Welcome back. Thanks for our previous speakers. The next panel is what should special operations forces look like by 2040 joining us is Lieutenant Colonel Katie Kroom from Special Operations Command. Major Achille Iyer from Marine Special Operations Command Captain Shay Haver, ADCAM to the Commander Joint Task Force National Capital Region and Military District of Washington. And Commander Chief Master Sergeant Greg Smith, Special Operations Command senior industry leader. This conversation is going to be moderated by Colonel Ike Wilson, who is president of the Joint Special Operations University is also a senior fellow in the International Security Program at New America. Professor of practice at Arizona State University. And before we hear from our speakers, we're going to have a short video from Joint Special Operations University. My name is Dr. Ike Wilson, and I am the president of the Joint Special Operations University at United States Special Operations Command SOCOM. It's a great pleasure for me today personally and professionally to be with you today and to frankly be moderating what promises or at least I'll hope the promise will be a great and exciting frankly provocative 45 minute discussion. We have a very amount of a very tight amount of time before us and as moderator I'm going to make a couple of opening framing comments just to kind of warm up the living room here the virtual living room to get some provocations going and I'm going to turn it over to our great panelists today and I wanted to thank Peter Bergen for the great intro of each of them and for myself as well. And a little bit of technical difficulty here I'm seeing the chat, but I'm sure that'll work itself out you all can hear me. Our panel today, we're going to take on the question straightforward, and then I've asked each of our panelists to give us a quick type five minutes or so provocation to put some more meat on the bones of the question. Again the question before today is what should special operations forces look like by 2040. What I want what we're going to do in our comments is we're going to expand on that question and not only we're going to address what should soft look like by the year 2040, but what must soft be and become by 24 and that being and becoming starts today. And so with that as moderator, I'm going to go ahead and just give us some provocations try to frame us out a little bit. And I'm going to turn it right over to Lieutenant Colonel Katie Chrome. The US director of strategy plans and policy, the J five and military jargon of the US special operations command central command. So first, just some provocation. I would offer that soft like the nations that we serve. Let you have another threshold crossing the need to reorient the soft enterprise for this coming fourth age what we regard as the fourth age of soft is motivated by the unique challenges posed by a very major feature of the strategic and operational development that feature is a change in the character of global geopolitical competition, what we're calling what we're theorizing as a new compound security dilemma. Now striking a proper rebalancing between all of sauce past, and particularly its most recent past, the so called GWAT era requires a delicate maneuver between recognizing the nuances of the compound security dilemma. So we're going to start with the present and current and future threats and revisiting the past to learn how our future shapes the present through this critical lens we can forecast what changes are required to be more comprehensively effective in the future compound security environment. This is the most challenging all of this. I offer that it's nothing less than the classic innovators dilemma, striking the right balance between leading change and preserving and protecting the essence of who soft is who soft has been based on what soft has done for nation and the United States special operations command. This is our prime directive as soft professionals. Now this soft this compound security character of the global security environment is such that it demands a utility of soft that is equally compounded. Now what do I mean by that that's to say a comprehensive combination of all the skills techniques and operational methods of all three preceding ages taking us back as early as the World War two era, amplified all that amplified by 21st century technological advancements. I'd offer that nothing less than this comprehensive joint combined utility of soft philosophy culture and approaches required for over matching power in and under these fourth age conditions, nothing less folks than a trans everything view of an approach to special forces use utility and identity. Now with that I'm going to turn it over and to Lieutenant Colonel Katie Chrome, Katie you've got about five minutes, please provoke over to you Katie. Thanks Dr Wilson and thanks to all my fellow panelists for sharing this important conversation today. So right now I'm in the fortunate although it hasn't seemed like that lately position to be part of the theoretical future of how to employ soft in the future, and also part of the ongoing experiment. We live in every day at special operations command central as we have purview or remit over the 22 countries in the Middle East and Central and South Asia. Never a day goes by that we don't talk about the what ifs though the what next and how we can do this better in the future. The larger defense apparatus is shifting its resources and intellectual capital toward China and Russia. I think the instability that generated the trauma of terrorism over the past two decades has definitely not subsided in the Middle East. In fact, many of the root causes that contributed to this threat have multiplied and I'm now exacerbated by climate change changes the energy access and the global pandemic. These positions present opportunities for both global and regional adversaries alike pursue their goals of fomenting unrest and undermining regimes that are friendly to the US. They're attempting to break us from our alliances which as everyone knows is our center of gravity in the Department of Defense and the US government at large. So how can we in special operations stem this tide. How can we position ourselves with human capital and technological advances to create upstream approaches to this burgeoning dilemma.  It states that the regular warfare is a persistent and enduring operational reality employed by non state and increasingly now state actors like Russian China. In competition with the United States, a regular warfare is defined as the struggle to influence populations and affect legitimacy. The annex goes on to talk about five more missions on conventional warfare stabilization for internal defense counterterrorism and of course counterinsurgency. And states that IW is not just a soft mission, but a core competency for the department at large. Although all the movies and books that everyone's seen for the past two decades highlight counterterrorism and direct action as our primary missions. In the past 20 years we grew in others as well and perhaps more importantly. We evolved and innovated across all of the population focused areas, including military information support operations, cyber space ops counter threat networks, really importantly counter threat financing, civil military operations and security cooperation. It's here where we will continue to serve as leaders for DoD. These aren't extracurricular or nice to have skill sets there at the core of special operations soft is not about being better or being elite special is about being different. In 2001 we became what the nation needed and we will do that again. We're designed to operate in the human environment and that is where we will continue to provide outside value. We need to be brilliant in the basics. We need to shift from a bias for action towards a bias for understanding. We must develop our enterprise, our humans to understand. We need to focus on the cognitive dimension as the key terrain and everywhere. The influence campaigns both virtually and physically around the globe. Cognitive change requires patience, a long view that's important in the execution of regular warfare. Part of this is an effective campaign that will require recognizing certain effects take longer than others. Return on investments is a really difficult thing to measure in the near term and in term. Allegedly the Chinese approach is anchored on a hundred year outlook. We could probably learn a few lessons from that. Cognitive change also requires partnerships both internal within the USG and external with partners and allies. These relationships both physical and virtual are our and will remain our keystone. While some are promoting soft machine fusion as the way forward, I would caution fully against RMA 2.0 reliance. Yes, machine learning and AI can process data at light speeds, but these platforms are not able to provide context. There is no man in the loop or woman in the loop. Each human requires a larger, more nuanced knowledge based on experience enabled by true overhead talent management system. We can't just download a language like the matrix into human brain or rely on a translation app without divorcing it from the larger cultural context that provides us meaning. Soft plus tech does not equal the solution. Relying on a small number of elite troops married to advanced sensors, communication platforms, PGMs and AI. This is not guarantee immediate victory and definitely not long term, long term consolidation of games. All these changes may drive a requirement to develop structures and think differently about how we are organized. To do this, we have to institutionalize adaptation, especially regarding the understanding that is necessary to prevail against a regular activities or regular adversaries. Adaptation is more than just technological advances. You may finally have to get rid of some of the sacred cows we've been holding onto for so long. So from big to small, just some food for thought for the panel. Within our own service, we can look at career management and promotion structure, not just things like battalion and brigade command, but things like soft as its own service or as a profession. Next, looking at deployment and readiness cycles, not to be the full drivers of a forward presence. Soft must be present forward to build relationships, access and truly understand. It's not full T Lawrence, but there's a bit of that here. We need a better way to under to ensure readiness that counts for human centric aspects of a regular warfare and keeping people forward. And last, we need to look at the UCP and GCC structure, perhaps look at replacing it with a structure that allows saw to thrive as a true integrator between the interagency and intelligence community via force. The sect of recent integrative currents initiative really builds on this and