Customer Reviews

Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Vandergriff begins this monograph with the observation that fundamental ways of thinking about conflict must change from defeating other armies in set-piece battles to successfully resolving "fourth generation" conflicts that are practically never decided by battles. He characterizes this change as a shift from "linear" to "complex" thinking.

Many others, of course, have made this same observation, and Vandergriff duly acknowledges the big names in the field. Where Vandergriff makes his original contribution is in proposing specific methods for creating leaders who can carry out the program of change that he envisions. He calls his methodology the "adaptive course model" (ACM) and states its purpose as " ... creating leaders who understand and practice adaptability, while encouraging Army senior leaders to nurture this trait in their subordinates." As he notes, to accomplish this purpose, the ACM must encompass three elements: a culture of learning, a program of instruction designed to nurture adaptive students, and a corps of highly trained and competent instructors.

Vandergriff does an admirable job of explaining each element in the 40+ page Chapter 3, Creating Adaptability. It is worth noting that he draws on the latest research on leadership, including the data supporting the concept of "recognition-primed decision making," and employs a variety of techniques to make the program as "experiential" as possible. The name of the game is "adaptive leadership," and under Vandergriff, you'll be doing a lot of it.

Will it work? I am pessimistic, not because I doubt the power of his methodology - similar approaches have worked in the past - but because of the role of the Army in fourth generation warfare. Frankly, I don't see one. It's quite likely that Vandergriff's recommendations can create a better Army, but how do we judge "better" in a world where the threats appear to be nuclear-armed states on the one hand and shadowy, transnational "terrorist" groups on the other? It's not clear that we would risk land combat against the former and it certainly isn't clear what role the Army can play against the latter. To the extent that this view is correct, the Army doesn't have much incentive to change its comfortable culture in order to become more relevant in the 21st century.

One group that can adopt Vandergriff's ideas is modern business. Many of the techniques he recommends to create and evaluate adaptive leaders in the Army will work with obvious modifications for business. They are sorely needed: As Deming preached, virtually all the problems of US industry over the last generation can be traced to failures of leadership. It's instructive to contrast senior military and civilian leaders on this point. The top generals of the Army really do see their people as their primary resource, and they aren't reluctant to spend money to develop them. To be competitive for promotion, for example, officers need to spend four or five of their first 20 years improving their civilian and military educations at the Army's expense. This is not a philosophy that permeates private industry: An executive vice-president at Wal-Mart, for example, complained to the board in October 2005 that workers with seven years experience at the company cost more than new hires but were no more productive, a statement that would flabbergast any military professional.

For those who do want to improve the performance of their companies by improving the capabilities of their people, Vandergriff's little book cuts through the fluff and delivers a tightly packed duffel bag of philosophy, ideas, and techniques, many of which were tested by Vandergriff himself during his years of training future officers (he was ROTC Instructor of the Year in 2003).

Many of those who have experienced the Army training and education system first-hand view it as an attempt to stuff 10 pounds of "stuff" into a two-pound bag. The focus of most Army courses seems to be an attempt to throw the maximum amount of information at the student in the hope that some of it will stick and come back to the student at a later date when needed. In his latest work, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War, Major (Retired) Donald Vandergriff poses a radically new way of approaching the traditional education system, one that eschews checklists and PowerPoint in favor of what he calls the Adaptive Course Model (ACM). ACM, Vandergriff posits, will focus on creating adaptive military leaders; these leaders will use that adaptability to seek innovative solutions to complex problems on the battlefields of the Three-Block War. Vandergriff has an established reputation as a visionary thinker in the fields of military personnel management and leader development, having written over 50 works on the subject over the course of a 24-year career. Vandergriff is unsentimental about the current systems of officer management and selection, calling them antiquated and profoundly dysfunctional in the current environment of Fourth Generation (4GW) warfare. He is emphatic that simple tinkering around the margins will not do - only a system-wide reform of educational practices (what he calls a "revolution in educational affairs"), coupled with a complete cultural shift, will produce the kind of leaders needed for the Long War. Although Vandergriff's work sometimes fails to meet the scope and breadth of its own defined topic, it is a seminal work on the need for change within the Army Educational System and deserves to be widely disseminated, read, and integrated.

