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This award-winning speech appeared in the May 1, 2007, edition of Vital Speeches of the Day.

In the summary of my background that Gordon just shared, you probably noticed that it was pretty short on logistics experience. You’re the logistics experts, and I don’t want to pretend that I can add to your knowledge of your field.    

However, all of you here are leaders as well as logistics experts – and I do have some perspectives on leadership today that I believe relate to the challenges you face in both the managerial and technical aspects of your profession.  

Although it’s not listed in my biography, my very first job – actually my first several jobs – were in the logistics field. And it gave me an appreciation early on for some of the challenges and rewards of getting people and goods from point A to point B.  I was 18 and working in Jacksonville, Florida as a customer service agent for Greyhound Bus Lines. So, being invited to speak at a logistics conference in my native state of Florida really does feel like “coming home.”    

At Greyhound, I had the challenge – long before computers were there to help – of assembling routes and fares to get passengers from Jacksonville to Miami, Atlanta, or even Montana.  I was in a windowless room with a headset on, surrounded by volumes of schedules and fares that I had to put together quickly for the callers.  The questions that were hardest to answer were: “when does the bus leave?” or “how much does the bus cost” – when accompanied by no additional details about where the person was going.

Whether I was on the phone … or subsequent summers when I worked directly with customers in Greyhound’s package express service – I found that being genuinely helpful to people and getting them to their destination as quickly and cheaply as possible mattered a lot.  And I felt good and successful when I could make it happen. I’ve never forgotten that.  I also learned that I need to have a job centered around results, not punching a time clock. 

Now, there’s no question that your job today in the age of information overload, instant expectations, and life-and-death deployment decisions – is light-years from my early job with Greyhound.  But I believe the motivations and rewards of mastering the logistics challenge are similar. So, while I’m far from a logistics expert, I do feel like something of a kindred spirit, and I’m very happy to be here in Miami this morning. 

Some of you may have wondered about the title of my speech in your program brochure: “Solid Connections in a Liquid World.” It’s probably one of the more mysterious titles at the conference.  

The New York Times’ columnist and best-selling author Tom Freidman wrote “The World is Flat.”  I wouldn’t exactly disagree with his conclusion, but I would modify it a bit – and assert the world is liquid. 

What do I mean by that?  I mean that today’s world is so fluid and changing  that it is more akin to whitewater and rip-tides than a flat plateau. Liquids seek both a flat surface – as they do in a closed vessel – and they seek the lowest point. And if you think of the power of rivers to cut through hard rock – America’s Grand Canyon being a perfect example – liquids are powerful enough to change the course of time and nature. 

There’s another quality of liquids that I find especially relevant to the challenge of leadership and logistics in today’s world – that is the ability of liquids to create solid connections without being rigid. Those of us of a certain generation – or owners of high-performance sports cars – can relate to the differences between manual and automatic transmissions and the fluid coupling of automatics that allows us to seamlessly and solidly shift gears without the rigidity and narrow tolerances of standard transmissions.  

Canyons and cars aside, the message I’d like to convey today is about the value of solid connections in a liquid world… specifically, the value of solid leadership, solid logistics, and solid linkages with other people. 

And, while conventional wisdom and modern-day pressures are demanding more and more, I’m convinced that – in many respects – “less is more.” Less – is more solid. 

In leadership, “less instant” is “more thoughtful.” In logistics, “less rigid” is “more capable.” And, in linkages with others, “less virtual” is always “more personal and powerful.”   

So, if you’ll accept for a minute my premise – that we need solid connections in a liquid world – I’d like to take each of these dimensions: leadership, logistics, and linkages, and offer some perspective and advice. Accepting the premise is an important first step, because liquid situations are inherently less predictable. And, human nature much prefers the predictability and certainty of a fixed state.  As we all know, the 21st century is far from a fixed state. (I don’t think past centuries were either, but today and tomorrow are ours to deal with.) 

So, we have to get beyond our natural tendency to want a fixed, certain state. It simply doesn’t exist.  

How, then, can we be most effective in this liquid world?  

First – let’s look at Solid Leadership.  And to pick up on the less-is-more undercurrent, I’ll explain why, when it comes to leadership, I believe “less instant is more thoughtful.” 

Leaders have challenges in every dimension including the need: for clear vision and priorities… for consistent measures of success… and, for informed, but timely and un-ambiguous, decision-making. All of these are essential components of solid leadership in a liquid world. 

Leaders need to communicate a clear vision and clear set of priorities. In business or in national security, this means making sure that everyone in our organization and value-chain understands where we are going, why, and what trade-offs should be made to achieve the most important priorities. It sounds pretty straightforward, but in reality, is anything but. Our followers need to understand the precise destination, they need to understand the urgency of the mission, and – when push comes to shove – they need to know what comes first – whether it is expediency, economy, or an over-arching principle. If nothing else, our job as leaders is to make it clear what comes first when trade-offs have to be made.  

