Leadership or reactionary?

I have just read a bunch of posts and blogs and read a bit of Kilcullen's Articles. What strikes me in all of this is that there is not much leadership of new ideas. There is a lot of discussion about things said and done and a lot of assumptions being buried so deep that they appear now to be facts.

It would be too easy to get drawn in to debates for the enjoyment of debating. But let's stand back and ask ourselves if what we are discussing is helping to identify the issues. We can compare products all day but the better strategic policy is to create a new playing field that deals with brands and images that people aspire to.

What leadership comments have you read that get's the discussion out of comparing or tail chasing and demonstrates good leadership?

I'm feeling so many different replies coming on from so many different angles, I feel I must be missing your point. What do you mean by "leadership" and are you drawing a distinction between legitimate organization leadership functions/expectations and thought/issue leadership as you indict the "product?"

Let me float questions to two specific items from your post:

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Originally Posted by Arctic Breaze

What strikes me in all of this is that there is not much leadership of new ideas.?

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Leadership is not necessarily about new ideas. How about mobilization of solid and relevant old ones.? And I think that, there, the results speak for themselves.

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Originally Posted by Arctic Breaze

We can compare products all day but the better strategic policy is to create a new playing field that deals with brands and images that people aspire to.

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Sorry, but are you from either JFCOM or P&G? What does that mean? What is a strategy policy? And how did a treatise on company level principles for COIN become brand marketing?

I think we can pile on and pummel the 28 articles and some other works until we're blue in the face, and we'll wind up making some incremental improvements / refinements on the 2-10% level. But that apple cart will not be turned over so easily. There ARE some core truths, and they're pretty close to what was laid out.

Leadership by deploying old ideas for the first time would make them new in this theatre.

Many military strategies are used in Marketing. I am feeling that marketing has become more advanced and points the direction to where current military problem solving for Iraq is flawed.

it is common knowledge that if you get in to a competition where the discussion is about features then you are product orientated and will get drowned out by the next person claiming to have better features.

This is what i see in most of the discussions. People claiming mostly what can't be done because the Coalition lacks a lot of features. What I see that needs to be done is to take the problem solving to neutral playing field that does not give insurgents any advantage. As a product in Iraq they win but as a future for the country they lose.

The '90s in particular was a heyday for the flow of military terminology into business vernacular, exemplified by FMFM-1 Warfighting (now MCDP) and its companions becoming management tomes. The military started to respond in kind, but little things like OIF and OEF seem to have reminded us that there is bigger difference between combat and competition than the management gurus would have liked us to believe. I for one have sensed an ebb of the "military as a business" characters as another relic of the peacetime military. They're still there, and they still have some points, but war does have a cleansing effect. For me, it is not a metaphor that works well in reverse.

I still don't get your product analogy and how it relates to the 28, et al.

But if you'd like to wear out the metaphor a bit more, the one I'll fully concur with is to say that it does the company no good to have the CEO and Board Members meddling with the intricacies of the product line, at least until they get a viable competitive strategy and get the house in order with the CFO. Leave the metal bending to the foreman, industrial engineer, and craftsmen.

As an ex SF soldier I was more motivated when the political agenda was clear. IE the leadership had their strategy sorted out and it was intelligent. It is very difficult and demoralising to be deploying 28 Articles when the leadership was supplying the wrong resources.

For example, when having discussions with locals on the streets it helps your credibility greatly if there is contructive agenda working concurrently. Absolutely I would want to kill as many people that were bent on killing others but I also expected that a lot of effort was being put in to constructive projects that would eventually result in providing less motivation for locals to get hell bent.

28 Articles is a predictable result of top quality miltary officer education. We used to read stuff like this all the time. In the end the locals may get along with you better but something still stinks to them and they do not have the words to articulate it. What it is that is missing is the substance, the resources not appearing that back up your story on the ground.

The July-August 2005 issue of Military Review has a great article on this very subject. "Marketing:An Overlooked Aspect of Information Operations" compares the Army D3A targeting process to the Marketing 4D process. Don't have time to find the link but it is out there.

It seems I probably have not clarified the Product Vs Brand analogy.

Product promotion is involved with debating colours, materials, languages, cultures, ideologies.

Brand analogy is involved with debating what services, infrastructure, industries, exports you want to include in your vision for the future. Then you deploy strategies to get you there.

The insurgents will be exposed once you get them talking futures. Who cares what products are used to get you there even Christian soldiers will do as long as it is guranteed they are not there to occupy and they are backed up by resources to get you there.