begins to address the importance of bringing all these tools from different organizations together. I think we can maybe use that as a forcing function to look at something like a Goldwater nickels 2.0. Thank you. Thanks Katie that was excellent. Hey, major Achille Iyer of the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Achille over to you. Five minutes for focus. Sounds great. Thanks so much, Dr Wilson and no cron. Thanks so much for setting the stage. You know, I'll take the perspective here less so as major Achille Iyer and just Achille Iyer the individual who transitioned in 2019 to a business school program and try and put a little bit of a business lens on what arguably is one of our nation's most successful startups going back to its roots and I'll I'll offer three comments as I think about that. The first is, I don't think we're the only ones as many organizations experience at a contextual environmental inflection point. We're not the only ones trying to refine and stress test our core competencies and our competitive advantage going forward. I remember in a recent naval war college discussion a quote that I wrote down was, if you are uncomfortable if I'm sorry if you are comfortable in the community right now, it's probably because you are irrelevant. I think that strikes me as something that you know we're not the only service or service like component dealing with this. It reminds me of my my old hat as a conventional infantry man as a lieutenant on muse and I would argue actually that this inflection point geopolitically creates some opportunities to figure out how soft can act as a connector to not just a broader force but even new members of the force like we heard from today that being the space force. And I think this relationship of soft being as a connector, I think might be an inflection in terms of how we think about the supported supporting relationship something that might be a little different than how many of us have experienced over the past 20 years. I don't think this connection ecosystem needs to be a zero sum game of whether it's soft or whether it's a conventional force but rather, I think a much more integrated set of solutions and capabilities whose holistic value is greater than the sum of the ports. The second point I'll bring up and Dr Wilson I think you hit on it very well was this idea of the innovators dilemma. You know traditionally in the business world innovators dilemma is used to describe an incumbent who has succeeded very well created a sustainable business model, but only provides marginal improvements to its existing customers. But that's it it's only marginal improvements it's not a radically new value proposition or capability applied to some new customer problem set. Now how does this apply to solve the late Professor Clay Christensen, you know who really wrote the innovators dilemma I think captured it best in one of his articles and I think it relates well here. Incumbent companies should not overreact to disruption by dismantling a still profitable business. Instead, they should strengthen relationships with core customers, while also creating a new division focused on the growth and opportunities that arise from this disruption. And that leads to my third point which ma'am you highlighted very well and that's how do we incentivize and organize soft from the bottom up to fit the form to the function of what soft can and will be asked to do in the future. And how do we want to create the incentives to ensure that culture that culture as you know many often to quote it is culture eating strategy for breakfast and I would argue and many would argue that, you know it's also the incentives that influence the culture. Are we tangibly and intangibly influencing the incentives when it comes to our selection, our recruitment, our training and our career pipelines, ones that emphasize the right skill development or the right types of experiences we want as we think about the great power competition arena. The last point I'll make in regards to this this idea of incentives and and and or an organization I think this is for me coming from business school one of the biggest mental shifts I made from active duty is how do you combine incentives with an a true ability to have organizational experimentation. And I think finding some ways to instill enterprise level agility, despite the fact that so come is no longer that small startup from the 1980s but is rather an established incumbent, I think and still be achieved, but we need to find adequate ways to enable that experimentation, which may be including task organize units or unique cross functional experimentation with technologies, but ultimately be able to incubate that and scale it where appropriate. So looking forward to discussion day and thanks again for joining. Thanks for that. Thanks very much. Captain Shay Haver, aid the camp to the commander joint task force national capital region and military district of Washington and Army Ranger Shay over to you. Thank you Dr Wilson and thanks everybody on the panel today really looking forward to being part of the conversation constantly learning and growing from everybody's perspective so first I just kind of want to hit on both Colonel Crom and major air are already kind of took a little bit of a glimpse into this but as we move towards more of a technological idealism and moving to solve problems in that way that my my provocation here is that we'll never be able to completely eliminate the humanity out of it. And that that that the human aspect is going to be something that we will have to continue to focus on. I think what's going to be unique and interesting is that moving forward. We're going to have the same amount of jobs, if not more, and we're going to have to recruit the right people to fit those jobs. And in this generation maybe even motivating people to either stay in or to continue to contribute to this conversation, moving it forward what the competition will look like. We're going to be working with a generation that more than likely doesn't have the same experiences that the total force may have had over the 20 years of experience where we have been so not only are we are we kind of trying to shift culture right we're also trying to create something in a different way kind of new, we're going to have to rely on that bottom up refinement that major areas talked about. So really really interested in how you know we're going to tie that into our conversation today with some of the soft truths and keeping keeping in mind that overcoming a generation of more you know individualism and isolationism how we do that how do we maintain a culture for the military in general but for soft moving forward in these very specific ideas as we kind of culminate in that but really looking forward to the conversation and thank you so much. Shea thanks so much and great army Ranger form you came in well under the five minutes I appreciate that you've given us some time back. Folks before I introduce our final quick profit provocateur. I just want to make sure that I want to give the audience or our living room audience. Some time, some information on how to submit questions, folks will be using a Slido SLI dot do to submit questions Slido is the box located to the right of the video. If you encounter issues in attempting to load up your questions using Slido, please contact events at new America.org. Okay, and without further ado, I want to turn it over to to our command chief master Sergeant Greg a Smith command chief Smith is the 10th senior enlisted leader of the US special operations command. He's our senior leader so I could not think of a better way of rounding out the provocations other than turning it over to command chief Smith Greg over to you. Thanks Dr Wilson and as always, it's always a big struggle to back clean up behind three eloquent leaders that make me feel very confident in the future of our force from a person that's really the past of our force. It's somebody with more than 26 years in special operations of my 31 plus years of service. I've watched the second third and now the fourth age of soft as Dr Wilson coins it. And as the last enlisted airman in our United States Air Force and activity who came in before Desert Shield. It's also an important inflection point as we look at the evolution of the military and special operations in in general as we look at how we got here where we're going, I will tell you as we struggle and I say that because on behalf of General Clark and the leadership team here we spend an enormous and inordinate amount of time, questioning those truths, not our soft truth but those truths that we've known for these last 20 years of how relevant they will be going forward. And in that questioning and through significant inflection, we've come up with kind of four key areas that soft will continue and into the future for seeable future. And that first as evidenced by the recent events in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world in places like Haiti in support of Hurricane Ida and other crises is this is this concept of crisis response soft innate ability to get from point A to point B in a rapid fashion to the sounds of the guns or the sounds of the cries is the significant single most important value proposition we can offer our nation as it offers the nation's decision makers time and space to make decisions. We can we can question those decisions and we have the luxury of doing that, but we do not have the question. We do not have the luxury of questioning response time. So special operations forces in crisis response will always be the nation's key advantage. The second is this continuing counter violent extremist operations, although we see the events in Afghanistan and other places around the world, a more sustainable approach. Counter terrorism counter terrorism and those who ideologically seek to destroy or you serve everything this creation great nation stands for will continue to be present. Those things require unique solutions and as Colonel Crom brought up this irregular warfare concept and by within through our allies and partners will continue to be our key strength as we go forward. Another kind of important hinge point here is in state on state conflict, as we prepare for the nation to avoid war, we prepare for war as a military special operations has been the supported force, the majority of the last 20 years, reconnecting our services and integrating into the joint force as a supporting, enabling portion of this element of that will be important for our decision makers. And then finally this continuous continuum of competition, everything from cooperation to conflict on both ends of both at state near peer and middle peer conflicts or disagreements will continue. When we talk about China use China as a quick example and we look at things. China is not necessarily a military