[Music]
in the past ten years I've been both a
captain in the Marine Corps and a
manager in corporate America and in both
cases I believe the best way to lead and
be successful in complex environments is
by empowering other people and as we
move toward a more automated and machine
driven future this kind of leadership is
gonna become more important and I
believe the best model for doing this is
found in a surprising connection between
the way Marines do things and the way
machines learn things so back in 2012 I
had the privilege of being a platoon
commander with 1st battalion 8th Marines
and Helmand province Afghanistan I was
27 years old and I had 36 fantastic
Marines working for me and our job was
to keep the infantry supplied with
everything they needed to fight the
Taliban it was pretty straight forward
four to five days a week we would run
convoys which are these long lines of
armored cargo vehicles and gun trucks we
carry ammunition food fuel water you
name it and we delivered an outpost
spread along a 40 kilometer stretch of
rugged and unpaved Road that sat just
east of the Helmand River and for the
first few months of that deployment I
commanded every convoy and I did this
for two reasons I wanted to give the
Marines confidence that I knew what I
was doing but also because in my mind
that's what a leader should do be hyper
involved present commanding controlling
but about five months in the situation
changed and the Marine Corps was going
to start pulling troops and equipment
out of Afghanistan and so for my Marines
and I that meant we suddenly had two
missions we still had to support the
infantry but we also had to move a ton
of excess equipment back across Helmand
province so that it can be sent home to
the states and these two missions were
separated by about a hundred and sixty
kilometers of Afghan desert now
obviously I can't be in two places at
once
or control two convoys at the same time
so I had to rethink my role I had to
divide the platoon
and I had to let go with some of that
control that I thought I had in essence
I suddenly became more coach than
commander and I had to reach back to a
core principle for my officer training
called commander's intent it's when the
leader clearly defines what success
looks like but gives others the
flexibility to be creative and how they
get there but that's what needed to
happen and I was humbled by what
happened next because when I got out of
the way I unlocked human potential that
I didn't know existed
the Marines exceeded every timeline and
goal that was given to them they moved
all the equipment ahead of schedule they
found innovative solutions to complex
obstacles they encountered along the way
and they did it safely my initial
leadership instincts about control were
wrong and what I learned was that I
didn't need better equipment or more
control I needed well trained Marines
capable of acting as leaders themselves
and my experience was just part of a
broader trend toward more decentralized
leadership in the Marine Corps driven by
the speed and complexity of the modern
battlefield and I know that business
isn't a battlefield but having been in
it a few years I know we can agree that
business is challenged by its own
version of speed and complexity and so
in that sense I think everyone from
frontline managers to chief executives
could benefit from some of these same
leadership themes and try to produce
what general mattis would call motivated
innovative in agile warriors qualities
that are so relevant in business today
but we don't have to look to the
military for answers and how to do this
because many of the same principles we
use to empower men and women on the
battlefield are being used to empower
machines in business in places like
Silicon Valley so ironically it's
machine learning that can give us three
lessons for how to more effectively
empower our people and I'll show you
what I mean so one of the great insights
with machine learning is that you can
actually get a lot more out of an
algorithm by not explicitly telling it
how to do something
instead you give it a goal a way to
learn and let it make decisions without
a lot of intervention this sounds
incredibly human to me and as leaders I
think we need to foster this same kind
of freedom for our people because when
we micromanage a process we limit what's
possible and we limit the spark of
talented people to give us new ideas so
instead we should clarify the
commander's intent and focus people on
purpose instead of process purpose for
me is the big difference between
leadership and management because when
people understand the big picture it
increases the intrinsic motivation of
the work and it helps people be more
creative but as you probably guessed
from the Afghanistan example this kind
of hands-off empowerment only works if
people have the right skills to
effectively execute that purpose but
these skills can't be static and with
machine learning the algorithm is only
relevant if you feed it data and keep
feeding it often so that it can learn
and adjust and so if we want to build
teams of great human algorithms that we
can trust we need to give employees
opportunities for early and lifelong
learning because learning is how we
adapt and in a high change environment
where people are the ultimate
competitive advantage the organization
whose people can learn and adapt the
fastest will win the military solves for
this by creating learning journeys
professional education that starts early
and spans an entire career and this way
they don't have to settle for this fine
why an approach to people development
where talent ages on a shelf for years
waiting for the the right opportunity
they challenge them early so they can
fail quickly and adjust through feedback
but right now this kind of education
isn't happening in most places in a
recent study from MIT and Deloitte 90
percent of workers reported needing to
update their skills at least every year
but only 1/3 were satisfied with the
kind of support they were getting from
their company we can do better
but speed is important too and at some
point we've got to take all this
learning and all this creativity and
actually do something with it and so our
third lesson for machine learning is
that we need to have a bias for action
and this means getting comfortable
making the decision that's probably
right instead of waiting for that
elusive perfect answer because one of
the great ironies of the Information Age
is that even though we have all this
data there's still a lot of uncertainty
there's just too many variables and so
we can analyze things to death and never
have a clear picture of what to do next
programmers know this and they're using
probabilistic techniques to build
algorithms that can learn from really
small amounts of data and the
inspiration for this is human adult
learning you and I are already
programmed to think like this but too
often we get stuck in this mindset of
having to have perfect information
before we can execute and by the way
it's not lost on me that I'm telling you
not to focus on process and then giving
you a three-step process for how to do
it but this model isn't just about
solving for a fast-paced or complex
business environment it's about filling
a skills gap in a global survey from PwC
over thirteen hundred CEOs were asked
what employee skills are most important
and hardest to find the answer
leadership problem-solving adaptability
creativity and innovation soft skills
it's because CEOs realized that these
skills bring uniquely human qualities
that can't be replaced by technology and
so that's what I like most about these
lessons of purpose lifelong learning and
empowered decision-making is that they
give people the ability to do the things
machines can't because we will never win
a race against the computer to solve
simple tasks or answer complex
computational questions but we can help
people be better leaders be more
creative be more innovative and figure
out which questions we should be asking
in the first place because I don't know
of an algorithm
that can replicate the spark of human
imagination at least not yet but whether
or not you see this as a viable
blueprint for leadership I do believe
that artificial intelligence is going to
force us to have a fundamentally
different relationship with uncertainty
and control and I've seen firsthand how
letting go of some of that control can
bring out the best qualities in people
and so I'd invite all of you to join me
in thinking differently about leadership
and start empowering our people the way
we empower machines thank you
[Applause]