Only leadership can instill the brand, the image, the vision.

Hi AB,

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Originally Posted by Arctic Breaze

It seems I probably have not clarified the Product Vs Brand analogy.

Product promotion is involved with debating colours, materials, languages, cultures, ideologies.

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I certainly wouldn't consider languages or cultures to be "products". Ideologies, probably. There is a connotation with "product" that it is one amongst many competing "products" that vie for a consumer (or customers') purchase, and an I don't think that applies to either languages or cultures.

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Originally Posted by Arctic Breaze

Brand analogy is involved with debating what services, infrastructure, industries, exports you want to include in your vision for the future. Then you deploy strategies to get you there.

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Again, I have difficulty with this. I would think that a more apropos definition of a brand would be "American", "Canadian", "Muslim", etc. Brands are quintessentially symbols not the accretions on symbols (which is what you listed). A more appropriate term fro the examples you gave would be "product line".

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arctic Breaze

The insurgents will be exposed once you get them talking futures. Who cares what products are used to get you there even Christian soldiers will do as long as it is guranteed they are not there to occupy and they are backed up by resources to get you there.

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The point behind the 28 articles is to get them to where they can talk about a future, rather than the irhabi product, which is a revitalization movement version of the past. Contra the rather crude marketing strategies used by many American firms, just "telling" someone something is meaningless since you have no way to know how they will interpret what you are saying. Think about the original Coke campaign in China where it took several months for the "marketing specialists" to realize that the transliteration they used was, in fact, a slang expression with pornographic connotations.

Neither the Iraqis nor the Afghans, nor the Muslim world in general, are a tabula rasa for selling old wine in new bottles.

Marc

I think I'm back in the same grid square pointing generally north with you.

I mistook your opening lament of not much leadership as a cheap bash at the military and some pretty solid COIN tactical principles. I believe I now see that you are discussing a dearth of macro political / economic / operational / strategic leadership at levels well beyond.

OK, I can basically climb aboard that. But it isn't just leadership articulating a vision, it is about a functional alignment and execution of all the instruments of national power to fulfill that vision. There must be troops to lead. Goldwater Nichols II, etc. Roger that.

Brand / product or just Maslow's hierarchy of needs, certainly it is best to turn the water and electricity on rather than engage in an idealogical rant while parched and in the dark. We Americans have the luxury of being so damn gadlfy self-indulgent about absurd things that we can pander to only because all our real needs our covered. We forget the pull that Hamas' hospitals have to folks with sick kids. At the peak of Apartheid, there was still in-migration to South Africa, at least in part because equality meant a whole lot less than food on the table.

I believe if you get stuck talking about which culture is best then you have reduced your discussion to the same non strategic level as promoting a product. All Americans are not happy with just being identified as American so they re brand themselves by associating themselves with a group to create the image they are more comfortable with.

As far as I know the UN neither has grasped the idea of brands to assist inspire a vision for people in different countries. Maybe the OECD is the best example of a brand to aspire to but it only has value for governments.

28 Articles provides direction only for the military dimension. These sort of articles seems to stimulate many that get off on military tactics. SLAPOUT9 referenced well http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/milreview.../chiarelli.pdf The Page 7 diagram shows what more has to be involved otherwise there is no point having a military there at all.

Page 9 of Chiarelli's article sums it up well 'If there is nothing elsedone other than kill bad guys and train others to kill bad guys, the only thing accomplished is moving
more people from the fence to the insurgent
category—there remains no opportunity to grow
the supporter base.'

The commander of the Australian Special Forces first in on the ground for the UN mission in East Timor was not consulted by the US. Here is a guy that created a brand image of the Australian soldier very fast early in the conflict. He had much opportunity to kill but on many occassions he did not so as to build up the brand.

The short of the long story is that this resulted in the insurgents being discredited and all professional UN soldiers were seen in the same light as SF soldiers. This is all against insurgents backed by the largest Muslim country in the world. But does the US want to learn anything?

Same thing happened in Vietnam were Australian SF had a brand image feared by the enemy. Australians were so successful that they got frustrated the enemy had cleared out of their area of operations. Considering that Australians were a smaller force than the US you would think it would have been a higher priority target when it is easier to remove a country's involvment via attacking Australians.

So why do lessons learned not get used elsewhere? Ego's. You see it at all levels in all Military's. Officers are so caught up with the in-house political jockeying. Military folk reading this should be able to well recall observing discussions where one persons makes the suggestion but then another will restate the same suggestion and try to convince all that it was their idea in the first instance.

