Bet on People with Doug Krugman

In this episode of Bet on People, we sit down with Doug Krugman. 

Doug is a retired Marine infantry officer who led units in Iraq and Afghanistan, served as a foreign area officer across Southeast Asia, and spent his final assignment planning operations for 45,000 Marines on the West Coast focused on deterring Chinese aggression in the Pacific. In January 2025, he chose to retire rather than execute orders he believed were morally wrong and potentially illegal — and in October 2025, he published an OpEd about that decision that received national attention and landed him media spots across the country. He now serves as Senior Advisor to the Vet Voice Foundation, applying the same standard to himself that he held his Marines to.

In our conversation we talk about:

• The myths about military leadership
• Why we hold leaders to higher standards than incoming recruits
• How doing your job well means making yourself obsolete
• & so much moreConnect with Doug and Euda:

Doug Krugman on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/doug-krugman/

Doug Krugman on Substackhttps://substack.com/@dougkrugman

Vet Voice Foundation: https://vvfnd.org/

Follow Euda at https://www.linkedin.com/company/euda-io/

Learn more about Euda at euda.io

Subscribe to The Euda Debrief: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7435041512645718017

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

I'm Keegan Evans, and this is Bet on People, where we explore the decisions between human-centered leadership and why betting on people isn't just good for people, it's smart business. My guest today is Doug Krugman, someone I've known for almost 30 years. We were both broughtsee midshipmen at Tulane, and Doug went on to serve as a Marine Infantry Officer leading units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served as a foreign area officer across Southeast Asia, and he spent his final assignment planning operations for 45,000 Marines on the West Coast, deterring Chinese aggression in the Pacific. In January 2025, he chose to retire because he could not, in good conscience, continue under orders he believed were both morally wrong and potentially illegal. In October 2025, he went public, publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post that received national attention. Doug now serves as a senior advisor to the Bet Voice Foundation, and today he's going to share three decisions from his time in command. Doug, we've known each other for almost 30 years, and I've watched your career from a distance from a for about that long. I've never really actually sat down with you and asked about some of these decisions uh behind it. So uh before we dive into the specifics, uh can you just tell me a little bit about your general leadership philosophy, me and the audience?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

My general leadership philosophy today is very different than I would have told you in uh 1998, the uh first time we met. Likewise. The leadership philosophy I eventually uh started to probably thrive and succeed with is um to borrow from a book title, uh, start with why, understands the why. Yep. It's great to train people on processes, it's great to train people how to do tasks, but if they don't understand why they're doing them, they're not prepared to react to unforeseen circumstances, they're not prepared to adapt, and they've got utility, they can have great utility, but if they don't understand the why, they're not gonna take your organization to a place that hasn't been before been before, and they're not gonna help you succeed beyond in the day-to-day tasks you set in front of them. So understands the why, and suddenly your organization becomes a lot more capable.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Love it. Yeah, when I for when I first read Snack's book, uh it it just clicked uh beat after beat. Uh I and of course I his second book was Leaders Eat Last, which he gratuitously stole from us.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Uh he stole that from then Colonel uh George Flynn, who was the commanding officer of Officer Candidate School when I went through. And uh the younger Colonel Flynn, I did a uh peer and friend of mine. His dad was the one who uh Simon Sinek worked with quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

That's awesome. Yeah. Uh yeah, I went through OCS a year after you, and it was that was quite quite effectively beaten into us uh and and and a ground at grounds for a lot of uh a lot of my literature philosophy throughout.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

But not physically beaten.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

No, no, not officially. Uh thank you for that as an overall impression, Doug. Um I I hit some of the highlights of your career in the uh in my intro. Is there anything else that um like any any specific uh parts that that be uh a layer deeper than that that that you want to talk about before we dive into some of the specific decision journeys you've been on?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Well, it's I've had a slightly unusual career by Marine Corps standards. I was a active duty Marine for 24 years, but I spent um eight going on nine years of that, uh not wearing a uniform assigned to external agencies. Yeah. Um before anybody thinks that means something it doesn't. Uh three years of that was at an academic institution running executive education programs, and most of the rest of that was with the U.S. State Department. So when I say external agencies, I'm not talking about Jack Ryan, James Bond. I'm just talking about places where my name was not Colonel or Major, my name was Doug. And I didn't get respect when I walked in a room because I had something shiny on my collar. I got respect by performing, contributing, and earning the respect of my peers who weren't from military organizations and didn't particularly care what my official title was. They just needed to know how could I help the team.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

That's awesome. You brought up a point, um, and maybe hopefully I'm not stealing thunder from uh a later question around myths of military leadership, but something I've talked about, in fact, I've talked about a couple of times in the last week, even, is uh there's a perception that military leadership uh and skills are based almost entirely on the rigid structure and the authoritarian uh style of uh leadership telling what to do, and because you because the UCMJ exists, because people have to do that. Uh but I've long been an advocate for um anyone who falls back on that as an officer uh or any leader is is uh is dead from the word go uh in in terms of uh effectively leading their leading their people. And it really is about all the pieces that you just described in your roles out uh not wearing a uniform uh that that it that that's pervasive whether you've got the shiny rank on your show on your collar or not.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Uh completely agree. And um when I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Singapore, the um I was the ambassador's representative on the board of directors equivalent for the American Club, which had 10,000 members, staff of about 250, and uh turnover in the tens of millions of dollars. And I got to sit through all those board meetings, and I was sitting through either the first or second one, just watching how these board members, who are mostly successful senior executives, were interacting with each other. And at one point there was a debate about something, and one male member of the board said, What some people might not understand, like you, and name dropped somebody right next to them, and basically went on for about two minutes, making her feel like a complete idiot. And I walked out of that meeting and I said to somebody else, you know, if I talk to any of my peers in the Marine Corps that way, I would be ostracized and completely ineffective in the span of about a week. You shouldn't treat people like that.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Um, so yes, I the Marine Corps, on rare occasion, after recruit training, you do need to revert to a very directive leadership style of do this, do this now. You don't have time to ask why. Yeah. But for the majority of the time, it's there's 170,000 active duty Marines, throw in the reservists and our civilian staff. It's a multi-hundred thousand-person bureaucracy. Yeah. And your ability to succeed in it long term, your ability to accomplish the mission long term, is based on your ability to persuade other people who you don't have direct authority over that you're both working for the same mission and your idea will contribute to the mission in this way, and that's why they should help you. And that is much more important, has been much more useful to me in especially the second half of my career than any II drill instructor type stuff that you might have seen when you worked on the recruit depot a few years ago.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah. I want to tie something together. You just said that really I think it's impactful, especially when we're talking about stereotypes of military leadership. So often the perception of military leadership may be informed by media and may be grounded in things like Full Metal Jacket or uh the per the depictions from that early uh uh crucible of training that that that forges marines, especially and root camps for for any soldiers, sailors, or airmen. Um the dynamic of that type of training is the yell, scream, yadda, yada yada yadda. Um I had an experience in an officer canada school where that that that was the primary means of leadership and and often displaying that as a candidate was perceived to be the primary success path through through it. I spent most of OCS struggling because I don't have a natural tendency towards that kind of leadership, so I I can't lead authentically like that. And imagining that I was actually going to fail. Uh in fact, imagining uh assuming that every day was the day that I was about to be kicked out of OCS. Um I get I get back to Tulane and I talk to our major uh and I mentioned that and he's like, Are you kidding? Uh no, they they they know that they're they're only evaluating on one, but good officers come from across the the broadset. Uh and if they'd had a worry about you as a as a candidate in general, I would have gotten a call where they said, Hey, is this guy really a dirtbag, or is he just failing to meet this particular style? And I never got a call on that. And so it's even in the consciousness where the intentional leadership um and and intentional dynamic is that uh that that heavy-handed one, the the the grounded knowledge of that longer-term view that you just articulated is is is there. So um I love that. All right, we spent a lot of time on that. Let's get into how does that translate into some actual decisions and and what what was kind of your growth journey um along the way as you developed as a leader, as an officer. And uh first I want to talk about a couple of the times that you made decisions that in balance, in perhaps trying to balance successfully or unsuccessfully, mission and people, where you deprioritize the people or or or approach that from a little bit of a lesser view. Um can you tell me uh a couple uh the stories that you had in mind around that?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