From the start, Vandergriff aims his work at a broad audience - he makes it clear that he wants his work to be read not only by officers and leaders "on the inside", but by the general public as well. Because he has aimed so broadly, he spends more than half of the book defining the core problem: the Army education and promotion system is based on an antiquated, industrial-age paradigm that focuses on quantity over quality and views individual leaders as fungible cogs in a great set of gears. His critique is devastatingly detailed and almost painful to read; it stands in stark contrast to those who view warfare as inevitably progressing towards information dominance and transparency. One of his best comments on the subject should be reproduced and posted on the wall of every office in the Pentagon: "Effective business practices are often very different from effective military practices. This is particularly true in the area of personnel policies, where the idea of soldierly virtue embodies the ethos of self-sacrifice, and where, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the material as three is to one." Vandergriff then turns to the question of how to fix the system from the bottom up - his proposed solution of ACM promises to radically refocus the military classroom from processes and slideshows. These will give way to scenario-driven education that eschews a "school solution" in favor of an evaluative process that assesses how well a student is learning and adapting to changing circumstances. ACM adapts the small-group methodology already in use at most Army schools and takes it to its next logical step - a free-form exchange of ideas between student and instructor that challenges the student to make difficult and far-reaching decisions under difficult time constraints, and then defend those decisions to their peers and colleagues. Vandergriff notes the difficulty of selecting and training the kind of people capable of running such a program, and calls on the Army leadership to be more aggressive in rebuilding the current broken system.

Vandergriff's approach to the topic is visionary. Although many of the ideas he proposes are not new (the use of Tactical Decision Games, for instance, has been commonplace in Marine courses for years), this is the first time that they have been proposed on this kind of scale within the US Army. Much of what he proposes is already recognized as fundamental to good pedagogy and taught in Teaching Excellence courses around the country, but this is the first time they has been employed in the highly technical and complex field of military science. Rather than focusing on whether or not a student can regurgitate a particular piece of tribal lore, Vandergriff's ACM focuses on how a student came to a particular decision, and whether or not that process could have been handled better. This is a long-overdue change in an era where junior leaders routinely rewrite Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) "on the fly", and use those TTPs in the face of contrary elements of doctrine. The author does his fair share of slaughtering of sacred cows - he rightly denigrates the statement that "there are no dumb questions", noting that questions that delay critical decisions or cover material already reinforced in previous orders are, in fact dumb - they cede initiative to the adversary and cost lives on the battlefield. His insistence on an instructor-centric curriculum with broad guidance and objectives stands in stark contrast to the typical TRADOC course packet, with its Enabling Learning Objectives and Terminal Learning Objectives laid out in long-winded briefings and outlines. He rightfully minimizes the use of jargon and frequently references a glossary of abbreviations in order to make the work as accessible as possible to the general public.

Vandergriff's book does overreach at times, and ultimately falls short in delivering on its vision of a system-wide cultural change. For instance, he cites the new Basic Officer Leadership Course (BOLC) as a needed shift forward (from the old CAS3 and CGSC) of officer integration in general training. This ignores the fact that because BOLC takes place before any branch-specific training takes place, it really only functions as a training leveler between commissioning sources, rather than a source of transmission of ideas between branches. Likewise, his emphasis on the use of distance-learning technologies to cover "the basics" may be sound for the training of mid-level or career soldiers who have already developed the necessary work ethic, but is problematic for the training of cadets who may never been challenged to do anything of the sort. Some portion of classroom time will have to devoted the the basic elements of tactical and operational instruction - you cannot reasonable evaluate a student's decision to execute an L-shaped ambush until you are sure that the student really understands what that is. The largest problem with Vandergriff's work is that he underestimates the scope of change needed to support his proposed reforms. He rightfully emphasizes the need for cultural and procedural change within the Army, but neglects any call for such change in the multitude of supporting agencies that make Army Training and Education possible. Anyone who has ever tried to negotiate a shift in times with Range Control or get a Central Issue Facility to alter its standard menu items understands the difficulty of getting supporting civilian agencies to adapt the kind of flexible calendar and training philosophy Vandergriff espouses. With more and more aspects of garrison operations shifting over to contractors and full-time civilians, the gap in philosophy could become catastrophic, and reinforce an "us vs. them" divide that is currently all too prevalent in American society. The changes Vandergriff proposes must affect all aspects of Army education and training support, not just the ones wearing camouflage.