threat, but it has military capabilities that threaten United States capabilities. China's economic growth and when we look at it through four lenses, and that's the Silk Road economic belt, the 21st century maritime Silk Road, the Polar Silk Road, and the digital Silk Road. These threatened to underpin the economic engine that is the United States that gives us that access and placement. So special operations forces ability to characterize the nature of this by within through friendly countries and understand dual use facilities and potential threats is a key and important enabling function for our decision makers. These things through the next 20 to 40 years will continue to be truths that we see in the operational environment, and those things require uniquely assessment selected individuals to use major iris point, do we have the right individuals today to do these things These are the inflection points that we face today to make sure that we are inclusive in the entire problem set to make sure that we are getting after and addressing the nation's key challenges with that I yield my time back to you Dr Wilson. Command Chief Greg that was that was excellent. What I'd like to do we have we already have some great questions forming up from the virtual living room audience. Before I do before I go to that we've got a I want to take a couple of minutes and kind of come back to what was a harmonizing theme across all of your comments but I thought who put it best was a Lieutenant Colonel chrome. Katie you said, you said, we have to be brilliant in the basics, we have to remain brilliant. I would say exquisitely so brilliant in the basics, while also remaining human right and again Shay Captain Captain Haver emphasize this as well you all did. I'm haunted by the fact that part of the American way of peace and warfare is a heavy reliance on technology. But when we're talking about a fourth age of soft, it really comes into coincidence and increasingly is going to come in collision with the fourth technological revolution as well and again major ire spoke to this a bit as well. So the natural proclivity to at times of strategic ambiguity and unknown strategic inflection points to tilt towards more of the reliance on hopeful solutions through the hyper enablement through tech solutions of the leader operator. While we certainly have to do that, how do we, how do we do that at the same time of getting maintaining that equipoise that balance that healthy balance between becoming hyper enabled at vanguard on these technological changes. While also remaining soft truth number one human over all things much less hardware. I'd like to put that before you and give you guys maybe you know 30 seconds or so to kind of, you know, give some thoughts on it. And it's open to whoever wants to start it out. So real quick and just say the hyper enabled operators really about three key concepts it's about power, right how do I power, and how do I do those things it's about projection how do I leverage data, satellite, all these other capabilities across multiple multiple domains to project capability and protection. How do I synthesize and rework industry plates carrier transport to make sure I'm protecting the operator but the end of all of it. It's about the human that is enabled by this rapid influx of technology. Outstanding.  I know you have something to say on this. I think we were joking last time. You know Shane I even though we're the youngest on this panel I think we ourselves are old in the sense that we're not digitally native. We have a generation of young, you know, aspiring special operations personnel who did grow up in that environment and I would argue they are part and parcel of that solution. The technology you know I in my, you know, I'm in the reserves and so my my full time work is dealing with technology investments to include artificial intelligence. And the end of the day I think it reinforces chief Smith's point and that it's it's about the people and the ability of those individuals to understand the capabilities and limitation. We're going into those types of systems and then how we use it and to leverage the capability of our young soldiers sailors airmen Marines who grew up in that digitally native environment who have been tooling with the Raspberry Pi since the age of seven and can bring some of those competencies I think are critical outstanding and I would just add our new new members to the team to the soft team our space guardians who we're we're beginning the early work now try to figure out what that looks like from a soft component. So even more so in terms of that challenge of maintaining and preserving that perfect equipoise again the innovators dilemma, you know, preserving who we are as human beings a human at the heart of what we do the human essence of what we do, while leveraging to the hilt advanced technology. Okay, I'll turn it over to you see if you have any thoughts at Yeah, the one the one comment that I was going to make is that I think that we are going to have a challenge for ourselves to appeal to that generation who did grow up you know essentially you know that the iPhone in their hand right like how does that translate to how they can serve and how they can be recruited into these these positions so those skills might not necessarily translate for them, and they're going to see, you know, probably what they think that soft is from a historical standpoint and not necessarily what it is being projected to be. And so, us finding a way, and us meeting you know that the active military now, and how do we recruit the right people for some jobs that maybe don't even exist yet, getting people to think because they're going to be the ones that are going to solve, you know, some of these, these future problems so we might be doing the NUG work of coming out with the orders and you know doing the late night, you know background planning sessions but really what is it that is going to be coming out to the rest of the population to be able to recruit these individuals, and to meet them where they are, so that they're not intimidated by the fact that like hey I don't have, you know the experience of being you know finding this past you know 20 year war under my belt, how do I you know how do I contribute and very necessarily they might be the solution so so getting them to see that I think is a challenge and something that we need to start doing now. Okay, Katie I'm gonna sit you since I used your provocation to for this question. I'm going to ask you to maybe take this in the opposite direction that that major iron and shade took it. I talked about the challenge of you all as the as, from my perspective, the young, the young youngsters in trying to communicate downstream to those gen gen Z years, the did the true digital natives. What's your all challenge and their challenge even more so in translating that up echelon to old soldier sailors airmen, once in young, but no longer. Command Chief Greg Smith is always forever young. So I won't put him in that in my category I'll just pick on myself representing, you know the old folks that are far from being digital natives. And, but still in positions where you've got to convince us as the executives of what all this means and how it means for change going forward any thoughts on that. Sure, actually, I was watching the video at the beginning and I kind of went back to what we feel about the posters and the stamps or the branding of special operations and it's, you know, the night vision goggles and the operator with all of the gear, you know, going into a building. And I thought, you know, that's that's not what we need to be advertising fully right now of course it's a huge part of it. And I know it does help recruit some people that we need but you know if we all agree that the future is different the people in the mindset and the creativity that we're trying to recruit right now is much different than that and I think it comes down to things like words do matter, you know hyper enabled operator right the last word is operator. All ms's professions within special operations need to be hyper enabled, you know and that goes back to this understand function. But I think it's difficult for the more senior generations. I mean we have super forward thinkers like chief Smith and you and it's bright and you know our people that really do want to change but I think it is difficult for them to promote and bring up talent. And that looks different than them and I'm not talking in physical appearance but has a different resume than them, it just, it doesn't compute somehow in these boards, right. And so people often asked, I mean, we talked about this last week, if you said 10 years ago what is a panel for special operations 2040 look like, you know they all it was chief Smith time spy, right. And if you look at his handsome as you, but if you look at, you know, Dr. Wilson, major higher cat and haver me, you know, we, we are definitely not the recruiting poster for special operations. Um, but I would say that we are at the forefront of a lot of thought within the community. And with the expertise above us, we all come together we are, you know, we're pitching some creative solutions that are being latched on to, you know around the globe with the National Security Council and things like that but it's, it will become increasingly difficult to hold on to people like Shay and I mean look, major higher is already out in the Harvard Business School, you know, I mean, they will be recruited outside if they aren't properly talent managed.  And some of my most talented guys and gals that work for me, they do not look the part, but they're an absolute requirement to make special operations command successful going forward. And it's just about reminding these guys on a daily basis that that's true and usually they do listen. And I'll just say that from my seat, Colonel Chrome is more soft than most people that I know, just so you know I mean in the sense of her thought and what she does for these commands. And there's a reason why she's, she's handpicked to be one of our preeminent war and peace planners, not set on that. You know, Katie to your point about you know how do you keep folks like yourselves and we'll pick on a keel specifically how do you keep how do you keep them in how do you keep the talent inside the force. And I think even thinking beyond what constitutes inside and outside the force. Right, it's something we've got to, we've got to rethink, right, and the ability to actually leverage opportunities for folks to view all the rotate in and out, if you will, of the of the active formations, and just think of the integrated kind of statecraft solutions that we can get when we start thinking about those, those kind of things what is likewise what is a 21st century equivalent of a old 1819th century approach to brevity. Right to where we're putting we're putting rank in accoutrements to mission sets not to individuals, right we had it in some respects, really right in the past, how do you, how do you go back to our futures and those respects is just some of the things that your comments really inspired. Let me open this up to to our audience we've got some great questions here that are all in line with, with what we're what we're talking about so far. Let me start right at the top of the list here. I'm just going to make this open from everyone. Bad strategy often comes from flawed assumptions, what are the wrong assumptions about what we need from soft that would lead to bad strategy for the for the future.  