All right. Um the next three stories, two where I deprioritized the people to some degree, and one where it was a much bigger consideration, all happened around the midpoint of my career. I'd been in about 10 years. I was the uh commander of about 200 to 250 marines and an infantry battalion of a thousand, and I was responsible for the heavy weapons company. So we had a lot of niche things that sometimes I employed directly, and sometimes I sent small detachments out to support the rest of the unit. Um and all of these stories happened in training in the US, but we were training for a combat deployment where we ended up spending um the majority of our time in Afghanistan. So everything I'm talking about is training, not quite in combat yet, but ultimately that's where this unit was going to go. Right. Um, and the first two, I'd say it was less about mission first and it was more about principles first. Um the first two are cases where I relieved for cause, I fired somebody. And in both cases, they were career marines, not their 19-year-old in their first four years. Sure. Um, one was actually uh fairly senior enlisted, a gunnery sergeant who probably had about 15 years in. And the other one was a sergeant who was around the eight-year mark and looking at his promotion to staff sergeant, which is kind of when you're enlisted, you get tenure and you know at that point you're gonna be a career marine. Yep. Um, and both were just straight about principles for me. Um, first one, the gunnery sergeant, he was out with his platoon or part of his platoon of probably 30 or 40 Marines that were training. Something went wrong, something angered him. And he took his helmet, which weighs probably about six or eight pounds, and he slammed it down on the hood of a Humvee. And it skipped off the hood and it went to the windshield, and it left a nice big indent spiderweb cracks, uh, destroyed half the windshield.

unknown 11:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

You know what? I like passion, I like some emotion sometimes because that shows me that hey, he cares about his job. When things go wrong, he gets upset.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

For sure.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

I don't like the fact that he couldn't control it, but you know what? Tempers run hot sometimes. What happens, unfortunately, was that he was with a few of his subordinate Marines and he was the senior enlisted guy, the oldest one in the platoon. And he looked around at what happened and he decided, huh? And instead of admitting, hey, I lost my temper, I threw my helmet, I put a dig in the windshield. Um, he told them that, hey, we were driving down the road and a vehicle in front of us kicked up a rock and that sort of broke the windshield. Everybody got it. And given that he controlled their day-to-day lives, he controlled their careers, um, those Marines looked at them and looked at each other and went, uh, yes, gunnery sergeant. One of those kind of instant obedience moments. Sure. Um, my two senior enlisted advisors, um, my company first sergeant, who was about more about morale and discipline, and my operations chief, who's more about making sure things ran. They both happened to be in the motor pool that day when the vehicle came back in because, well, we had a lot of vehicles, so my enlisted team and I spent a lot of time in the motor pool. Sure. And they looked at it and they asked the Marines what happened. And the Marines in front of their gunny, I think, told them what happened. And it's had a rock ding your windshield, it's usually a about that. Yeah. This was more like that. Yeah. So not sure exactly how people moved around, but the uh junior Marines who were responsible for the vehicle, including the one who signed it out from the motor pool and was responsible for the condition of it. Um, it took my two senior enlisted less than five minutes to get the junior marines in the vehicle to unanimously uh tell the truth, explain exactly what happened, and explained that their platoon sergeant had ordered them to lie about it.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Now, there are three ways he could have handled this.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

He could have just admitted it was his responsibility, it was his fault. And it wasn't like bulletproof glass. This was a training vehicle, it wasn't anything fancy. Um, I think vague memory of the damage bill was about$800. That would have put a dent in his paycheck, but 15 years ago,$800 was not going to bankrupt him. Yep. And he could have just taken responsibility, probably would have gotten him some kind of written reprimand for losing his temper, losing control. And there's a decent chance we would have forgotten about it by the time his next evaluation came around.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Second approach, um, some people who have been around the Marine Corps in the military a little bit longer might ask why he didn't do this. He could have got back to the motor pool, tried to park it in the back somewhere, and then find a buddy in another unit who had a spare windshield. We were training on an army base in Virginia. We weren't at our home base, so he didn't have any buddies to call. He didn't have any spare parts stockpiles he could raid. So that's why he didn't do what some people might say of what, he couldn't just find a windshield? No, he couldn't. We were on an army base 300 miles from home. Uh instead, he took the third approach. And this was one of the not pleasant but easiest decisions. My two senior enlisted came to me and said, Hey, sir, this is what happened today. Yeah. He broke the windshield because he lost his temper, and then he lied about it and he got junior Marines to lie about it. Yep. And I think I gave the platoon commander, that young lieutenant, the courtesy of saying, Okay, Lieutenant, what do you think I should do?

