Name: Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski
Occupation: Became the forty-seventh president of the Naval War College in Newport in July 1998.
Background: Served as a fighter squadron commander in Operation Desert Storm, and after promotion to flag rank he became Commander, Carrier Group SIX and Commander, AMERICA Battle Group. Besides combat assignments to Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, he has served in support of United Nations operations in Iraq, Somalia and Bosnia. Among his decorations are the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal, five awards of the Legion of Merit, Bronze Store, two Meritorious Service Medals, 10 Air Medals, and two Navy Commendation Medals with Combat “V”. He is also the 1991 winner of the John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership.
Education: Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Villanova University and a Master of Science Degree in Computer Systems Management from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.
VICE ADMIRAL CEBROWSKI: One of the things that we’re aware of is that there’s alot of failure out there. But I’m not sure that’s wrong, because it means there’s a lot of trying.
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What is the Naval War College’s mission and its future in Newport?
CEBROWSKI: The Naval War College was founded in 1884. It was the first war college. Frankly, it has a rather glorious history. In 1998, the Chief of Naval Operations decided to significantly expand its mission in addition to its longstanding missions of preparing mid-grade and senior officers for leadership positions, in positions of command. In addition to our traditional mission of doing strategic research and development and strategic thinking for the Navy and the nation, now we have picked up the tasks of development of new concepts, experimentation and the formulation of doctrine. So we run the Navy’s experimentation program, which runs around the world.
What do we mean by experimentation?
The broad thrust of the experimentation program is to move the Navy as rapidly as possible into the information age. To the front edge of the information age. To capitalize on the great American advantage in information technology, information processes. We’ve looked a lot, we’ve looked hard into the business world to see what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve looked at how information technology has changed the American culture, marketplace. And a few things have become very apparent to us. So now we are experimenting. For example, speed. The information age is dominated by speed. And consequently we are looking at all of our processes and activities to identify those things which are impediments, things which slow us down. Why, why do they have to be there? Then, we’ll experiment with alternative ways of doing business. Another is access. The information age is characterized by access, access to information, to ideas, to people, to places, to things. Always with speed and facility. One of our capstone concepts is what we call short access. So we try to move the force in that direction. It amounts to a new way of thinking.
Another change is to move from an input focus to an output focus. What we call “effects based warfare.” It used to be you’d think how many men and material can you get to a certain place in a certain time. How many missions could you fly? How much ordnance can you deliver? Those are infinite measures. One of the things we looked at in the world of business is — wait a minute, in business it’s what happens at the transaction end that counts. All those other things at the input end are very, very important, but they’re important only in so far as they contribute to the ultimate transaction. So we’ve shifted our focus toward a less physical and more behavioral view of warfare. Very challenging.
In looking at the business community, what have you learned that they are doing wrong?
One of the things that we’re aware of is that there’s a lot of failure out there. But I’m not sure that’s wrong, because it means there’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trying. That’s good. So that’s okay. We talked with Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, a remarkable man. We asked him what the most important thing is that he does. What goes on inside your firm, the absolute most important thing? And he said the most important thing for me is to make sure that at all levels of the enterprise there is robust experimentation and innovation going on, at all levels. And we thought about that a lot. And we’ve looked at that, and we’ve internalized that. And in fact our experimentation program is really based on that concept. So it is not just experimentation at the top, a few ideas at the top, but rather it is developing an ethos of experimentation. So one thing that can be done very wrong is when a senior leader thinks he has a corner on the good ideas for the firm. That he’ll call the shots.
That’s the old TQM process?
That’s right. We’ve all studied TQM too, and there’s a lot to it. One of the things we have done is we have backed up the focus on experimentation with people and money. That’s how the junior people know that this is serious. For example, we’ve brought upward of a hundred people here to help with our experimentation and innovation efforts. That’s a major plus, at a time when nobody has enough people to do what they have to do. Of course, it takes millions of dollars to run these experiments. Furthermore, we run them around the world with the operating forces. On the eighth of December we finished a major experiment with the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. It’s a lot of overhead to fly our staff halfway around the world for a couple of months to run this. But what this does, this sets an experiment in the actual operating environment. It keeps it from being in some ivory tower. It keeps the experiment from just being schoolhouse.