These shortfalls are relatively minor, though, and pale in comparison to the originality and audacity of Vandergriff's main arguments and ideas. The author has written a truly visionary work that deserves to be read at the highest levels and acted upon with all due haste. Every branch school commandant in TRADOC, for instance, should be required to read it, and then backbrief how their own Programs of Instruction support or fail to support the ideas laid out in the work. Congressional leaders on the Armed Services Committees would also be well served to survey the book, and prepare some hard questions for military leaders on how things have gotten to this point. Ultimately, Vandergriff's work should be viewed as a thrown gauntlet for others to pick up and accept the challenge of a long, hard look in the mirror.

Don Vandergriff is arguably the best major to be not promoted

by the U.S. Army. Among other things, he was their ROTC Instructor of the

Year in 2003. While his passover may not bother most Americans, it should.

For when careerism becomes so rampant in a military organization that

exceptionally talented professionals are rifted for being

proactive, that organization may also have trouble winning wars. As a

retired Lieutenant Colonel myself, having communicated with Don

many times at Georgetown University, and still in touch with his "most

promising" cadet, I know of what I speak.

Among other things, Major Vandergriff is a realist. He knows that until

just recently the U.S. Army had no reason to change. Now that it has

once again proven its ineptitude at counterguerrilla and 4th

Generation Warfare (that which is fought in martial, political, economic,

and psychological areas simultaneously), perhaps Major Vandergriff's

insightful plan for the future will finally be acted upon.

He argues that the most effective way to change the Army is by changing

the way new leaders are trained and what they are trained for. Then, as

these leaders migrate through the system during their careers, the Army

will change along with them in an inevitable, organic process. "Changing

the culture of the Army and the military is generational and begins with

the Army's newest and potential leaders." (p. 24) In essence, he wants

to teach young lieutenants how to responsibly consider alternatives

instead of blindly following what they perceive to be established

procedure. In the process, he hopes to create an army that is more

adaptible at its bottom echelons to an ever-changing combat situation.

This is essential to beating a loosely controlled foe who likes to fight

at close range.

Major Vandergriff is too professional to talk about a problem without

also providing a fully tested solution. He calls his methodology the

"adaptive course model" (ACM) and states its purpose as " ... creating

leaders who understand and practice adaptability, while encouraging Army

senior leaders to nurture this trait in their subordinates." As he notes,

to accomplish this purpose, the ACM must encompass three elements: a

culture of learning, a program of instruction designed to nurture

adaptive students, and a corps of highly trained and competent

instructors.

There may never again be a large set-piece battle. WWIII will, in all

likelihood, be fought unconventionally and will look, in its initial

stages, like what is going on around the world today. If the Army's

current crop of senior leaders wants to be favorably remembered by

history, they best take to heart Don Vandergriff's proposals.