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

But um, by that point, it was already decision was already made in my head of no, I cannot have a senior leader who's responsible for 30 or 40 of my Marines who I don't trust.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

He made a mistake. Instead of owning his mistake, he lied to cover it up. We're going into combat. I can't tolerate that. Um, that day was the end of his career. Cut and dry. My senior enlisted got it. The battalion commander's senior enlisted advisor, the sergeant major, responsible for all thousand marines, didn't have an argument with him at all. He's like, wait, he did what? And he lied to you about it?

unknown 14:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Um yes, it created some uh wasn't great for that platoon. True. Yeah, we had to find a replacement for him, which we were far enough out from deployment we had time to do, caused some disruption, but the principle was easy. If you lie and I can't trust you, I don't let you lead, and no argument at all.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Yeah. I know from my experience, and I think some of our listeners also will know this, but I really want to double-click down into this is this is more than just principle. Um I think principle is a good place to start, but integrity, uh the core values, uh the Marine Corps, honor, courage, and commitment, and especially the that you don't like piece. Talk to me a little bit more about why and you you talked about uh hinted at this, but why is that so so sacred uh in in what we did?

SPEAKER_00 15:47

It's sacred, but it's also a human organization, so I wouldn't say it's absolute.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

I'll ask the question differently. Why is why was it such a clear-cut decision? Because I can imagine people who aren't don't have the experience of being uh thinking from the mindset of we're preparing for combat or this is infused in everything we do. It's like, yeah, he lied. That was really shitty. Uh and he broke a windshield. And but end a career over a broken windshield in one lie and in in in a single day, is that really justified? I I'm not challenging you. I just want to I I'd love to I'd love to have the a little bit broader explanation on on the why of that.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Well, uh first on the why, I'd say it's almost a sliding scale. There's a um unfortunate expression in the Marine Corps and in the military in general about uh different spanks or different punishments for different ranks.

SPEAKER_03 16:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Um I agree that's true. It's been true in my units, but and I think I enforced it the opposite way that many people perceive it. Had that been a 19-year-old Lance Corporal, uh, who'd just been the driver of the vehicle and his buddy, and we came back, um, wouldn't have been thrilled with it. But that would have been a, okay, you got caught, you're gonna end up maybe some administrative punishment, and then we're gonna forget about this and you're gonna move on with your day, you're gonna move on with your life. Yeah. My tolerance for mistakes at junior ranks, newer personnel was much higher. He was supposed to be the adult. He was supposed to be the example, the role model for a group of about 30 or 40 Marines.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

And if we're getting ready to go on a combat patrol and I say, Hey, did you check over the vehicle and make sure it's good? I needed to be confident that when he said yes, the answer was really yes. And it wasn't, yeah, hey, yeah, I know you want me to say yes, so I'm just gonna say that and we're gonna move on. And I needed his Marines to understand that when we ask them a question, the expectation was hey, we're not messing around here. This isn't the bar on a Friday night. Yeah. When I ask you a question about work, your answer needs to be the truth, the straight truth, and it needs to be quick.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Little, maybe not instant obedience to orders, but instant adherence to that principle, instant to that core value. Yeah. And the fact that he lied and he pressured his subordinates to lie for him meant that as long as he was he was in that position with that group of Marines, I was gonna have questions, I was gonna have doubts every time I asked them to do something about whether or not Yunny was really giving me what I needed to hear, as opposed to what he thought I wanted to hear that was convenient for him, or maybe even convenient for me. Maybe he's just trying to protect me by telling me something that I want to hear, sure, even if I don't like it.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

And with that doubt, my company first sergeant didn't trust him anymore. My operations chief, my master sergeant, who um at that point, he and I were on our second unit together. We knew each other pretty well, we trusted each other, and the battalion sergeant major, all three of my advisors just went, yeah, nope, can't trust the guy, can't count on the guy, we're going in combat, move on.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

And just to put a final button on it, we've used the language we're going into combat, we've implied what that means. But trust is so important in especially in the leaders and in and who's representing the adults and and the integrity here. Uh why? What are the stakes?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Lives depend on it. Um unfortunately, my first four deployments, um, I either had Marines in my unit or Marines who worked for directly for me, killed or wounded. And sometimes it comes down to, hey, buckle your seatbelt. Oh yeah, I did. I know of a Marine who oh yeah, I buckled my seatbelt. Um, a blast hit his vehicle and he broke his neck on the roof of the vehicle because he wasn't strapped in. Yeah. So simple little things, simple little checks, that self-discipline and that honest, honest ability to communicate were essential. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

You uh you shared another story related to uh to this kind of weather prioritizing principle or mission. Um could would you like to share some of the details about that one?

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Um same year. Um I don't rem within a month or so, plus or minus, I don't remember which happened first. But um one of my platoons was doing something that sounds like a lot of fun. They were training for some missions and they were doing uh force on force, basically role-playing, not quite live action, uh sure. LARPing. Not quite LARPing, but they were going force on force. So the bad guys were all Marines, the good guys were all Marines, and we were all ultimately on the same team. Yeah, uh, we were not using live ammunition, we were just using blanks, which create a little flash, make some noise, so you can tell when somebody's shooting, but safety was the number one priority.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

In addition to blanks in our rifles, we also had some flares, basically mini handheld fireworks we used for signaling. Perfectly routine. Um, and we finished up one evolution, I think it was a recovery of a down pilot scenario. Don't quite remember for sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

Always a good scenario to practice.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Uh as a pilot, I thought you'd appreciate that. And um, because we were training for a deployment, we had some folks from an external training group out there facilitating the training, evaluating it, watching it. And one of their officers came up to me after and he said, Um, hey, by the way, I thought you should know that uh in the middle of that force on force mission, um, one of your guys took one of your uh pyrotechnics, one of your signal flares, and instead of putting it up in the sky where it belongs for a signal, um, he aimed it directly at a couple role players and shot it at them. And good news, they don't shoot very straight or very far. Um, one of them got a few sparks on them, I think a little burn on his lip, but like not even sub band-aid level. Nobody's seriously hurt, but yeah, that was really dangerous. Um Okay. And asked around a little bit and found out the Marine who did it was um, as I mentioned earlier, he was a sergeant responsible for a section, probably of about half a dozen Marines.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