You’re transferring what you experiment with here to the workplace.
That’s right. So what happens is the thousands of sailors and Marines that are involved in the Fifth Fleet are participants in the experiment. They are part of it. They have ownership. They are in on the ground floor of whatever it is that we happen to be working on. This is also one of the key features of retention. The military has been downsizing for over 10 years. That means the vast majority of our employees have been looking at a downsizing of the military. Anyplace else in the world it would be called a sunset industry, but obviously it’s not. How do you retain key people in that kind of environment? One of the ways to do that is to give them a sense that this outfit has a future, that it’s experimenting with that future, that they’re in on that experimentation, that they’re in on that ground floor. And that they are helping to build the future for themselves as well as the firm.
Obviously this thinking wasn’t there all along. When was the decision made to make a change, to make an investment?
It started with a former Chief of Naval Operations who looked at the Navy and said the United States Navy has always been one of the great sources of innovation in America. We are the people, after all, that gave you precision guided weapons, we gave you infrared missiles, GPS (global positions systems), essentially a Navy invention. Almost everything in the space program came out of the Navy, out of the Naval Research Laboratory, which formed the core for NASA. Signals, surveillance from space is essentially Navy. Communications in space is Navy. The list is long of tactical, network, very high speed networking for tactical information is Navy. Grace Hopper, one of the original inventors of the computer, is Navy.
So he looked around and said where are these inventions today? Where can I look and see examples of these kinds of innovations going on today? And he looked around and he wasn’t happy with what he saw. He realized that we had simply gotten too good at what we do. We had become very, very good. For what we do, we’re the best in the world. So people focused in on that, and you see this in other big firms too – firms with great track records of success, well thought of, customers like them, and they continue to refine themselves around that same formula for success. In the process what they do is they refine out the new ideas, and the innovation. So the senior leadership decided we have to stop this and if need be reinvent ourselves.
I think it’s Motorola that has the principle that if they don’t destroy themselves regularly, their competitors will. And so that’s what we have been essentially created to do. The United States Naval War College has now become the change agent for the United States Navy. We focus on disruptive technologies and disruptive concepts. One of our sources for thinking, Harvard professor Clay Christiansen, the author of “Innovator’s Dilemma,” did a lot of research in disruptive technologies and how it impacts firms. We adopted his thinking.
How does what you’re doing here relate not so much to big business, and the Navy is a big business, but to the firm that’s out there with a hundred people or even less that is struggling to make it on an everyday basis. How does what you do here relate to what they ought to be doing in their business?
The principles apply very, very well. While we look at the Navy changing things, things that transform the business of national defense, the business of navies and we have to do that without betting the family farm. Because we can’t afford to be very wrong, in such a way that it keeps us from securing the national defense. The same principles can apply. I think with a small firm it gets harder and harder to make those kinds of bets without betting the family farm, to decide that you are in a different core business, moving into a different competitive space.
If you don’t do that you’ll be on a path to extinction.
Yes. Yes. The less adaptive you are the closer you are to extinction. Everyone wants to talk about the create and implement form, steps in the innovation cycle; they don’t want to talk about the next step, which is to destroy. The old must fund the new. And those are tough choices. Those are gut wrenching choices.
It’s also a painful process for senior management, people having to accept that all of those concepts, all of those principles they have accepted in the past, might have to change.
And it’s particularly hard when the labor market is tight, because you don’t want to shed employees who have been loyal, have skills, skills that are still contributing to the corporate well being. You don’t want to displace these people. And yet at the same you have a sense you have to acquire new skills.
Acquiring new skills within those people?
