Practical Genius - Making Wagers: QMN020
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Tuesday, 21 May
(Today’s report is a 4 minute read)
BLUF: What characterizes genius - an “exceptional natural capacity of intellect” - that’s valuable for practical life and for business? Is it simply inborn or can it be learned? One view is that it’s about judgment and the ability to make effective wagers - in order to make better decisions. How does one develop that ability, with or without a natural aptitude?
Brady here. In Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire, racketeer and crime innovator Arnold Rothstein, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, reveals the genius behind becoming a millionaire by age 30:
“I’ve made my living, Mr. Thompson, in large part as a gambler. Some days I make twenty bets. Some days I make none. Weeks, sometimes months in fact, when I make no bets at all because there simply is no play. So I wait, plan, I marshal my resources and when I finally see an opportunity and there is a bet to make, I bet it all.”
What is real genius and why should we care? There's a widely held belief that genius is inborn and can’t be gained through effort alone - so what's the point in studying it for practical effect? Most definitions of genius call it a “exceptional natural capacity of intellect” and images of a child prodigy such as Mozart composing small pieces at an age where most children can barely read make us feel like it's out of our hands - but is it? And if that weren't the case per se - if we can augment or enhance some natural abilities to the point of excellence - what does that look like practically?
The military examples of practical genius have been studied extensively and I believe offer great insight into how to build a kind of practical genius and then how to apply it. In his 1984 study of command, Martin Van Creveld distilled Napoleon’s genius down to one all-encompassing thing:
“To know what one can do on the basis of the available means, and to do it; to know what one cannot do, and refrain from trying; and to distinguish between the two—that, after all, is the very definition of military greatness, as it is of human genius in general.”
Field Marshal Sir William Slim stated it even more succinctly:
“…it is not usually difficult for a commander to know what he wants to do; major tactics will be the basis of that knowledge. The thing that is difficult to know is if he can do it with the resources he has.”
Slim called it “judging administrative risk” and “the real test of a great commander in the field.” What Van Creveld and Slim are describing is a way of making informed, considered wagers on the performance of their own forces given their adversary and battlefield conditions. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was known for having mastered this ability, acquiring a “fingertip feel” for the battlefield - allowing him to move faster than his adversaries and seem to foresee their every move. But all my examples here are people at the peak of 40-year careers - meaning they all had a significant amount of practical experience built on top of what might have been a certain level of inborn ability. Real, effective genius - especially in operations - requires worthwhile, considered experience. How can we distill that for ourselves?
In The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker describes a “systematic decision review” process whereby leaders can make wagers on the results of a decision versus expectations. He instructs readers to write down what they expect will come of a business decision and then come back months later to see if what they thought would happen actually took place. Drucker’s method is a continuous process across a career - years worth of decisions to review - to identify biases, misconceptions and abilities, allowing a leader to make better bets on what can be done with the resources he or she has. But it’s the path to building a career’s worth of genius - with inborn ability to without. (BJM)
DON’T NEED THIS: Special Forces Veteran Speaks Candidly About the Necessity of Military Exoskeletons (3 min) "For the warfighter, we have been trying to up-armor and overburden the infantryman for far too long - it's no exaggeration to say that you could be carrying a hundred extra pounds of kit into battle. That's insane from a shoot-move-communicate perspective. In many cases, it's far better to be light on your feet and to be able to quickly move up, down, and around on the battlefield three-dimensionally, and an exoskeleton is just more crap that breaks, crap that needs batteries, and crap that slows you down. I'd rather see money go to better and lighter armor, improved integration of force multipliers like drones, and better attitudes in the military towards a good offense making a good defense." (KSA with CPP)
THE JUNIOR EXEC WITH CPP: Act decisively even with limited information.
Chris here. There’s no such thing as perfect knowledge, and most organizations do not take seriously the happenings of the market until someone gets fired. As a junior executive, you may so far removed from the decisions of upper management that nothing will make sense. You’ll have to learn to act decisively even with limited information. Qualify it, remember why you made the decision you made, based on the information you had… but act decisively. It’s better to make a mistake and take ownership of it than to be viewed a coward. “I fucked it up, and here’s how I’m fixing it” works counterintuitively: it shows that you’re honest and can be trusted with the responsibility of authority, and strengthens your position with your team – and with any boss worth having.
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA), Chris Papasadero (CPP) & Brady Moore (BJM)