He

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Had about eight years on active duty already. He'd already done a couple deployments to the Middle East. He'd fought in Iraq. And I think he was up either that year or the next year for promotion to staff sergeant, which is the point where you perform well enough and done enough service. If you make that rank, unless you commit some crimes, you're allowed to re-enlist, you're allowed to stay in for up to 20 years, and you're leading Marines.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And um, his platoon commander, also prior enlisted, and his platoon sergeant, and again, my senior enlisted advisors started talking to him about it. And his answers, oh, he started out with, well, that's how we did it in Iraq. When we need to, we just shot flares at people when we had to. It's like okay, great, but that was to like stop a vehicle from running directly at a checkpoint. That wasn't like at a fellow Marine. Right. And so he's going down that path. Um, and then when he keeps getting defensive about it, he ultimately comes down to well, and the safety rules for the range that you brief for training, you didn't tell me I couldn't. And honestly, the initial reaction was, okay, guy got caught up in the heat of the moment and did something stupid. He shot a flare at somebody. Yep. Um, not the first time I've seen it happen. I'd seen it happen once or twice before. All that Marine needed to say was, hey, wait a second. Yeah, no, that was dangerous. I could have hurt somebody. That was dumb. I'm sorry. Yeah. That's all he had to do. Yep. And we gave him probably half a dozen, a dozen opportunities, yeah, with different people trying to explain to him of no, really. Yeah. And again, different spanks for different ranks. If he'd been a 19-year-old straight out of boot camp, the answer would have been, okay, this is why that was stupid. We're going to explain it to you. This is fairly directive. Don't do that again.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

But he was in charge of half a dozen other Marines already. He was experienced, and he was on the verge of promotion to somewhere where he'd be allowed to run his own training ranges, run his own live fire training ranges. Yep. And this was almost disbelief. It was the same sergeant major, um, same senior enlisted advisor, my same operations chief, and the lieutenant. And the lieutenant finally just came to me is like, sir, I can't make him understand that he did something wrong.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

I don't trust his judgment anymore.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

And I think I had a conversation with him and I had to sign his evaluation. And it was, well, if he doesn't understand he made a mistake, then he's never going to learn from that mistake. And I don't trust his judgment anymore either.

unknown 24:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

And um, for those who know the Marine Corps well, our senior enlisted advisors are pulled from any specialty, not necessarily the infantry where I was. Right. Um, my battalion sergeant major happened to be an infantry man as well. Um, and my operations chief, senior enlisted advisor uh advisor, was also career infantrymen. All three of us had fought in the Battle of Fallujah together, different parts of the city, but we all had a pretty decent amount of combat experience. Yeah. And we were just kind of dumbfounded. But again, it was I had unanimous advice of if his judgment's that bad and he can't learn from his mistakes, you can't keep him in your organization. He's too much of a risk in combat.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

So, not for what he did that day, which was dangerous, but didn't really hurt anybody. We got lucky, but for his potential to cause greater harm, his potential to cause greater risks. Um, we gave him a negative evaluation. He happened to be from an external unit. He was on loan to us for the deployment, and we sent him back. And he tried to contest that evaluation, tried to have it administratively removed from his record after the fact. Um, and the last I knew, he had not succeeded, and he was forced to exit the Marine Corps at his uh at his rank, and that ended his career.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah. As a uh as a quick uh footnote for those who don't know, uh Doug casually dropped in the Battle of Fallujah as as a marker of experience. That particular battle in 2004 was represents some of the most uh intense urban combat uh in recent Marine Corps history. And so the the lessons uh and the perspective and the experience earned um by by Doug and and and the others that he mentioned uh is is um hallowed in uh in in the uh and and and therefore the perspective to to recognize where this was this Marine would have a judgment risk is hard-earned uh as a result.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

And the sad part is as a junior Marine, this sergeant had actually fought in the April 2004 Battle of Fallujah, the initial fighting in that city, which was also some really serious heavy fighting. With it was not a happy place to be. There were a lot of casualties, there were a lot of losses.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

So he actually had what you'd look at on a resume and say, wow, he's got that experience. He must be great. But he didn't know how to learn from it, he didn't know how to apply the lessons from it. Um, and the two senior enlisted I, the sergeant major, the mass sergeant, and I, we all happen to be in the November battle about four or five months later.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Yeah. We talk a lot uh at Uta and and I talk a lot to the leaders that I coach around. Uh the specific experience or decisions may not be uh are important to talk, think about, and reflect on, but the k capacity for growth, infinite growth is one of our core principles. Um and uh the Marine Corps version of that is know yourself and seek self-improvement, of course. Um and so it's it wasn't just feels uh for from your perspective of recognizing this. It was it was a clear uh uh failure to m meet the expectation of of the clear principles. Um I recently wrote an op-ed where I talked about uh a few things uh and the uh something you said in there where he where he he hail married to the uh the range brief of well you didn't say I couldn't do it. Um especially my my pre and in this op-ed I I argued that uh especially in military combat, the the structure of the rules and and and the laws uh uh is the floor, not the ceiling. Uh it's it's the it's the foundation for judgment that is applied to complex scenarios. And so I I uh tell me if uh if I'm off base here, but I feel like that being his argument of last resort really sealed the like gave confidence that he wasn't gonna be able to learn.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

I expected everyone to be intelligent enough to realize that sending a really hot, flammable thing at your fellow Marines was not a plan. Yeah. And um there's a historian named Studs Turkle who wrote an oral history book on World War II. I think it came out in the mid-1980s. He looked at stuff overseas, but also on the home front. And this quote on regulation has a lot of applications, but it applies here of the interviewee was at some type of grocers meeting with government regulators. We had a lot of strict price controls in World War II. And the grocers were complaining about how long these government regulations were with these two three-page regulations on what they could and couldn't do. Yeah. And the government representative came back and said, Well, we wanted to write a short, clear regulation, but every time we do that, you just find an accountant or a lawyer and you find some loophole to try to go around it and it fails to accomplish what the country needs. Yeah. So yeah, we had to write a longer one.

SPEAKER_03 29:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

And in the this environment, I wanted to give a relatively short safety brief. I thought everybody understand the point was not to make sure nobody got hurt in training.

SPEAKER_03 29:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

If you'd like me to discuss everything you can't do that could possibly cause risk, we're going to be standing here for a long time. So I'd just prefer you have enough judgment that I don't have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Yeah. There's a reason that in the Navy and Marine Corps the uh the term sea lawyer is a derogatory one.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Yes, it is. And uh unfortunately that explains a lot of the laws and regulations in our country today and why there are thousands and thousands of pages.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Surely, surely. Um I want to move over to a slightly different theme of a of a story where um and I where you more explicitly prioritized uh uh the Marine. Um the the the Marine at the center of the of the story. Can you tell me about the uh the the example where there was a poor performer?