But back to my point of brands and image. What is the brand or image that Iraqi people aspire to? IE what is their vision for the future and who created that image?

If there are no new leaders then someone has to fill the void and it seems religion has filled this void. Now you are back again at a pig-swill leveled debate about cultures and religions.

Who is actually in charge of the Iraqi liberation demonstrated by leadership with authority?

For the record here is a link to the article I was talking about Marketing and I/O Ops. http://calldp.leavenworth.army.mil/e...CUR_DOCUMENT=1

SLAPOUT9 I skipped through the article and saw that the suggestion is to promote the US as a preferred brand. This is not want I am suggesting.

The US has to be just the vehicle or the product that the Iraqi people make use of to obtain their branded vision.

I am beginning to see as Iraqi's probably do that the US is not genuine and is there in Iraq trying to seek glorification for itself. The best brand the US can come up with is Democracy.

This is so pathetic when the people of Iraq can not clearly understand what Democracy means for them. They think it means they have to turn Christian and be thankful to the US for bombing them.

I am simply shocked that the US could not learn anything from Vietnam. It seems every other country learnt more form the US experience in Vietnam than the US did!

Can you reference studies done on how US company promotions and business practices internationally were causing foreign peoples to establish a dislike for the US? Does the US government provide guidelines to US companies for doing business internationally so as to decrease damage to the overall US image?

Is there any study on how the US company obsession with shareholder profits has alienated people in foreign countries?

I have been 1 person in a room of 20 debating in support of US leadership in Iraq. But it seems I have thought the US leadership were more intelligent than they are.

My conclusions are that the people of Iraq have no common positive vision for the future and the US are being caught up in the negative stories simply because they can not differentiate between and product and a brand. Who cares about the US it is not a brand in Iraq it is simply a product in Iraq.

My conclusions are that the people of Iraq have no common positive vision for the future and the US are being caught up in the negative stories simply because they can not differentiate between and product and a brand. Who cares about the US it is not a brand in Iraq it is simply a product in Iraq.[/QUOTE]

Arctic Breaze, I agree with this 100%. Also I am not a marketing expert by any means, I did take a course in college about it and have read some books and articles about it.

In your original post you talked about how Marketing has a lot of Strategy in it and I agree with that 100% and I do not think it has been used to its fullest extent in Iraq.

So since I am a student here on this subject can you talk more about your ideas to help solve the problem?

To answer this requires length as it appears that a lot of explaining would be required amongst conventional minds.

In a few sentences the strategy has to be getting to neutral ground so you are selling futures the leaders of the insurgents can not compete with.

Avoid professors that argue that the US is a brand based on Levi jean and Harley Davidson theory.

Neutral ground does not isolate those that are already on your side.

So many things to be done that go under the heading of stories, slogans, champions etc that are important to the Iraqi people.

'Better to use an Ugly Camel when stuck in the middle of the dessert.'

You have to re brand the coalition as something like an ugly camel and get away from christian crusaders. Get local kids spary painting stencils of ugly camels.

Stencil Ugly camels on military vehicles.

The idea is to give people many messages with in one slogan.

1. You are commonly not desired
2. You are necessary when stuck in a situation
3. There is humor.
4. You are self critical.
5. Gives people an excuse to cooperate
6. Confirms you are temporarily there.
7. Uses an analogy that is culturally sensitive in that it has much depth in meaning. Like modern Chinese characters and the stories behind them all come down to abbreviations but convey a big message. EG MaMaHuHu in Chinese.

With all these messages in one slogan discussion and jokes will evolve and that is what you want.

'An ugly camel with a hump is more comforting then a beautiful horse when stuck in the dessert.'

Then there has to be a vision for the future for Iraq. Where are all the city planners and IT gurus putting graphics online showing all suburbs of Iraq and what they could look like? Where is the discussion forum that goes with this?

Arctic Breaze, thanks for responding. Intersting concept "Ugly Camel".

One of the niftiest ideas I've seen in awhile. No idea if it would be effective, but it's crazy enough, it just might work!

The answer to whether image branding should or should not be done is this:

What is the image conveyed now by coalition soldiers?

What is the image all people in Iraq would be comfortable with? (This includes the soldiers)

What is being done to influence the image?

It has to be simple and involve an iconic picture that creates a brand for the coalition soldiers that slogans are associated to.

Then do me a favour and create an image of a spineless camel to be representative of Germany and France ;)