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Don Vandergriff
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Raising the Bar Kindle Edition

by Don Vandergriff (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 26 ratings
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Raising the Bar outlines the core concepts and practices developed by Major Don Vandergriff (United States Army, Retired) and now being applied across a wide spectrum of military leadership training. The text has become required reading for ROTC faculty and students.
Don Vandergriff's experiences, research and interaction with fellow military professionals suggest that a cultural revolution within the U.S. military is essential if the nation is to successfully adapt and prevail in the emerging 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) or asymmetric warfare threat environment.
An Army cultural revolution has three parts:
1. Strategic leaders must change a counterproductive array of long-established beliefs including many laws, regulations and policies, which are based on out-of-date assumptions.
2. Military leaders must drive and sustain a military cultural evolution through effective education and training of the next generation(s) of leaders in a system that is flexible enough to evolve alongside emerging changes in, and lessons from, war, society and technology.
3. Finally, senior leaders must continue to nurture and protect these younger leaders as they go out and put to practice what they have learned, and allow them to evolve.
When the Army begins and sustains an evolutionary process of cultural change based on these or similar principles, it will be on the road to effective reform. This study aims to provide ways to plot and follow the transformational road map for the Army and nation to deal with the complexities of 4th generation warfare.
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  1. Print length
    168 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    August 12, 2012
  4. File size
    623 KB
  5. Page Flip
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  6. Word Wise
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  7. Enhanced typesetting
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4.2 out of 5 stars
26 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Charles S. Heal
    5.0 out of 5 stars Adapt or become obsolete
    Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    This is the second time I've read this book and I think I took more notes this time than last. While the book is clearly written for an audience from the US Army, only the most casual readers will not be able to extrapolate the lessons and ideas to much broader applications. In particular, the insights on teaching young officers to recognize and adapt to a continually changing environment have the same significance in a business environment. Likewise, the criticisms in perpetuating a legacy simply because of traditional allegiance is a harbinger for missing environmental and social cues in other disciplines. The book is well worth the expense and effort, especially for those who must contend with unexpected change and the necessity for quickly compensating and even exploiting opportunities.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Kaytee/Jeremy T
    4.0 out of 5 stars How the Army changes
    Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2015
    This is primarily a book on making adaptive military leaders, yet it can be for any form of leader. Best case is when the reader has some familiarity with military acronyms and jargon to make their leadership adaptive.
    E
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  • M. Dupre
    5.0 out of 5 stars Raising the Bar
    Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Don Vandergriff pulls out all the stops in his assessment of where the military is at present, and where it needs to be to meet future threats. For far too long, leaders and followers have been told "what" to think, not "how" to think, mostly for an industrial age, echoing the paradigm from America's education system. Vandergriff recommends methodologies and principles for changing that paradigm to produce real thinkers in uniform, so necessary for the type of conflicts we are facing.

    I recommend that ALL leaders, present and future own a copy of this easy-to-read manual, right next to their copy of "Sun Tzu: The Art of War."
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  • Thomas M. Magee
    3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Bag
    Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    This book is primarily written for an Army audience. He talks about the need to change how officers are trained at the basic level, ROTC and Basic Course. The intent is to better train people for what he calls the 4th generation of war. That was his term for counter-insurgency. I do think the Army is already trying to implement what he calls for in the book. They have changed POI (Program of Instruction) in several courses to try to make people think more on their feet.

    I liked his ideas about teaching method changes. The third and fourth chapters call for innovative use of scenarios in all modules to make people think outside of the box and bring in new ideas from outside fields. I think teaching in any field could use these ideas. I have seen that concept work very well in different fields. The book needs more explanation and examples of how this new concept radically changes things. That would make this book excellent then and a NY Times best seller that everyone could enjoy.
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  • C. T. Bean
    4.0 out of 5 stars Exploring Raising the Bar through the lens of Complexity
    Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2007
    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."
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Katherine W.A.
    2.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, but the copy literally fell apart in my hands.
    Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    I purchased this book because it was written by my college ROTC instructor, and his writing is superb. He was years ahead of the Army in describing the problems facing the Army and providing viable solutions. I have seen many of his solutions come to pass in the past five years at various levels.

    Now the bad. My copy started shedding pages from the binding at page 10 and by then end I had a loose collection of 100 pages sitting in my hands. I have had magazines hold together better than this book.

    I would have given it zero stars, but the actual writing is quite good.

    ****UPDATE****
    An update to this rating....the seller refunded the cost of the book and offered a free replacement. While the copy we originally received was poor, the seller made it right!
    One person found this helpful
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