I can just jump in really quick because you know falling from I appreciate your comments because 100% I think that's one of the, getting to this question to one of the things is like what what wrong with these assuming that we just keep doing the same thing and everybody has to look the same. We're going to end up having to put people probably that look different or may not even have the right experiences into positions of change and positions of responsibility or authority to make decisions surrounded by a team to progress the team forward that that are going to fail. And we're going to have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that that's probably the biggest and first takeaway. It's got it's going to look different than probably a lot of people are comfortable with and we're going to have to be uncomfortable moving forward. The goodness in that is that it's a team effort and that the individual, you know, the, if we're playing if we're doing it right because we're thinking about it and talking about it and planning it now. But that one individual will be surrounded by the right team so it'll be the right person but the right team as well to continue to perpetuate that on. But I think that that's just one, you know one aspect or one facet to kind of get after that question and also to highlight what Carl was talking about there. General Chrome, major iron any any comments. Anything to add anything to add. Okay, nothing heard. All right, next question. By 2040, the people so calm are recruiting today will be leaving the enterprise. What new different attributes should we be screening for and those future leaders today. I think that one first, I mean, you know, as a woman and soft without the, the opportunity to, you know, go to ranger school everything that shaded not saying I would have passed this by any means but it wasn't allowed. And then you always feel like a second class citizen without the tabs and the accoutrements and everything that comes with that. And so I think that when we do look to recruit and assess, we need to put things like, you know, writing reading speaking problem almost ahead, not ahead all the way but equal at least as as the physical testing, you know, I think that it's always an afterthought and it probably needs to be on the same playing field. It's very rare that people get dropped, you know, we all have friends relatives that have been through the series of schools across the services, you know, from buds to Delta training and all of that. I never hear about people getting, you know, dropped for intellectual shortfalls, it's the mountain phase or, you know, frostbite or something like that. And I think that when it comes to the challenges that we're facing right now a strategic competition. And it's the problem solving and creative solutions that paralyze senior leaders on, and, you know, that that's time and progress right now. And so those are the things that I think we really need to be testing in the future to make sure we're recruiting. I think the problem is not a pretty good point here of was we've re looked at assessment as part of our comprehensive review of looking where we're at is really about critical and creative thinking thinking in time, ethical thinking, and then design thinking Dr. Wilson, as you know, kind of the five elements of thinking if you want that all falls under cognitive agility, which should weigh significantly more we still need the physical standards, because of what we physically demand of of our force. Sometimes we've overemphasized certain things in it to the detriment of cognitive agility, which is where we're at where we physically demand of our force. However, as we've overemphasized certain things in that to the detriment of cognitive agility, which is where we're inflecting. Absolutely. We've got time probably for a quick lightning round of two more questions. First next question. 911 was a catalyst for military recruiting. As United States Special Operations Command continues to shift its focus away from direct action is soft experiencing challenges in retention or recruiting. You start with a keel and maybe Katie I know you're you've done a lot of background work on on the on human resource side talent management side, maybe give you a chance to comment as well but go ahead, I kill any thoughts on that. Thanks Dr. Wilson I'm probably coming with an outside perspective so don't have the numbers here on this. I think, and maybe this goes a little bit. What I will offers in conjunction with the last question. I don't think we need to see it as a I'm in active duty or I'm out of active duty. I think there's a lot of relationships that we can have I look at the National Guard model. I mean talk about an amazing capability that the US Army has developed where I have people working in all sorts of incredible industries on the outside, but can also come back and leverage when the nation requires. And I would like to think as you know as the question was posed earlier that that we can question what that relationship looks like. So your second point I think in terms of retention. My argument is, I think in many ways that the desire to serve is still very very strong actually in many ways. I think the desire to do something where the mission matters and may not be necessarily creating the next dare I say Facebook filter, or something like that. I do think we're seeing a generation that wants to work on problems that matter and special operations and the broader not even special operations the broader national security enterprises is still going forward on that. Yeah, really quick the only thing that I would add and I think that Chief Smith probably have a great perspective on this is, we might have overcorrected on the kind of deployed it well type of ratio that we were getting I mean people were deployed too much for many years. Now there are many people feeling kind of underused after 20 years of continuous deployments and really feeling like they were part of something bigger. So I think that there's probably a happy medium in there that we can get people out in the field overseas feeling that they're contributing to the bigger picture while also maintaining you know family readiness back home. And we do not have a recruiting issue at present we have a retention issue, potentially that we're working through the analysis is early but we want to make sure there's meaningful employment to Colonel Croms point of making sure that that that the force feels properly employed in some Folks, I promise one more question I was told we've got an extra minute because we got started a little slightly a little bit late so I'm going to steal a little bit more time just ask one more. I just want to ask you all, each of you. You know, and this is this is coming from left field for you. You know, as we think about what soft looks like and needs to be become next 20 years 2040. What key trends. Do you think about what you know maybe name one each of key trends to be on the outlook for maybe something that keeps you up at night. Either from fright or or from peril or promise something that excites you about the trends that we're seeing today we have made where it may be leading us forward. How about we start with Shay. I would say not necessarily frightening but says just something that last key point that was made is like making people feel like you know value members of the team being able to contribute so very very specifically you know having having a and in state having something that we're working towards that being very specifically you know communicated so people can attach to it and contribute to it. Thank you. I think the key attribute is a willingness to take risks and experiment. We're not going to develop a more optimized force if we don't have a culture in which we create the opportunity to do so. Many of those will fail. We're not going to get the right M to or formation or technology integrated off the first that that's what the innovators dilemmas all about, but to enable that culture of risk taking and see that in an individual level I think is key. Yeah, along those lines it really goes back to my main point of understanding I think what really keeps me up at night is kind of the climate change mass migration weaponization of refugees around the world issue. And to chief Smith's point at the beginning, it's going to be more Hades and less Afghanistan's you know coming up and we need to be prepared with the type of people that a want to tackle that type of mission and be understand the context and the culture around it when they get there. Outstanding command chief over to you. This reminds atrophy what keeps me up at night is readiness atrophy. So on the 10th of September 2011, we had done 1000 exercises for that one up as somebody who was seven days after 911 deployed forward standing up and the second US guy into Pakistan to kind of start working those pieces seven years of my life. Forward Iraq Afghanistan Somalia North Africa working across there. I never worried about readiness right now with policy and where we're at in the world. I get worried or what concerns me is maintaining a state of crisis response readiness for whatever our nation requires. Whatever our nation requires. Thanks so much for that command chief Smith and right along with you that's what would tend to keep me up late at night from a from a what worries me but from a what excites me and the great promise ahead. I mean, I got to tell you the perfect answer to this question of what should soft look like for the outwards to 2040 before the first word was said, as soon as we all popped up visual on screen I think we've got our answer to that and with that these are the things that help me sleep very well and comfortably tonight amid all this ambiguity knowing we've got these great these great leaders today that are going to be leading the force into that next 20203040 years plus going going forward. I want to thank you all for what I think we kept our promise for a very informative and provocative conversation and with that I'm going to turn it over to our great host Peter Bergen Peter. Thank you very much over you sir.