Solid leadership in a liquid world also requires a common understanding and consistent measures of success. I read with interest the challenges facing the military in the development of enterprise information systems like ECSS¹ – in particular, the credibility issues and inefficiencies caused by non-standard reporting.    

Talk about kindred spirits!  Over the past year and a half at Booz Allen, we’ve undertaken a significant reorganization that is akin to the US military’s emphasis on jointness.  We eliminated the organizational distinctions between the large business unit serving our commercial clients and the one serving our government clients. In some respects, this major realignment has gone more smoothly than I expected, but one of the areas in which it has not gone so well is around consistent measures of success. Every market area and every geographic region in our firm seems to choose metrics they feel position them in the best light. Some choose profitability, some choose revenue growth, some choose 2 or 3 year time horizons, other choose only the current fiscal year. In a way, the creative accounting is intriguing – but in reality, it hurts our ability to build the institution because it can mask true performance.    

So, one of the key initiatives Booz Allen’s Leadership Team is undertaking    going into our new fiscal year which starts on April 1st is to explicitly define “measures of success.”    These will include:  alignment with the firm’s strategy; longer, deeper client relationships;  top-line growth better than market; and, profitability sufficient to cover compensation and operating costs and to invest in the future. Defining these as the consistent – and as the only measures of success that we’re going to track—is a major step forward in better leading and managing our business. 

In addition to clear priorities and consistent measures of success, another key aspect of solid leadership in a liquid world is informed – but timely and unambiguous – decision-making.

In January, I participated in a panel on “Leading in a Networked World” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and made the point that leadership attention is perhaps the most scarce resource in today’s highly networked world. The amount of information, the compressed time frames, and huge span of control in our extended enterprises can be overwhelming.  

And, therefore we as leaders need to focus our attention on the most important matters.  My strategy for focusing attention is to be “minds on, but hands off.”  By “minds on, hands off,” I mean that leaders are responsible for everything important – but we don’t have to actually do everything important.   

There’s no question that the buck stops here. And we’ve seen that shareholders, juries, and the American public have very little patience with a leader’s excuse that he or she wasn’t aware of what was going on. We must understand and decide – but we don’t personally have to execute. Our trusted colleagues can do that.   

All of these premises about leadership – communicating what comes first, institutionalizing consistent measures of success, and being minds on, hands off – require us to do something almost heretical in today’s world – to “slow down” a bit.  That’s what I mean by “less instant equals more thoughtful.”

Thoughtfulness and clarity cannot be compromised. Just because someone sends us an instant request does not mean we need to fire back an instant reply.  There are occasions where instant response is critical – and it is our job as leaders to be able to gauge that.   

But, more often than not, a thoughtful delay will result in a better-considered and better-appreciated answer.  And, it can save us from a sharp retort we might later regret.

Moving from ideas about solid leadership to solid logistics, I will be much more concise – because, quite frankly, I have much less expertise.

But my observations about the challenges the Department of Defense faces supporting critical operations at any location in the world, on short notice for indefinite periods – leads to another “less is more” principle. Specifically, “less rigid” is “more capable.”   

Whether we’re talking about skyscrapers built to withstand earthquakes, automatic transmissions built to compensate for imprecise drivers, or systems built to deploy munitions and food to a dynamic, rapidly-moving tactical force – I would argue that those logistics systems that allow for fluidity and flexibility, rather than systems that get hung up as a result of too-close tolerances and rigid conformity, will serve us well in this liquid world. 

Being less rigid also requires incorporating others’ points of view, not just sticking with our original and solo ideas. There are numerous examples in the world of logistics that show the value of considering varied sources of input with openness and flexibility, and avoiding the rigidity of our own silos and rejection of concepts “not invented here.”

I’m impressed with the lessons the US military is adopting from Toyota, Federal Express, Wal-Mart and other commercial companies to enhance process discipline and innovation. Likewise, in areas where the military is generally out in front such as transportation, triage, and information assurance, I see examples in which industry is paying close attention to lessons from the high stakes and high standards of military logistics.  The information sharing that is happening at this conference is another excellent example.

Which brings me to the last element of solid connections in a liquid world – personal linkages.  “Less virtual” is always more personal and more powerful.   

We need men and women more than machines. People are always more fluid – more creative and better problem-solvers – than the best systems. And even systems are best when they’re designed for more fluid operation and behave more like living and learning organisms.   

We need to use technology for what it does best – store, retrieve, compute, and mine data -- and use people for what we do best – imagine, design, dream, and relate. At the end of the day, one of us, not an information system must make all the big decisions. We’re the ones who need to be “minds on.”

The more we understand this from the get-go and design systems to complement people rather than replace them – the more solid our connections and missions will be. 

So, in closing, I would like to leave you with this idea about leadership, logistics, and life:  In today’s liquid world, less instant, less rigid, and less virtual equals more solid.  

As leaders in the logistics profession, you are the ones making solid connections in this liquid world – taming the tides to keep people and goods flowing smoothly.

Thank you. 

1 Air Force Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECCS) as cited on ECSS Fact Sheet posted on www.af.mil

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