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Yeah. Um again, same period of time, same company. This was another one of my platoon sergeants, another gunnery sergeant. Um he was a bit unique, though, in that he was not an infantry marine. He was brought in from another community because he had some niche technical skills that we frankly needed. And his he was there for the technical reasons. The fact he was also the platoon sergeant was just a matter of efficiency because he had the right rank and hypothetically the right arena, right experience to take care of and wrangle the junior Marines as well, while also contributing that technical expertise that we frankly needed. Um and this Marine came to us from his community, and after a couple months, his lieutenant, his platoon commander, um came to me and basically said, Sir, this guy can't do his job. He's kind of okay on the technical stuff, but he doesn't understand how it applies to how we use it. And he's terrible on the leadership. Like if I had to give him a grade on a scale of zero to 100%, he's hitting maybe like a 30, 40% a lot of days. We looked at a couple things to do. Um, we had an opportunity to send him off to some additional training that would help more with the taking his niche technical skills and making sure he understood how to apply them the way we needed.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Um, and frankly, he was also bad enough that we started talking about okay, do we can we get a replacement for him? Whether you want to call him human resources, your talent management, your recruiters, uh, we put the call out through the Marine Corps bureaucracy. Yeah and the Marine Corps Manpower Bureaucracy came back and said, Yeah, you know that's a really small, narrow career field. Um, if you don't like that one, I got another one for you next year. So after you get back from deployment, I can replace them for you. But um, it's kind of like when you write that description for a job vacancy where you're asking for the person who has the skills gained in 30 years of experience, but you want to pay them entry level. Yeah, your talent acquisition team is probably gonna come back and say, Hey, I can't do that for you.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Well, in this case, the talent pool out there just didn't exist. There wasn't another one to pull from.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

So we decided to send him off some training and see what happens to do that because he was gonna be gone for a month or two. We actually had to write an evaluation on him before he went. We gave him an honest evaluation. It was an adverse negative evaluation. It reflected his performance to date. Uh, the lieutenant and I, frankly, tried to write around that. We tried to write to the minimum standard and see if we get away with this is the worst eval I've ever written, but it doesn't specifically say it's negative, it was just bottom. Yeah. And uh we couldn't do it. So we took the honest approach and we gave him a negative evaluation, which for a career enlisted Marine is generally seen as a career ender.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

And then he went off to training for a month or two and he came back and he was up to maybe a 50 or 60 percent solution. Um couple moments in there where uh we unfortunately proved that he lost the respect of pretty much all the junior marines in his platoon.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Um, but he was a hard worker. He knew he wasn't doing well, and he kept trying and he kept putting in the effort. And then we looked around and we said, okay, even without his technical skills, do I have somebody else who could fill in for the leadership skills?

SPEAKER_02 33:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

And his two immediate subordinate section leaders, one was brand new, and the other one was frankly a new arrival who was already struggling. Neither one of them was ready to step up and take on the role yet. And the sergeant major didn't have a spare one for me somewhere else in the unit, he could move to me.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

So the platoon commander, lieutenant, my senior enlisted advisor, my operations chief, and I had a conversation, and it was okay, we've got about a 50, 60% performer. Our choices are we take him and we get 50 or 60% out of him, and we know other people are gonna have to do parts of his job or they're just not gonna get done well. Or we go with nobody and we just try to figure it out. And it was not a great choice in either direction. But in this case, getting somebody who could get 50 or 60% of the mission done, a 50 or 60 percent accomplishment contribution going into combat was unfortunately a better choice than going with just an empty desk or an empty. In this case, it wasn't a desk. He would have been out in the field with his Marines. Sure. And the lieutenant platoon commander had to step up and do a lot more work. He had to do some things that normally a good platoon sergeant would have um told the lieutenant, get out of my business, this isn't your job.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

We had a very strong cohort of junior Marines, young corporals, and sergeants around the three to five year mark on that platoon. And frankly, they knew their boss wasn't that good, and um they had to cover for him a lot and they had to do things for him a lot. So a combination of the lieutenant stepping down and a lot of the junior Marines not having that great example, not having that great role model, but knowing what needed to get done and stepping up. It was good enough, and we got through the deployments, and his presence was more value added than it was harm done.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Wasn't the ideal personnel solution, but it was the best solution we had available that year.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Yeah. You said something in there. Uh was most of his uh poor performance in the tactical specialty capability.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

You made a comment that his leadership his leadership was the real problem, and sometimes his common sense was the real problem. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

As platoon sergeant, part of his job was to frankly fairly basic math. Keep track of ammunition. How much do you have? How much have you expended? When do you need to order more?

SPEAKER_02 35:51

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

And even in training, when it was a fairly controlled situation, we're only using ammunition at one place, yeah, we're shooting it on live fire ranges. He had trouble keeping track of that. He had trouble giving me accurate information. He had trouble telling my operations chief what his consumption was when he needed more.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Basic stuff he should have been capable of. But once we figured out he couldn't do it, we frankly found, I think the lieutenant found a couple of non-commissioned officers, junior marines in the platoon, who could do math very well and very easily. Yeah. And we just gave them more responsibility and expected more of them than we normally would. And they helped him avoid continue problems there.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Gotcha. What was the net on morale in the in that platoon and uh overall? Because there's versions of that where it's a rallying third act of a uh of a movie uh where they they they come together uh and there's a a dog is saved in the end. Uh, and there's a version of that where it just creates generations-long perpetuation of bad leadership.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Uh, I'd say it was closer to the dog saved in the end. Um at that time in the Marine Corps, our ideal would be about six month deployment and then 18 months to train and prepare for your next deployment. Yep. At that point, you were running between six months and a year of training, so a half to a third of your normal time at home. Yeah. So that platoon uh had a core of third deployment, might have had a couple fourth deployment non-commissioned officers around the three, four-year mark. Oh, wow. A couple slightly past that. Yeah. And um, frankly, like I said, there was one case where something I said helped accidentally prove that that they lost all respect for the guy. They might have liked him as a person. They knew he was trying hard, but they didn't really respect him.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Um, but we knew that. And they listened to him on the technical skills, they learned from him on that, and they learned to tolerate him. Yeah. Um, and frankly, that platoon, despite that gap, and the other section leader, one of the two junior staff non-commissioned officers I mentioned, we actually did relieve him halfway through the deployment for um causing problems.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

But their performance in combat was incredible. They kept it together on the lieutenant and the junior Marines and the other section leader who grew into his role. Yeah. And they fought, they clicked, and it worked well. So that was the uh kind of confirmation we made the right choice was at the end of the day, they executed their mission successfully and frankly, well above standard, better than most people would have expected.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

That's great. There's a um we spent a lot of time thinking about organizational culture. I've got a core core belief hard-earned that uh deliberate culture is really what drives uh outcomes um uh more than anything else. And what I'm hearing in this story is that despite the significant risks of one of of one particular individual who could be a drag on it, the intentional leadership of the lieutenant, intentional oversight of yourself, and and and collective leadership and stepping up of the entire group um maintained the high quality and effective uh culture that that platoon had going through uh in order to adapt. I think there's a good lesson in that.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

And of the five platoons I had at the time, um, by virtue of what they did, uh that was the platoon I spent the most time with. That was the platoon where I knew the junior Marines best and I knew the non-commissioned officers best. And I think that's part of what gave me the confidence to carry on in that situation was uh normally in the infantry world, if you're a corporal, you talk to your sergeant who talks to your staff NCO, who talks to your lieutenant, who maybe talks to the first sergeant, maybe to the company commander. You got about four or five people between you and the company commander.

