Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

What the military could learn about mission command from General Motors

Like I said, I generally don’t think that the military should use business as a model. But there are exceptions in specific cases, especially on leadership of large organizations. Peter Drucker, one of the great thinkers about how corporations really work, in describing the Generals Motors of the 1940s, mentions that 95 percent of all ...

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
Wikimedia
Wikimedia
Wikimedia

Like I said, I generally don't think that the military should use business as a model. But there are exceptions in specific cases, especially on leadership of large organizations.

Like I said, I generally don’t think that the military should use business as a model. But there are exceptions in specific cases, especially on leadership of large organizations.

Peter Drucker, one of the great thinkers about how corporations really work, in describing the Generals Motors of the 1940s, mentions that 95 percent of all decisions were left to the heads of the company’s various divisions. "Hence central management refrains as much as possible from telling a division how to do its job; it only lays down what to do."

Mission command, anyone?

Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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