Hello my friends in Monet Cafe. This is artist Susan Jenkins, and I'm gonna be bringing you a little lesson today Using something we talked about in the last lesson on punching up color I'm gonna actually use the color wheel to pick my my palette for this little painting that I'm going to be doing We're gonna get a lot of learning in on this one, but I just thought I would say I'm so thankful that it's sunny today Where I live we've had so much rain and potential flooding since we live near a river But wow nothing like what was in Houston my heart and prayers just goes out to all of those people suffering from that tragedy I wanted to share to you really quickly. I've had some of you ask how to store pastels I do have a video on that, but I thought I'd share my other little Technique that I use just in the interim as I finish a pastel painting it's sometimes like okay I don't have time to get it Ready and put it in my little storage system where I have them like in bags and Just keep them stored this way with the cardboard.   I'm going to go grab a cup of coffee and we're going to get started on this fun lesson Yay. All right time to get started. I've got my essentials here including my coffee And I thought I'd just go ahead and show you a little bit I have a lot of people ask about how to choose a color palette And if you recall from my last video on punching up color, I don't think it was it was like two videos ago I talked a lot about the color wheel and how to use it the color wheel is your friend and we're going to use a Color palette today that utilizes this little section on the back of the color wheel that talks about a triad of colors I love things in threes like the Trinity just reflected all throughout nature boy I could do a whole lesson on that, but I'll stick to color and I'm going to choose and if you turn this color wheel You see how it changes, you know, which colors are in the little sections, but I'm going to pick a Color family or palette based on this triad With the purples or the blue violets. Okay, this is going to be a little bit more of a warmer blue. Okay So it's blue violets and if you go down from the little triangle you go over to here. We've got Greens, okay, these are more of a warmer green in here And then if you go to this side of the triangle, we've got our reds kind of orangey reds Okay, and I chose that because I noticed I got to pull up my photo here again I'll stick it up on the screen for you guys In my reference photo. I picked something that was a little bit. Blase Often I will pick a photo. It doesn't have to sing and dance as far as color And a certain other elements go but I just looked for a good composition and I love this composition I love compositions with depth and things that I can use to create that sense of illusion because that's what we are as artists We're really illusionist trying to create an illusion of making something look three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface And there are so many neat little techniques that you can use to accomplish that and that's what I try to bring You guys as artists is ways to know. Oh, aha That's what happens if I put a cooler color and a lighter value in the distance. It makes it look far away It's like magic. Okay, it's very cool Not dark magic just illusionary magic And so what I've done here is I've used the little Triad of colors on the back triad triad and I've chosen these colors now I've got my my blue violets, okay, and I've got in here I've got a little bit more of the blues because I know I have some water in this scene in the foreground and But I've got my greens some warmer greens and a little bit of cooler greens for those things in the background And I've got my reds with some of these yellowies because I know I've got marsh grass and some of that Hop over there yellow get back over there some of that tops of the grasses Maybe I might even grab a little bit more orangey colors, too Okay, so I've got my little families and I've got them. Hi little families. I Have way too much fun with this and I've got them arranged as far as value Basically, okay. I've got my darkest to the back Moving towards my lighter values towards the fronts Okay And the reason that I do this is a painting is going to be very dull if you don't have Good values in them and a good range of values Okay, if I just did all middle values for everything in this painting is going to look very flat So you have to have your darker values for the foreground your lighter values for the background And that's really going to enhance that illusion of depth in your painting. Okay, so that was my reasoning behind it I may use this as a little bit of a harder pastel For some of the I'm going to do a quick little underpainting and I'm going to focus kind of on complementary Underpainting to start with so here we go with that. Yay All right I have my very simple reference photo up here To work from and I'm just going to kind of sketch in the basic landscape And then I'm going to start working on an underpainting for that and I did choose this photo from the The paint my photo app that I've talked about a lot a great great place to get reference photos and I like to this one because it had a nice a nice composition Utilizing that rule of thirds that we talk about so often and I want to try to keep this one really loose. I'm I'm doing this one today that is going to be part of a It's a little challenge that we have in our Facebook group It's I don't know who started it but it's called 30 in 30 you're to paint 30 paintings in 30 days and That is just one of the best ways that you can grow as an artist and Is just to get lots of practice and to do things fairly quickly So that's kind of my goal here today is to do kind of a quick painting my pencils not working But I do I do like this composition and like I said the photo It may look a little lackluster with color But it is it's just got a really nice composition and I happen to love marsh grasses I might need to get another pencil here I like how they they carve their way through through these this grasses and Also to right now what I'm seeing when I when I draw our sketch is I see shapes This is something I talked about in the last private lesson is try to avoid seeing what the thing is And see what the shape is okay because our brains want to sometimes see things and draw it the way We think it is rather than what that shape actually looks like Now right now. I'm kind of doing some measuring with my eyes. I'm seeing how far I sometimes often just look at the center point of the reference photo and then I judge everything on that So now I know the center and then you don't have to worry about the scale Okay, the center is right about here and the bottoms of those marsh grashes are below the center So my center is right about here and the bottom of these marsh grasses is going to be right about here Again pencil challenged here. Okay, so this is just kind of to make sure when I get going on the Underpainting I don't have to Focus so much I can just focus more on the values rather than the The drawing or where things are now I know these grasses were here and the other grasses are gonna kind of angle down this way and they're a little lower Okay, so that's kind of my reasoning and logic there and this is you art paper by the way I do love this paper But if you've been on my channel on you know I work with a lot of different surfaces and I make my own homemade surfaces sometimes But you are just a good a good paper You can wet it too, which is great. You can do it a watercolor underpainting You can do a thinned out oil painting. Actually, I haven't done one of those in my video But I need to okay, so you see now we've got a general composition. We've got our sky That's going to be absolutely the lightest value and that you can see right away We've got our background trees That are going to be very loose because they're far away. You can see in the reference image You know your brain knows their tree, but I don't have to draw any leaves on that you wouldn't see the leaves that far away Anyway, we've got our big marshy area. We've got this Waterway carving its way through there. I'm gonna leave out the house. I think that would be a distraction in this lovely scene So anyway, we've got our basics now the next thing I'm going to start looking at when we go on to a little It's going to be a combination underpainting Value study, okay, and the reason that I do that I'm going to do a complementary Underpainting which means it's just the opposites of the colors in the scene We've got a lot of greens in these grasses So the complements of green are going to be opposite on the color wheel They're going to be more like a red violet pinky red violet and and reds in general And that's going to create vibrancy in the painting to use those as an underpainting Some of that will kind of peek through but the next thing I'm doing is not just getting a Complementary nice color underneath is I'm beginning to focus on values the things we want to determine before we even start is first Where's your light source? Okay, it looks like the sun's going down behind these trees But actually I'm seeing the Sun right here here We go you see that right there and I'm seeing this we're going to have lights on these grasses Okay hitting the tops of these all right We're going to have shadow area behind these trees because the Sun's back here And we're going to have reflections on the water in here. You see the little reflection in here So there's our light source now. We want to focus on value Okay, a good way to do that is to squint your eyes. This photo is already so dark on my iPad I can kind of see where the lights and darks are easy peasy. This guy is the lightest Okay, we've got some light areas in these grasses back here is lighter Okay, the Sun's coming and it's hitting in here these actually usually you get warmer grasses in the foreground But these look a little cooler. It's like there's a shadow on this side Okay, warmer on the tops of these grasses Lighter value and of course we've got lighter values in the water the water is darker over here But we've got some pretty light values in here and a little bit of reflection of the light here Okay, so we've got a general idea of the values there and that's my focus in laying down the color So what I'm going to do now is I said I was going to use this this beautiful kind of pinkish Color it's not coming off very good on my newsprint. I'll use it if it'll behave That's a nice middle value. Okay, let me get a a lighter value Okay, I'm gonna keep this all in the warm Family, okay, there's a lighter. So I'm gonna work on three values right now. I've got my middle Let me see if I like this middle better. That's more of a red. This is more of a pink I think I'm gonna go with the red. Okay, and then I'm gonna go with a little bit of a darker value and I may do a purple That's pretty dark. I don't think I want that dark and I think I want to stay more in the reds Try this one. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so we're getting that That family of warmth going on here to do as an underpainting. So right now first, I'm gonna start on the dark Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and get in. I know these these trees in the background are dark And at this point, I'm just using the side of this pastel. This looks like it might have been a unison at one point And we want to keep a nice little Variety in the trees and how they grow. You don't want things to be samey samey I kind of got it right there the little samey samey thing. I don't like that I'm gonna make some adjustments in that when I carve out the sky so we want Not things looking Consistent we want a little inconsistency. That's the word I was looking for Yeah, I think I want to join those trees together There. Okay, there we go. That looks a little better. All these little things come in time too. So don't get frustrated or discouraged Just keep practicing now. I'm just getting in some of these values that are darker in this background Grasses where the water has carved it out. Now. I'm just using the edge of this pastel And you learn finesse with these as you work some of the challenge with pastels It was really just like brushwork or any medium you have to learn to manipulate the tool, you know and If you Haven't used it It's just like anything you've got to just get better at it same with pencil work and Um anything you're using really practice really does make perfect. So we do have to practice Okay, now I've got some of these these grasses here have darker values at the base and all of this is laying A foundation and I find that that's one of the things, you know here on this channel and in our facebook group Monet cafe the reason that I even called it. Monet cafe was a couple reasons is because I like a loose style and that is what many artists are trying to get to We have a tendency to want to start to draw every blade of grass And then you look at other people's work that have that loose down. They're like, how do they do that? And so that's one of the keys to laying down a good foundation a good loose foundation Is that it will create that painterly look that nice painterly look now. I've got some Um darks back in here too, not quite as dark. I might lighten them up a little bit or like you see I'm using a light touch right here. Okay. See that already doesn't look quite as dark with the light touch um, but back to the name Monet cafe um, another reason was not just because of the Um loose style the cafe part is because I love coffee Let me take a break, but that's not the only reason It's because I like the casual atmosphere of a cafe and people just joining together like friends to learn something So that's the reasoning behind my name Monet cafe and not just that it rhymes All right, so I've got some of my darks in now. I'm going to go ahead and start getting in My lighter values. This guy's actually going to be even lighter than that. I don't think I have a a lighter Paint though. Let me check this real quick Maybe this one's a little lighter. Actually, I think I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to use this little lavender I know the sky's going to be light Okay, so I'm just going to go ahead and get in this nice Lavender tone a lavender in a sky. It makes a nice um Value and color because um, it creates a mood of either early morning or late afternoon. Okay, so see how I'm just getting that in there And uh, it doesn't take much more than that now when I finally start getting the sky more I notice the sky's lighter on this side and a little darker in the atmosphere upper atmosphere there Okay, so there's my lightest light. I am going to have More light down here, but I don't want to add that just now I want to get my dark down first Okay And the only reason I did the light here is because that I can easily lay my other values on top of that They're not going to be a whole lot darker or lighter, but always try to focus on getting your dark values down first All right on that note Now I'm going to go on to my mid values and I'm squinting my eyes. Okay. We got that darker. You can see this is more of a middle value And I'm just going to start getting some of those in here And we're going to lay those green grasses on top of these Oh and the other thing too is after you determine your light source Then you want to determine your values Then you work on big shapes. Okay You focus on shapes like I was saying before rather than what the thing is and so that's all this is right now Is I'm working on those big shapes All right now We've got Our where's my middle value? I mean my lighter value. Here we go This value those other grasses in the back. Remember I said they were lighter That's why I'm using this little bit of a lighter here All right, and I am not going to do a water underpainting with this sometimes I will take it and I will Use alcohol or water And I'll literally paint this and I'm careful so that it doesn't bleed all over the place A little bit of running and bleeding is okay, but um, you don't want to do that everywhere But in this case, I'm just going to blend it a little bit with a piece of pipe foam insulation and now we know from a A beautiful artist friend of mine that we can also use um a pool noodle If you haven't been on my channel before you're probably right now thinking what the heck is she talking about So I'm I'm going to show you that in just a minute All right, and I'm using this lighter here because I can see in the water that this is indeed Lighter on this side. Okay All right, so we're getting our basic values in here All right, I'm going to add a little bit more of this one in here I'm going to punch this up a little bit in some places And directional strokes that's another thing I was just talking about with a student is um You give a sense of mood With it's almost like things are dancing. It's like nature is praising god is what I see And sometimes I think that's why it's good to paint to music is um You feel that energy and you almost feel where these grasses would be going and it's it's like a beautiful um nature symphony so that's One thing I like to try to accomplish in my work. Okay, so we're getting a pretty good idea for a value study in here um And I think that's looking good. Okay, so we don't need a whole lot more than that And then I'm going to take now. Let me grab my little pipe foam insulation And we're going to just blend it in the reason for blending is just to get a little softness to it Before I start laying down my other Values and colors now I'm starting I kind of cleaned this off. This is the pipe foam insulation I was talking about literally just buy it at a hardware store or use a piece of a pool noodle I think the pool noodle actually worked pretty good with my friend the other day. She showed it to me and um It mine's kind of dirty here. I'm looking for a spot.  Okay, this is going to kind of get covered up anyway So we see that we just blended the sky in a little bit Now I think I'll go ahead and go with these middle values since it's kind of clean now Just blending these in a little bit Creating that little softness in here Oh, I love this brightness right there. That's just so pretty now You'll be able to see that this warmth underneath here is going to create Just a nice glow This water I see a direction of the water kind of moving like that. So I want to keep my strokes in that direction This is kind of flowing along here And again, I'm doing this as part of that 30 and 30 challenge 30 paintings in 30 days And so my goal is to focus on doing these rather quickly But I thought hey, why not make this a lesson for all of you at the same time? So I'm probably spending more time On this than I would on some of the ones that I'll do. Okay Now I'm going to get in and get those background trees. You see how that already softened up those grasses And we've got, you know, just a little bit of that feeling of what it is already with just that simple Little bit of what we've already got here. It's just Already looking like something. All right an idea of these marsh grasses. All right So there's our little value study with a complimentary underpainting And now not applying any water just blending it like that. We can get started laying down some of the final colors that we're going to use All right, now I'm going to put on some music and paint and do what I said, which is kind of feel The spirituality that you can feel when creating art. I think that's why so many people And our even our little facebook group for Monet cafe art group is such a success is because we're all enjoying The escape from some of the craziness in our world and some of the negativity and we feel that connection To our beautiful creation and our beautiful creator as we paint So I'm going to do just that I'm going to put on some music and paint I may add some commentary on top of this, but I hope you enjoy this process Okay, so in an attempt to not overwork this I am going to finish it up quickly and kind of leave it more as just a loose study like this I don't want it to be fussy or too detailed But I do need to do a couple of things. I wanted to point out The background trees I had to lighten them up with almost just like a gentle little wash of a lighter or like a light to middle value blue and It's softened those trees up and we have to remember trees in the distance are going to be blurry. They're We don't want the eye in the painting to be drawn to those background trees We just want them to enhance everything else. So that's why I I soften them up a little bit But I did have a question asked to me the other day about Sky holes, okay? A lot of times people will draw the individual limbs of trees or Leaves or bushes or whatever and It's so much better if we draw them in mass As a shape like I said before mostly I put in my values as a shape and then we carve them out later and Sometimes if we use the same value, this is the sky that I used here Down in the trees it ends up it looks too light It looks almost like it shows up too much It draws your eye to it too much because of the stark contrast Of the value difference between the darker blue and the lighter sky So it's usually a better idea to get a value That's a little darker This one might be a little too dark, but it's all I have here right now. I don't want to get up To do the carve out the sky holes in the trees So I've done a little bit of that here, but you can see that now when we put those in You don't want to get it up in the sky. I'll fix that in a minute They are more subtle your eye is not as drawn to Those marks in the trees as it would be If you had that really light value next to it So and especially down deep behind the trees and places too Usually the value is dark in a little bit So and it adds interest but again to not draw the eye Right to those sky holes Use a little bit of a darker value and you want to have some finesse with this You don't want to Have them look so consistent. I've got a little consistency going on here a little bit You want to vary it as nature does nature has beautiful Harmony but it has spontaneity too. So it's usually good to try to emulate that So I'm going to play around with these sky holes a little bit in an attempt. Sometimes I'll just touch them To make them a little bit softer not much We don't want to do a lot of blending with our fingers by any means So thanks for joining me in this little fun painting today And I hope you will come back soon. Please subscribe and feel free to comment And I just am so excited to bring you another video. Hopefully soon. Thanks guys. Bye