SPEAKER_02 39:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Um, in that platoon, I knew a lot of the junior Marines, some of them had been attached to my company on a previous deployment that I had no hesitation walking up and saying, Hey man, what's really going on today? Yep. And they would quietly step aside and give me an honest answer because we had a trusting relationship already. Yeah. And I had enough of those in the platoon, and I was close to them enough to keep that kind of vibe for the platoon, keep a vibe for the organization. And also to the non-commissioned officers were great, and the lieutenant was the best one I happened to have in my company that year. He was the strongest leader I had. So that's great. They made it work, and we got the most contributions we could out of that Marine.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

We he didn't get promoted again after that for good reason. But the unit accomplished they succeeded in their mission every time, and we got the most we could out of somebody, even if it was a definitely suboptimal situation.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Yeah. One thing I I noticed listening to the three stories you just shared, uh, and and of course we set this up intentionally to try to provoke uh a story of okay, but the person is not prior is not the priority in the decision making. The the the uh the follower, the employee is not the priority in the decision making, followed by an example where the we find a way to make that person like we make a decision based off of that person. What all of your stories reveal to me is a through line of the decision about any one individual is weighted way more heavily on the effect of the whole group of people. And um uh the premise is you're you're still betting on the people as a whole, one way or the other. You're just i in these different situations, you're you're elegantly recognizing where the most uh positive outcome for the for what you're trying to accomplish to enable the people that you're the collective people you're responsible for, uh, to best accomplish that outcome.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Yeah, it's all about building trust and building teams. In the first two cases, lots of people saw those incidents, lots of people saw what happened. Yeah, and we couldn't maintain trust, we couldn't maintain the coherence of the team if we allowed that to continue. Yeah. Um in the third case. Well, I'll explain the day I realized that he'd lost the respect of his Marines. Um if you've looked at a military map, there's little squares on it that are called grid squares. They're just lines on a map, and they're used to measure things and for lots of stuff. And we were doing some live fire training and we were in the field one day. And again, this guy had been in the Marine Corps probably about 16 years at that point. And he sent one of his Marines, one of those corporal non-commissioned officers who I knew pretty well, uh, during a quick pause in training, and he came up to me and asked me what I thought was a fairly not intelligent, not well thought out question, pretty obvious. And so I sent the corporal back with the answer to the question, and I told him, hey, and tell your gunny that the next time we have a break in live fire, I need him to bring me a box of grid squares before he asks me any more questions. Again, grid squares are the lines on the map. There's absolutely no it's like going on a snipe hunt or go, I'm gonna offend some people. It's like sending somebody out in the woods to look for Bigfoot. Yeah. Like, hey, kids, uh yeah, go go look in the backyard for something.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

Um we we don't have the statistics on the Venn diagram between our listeners and uh Bigfoot uh uh truthers. Uh so I'll I'll I'll take the risk and we'll leave that in.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Poor leadership on my part, I made that as a kind of flip sarcastic remark. It was meant to send a message. It was absolutely the wrong way to send that message. Right. Because he knew his performance was struggling. He knew he was on the verge of being relieved from his position and that we were thinking about it. Yeah, and so I'd forgotten about it. And three or four hours later, uh, we have another break in live fire, and he comes walking up to where I was, head down, looking like somebody had kicked him. And there's a slight chance he was screwing with me. But if he was, he's a much better actor than I gave him credit for. And he's like, Sure, sir, I'm really sorry. Um, I had the Marines look everywhere, I looked everywhere. We didn't bring any grid squares to the field with us. And again, I could be wrong. He might have been just a beautiful actor. Yeah, but I realize number one. He didn't know that wasn't a thing. Yeah. And number two, the Marines in his platoon, who definitely did know exactly what I meant and that I was joking. Yeah. They let him go. Yeah. And they look they pretended to look for him and they pretended to try for him. And they let him go. And that was one of the worst mistakes I made as a leader because I put that guy down in the dumps. It did confirm to me that his Marines already realized what was wrong with him and they had a problem. It did help define this problem we need to solve. Yeah. But as a way of treating a fellow human being, that was the day I learned that when you're a leader, you need to be really, really careful about sarcasm and really, really careful how you frame things because I definitely put him in a mental state that I should not have that day. Yep. Again, I would say it undermined his credibility, but his credibility, he'd already effectively undermined it himself. But it anchored really, wow, his Marines let him do that.

SPEAKER_02 44:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Okay, got it. His Marines are more loyal to me than they are to him.

SPEAKER_02 45:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

I've now got a problem the lieutenant and I need to fix.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

And the lieutenant was not with us that day, which is why it happens.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

Yeah. There may not have been any material impact on credibility. Uh changing the credibility may not have been there. But um something that comes to mind is that the a leader's role is is uh is to fix the problem for everyone, not to amplify the negative dehumanizing pieces. Uh and I've I've been very guilty of this myself. I had a I I uh my third deployment, I was a senior captain. Uh we had uh we we were usually organized the pilots were usually organized into kind of three tiers of there's the senior captains who are on the third deployment in our cycles, there was the newer captains who were on their second deployment, and then usually the lieutenants were on their first deployment. Um and this this particular one we had uh uh a couple of the lieutenants on the first deployment got promoted to captain uh just because of how the timing of the deployment, all that, all that worked out. Uh and sometimes amongst the pilots, we would screw around and call them captenants, um, implying that they are lesser lesser than captains. Uh I I I regret this to this day. Um I had one of these guys as my co-pilot on a long fly. We were flying out over western Iraq, very boring uh terrain, unless yeah, unless they're shooting at us. Um uh but it was it was 2009, so they weren't shooting much at us. Um and we were the crew was just kind of all screwing around, and I had uh the the co-pilot captain uh to my left, and I had uh probably a sergeant and a corporal or something in the back as crew chiefs. And I'd been on multiple deployments of the crew, I obviously had the report of that, and I started calling this guy Captainant on the intercom uh with them. Um and he got quiet. Uh and and so I, you know, in retrospect, I immediately destroyed the um uh I immediately destroyed some very important communication channels for safe safe flight. Um but I it also I I undermined my own credibility deeply by uh teasing uh uh an officer in front of enlisted Marines. Um and yeah, it that was a huge that was a huge by amplifying that negative that that negative sentiment and creating a creating a gap in us versus that gap. So thanks for sharing that one. Uh Doug. That was that's a that's a good uh an important recognition of your own choices in there as as navigate around that. Um the third story you you you uh shared, you wanted to talk about. This is our our wild card. What's the favorite story? Uh tell me about uh working yourself out of a job.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

