One gets people to show up. The other gets them “All in”.
I grew up in a Culture of Compliance. As a young West Point cadet in the early 1970s, I had only a vague notion of what culture even was. We had a set way of doing things called “the military way.” Compliance was the operating system. You did what you were told, when you were told to do it, and why was not part of the paradigm.
What I didn’t fully understand then was the cost of that operating system. West Point was screening roughly 10,000 applicants, selecting between 1,200 and 1,400 cadets for admission each year, and losing between 25% and 40% of them before graduation four years later, either voluntarily or involuntarily. That is an enormous waste of talent and national resources. And for years, the institution and the country accepted it as normal.
In the 1980s, the Army’s more visionary leaders recognized that its culture was in danger of becoming irrelevant. Something fundamental had to change. The institution began moving away from compliance and attrition as its organizing principles, and toward empowerment and commitment. West Point was the vanguard of the Army culture, and as I wrote in We’re All In, this transformation was a tectonic shift for a 200-year-old institution. It did not happen quickly or easily.
But it worked. By the time my son graduated in the West Point Class of 2011, the attrition rate had fallen to half of what my class experienced. West Point had built the right culture at the right time. And that culture produced better leaders, better officers, and better outcomes for the Army and the Nation. Just look at the outcome of Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990-1991. A classic campaign of annihilation that will be remembered as such for decades to come.
The Army (and West Point) transformation from compliance to commitment was extraordinary. But it happened. And it can happen to any organization willing to do the work.
How We Got Here
Compliance-based culture wasn’t a mistake. It was a rational response to the world that existed fifty years ago. Large workforces operated in big facilities such as offices and factories, top-down management structures were the norm with standardized processes, dress codes, regimented hours. If everyone did what they were told, organizations ran efficiently. Compliance minimized variables and kept the trains running on time (a paraphrase of Mussolini’s brutal regime in the 1930s).
The U.S. Army operated on the same principle for decades. During the Cold War, our entire training posture was built around large, coordinated formations operating as a combined arms team. Compliance was essential. Direction was expected. The battlefield of the Third World War demanded it.
But then the landscape of warfare changed. The end of the Cold War and Desert Shield/Storm were followed by extended campaigns in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, with dispersed forces across hundreds of square miles in small units operating with far greater independence. Junior leaders were making tactical decisions with strategic implications every single day. The old compliance model couldn’t keep up. We had to develop leaders who could think, decide, and act without waiting for specific instructions from above.
That shift took the better part of a decade. It required a fundamental change in how we developed leaders, communicated intent, and defined what “good” looked like. It was not comfortable. And it was absolutely necessary.
The same reckoning has arrived for business.
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Enjoy the journey!