Well hello everyone and welcome back to our part two of business 501 unit four review this is corporate strategy now if you haven't joined us before you can find the links to the old videos down below as well as a link to the course itself which you should take along with this because this is just a supplemental bit of material. Just a reminder for everyone I know it says down below me that we are live every Monday that is not true we will be coming to you next week on Wednesday June 1st instead of the usual Monday it's a holiday here in America I will say that multiple times I also think I have it written down in the description but now that we've done that I'm just going to hand it over to Dr. Portalees to get us going. All right thank you very much hi everybody I hope everything is going going well as Mike mentioned we're just picking up where we left off on unit four and if you recall we started talking about some different specific strategies that organizations can can apply and of course all of this is after you've done that internal analysis the external analysis you figured out what your competitive advantage is so this is really the last step in the strategy process is to ultimately apply apply everything that you've learned as as you've gone throughout throughout the process so today I want us to talk a little bit about one of the ways that organizations or one of the strategies they might use and that is the idea that they really want to grow and this strategy can be really really effective especially in certain sectors of the market and there are four phases that I want us to talk about as far as the growth model goes so the first phase is the concept and development so you have this new product or service that that you're in the process of developing in order to to obviously make your company grow so during this phase one of the challenges or a few of the challenges actually that we see are listed here on this slide so of course development of the idea that can definitely be a challenge you look at prototyping if it's a product lots of testing that type of thing and then another challenge here is investment support for the idea so if your company doesn't have the money to create this new product or service you may need to find investors to help you do that and that can that can definitely be a challenge within this phase so you've gone through concept and development you have this great product or service now you want to commercialize it so what I mean by that is that we develop it the product or the service for introduction into the market so we've already tested it we've developed the idea now we really want to set up our organization for success to be able to produce to produce that item a couple of the challenges here in this phase include getting everything set up so organizing all of those moving parts and those moving pieces as you as you commercialize your product and also market entry can be a challenge as well so ultimately figuring out how to best market that product or service that you've developed can can often and sometimes be a challenge also this is usually the phase especially if it's a product where you may run into technical issues and I guess it's that's true for for services also service products but where maybe the product that you developed isn't working like how you thought it would so maybe you're finding challenges there which is okay because you're just commercializing it you haven't actually sold it to the public yet so it's not ideal but to find a variety of issues at this phase is is fairly common and it's okay because you still have time to to ultimately solve them so let's look at phase three and phase four so phase three is is the growth phase so this is where you know you've gone through the process of developing the product and service and now you're really just focusing on selling that product so companies struggle a little bit in this phase with trying to produce the larger quantities enough to meet the the demand also trying to keep quality as they are creating more and more products a greater quantity of products and also expanding the market share so really entering into that market that maybe you're not familiar with can be a challenge and then also in any kind of growth model there there are personnel issues or employee issues maybe you can't get enough people to fill the jobs that you have you you have a lot of training to do there are a lot of things that must happen in this phase to to make it successful so finally when we look at phase four this is our stability phase so here we're really looking at consolidating our market position and and we may end up developing we may end up developing new products during this phase as well which of course then starts us back at the beginning of this cycle but what's what's good about this is that you've done all of that up front work and now hopefully your product is selling you have all of the systems in place that need to be in place to make that successful but of course one of the challenges here is as you're looking at developing other products and services you're also having to manage those and manage new products that are in the beginning of the growth phase so that's probably the biggest challenge that that we might encounter here I'd like to stop there this was a lot of information and see if if anybody has questions I'm here in the chat for everyone if they have any questions I don't see any questions right now I just remind you you can put them in the chat up but we'll give everyone just a second right now if they if they have any questions it doesn't look like we have any questions right now so we're just I'm just going to hand it back over to Dr. Portales and again if anyone has any questions you can put them in the chat to the side or if you're watching later feel free to leave them in the comments down below but I'm going to just hand it back over all right thank you so I'm so still talking about growth here as as a potential strategy there are some other problems and challenges that I want us to to discuss and it's not that these challenges or problems are going to hinder our ability to grow it's just there are things that we want to be aware of so that we can address those issues before they actually happen if you are trying to trying to grow your organization so the first thing that I want us to talk about is that sometimes companies will choose products or markets that don't have a lot of room for growth so the market may already be saturated with lots of similar products which makes it really really difficult to compete in that market and just to give you a bit of a reminder here this is a lot of why we do all of that internal and external external analysis like SWAT we talked about that a couple weeks ago pastel analysis because at that phase we would have discovered that that maybe this product that we're trying to enter into the market is already saturated and then perhaps we would have chosen to go a different direction so doing as a as a company doing research is extremely important to try to eliminate some of some of these strategy problems that we're discussing here um another important thing to remember and we haven't talked too much about it yet in this course is that really any kind of strategy requires the right people so we really depend on our employees to ultimately meet our strategic goals you know if we are the CEO of an organization we're not there all the time we're not in the really engaging directly with the customers and that type of thing so we want to make sure that whatever strategy we choose especially if it's a growth one that we have the right people and they're trained properly and they're on board with the strategy they support the strategy and of course the same is true with any type of leadership and management in the organization too they you need to have the right people in place in order to make that successful another important thing to think about is when you're implementing a growth strategy you want to make sure all functions within your organization are in alignment with that strategy so finance accounting human resource management the individual department strategies should be very much aligned with the overall growth and organizational strategy that has been chosen and they all work together of course as as you already know so if one department really isn't on board with a particular strategy the strategy is less likely to be effective especially when it's a growth strategy so we just want to make sure that there is clear alignment there in all of the functional areas of of our organization we also want to manage growth so while it may seem great to grow really fast there are lots of challenges as you can imagine associated with that in terms of you want to be able to manage that growth you don't want it to explode and be too big where it becomes unwieldy and you don't have systems and processes in place in order to deal with it so while we don't want it too fast we also don't want it to the growth too slow so we want to try to find a balance there as we implement the strategy specifically for for growth marketing of course having the right marketing strategies is is definitely key in all of this and that definitely speaks to our third bullet point the alignment of a growth strategy with other strategies so marketing usually is a department in of itself and we want to make sure that the chat strategies that we've chosen specifically for for growth are really in alignment with with how we're going to move forward and market and we also want to have systems in place for for accounting and finance and we talked a little bit if you recall about mergers and acquisitions last time so if if that is one way that we are going to grow by acquiring other companies we want to be aware of potential culture issues and I mean company culture in that sense where when you're trying to merge these two companies there are different perspectives and different beliefs so just having an awareness of that before the merger or acquisition