This comes uh even earlier in my career. This was um summer 2003. I was a let's see, first lieutenant by that point. I was about two and a half years out of college, and I was about a year going on a year and a half in uh a leadership position in command of an infantry platoon of 33 Marines. Um I'd gotten there in June 2002. Uh, we deployed in March 2003 at sea. We spent a couple of weeks in northern Iraq, like literally, I think it was two weeks around Mosul. And so we'd done a lot of training to get ready for deployment. We'd go into a very brief and very limited combat experience, very limited. And then we're back on ship doing a lot more training. And when everybody else is going home from the war, we're still deployed at sea. And then a civil war breaks out in Liberia. So we spent two or three months sitting on ship off the coast of Liberia, not touching the shore, just sailing around in circles. Um, the positive experience was that by about January, about six or eight months in, I'd made the worst of my mistakes. The worst I had many as a new platoon commander. Uh, you knew me even before that. I was not the greatest leader to my fellow midshipman in Ratsi.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Um we all have thurning hurts.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

Yeah. Uh hopefully you and Tommy and Ern forgave me and John. Um, but by this point, it's probably around August or September. We've been deployed for five or six months. All my squad leaders, who each led a third of my Marines, had been in place for the entire time. My platoon sergeant had been with me for about a year at that point. I went through two or three in my first few months just for some personal instability. Not my fault. Squad leader instability, some of that was definitely my fault. I did not handle some problems with junior marines well. Sure. And we were just doing this is the infantry. So we're on ship. We go to the flight deck on the back of the ship, and we're just doing some live fire sustainment training with our weapons. We set up targets and we shoot for a few hours. We do some drills and stuff. And we got out there that day, and my platoon sergeant and my squad leaders had done most of the prep and organization. It was mostly things they wanted to do, what they thought they needed to work on. And I was in charge. So I gave the obligatory, hey, here's what we're doing today, here's the safety brief. And then a few hours later, as I was walking away, I realized that was really the last time I spoke out loud. As my Marines were shooting, I probably said a few things to a few Marines, maybe a little nudge on technique here or there. Um, I wasn't, as the safety observer officer in charge, I wasn't supposed to be shooting myself, so I don't think I did. But I walked away that day realizing if I hadn't been here, they would have executed and they would have executed perfectly to standard. And there, I would did not actually have to lift lift a finger to accomplish that today because of all the time we'd spent together and all the other ranges we'd done together and all the other times that I had contributed to their training and that I had prepared them. Yeah. I had effectively taken that platoon and I'd worked them to the point where normal day-to-day situation, some people will joke, you never need a second lieutenant to begin with. But in this case, I had worked them to the point where they absolutely did not need me on day-to-day tasks. And how I think this applies and how I applied it later in my career is if you're a leader in an organization and okay, if you're the line manager on the production floor, okay, you maybe need to be a little bit more focused on day-to-day tasks.

SPEAKER_02 51:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

But in general, if you're a leader and you're focused in on what's happening today, what's happening this hour right now, then who in your organization is thinking about the plan for tomorrow, the plan for next week, or your long-term development?

SPEAKER_02 51:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

And if you can't train and prepare your team to function without you looking over their shoulder minute by minute, day on a day-to-day basis, then you're doing something wrong. You need to either change your team composition, or more likely, you need to change how you're interacting with them and change how you're preparing them. As a colonel in the Marine Corps, this might get me a few snide remarks, but my definition of success was I would go overseas to a planning conference or overseas to a major exercise. And if I had to make zero decisions in a day and everything turned out perfectly, that meant I had done my job well in the moments leading up to that.

SPEAKER_02 52:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:10

If people did have to come to me with problems, that was great. That's what I was there for. But the better job I did preparing them, the better job I did offering them guidance, making sure they understood the why, the better they could execute without having to come back to me for decisions. Yeah. The faster we could execute, the more efficiently we could execute, and the more we could succeed. So working my I learned as a lieutenant 23 years ago now that I needed to focus on preparing my team and working my way out of my day job so I could focus on the next step. I could focus on the long term to keep success coming. Not just today, but next week, next month, and next year.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Yeah. That's such a crucial, crucial lesson. Uh, and it's one that I see uh I I was literally just coaching a client today on an aspect of this. Uh uh I see this in tech, I see this in startups, I see this in all sorts of human organizations of um the transition into leadership and especially leaders of leaders. Uh as a put as a platoon commander, you were not just a leader of a team, you were leaders of your squad leaders and your platoon sergeant. Uh to uh yes, be involved. This is not an this is not a justification for absentee leadership, uh, but recognize where your where your value is looking forward and what is detracting you from the day-to-day, and how do you train your unit, train your team to uh to take that out to give you that space is uh is excellent. That uh that actually segues me into a question that I had you and you teed it up a little bit in in your kernel um example. A lot of these stories came from earlier in your career when you were at the tactical level of uh uh warfare predominantly. Um how did the lessons that you share today uh uh persist or evolve or evolve as you got into the later stages of your career, uh to the more strategic level of thinking, um, beyond just trying not to uh trying to prepare people so that you didn't have to make decisions. Where where did that inform your leadership uh approach um later on?

SPEAKER_00 54:19

Um I'd say the fundamental lessons applied throughout, which is if you take the time to get the people right, other problems tend to get easier to handle, or your people will solve the problems for you. Um I had a somewhat unique opportunity um when I was around the 2017-2018. I was sent to be the operations officer for a group headquarters that was switching from one mission to an entirely new focus area. And so we kind of spun off all the old requirements into a new subordinate unit, and we frankly gave them most of the staff people to do it because they've been doing it, and we had to rebuild the staff from scratch. Um on paper, I was supposed to lead a combined operations and intelligence section of about 60 people. I got there as employee number six, and I was the head of it. Yeah. Um, and if people ask me what I did for the 18 months I was there, I spent a disproportionate amount of my time looking for the right people, trying to get the right people in place, and then once they were there, trying to give them the tools they needed to succeed.