Don Vandergriff's Raising the Bar recognizes that the armed conflicts of America's current and next generations will require our warriors to think far more critically and creatively than we have either asked or prepared them to think. Accordingly, Vandergriff argues the need to reassess and redevelop the way the Army selects and educates leaders to confront unpredictable and complex future operational problems.
His service as an instructor of Army cadets helped shape his core thesis, that the system of selecting and training the current cadre of military leadership hampers our ability to deploy leaders who think adaptively. He diagnoses the root cause in the management practices of the 19th and 20th centuries' age of industry, notably the "scientific management" studies of Frederick Taylor. A legacy of the mobilization theories of World War I, reaffirmed by the American experience rapidly raising 91 divisions during the World War II, and entrenched by the force drawdowns of the nineties, the current Army leadership paradigm overemphasizes quantity of rapidly commissioned output in a least common denominator framework. Innovation, quality of thought, and merit are all suppressed by a model that pursues retention with foreordained promotions. A central assertion in his analysis is that warfare and business management are mismatched analogues.
Reaching further to intellectual roots, Vandergriff traces the origins of the phenomenon to the enlightenment educational practices of Rene Descartes, which broke up engineering problems into a series of process checklists. He explains that a Newtonian determinist approach - that is, one that treats the execution of warfare as a linear mechanistic process like the maintenance of a clock - shaped, via Taylor, the Army's outlook on personnel. Not included in his list, but perhaps as influential to the existing system, is the positivist theory of French sociologist Auguste Comte. Comte believed that every element of society could be measured, understood, and optimized by empirical means.
Vandergriff's prescription is holistic reform, both to the system that selects junior leaders, and the system that educates them in how to think, not what to think. He proposes a system that promotes self-actualized learning via weakly structured situational problems.
This slim volume, published by the non-profit and non-partisan Center for Defense Information, includes endnotes and a list of acronyms. Staying true to its purpose of advocating more artful and less scientific means to leadership development, the book contains very little statistical data which could reinforce points on accessions, promotions, and attrition. Indeed, readers searching for an operations research approach to improving the officer corps should look elsewhere. Raising the Bar is a sobering, well-reasoned explanation and critique of an outmoded leadership development paradigm.

As important as "Raising the Bar" is for military officers, this book is a must-read for anyone in management who is looking for answers when none are readily apparent. Management seeks to define and determine; it can be administrative and governed by metrics. The same applies to the military. On the battlefield, however, all planning (and many metrics), as Dwight Eisehower postulated, can be tossed aside. What military commanders must learn, and as author Don Vandergriff describes, is how to deal with multiple variables, especially those that occur in an asymmetrical battlefield, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Toward that end, Vandegriff, a retired Army major and much honored instructor, has written a book to provide insights for officers (and by extension, managers) who must deal in a fast-changing environment. One great insight that he develops in the book are the principles for the Adaptive Course Model and the accompanying Program of Instruction These two concepts form the foundation a program that actually teaches officers how to adapt in real time to real change real fast. Rooted in character and based on actual practice, the ACM program is highly applicable to the corporate world. Trainers and executive coaches can draw lessons from Vandergriff's insights into decision-making, tactics, and situational awareness. Vandergriff is also an accomplished writer. He draws from both civilian and military sources. The result is an easy, but instructive read as well as an invaluable resource. Read "Raising the Bar." Learn from it. And put it into practice.

Organizations tend to lose their ability to adapt in changing environments as they grow larger. When it occurs in business, the business suffers loss of market share or reductions in productivity metrics. When it occurs in the military, young men and women pay with their lives and nations pay with their national security.

In this insightful book, Major Vandergriff quickly dissects and identifies the source of this malady in one growing organization, the U.S. Army. Though his focus in this book is how to cure the disease in Army, his insight is worth noting for the same cure in other branches of the military, and indeed in civilian business organizations where there is the courage among leaders to face the problem and accept the cure. Major Vandergriff's observations and suggested solutions reach far beyond the US Army. He first identifies the cynical industrial theory that all individuals are motivated soley by self-interest and greed as the philosophy that feeds the sickness. Any organization built on such a faulty cultural assumption has little hope for reform. Reforming such an organization from the top is impossible; cultural foundations must be replaced from the bottom up.

