forces should be organized for warfighting and then adapted for peacetime rather than vice versa.”
      • Let’s pause there and ask what the equivalent of “warfighting” and “peacetime” are for us.  [Project work = warfighting; training, education, learning, retros = peacetime?]
        • That has interesting implications by itself—what happens to military units that are always on a war footing?
      • What would it mean for our “operating forces” to be organized for “warfighting” (= project work)?
      • How do you react to the last sentence:  “Units should be organized according to type only to the extent dictated by training, administrative, and logistic requirements”?
  • What does “Professionalism” mean to you?
  • Do you agree with the book that “trust is an essential trait among leaders”?
  • What effect do mistakes have on your ability to trust someone else?
  • Do you err on boldness or timidity?  Does [YOUR COMPANY]?
  • READ paragraph on 3-8 “Relations among all leaders…”.  What’s your reaction to that paragraph?  How does that apply in the workplace?
  • Training is interesting to dig into:
    • How much time do we allow for OTJ training?
    • How are our training programs structured?
    • What does training typically look like for your craft?
    • In what way—and level of frankness—are critiques provided for training (or actual) events here?
  • Whose responsibility is professional development?
    • (Three-tier:  education establishment, commanders, individual Marines)
    • If you’re not growing professionally, who is responsible for that?
    • If your employees are not growing professionally, who is responsible for that?
  • What do you think of “the mind is an officer’s principal weapon”?
  • “Doctrine provides the basis for harmonious actions and mutual understanding” — do we have “Doctrine” in the workplace?
    • What is the effect of having or not having doctrine?
  • In the workplace, how much time do we spend “waging war” — doing the work — and how much do we spend “preparing for war” — learning, growing, becoming educated?
    • And what’s the effect of that ratio on our effectiveness, growth, and long-term sustainability?