I think that one of the keys is to find a way to train, to retool an existing workforce, where you already have some degree of loyalty and commitment to the firm, and one of the things that has been found is that firms that invest in the training of employees have a higher retention rate than those that don’t. A common mistake is to believe that if I give this employee training then he’ll become more marketable and he’ll leave the firm and he’ll go someplace else and he’ll make more money and I’ll never see him again. So why did I spend the time and money to train him? That’s false logic. Because the surveys show that if you train them, there’s a higher probability they’ll stay. Look for example in the United States Navy. We retain about a third of our first-term sailors. These are young people at the most mobile period in their life. We give them a lot of training. We make them very marketable. By the conventional wisdom, they would all leave. But they don’t, because we give them training, we give them a sense of purpose, of belonging, we try to fire up a sense of loyalty, and loyalty is coming to be at a premium out in the workplace. There’s much talk about how neither employees nor employers have much of a sense of loyalty. And frankly I think that people hunger for that kind of relationship again. We try to work toward that in the military. We don’t mind spending the time and money to train them.
In the business community, do you see that kind of investment?
I think it’s very mixed. There’s all kinds of anecdotes about lack of loyalty, loyalty down. No loyalty down you’re not going to get loyalty up. It’s got to start at the top.
What the things are you are doing here that would help you retain people better than you did 10 years ago?
The experimentation program also gives them a sense of future. It’s just marvelous to sit down with an employee and say I’ve seen the future and you’re in it.
We’re talking about a future in which they believe they can grow within the organization.
That’s right, a sense of personal growth, I think is important. It’s just taken us back to basics. It’s stuff we learned in management school in the late ’60s, early ’70s, the organizational development people. We said all these things.
Before it was industrial, it was volume, it was piecework. A person could live there and work there for his whole life, 9 to 5, you give them step increases in salary. If the person is no good, they left. You got another one. It was a short training period and you went on. Now in the information age it is not like that. The whole environment, it’s changing at a rate completely unlike anything we saw in the industrial age. People have to learn more things, and there are more things to learn. To a certain extent there has been the disappearance of hierarchy. Employees are doing different things. We’re doing things differently at home. It used to be setting up an information system at home was deciding what newspaper you get, what television channel you watch. Not anymore. Now when you create your information domain at home, (you have) very complex and technical choices to make. You’re doing that at home, just think what you’re doing in the workplace.
Let me relate to the Naval Warfare College to Rhode Island. How many people are here?
We have over 1,000 people, but we have just under 600 students, most of whom are U.S. Military, about half of them Navy. We have some civilians. We also have 75 international students. Our actual program is excellent, clearly the best in the world. Last month we had the 15th International Sea Power Symposium here and we had leaders from 71 navies, and 41 chiefs of navies from around the world. Most of them were graduates or our school.
What does the future hold for this facility? More growth?
Yes. Even as we’ve seen downsizing in the military, the organization here is starting to grow. For example, currently the Navy is short about 500 line officers. Yet our quota is full. We’re filling our classrooms. An education at Newport is highly prized. We award a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies, one of the best such degrees you can get in the world. It is sought after.
It also qualifies for joint professional military education, which officers need for their general professional development, in a joint context with other services. We are expanding our off-campus programs. We teach seminars, the same course work you get here. We teach them in 19 places around the country and in Naples, Italy. And we also do a correspondence program as well. We have under 600 students in residence. We’re approaching 2,000 off-campus and that number (has) grown. And we’re looking at ways to grow our resident study body as well, which also means were growing faculty. This is a fully accredited institution. We’re accredited by the same agency that accredits all the other New England Schools, Harvard, MIT. We jump through the same accrediting wickets.
We’re continuing to grow. We just completed a new building, which is probably the finest working facility in the world. We’re continuing to upgrade it. We’re hoping within the next few years to start another building to house the new activities we have there but also to house our rapidly expanding library. We have some priceless manuscripts here, some historic documents, which need, of course, appropriate preservation. The library’s just expanding at a rate greater than the facility will allow.