But Major Vandergriff does not leave us only with a diagnosis but offers the formula for a cure. In the second chapter, a quote from Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, sums up the theme of this book, "It's the personnel system, stupid." One can hear the late Col. John Boyd's dictum booming out, "People, ideas, machines...in that order." Indeed, Major Vandergriff acknowledges Col. Boyd's theories as foundational to changing the Army leadership development program from a focus on training to a focus on education. Teaching leaders how to think rather than what to think is a key component of the necessary change. Feeding the change through the academies and ROTC programs is the surest way to change the cultural foundations needed to nurture this new wave of leaders. There are examples of this new kind of leader already present and Major Vandergriff gives us some examples of these outstanding young leaders. Unfortunately, too often, these leaders must fight the cultural winds blowing the opposite direction, forcing them out of the military. Without the sweeping reform to create more of them, the winds will continue to frustrate change. Major Vandergfriff even goes so far as to offer a description of curriculum and structure of a reformed educational branch of the Army. His ideas and his plan make sense.

Without exaggeration, Major Vandergriff has given us one of the most important works on military reform. But those in and out of the military need to comprehend and confront the issues he brings to our attention. Good business leaders will attempt to apply this cure to their businesses; good military leaders will attempt to understand and apply these concepts to their command responsibilities; and good citizens will attempt to understand and convey these concepts to their representatives so that they will encourage this military reform. The importance of this effort cannot be overemphasized. Share this book with your superiors, military leaders, and most of all with your congressmen and senators. Our nation's future may very well depend on it.

Major Don Vandergriff's `Raising the Bar' is a small book with a very big heart; which attracts, like a moth to light, the reader and sets the scene for an intellectual manoeuvre which is creative and thought provoking. It deserves careful reading as it contains many nuggets which if not examined closely might well be cast aside and ignored.

There are many examples from the natural world to support the need for adaptability, yet mankind has only some 8000 or so yrs of social and cultural experience to develop its own forms of adaptation to the changing environment. Modern mans' biological information processing system, the brain, is tuned to short term necessities and ad hoc action, primarily of a linear cause effect environment which in Maj Vandergrieff's terms means that it is not necessarily optimised to operate in today's complex environment. It is refreshing, therefore, that the current preponderance of methodism and process of implementation is recognised and the urgent need for a more appropriate theory and philosophy (doctrine) to create new ideas as to how we might adapt to new challenges is so well recognised.

The late Peter Drucker pointed out that if you can't measure it you can't manage it, reflecting the Taylorist approach to the efficiency of production; selecting this single management point restricts thinking that it is the system's effectiveness that really matters. Henry Ford created, at the time, the world's most efficient car production system for the Model T; however, by the time he was raising the flag of efficiency the value for money environment had changed, the intangible of hedonics had emerged within a new consumer society, with new beliefs attracting buyers. What these notable historic figures were doing was following sustainable technology, management, life cycle sigmoid curves, they were continually adapting to the slight changes, they were continually improving production efficiencies, but what they were missing was the that the marginal utility of their solutions was approaching zero and then turning negative. They failed to identify that new radical and disruptive solutions were becoming available which completely either neutralised or destroyed their current organisation and its competencies.

Such thoughts and observations as these are derived from the ideas Major Vandergriff sows which resonate to create a plethora of thoughts and like a multi-spectral lens brightly illuminate the problem with multiple details.

Raising the Bar is based on the operational, which includes the tactical, delivery and its current methodism which reflects rigidity of doctrine and does not have the theory, or philosophy, necessary either today or tomorrow. The book is particularly clear that the question it is exploring is a system orientated problem; it mentions the word system 159 times to emphasise the point. Yet the current approach described for the Army to understanding these diverse, divergent, problems is analysis. This results in the present condition that at the higher levels we find context without content and at the lower level, the soldier, we find content without context; means without meaning. We find data and information which links with knowledge, synthesis which links with understanding. And, this as Major Vandergriff points out is a problem of andragogical learning; perhaps the pragmatic approach of John Dewey, remains today just as relevant; an approach based on understanding not just the analysis of teaching.