can can assist us in in dealing with those problems ultimately should they occur okay I want to I want us to talk a little bit about this idea from minnsburg and I think this is important and actually really really interesting the the idea behind it is that strategies should actually come from the bottom and not from the top of the organization so minnsburg makes the argument that the first line employees that are working with your customers and producing and that kind of thing are actually the ones that probably have a better idea of what your strategy should be so it's a really interesting philosophy I think in that personally speaking I think that he could be right about that but oftentimes we see strategy come from the top of an organization so you know the CEO and the vice presidents and that type of thing but so having said that let's talk a little bit about his theory on on strategy so he says that the five piece of strategy the first one is that you have to plan we already know that we've talked a lot about planning for strategy development and a lot of the background work that we do on internal and external analysis so plan is definitely our first step and the first thing that we want to think about as we think about our intended course of action the second P is purpose which is a consistent stream of actions as far as minnsburg says it so we want to be driven with a purpose we want to have this strategy have a have a plan in place and and constantly make those changes as we drive toward toward the strategy that that is our that is our goal and minnsburg also talks about ploy as an important component to strategy as well and this is having plans at the tactical level so think of like a week to week plan in order to meet a strategy a longer term strategy so the ploy you want to have these tactical plans in place to make your strategy successful and that is again a really short time frame like maybe a week or a month think of that ultimately as having a to-do list of very specific things that you must do in order to to to implement that strategy our next P is position and position is relates a lot to competitive advantage which we spent almost a whole unit talking about so position is how does your company how does your organization compare to the competitors and other factors that that may be a play within that competitive arena or that competitive environment um finally he looks at perspective and he says that perspective is the personality of the organization as an important element to strategy so when you think about personality of the organization think about company culture think about the marketing campaigns that the organization uses those types of things would relate to the personality and of course when we implement a strategy we want to make sure that that's in alignment with the personality of our organization so those are his five piece of strategy and we've talked a lot about a variety of theories and I would say that while they're all important we want to look at them in combination most organizations won't use just one theory and move forward with a strategy based on that so we can kind of put all of these ideas together and combine them to to end up with the best strategy for us so I'd like to take a moment and see if there are any questions if you have questions please put them in the chat and we'll just take a minute or so for you to do that if you have anything come up we don't have any questions as of right now but uh just want to remind everyone that uh next week for our first review of unit five we will be on Wednesday June 1st same time as always for you wherever you are but uh it's a national holiday or so Wednesday next week June 1st I'll hand it back over to Dr. Portley to get us back and going all right thank you okay so the last thing that I want us to talk about in this session your readings discuss in a lot of detail as well and I think it's pretty important and that's the idea that really kind of taking a step back now and looking at the strategic planning process and looking at all of the steps that are involved within within that process so a lot of these steps we've actually already talked about but I want us to have um this bigger picture as we move forward within uh within the final unit unit five so the first step is to um as you already know is to establish the mission vision and values of the organization so every strategy and everything that you do in your company should support the mission the vision and the values of the organization so this is why it's a really important first step so a vision statement um a lot of times these are used interchangeably mission vision and values but they're really quite different so I want us to just talk for a couple minutes here about the the differences between them so a vision statement is a goal that is really really um think of it as um a future state so what would be the ideal thing that that your company that your company could do or would do um that's a little bit different from a mission statement in that a mission statement is a a little bit more specific than the vision and oftentimes is the how how we're going to do it so how are we going to meet the vision that that we've already stated within the vision statement and then finally we have values and a value statement is the beliefs that will govern the individual and the group all of the employees within the organization so these are the things that the company finds important such as um diversity how people are treated within a company um a lot of value statements will address um environmental concerns that type of thing so all of these ultimately will work together in order to uh help direct the the way that we should go in terms of our strategy so that's a mission vision and values so our next step is then to develop the objective so what what is it that we want to achieve and when we think about objectives think about them pretty long term um and that we also want to make sure that they're measurable so we want to know at the end if we met our goals or not um that's why they should definitely be measurable so once you've set your objectives we're going to look at the external environment and the internal environment too so that's where that SWAT analysis is that we talked about a few weeks ago and also pestle analysis um so really looking at all of the changes that occur or the changes that could occur in the internal and external environment um like technology night like new laws um all of those things uh could uh likely positively or negatively impact our business so we just want to have an awareness of those and as we already mentioned um looking at the capabilities of our organization uh and any deficiencies we can apply a SWAT analysis to that so that is our third step and as we look here at our final two steps um we determine the competitive position um this is the same as competitive advantage so don't get confused there competitive position is basically the same thing as competitive advantage and uh we've talked a little bit already about value propositions a value proposition is what what are you offering with your product or service what what is the the advantage that a customer might get from using your product or your service so once you've determined the competitive position competitive advantage value proposition um then you'll want to look and really really um hone in on the competitive advantage so what are all of the characteristics that you can possibly list out that will help you market your product and look at maybe the types of skills that you need in human resources and how do you ultimately tie all of that together so the one thing that I do want you to consider when we look at the idea of competitive advantage is um that there can be tangible assets that create a competitive advantage for us but also intangible so a tangible asset might be a a physical building or equipment or something along those lines that we use within our operations but an intangible asset is equally as important that could be a good reputation with our customers it could be a very recognizable brand so when we look at really digging into the competitive advantage looking at the tangible assets that we have as well as those intangible are really important to to divide those and and consider them because sometimes companies will only look at the tangible ones when really the intangible ones can provide a lot of value and and provide a pretty big source of competitive advantage for us so at this point that finishes us up for unit four and we'll come back next time next Wednesday as Mike has uh has stated and we will start unit five and spend two weeks on on unit five and just keep plugging away and keep reading through the course and in the meantime are there any questions that I can answer oh we do have a question right uh right now about um the importance uh the importance of difference between tangible and intangible aspect and assets which which would which is more important oh gosh you know I think a lot of that depends on the company um itself but since we are so technology driven and a lot of the technologies that um our our our companies use can create a pretty big intangible competitive advantage so if I had to say and this is just my personal opinion from my experience for most companies I think intangible is more important because that can get us a more competitive place in the market that we're competing in whereas tangible assets unless we have a whole lot of them you know unless we're a really really wealthy company and we have a lot of money that we can spend and and do things and oh you know create new products I think the intangible assets um are more important in my opinion all right cool yeah um we we have someone else down here in the chat just kind of uh reading reiterating the the idea about intangible assets but I will let everyone if that if you anyone has any questions if if that's more uh if we need more clarity on that feel free to hit me up in the chat right now I'll give you a little bit of time while I remind everyone that next week uh we're starting unit five and that's going to be on Wednesday June 1st we'll go back to Monday the next week but we have a holiday um here in America so we're shuffling things around so Wednesday June 1st part one of our review of business 501 we gotta thank you down there in the chat so I think you answered the question properly so I'm just going to get everyone out of here by saying if uh this is your first time here and you've made it all the way through this um check out the other videos in the playlist below and make sure you check out the course because again this is supplemental material for the course I want to thank everyone for joining us I would like to thank Dr. uh Laura Poitlis for taking us through everything and I'm I will see y'all next week on Wednesday June 1st bye everybody