Leadership skills learned in the U.S. military.

QUOTE from Gelett Burgess: "If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead."

I LEARNED something very interesting while reading the August 19 edition of TIME. The front cover was entitled THE NEW GREATEST GENERATION. The article was about how young war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are redefining leadership in America. The paragraph that struck me the most was how military officers are trained in making decisions.Here it is:

All officers in the U.S. military are trained to contruct an action plan for every mission. It consists of writing a five-paragraph memo. The inevitable militaty acronym for the five paragraphs is SMESC, and the mnemonic device is "Sargeant major eats sugar cookies." What are the five paragraphs? Here they are.

"S" stands for Situation: What's the problem?
"M" stands for Mission: What's our strategy for solving it?
"E" stands for Execution: What tactics are we going to use?
"S" stands for Support: What are the logistics; how many troops and what sort of equipment will we need?
"C" stands for Command: What other organizations (air strikes, aerial reconnaisance, Afghan security forces) will have to be involved.

To me this is interesting stuff. Many of these officers now are civilians and into leasdership roles outside the military and are using SMESC in making decisions. It appears to me that any person in a position of leadership can make use of SMESC.


HUMOR for today:
A third grade teacher had to leave her classroom for several minutes. When she returned the kids were in perfect order and it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

She was stunned and told the kids, "This is wonderful. But, please, tell me what came over you? Why are you so well behaved and quiet?"

Finally, Little Johnny spoke up and said, "Well, one time you said that if you ever came back and found us quiet, you would drop dead."