The Marine Corps Way: Using Maneuver Warfare to Lead a Winning Organization

Applied in the business setting, the Marines practices promise to take the venerable concept of focus on the customer to a new level. Indeed, shuffling personnel to the most critical areas of your business, using information to understand and anticipate customer behavior, designating and redesignating a main effort, and proactively managing the challenges associated with economy of force will enable you to bring overwhelming resources to bear on the customer s wants and needs.

Focus your personnel in the most critical areas of your business and do not limit the scope of this activity to mere numbers . Move your star performers into frontline leadership roles to supervise directly the focused application of resources. Shuffling people around the organization may take them out of their respective comfort zones, but they will be more well rounded, and you will be able to maintain a greater market presence with a smaller footprint.

Use information to guide the focused application of resources in pursuit of market opportunities. You may not have UAVs, SigInt, and Recon Marines at your disposal, but you can apply statistical analysis to customer demographics and purchasing activities, and you can leverage the insights of frontline employees . Information gleaned from these activities will enable you to anticipate customer behavior more effectively than your rivals are able to. Moreover, this information will enable you to identify the most profitable customers and target their needs selectively.

Designate a main effort and be prepared to shift it when a more lucrative market opportunity arises. Designating a main effort ensures that focus is a formalized process and resolves potentially conflicting claims on your organization s resources. Being prepared to shift maximizes your ability to bring maximum resources to bear on changing market conditions, but it extends well beyond your own preparedness. You must train your people so that they are accustomed to shifting, and you must communicate your intentions to them in advance of any shift so that your organization is prepared to bring maximum resources to bear on emerging market opportunities.

Finally, proactively manage the risk associated with focus by communicating with your people and building flexibility into your plans to commit resources. Ask the leaders of the business units from which you take resources what they need to continue operations and monitor their progress, either through ongoing dialogue or through real-time information systems, so that you may rapidly respond to an exposed weakness. And just as you ask yourself, What is the downside? when weighing risk and reward; ask yourself, How hard will it be to shift these resources back when needed? when committing to a focused strategy.