SPEAKER_02 55:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

And that's what I should have been doing from the beginning as a brand new platoon commander with my squad leaders and my team leaders. And that's the same thing I was doing 17 years later as a lieutenant colonel. Yeah. Was just trying to get the right people, trying to get them to succeed. Um, my last role, slightly different. My team wasn't entirely uniformed. I had a uh good team of defense contractors from a company called Booz Allen Hamilton that filled some niche roles for us. Sure. Um, and as we were looking to replace those people, it was Booze Allen Hamilton's 100% responsibility to find and bring on board the right people. But I definitely wanted to know who they were looking at, and I definitely wanted to see their backgrounds and I definitely wanted to discuss them. I wasn't making decisions for the company, but I was definitely giving them advice on what I thought would work and would not work because, and I dealt with this before in another position. Um, also a contracting situation. They sent in a contractor to do a project, and I about two, three weeks in, I was just looking at her, and you're not performing at all. Every person in the organization you've sat down and talked to, and I've said, hey, here's what the contract calls them to do, they looked at me and said, She can't do that. Um, and in that case, one of the more awkward moments of my career was I called the company that employed her and said, Hey, look, um, she's not performing yet, and I don't think she has the potential to. I'm gonna save the government money, some money. Um, and if you leave her here, I'm gonna terminate the contract for cause. If you give me a new one next week, you'll have a chance to continue with this contract.

SPEAKER_02 56:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:55

Um, so they had me call her into my office because the company she worked for wasn't in the area. And they I put it on speakerphone and I sat there silently while a contracting company fired one of their employees in front of me. And then my very capable civilian HR director uh did her job and was there with the tissues and to frankly escort her out of the building.

SPEAKER_02 57:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:17

Um, but that was a case where nice person, contracting company was trying to make a quick win on the government, take their cut off the contract without paying much attention to it.

SPEAKER_02 57:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:27

They sent me the wrong person, right? Person came in, and that program that that contractor was responsible for standing up uh 12 years later is still running strong. Oh wow. Hopefully not with contract leadership. The goal is to transition it into a civil servant running it uh once we figured out it was actually going to endure.

SPEAKER_02 57:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:44

But if we'd stuck with the initial, if we'd stuck with the wrong person, it would have been a failure and that program never would have gone anywhere. And I think it has actually done some good for that organization and done some good for the government, and I think it was worth the money as long as the money was going to the right person who's actually capable of doing the work.

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Yeah. Uh that is an excellent cap on the the persistent theme of balancing the uh balancing the people that you're prioritizing uh and doing so and treating them humanely uh along along the way.

SPEAKER_00 58:14

Yeah. Was not thrilled with the way that afternoon unfolded.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

I d no, I don't imagine. I'm glad you had a uh an additional support person uh in there. Um This has been an excellent conversation. Are you ready for a little bit of uh uh we like to lighten it up a little bit at the end with some lightning round? Um so first up, what was your first job?

SPEAKER_00 58:33

My first job was washing dishes in a local restaurant called the 108 house near University of Rhode Island on Friday nights and Sunday mornings.

SPEAKER_01 58:42

That is a that is a good first job to uh to learn a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 58:47

Learned what a bad smell was at the end of the night.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

What's uh we might have hit on a couple of these. What's one leadership skill that you wish you'd learned earlier?

SPEAKER_00 58:57

Listening. If I'd been a better listener earlier, I would have made fewer mistakes. Um I am a pretty smart person, but if you ever walk into a room and think you won't know all the answers, you're not gonna listen to that person who knows something you don't, and you're not gonna realize you're wrong until you're hopefully haven't screwed up beyond repair. But if I'd been a better listener 25 years ago, I would have been a much better marine.

SPEAKER_01 59:21

Love it. What's the biggest myth about leadership that you find?

SPEAKER_00 59:25

Uh, we talked about at the beginning. Uh, leadership is not about authority and telling people do this because I said so. Leadership is about making sure people understand why you're doing it and making them want to do it with you, making them understand why you think it's the right thing to do, why you think it's important. And if they internalize that, they'll be at your side doing it right alongside you. So leadership is much more about influence than it is about absolute authority.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

Love it. Uh hopefully you don't get paralyzed by choice on this based off your response in pre-show. But what's the worst professional advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_00 59:58

The worst professional advice I received is that there is a standard career track. And if you want to succeed, you want to do well, you have to do things this way. Um, I think I violated standard career track, good career advice seven times.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:13

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:14

Um, and I got promoted to colonel in the United States Marine Corps, which there's about 700 colonels and 170,000 Marines. Most people tell you if you don't follow good career advice, you're gonna top out two ranks below that at major. Yep. I ignored good advice multiple times. I performed my contributions were valuable enough that they kept promoting me anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:33

Yeah. I will just uh I will just reinforce that. Uh I received advice, great advice at one point as I was uh at the squad uh in the squadron thinking about perhaps next steps, and uh a mentor told me, don't listen to any of this normal standard career stuff. Go find the job where you're gonna ride horses in the back, you know, uh uh in in China or something, uh to do this. And I had internalized uh a need for structure and regulation and a path, and uh uh and didn't see a path on a standard career uh path for me. And so I got stuck in that loop by ignoring that uh the opposite of that advice. So I love that that's your worst advice and you and you proved it. Um all right, final question. What's uh podcast or book or some other media uh that's not leadership or military uh related uh that they recommend? What's the real Doug?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

Um yeah, this is like what you see behind me is just a small slice of the wall of bookshelves in my house, and I do most electronically nowadays. I will say if you thought Game of Thrones was decent, that's great. Go read the books instead. Um I read them first. I've only made it through season five of the show, which is about where the movies topped out.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

Um, but I enjoyed reading Game of Thrones more than I enjoyed watching it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:53

And I didn't even get to the part where apparently they ruined everything the last couple seasons.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:56

Yeah, no, I'm I'm I'm a firm believer that no uh the absence of a book is still better than the uh existence of a seventh season.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Um I might get there soon, but yeah, not yet.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

I hear I hear they're making up for it in the prequels. Uh all right. Uh thank you so much, Doug. Uh just as a reminder, Doug Krugman is a retired Marine and a senior advisor to the Vetvoice Foundation. Uh you can find his work uh, I think at vetvoicefoundation.org and on Substack. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

Uh Substack's the faster way, but yeah, vetvoicefoundation.org. It's a great organization advocating for a lot of great things that our country needs.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:30

Absolutely. Uh people can people connect with you on LinkedIn as well? We'll have all this in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

Yep. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn, I usually limit to uh book reviews these days. My more serious policy-focused stuff is on Substack.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

Love it. Uh, if and if anything in today's episode resonated with you, uh beyond reaching out with Doug, visit unit.io to learn about how we help uh leaders uh develop and uh amplify themselves. I'm Keegan Evans, and this has been Bed on People.