What readers of Raising the Bar might consider when exploring this change in terms of the move from 2nd to 4th generation WF, is a another comparison with industry, because as Major Vandergriff points out the Army is not a business; but that does not mean that it shouldn't be more business like. At the turn of the 20th Century it is estimated that about 95% of the people employed in the USA, and probably the same relative percentage in the UK and Europe, could perform the operational tasks as well as their bosses. The task undertaken being complicated; but not particularly complex. One of the features of such a system being what became known as the `Peter Principle' that all managers raised to the level of their own incompetence, ie just beyond their level of competence. Today, however, it is estimated that over 95% of the people employed can do their jobs, in the operational system, better than their bosses can. It seems logical, therefore, that they cannot be manage in the same way. When managing subordinates who know how to do what their doing better than the boss, you don't manage what they do, you manage the way they interact. That requires a different type of organization and a different type of management. Conventional management and conventional organisation cannot do it.

In the Commercial and social world we might consider that if people cannot adapt themselves to the methods, then the methods must adapt to the people, however, it is doubtful if such a compromise would be successful in the military. But it does raise an interesting paradox; if the nature of change is such that little is left for the senior command to teach the soldiers, or the soldier to accept from senior command what happens to the structure of military life - does it collapse? Moving from hierarchical command to lower lowerarchies!

As Theodore Roosevelt observed of the Navy - "change is a nontrivial activity." Like trying to retrain a large plant with thick branches, the branches are too strong to be redirected without breaking, and the roots are so entangled through history that they cannot be reorganised without complete removal and replanting. Experience shows that even leaving a small amount of root results in the eventual re-emergence of the original to dominate the forest. These systems are autopoetic, they display autopoiesis, the process whereby an organization reproduces itself; literally, self-production, and although the form may have changed the function remains - but the purpose of any system is what it does and not what it might say on the tin!

Early symptoms that a system, structure, is under pressure are given by its psychology, by a reduction in cohesion, cooperation, mutual respect, and self-respect, which in turn will be reflected in the courage to face adversity and the ability to face hardship.

Maj Vandergriff pulls these factors together in terms of the components of warfare: the physical, moral and conceptual, drawing on Lt Col Hughes experiences to illustrate the essential moral component; capturing the reality that it is nearly always more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to continue to advance in the direction of increasing sophistication and complexity. Yet the reality in truth is that Col Hughes approach was not simple, it just appeared so, it took a level of experience, of learning, an understanding of humanity to achieve what he achieved, Col Hughes applied his knowledge, which is a skill, to the information that was available to him; he correctly interpreted the supersignals.

These are the secrets of the learning organisation, to survive organisations need to learn at least as quickly as the environment is changing; to win competitive advantage they need to anticipate and adopt. Any poor quality engineer, consultant, manager, scientist can invariably increase complexity, the real flair though is to be able to make things appear simple even when they are not.

The world is complex, dumbing down is not the answer, individuals and organisations have to learn faster than their environment is changing to survive and profit. Einstein's maxim that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" in this context means that we need to understand the bounds of the system we are operating in. This needs particular thought in terms of 4th Generation WF, as, at the tactical level, the system's boundaries are different to previous forms of warfare; energy and material is input in different forms which need to be understood. In terms of the entropy, the disorder & lack of information, we have to recalculate the formula as in many ways it has become much more of a cognitive problem; the higher up the management structure the larger the system bounds are made to encompass the disorder and lack of information. Hence, it is at the tactical level that success will, or won't, be achieved.

This means that we cannot ignore complexity, quite the opposite, what it means is that we need to understand that the face of warfare is not mass analysis, which creates information and, yes, even the skill called knowledge; it is about understanding that delivers wisdom, and that rare capability the wisdom to perceive is what `Raising the Bar' is all about.

If there is one area that might be questioned it is on the use of the term adaptability; this may be transatlantic semantics but it should be clarified.

Adapting, adaptability is passive; in systems terms it responds to the actions of other parts of the system; it is often used therefore in providing early understanding that the system is changing in some form; it is often termed the reactive part of the system. In military terms it reflects a defensive posture; responding or reacting, to the enemy, being malleable to the environment.

