About 15 years ago, I worked with a man who was passed over for a training position even though he had spent most of his military career educating sailors for Uncle Sam. The job went to a person who had more degrees and certifications.
Hiring a better resume is always the safest step for management, particularly when those making the selection haven't experienced military efficiency firsthand. And, mind you, this hire occurred pre-Sept. 11, when it wasn't unusual for a veteran in the workplace to be met with more suspicion than appreciation.
Thankfully, those days are waning.
On the cover of the latest edition of Fortune magazine is Steve Mumm, a General Electric project manager. He's dressed in desert cammo and is holding a weapon. To the left of the photo is a short bio: West Point, Army captain, task force engineer and platoon leader in Tikrit. To the right is a headline that lifted my spirits: Meet The New Face of Business Leadership.
The article by Brian O'Keefe details that, in spring 2008, Wal-Mart confronted a serious management problem. Promoting from within could not keep pace with the company's growth. CEO Bill Simon had an idea. The 25-year Navy and Naval Reserve vet suggested the company recruit junior officers leaving the military. In four months, Wal-Mart hired 150 former junior officers and discovered it had struck human resources gold. One senior recruiting manger put it this way: World-class leaders were showing up at their doorstep, and all Wal-Mart had to do was teach them retail.
One can only hope that after decades of pursuing highly credentialed talent, American business is finally rediscovering the value of leaders, particularly those with military experience.
Two studies - a soon-to-be-published work by Harvard and MIT economists Efraim Benmelech and Carola Frydman and a 2006 project completed by the executive search firm Korn/Ferry - identified the ability to lead and undertake great responsibility at a young age as a major advantage for military veterans over their civilian counterparts. That real-world experience is why nearly all of the CEOs interviewed in the Korn/Ferry study preferred a military background to an MBA when appointing a young person to lead a department.
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told O'Keefe that he admires the military's ability to deal with ambiguity, a skill honed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Professor Leonard Wong (West Point 1980) said generals to corporals deployed in Iraq found that much of what they had been taught didn't apply. To accomplish their missions, leaders in the field had to adapt and improvise, at times making it up as they went along. In Iraq and Afghanistan, changing the paradigm has become routine.
Both studies, to varying degrees, quantify the benefits of seating a veteran in the CEO's chair. For me, trustworthiness is the most important attribute. The two works are split about whether former military CEOs are more ethical. I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the most scandalous corporate frauds in American history (Enron's collapse and the sub-prime mortgage bubble) happened as the percentage of veterans occupying the corner office was falling precipitously. According to Benmelech and Frydman, 59 percent of CEOs had military experience in 1980. Today, that number stands at just 8 percent.
Their soon-to-be published work, Military CEOs, did not find a correlation between ethical behavior and military service, but the Korn/Ferry study did. Nearly all of the veteran CEOs interviewed by Korn/Ferry cited military ethics as a foundation for their leadership. Former Navy pilot and ITT Chairman Steven Loranger told Korn/Ferry researchers that the military taught him the importance of an organization's obligation to fulfill its social contract. It's not just winning that matters in the business world, it's how you win.
Too bad Loranger wasn't an investment banker.
If there is a fault with the Fortune piece and recent academic literature, it's that they focus on the officer corps. As any good military officer will tell you, leadership is required at all ranks.