Adoption though is active, in system terms it reflects the levers within a system; the variables that have to be adopted, rather than adapted, to make any significant change to the systems performance. Active levers are, in reality, the only parts, variables, in the system that are going to have any effect; indeed this can be observed in terms of those other elements in the system that are described as buffers, those inert variables which tend to be loosely coupled and which are politically the nice to haves; as their very name suggests they are sluggish in action, not readily reactive and have no therapeutic effect.

As an example, to put this into warfare and command settings; during the early stages of WWII the RN had been forced, in the main, to respond to the enemy's manoeuvres, senior command was made up of seasoned officers who had succeeded in the peacetime system. Little risk was taken, or could be afforded, and scientific advice was provided by in-house experts. Strategy and tactics were responses to enemy action, stimulus and response; adaptation and a defensive posture.

By the spring of 1944, this had changed, command was now made up of officers who had not either been fired or killed, with scientific advice being provided by such luminaries as Prof. Blackett who had come from the far more competitive environment of commercial and scientific life. The new brand of officers were self-confident, hugely experienced and had learned from earlier mistakes. They were now able to anticipate, think ahead of the environment, to employ new tactics and take new risks; they adopted new tactical postures which had a self-reinforcing or positive feedback effect.

Another example that shines out is General Slim, Defeat into Victory, who unified his command through his own frame of reference, personal example, and focus on establishing and maintaining high morale through a focus on what he considered then as the three critical related components of warfare: the Spiritual, Intellectual, and Material (that famous triad again). Slim was a mediocre staff officer yet a brilliant line officer; this should tell us something as those who succeed in the peace time system, those convergent players who are good at efficiency but not effectiveness, means but not ends, result in being at the top of the hierarchy when war comes.

It is an unfortunate fact that war invariably follows peace. As Peter Drucker pointed out: "he whom the gods would destroy they first give forty years of success." We probably should not, therefore, expect visionary and inspiring leadership from the top to create a transformation.

The military, like successful civil and commercial organizations have done in the last few years, have moved from hierarchical bureaucracies to what Ackoff & Rovin call lowerarchical, task orientated communities. But this requires a systemic rather than systematic understanding and that requires as Maj Vandergriff so often points out (149 times) a cultural change.

Nothing leads to change more than success; as the US cartoonist Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' said: "we have met the enemy and he is us."

After over 16 years in the Army in positions that have so far ranged from enlisted to senior NCO to company grade officer, I have been exposed to every new idea for training and management up to this point. From institutional attempts through things like TQM and Six Sigma to commanders who force their staffs to read the latest and greatest from Harvard Business School, our force has moved in the wrong direction. Real field training has suffered the most as it has remained stuck in the Cold War neutral gear of task, conditions, and standard. ARTEP, METL, follow the checklist, get a GO, move on...
MAJ Vandergriff's application of 4GW thought processes and ideas combined with ideas for true institutional change address what is really needed in the Army if we're to thrive and win in the environments in which we find ourselves.
Most importantly, what really comes through in the book is MAJ Vandergriff's love for the Army and for soldiers. If you consider your highest calling to be the welfare of your soldiers, (and if you wear stripes, stars, bars, or leaves, you damn well better), then read this book.
My only criticism is that the binding on the copy I have is very poor. The pages are literallly falling out of the book. For a book that I use frequently and highlight and tab, this is UNSAT. For the high price of this book in paperback, better binding should have been used.

This book Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War is an outstanding resource. In only 132 pages, this book sets the leg work for reform not only in the military, but for any organization that wants to be effective. The strategies and methods Vandergriff discusses through out this book, work and work well. I know because I have used and still use the methods.

Vandergriff talks about organizational culture and the changes necessary to enhance decision making under pressure. He also provides you with the "how too" methods of developing and implementation of adaptive leaders, and the methods work. The book is about change for the right reasons, so we are more effective in that which we do.

The law Enforcement and Security professions should make this book required reading for any new Leaders who truely want to lead effectively and deal with crime and crime problems on the streets.