Training for Nuclear War and the C-Suite

For four years in the early 1980s, John Meyer spent most of his time in an underground bunker with only one other person, 150 nuclear warheads, and an enormous amount of responsibility. He's now the CEO of Acxiom, a marketing services and technology company. HBR asked him about how his early career in the Air Force prepared him to lead a company.

What did you learn as a missile launch officer that you found useful later in your career?

Attention to detail and how to solve problems under extreme pressure. Before video games were popular, I lived in a video game. It was a big computer room 80 feet underground, with shock absorbers, air conditioning systems, life support systems, and 20- or 30-ton blast doors, all kinds of crazy things. Because it was just me and another individual down there, we had to know how to make everything work and how to repair it. We could not afford for things to go wrong and so we'd practice every part of the process of launching a warhead, every possible scenario, over and over on the simulator.

The artificial pressure that ensures that you're always on the top of your game was built into the system. If we had to launch missiles, we had only three minutes from the time we acknowledged the order, because within three minutes, the submarine-launched missiles from the Russians would have blown us out of the water. We had three minutes to do a bunch of different stuff to make sure the right thing happened, with no mistakes, and we could be called to do it—either on the simulator or for real—at any time. That's a sense of urgency.

That training still affects how I approach problems. I often do pert charts to prepare. When I'm negotiating a contract with someone, for example, I try to anticipate what they'll say. If they say this, I'll say this. If they say this, I'll say this. I actually chart it out.

Do you find yourself creating that artificial sense of urgency for other people as CEO?

Yes, I'm very task-oriented. Creating a sense of urgency and demand in the organization is an important part of leadership; as CEO I see myself as the engine for the company. And why do something tomorrow if you could do it today? If you're not excited, you're not communicating, and you're not leading by example, then everything goes down to the lowest common denominator eventually.

Does the fact that it isn't a life-or-death situation make creating urgency a lot harder?

Well, there's a business life and death, right?

Did your military experience accelerate your early career?

I went from the military to Ross Perot's EDS, which was not a far step; it was somewhat of a paramilitary organization. They were looking for somebody who understood computers, and I had experience there. But they were also looking for people with a military background because they knew what kind of training and commitment that pushes into you. When I was 26, I was a flight commander with 150 people working for me. Getting that kind of leadership and responsibility at a young age, both with people and projects, gives you a head start as long as you take it and build on it. I was an individual performer when I went into EDS, but eight months later, I had six people working for me, because people could see I had maturity, I had the dings. I'd made the mistakes someplace else.

Was there anything else you took from the military that you found useful in your work as a civilian?

I think professionalism and professional appearance is pretty important because it gives you the first impression, the benefit of the doubt. If you look the part, you get the opportunity to show whether you're competent or not.

Leadership Begins at Home

One of the greatest gifts you can give your kids is help in foregoing immediate gratification, by setting boundaries for them and by modeling the behavior yourself.

That's also one of the greatest gifts you can give to those you lead or manage.

I got to thinking about all this after reading "Growing up Digital: Wired for Distraction," Matt Richtel's superb, often heartbreaking front page article in Sunday's New York Times. It's about the effect of all the new technology on the attention span of kids.

Compelling as it was, I suspect few read to the end of the article. It was long, and we ourselves are struggling with the same issue our kids are. Just last week, I wrote about it under the headline "Warning: Your Attention is Under Siege."

When it comes to the impact of our increasing obsession with being connected electronically, kids are simply an exaggerated version of the rest of us. They're also more honest about the costs.

By staying relentlessly busy sending thousands of text messages a day, playing endless hours of video games, and checking Facebook every three minutes, kids are addressing two core needs. They're eliciting brief, tiny bits of gratification and reassurance, and avoiding loneliness and fear. "Video games don't make the hole," a student named Sean McMullen poignantly tells Richtel. "They fill it."

The most obvious cost is that when they're preoccupied with technology for entertainment or escape, kids aren't engaged in learning or any sort of complex thinking.

In one recent study, 47 percent of heavy users of technology were found to have poor grades, versus 23 percent of light users. The kids Richtel describes struggle at school nearly in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend online.

The analogy at offices is that most of us are quick to shift attention from our work every time we hear the "ping" of a new email that promises instant gratification (but rarely delivers). Email also interrupts whatever else we're doing. When we turn attention from one task to focus on another, it dramatically increases the time it takes to finish the first task, and adds to the number of mistakes we make.

Nothing better fuels high quality work and productivity, or makes us feel more satisfied, than deeply immersing ourselves in a task. But really focusing requires resisting the instant gratification of other distractions, and that takes effort.

There are lessons here for parents, but also for leaders.

First, model the behaviors you hope to see. If you're forever on your iPhone, or watching TV, your kids get that message. If you're always looking over at your computer screen when you're meeting with people, they too get the message.

Second, recognize that these technologies are as addictive as any other drug or diversion that provides an instant hit of pleasure and/or an escape from pain.

"Sometimes I'll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can't," Vijay Singh tells Ritchel, echoing his friends. Parents must set firm boundaries restricting the use of electronics.

It's not about banning them, which is unrealistic and extreme, but rather about helping kids to regularly experience the deeper satisfaction that comes from becoming truly absorbed in and mastering a complex challenge.

Leaders, meanwhile, need to encourage their employees to turn off email entirely at times, in order to focus uninterrupted attention on their most difficult tasks.

Third, parents and teachers alike ought to encourage a new way of working. Whether it's for homework or for office work, the best way to get things done is in periods of interrupted work no longer than 90 minutes, followed by true renewal.

We embed, contextualize, and synthesize learning during downtime—which is what we've sacrificed in our addiction to constant connection.

The new technologies aren't going away, nor should they. The real issue is whether we can learn to manage them more skillfully, so they don't end up managing us. Who's going to lead the way?

Are Your Most Talented People Losing Their Minds?

For knowledge-intensive industries, people's talent, expertise and ingenuity are essential ingredients for success. Agile minds are our richest resource for sharpening our competitive edge. So just how closely should management monitor their employees' minds?

Tracking employee time, location, and attention is a no-brainer for most firms. Privacy matters, of course, but it's seldom central. Many firms won't hesitate to administer personality tests to see what kind of character and temperament their staff brings to work. Invasive? Perhaps. But enlightened executives use what they learn to better invest in and coach their people. Anticipating weaknesses matters as much as building strengths. Savvy managers are always sensitive to what might be going wrong as what should be getting better. Effective executives, as Peter Drucker noted, want to get ahead of potential problems.

If determining whether your employees are losing their ability to effectively process ideas and information costs next to nothing, aren't you ethically obligated to find that out? If minds matter most, assuring that they're working well becomes a business imperative. You'd be remiss if you knowingly allowed employees with propensities for physical injury to move heavy machinery. The economic risks of cognitive liability call for comparable precaution. Those risks are growing. Get ready to manage them.

America's aging population has inspired an explosion of medical research into Alzheimer's, dementia and cognitive diminution. Of course, these unhappy pathologies are global phenomena. Their causes and treatments, sadly, remain uncertain and ill-defined. Their impact on the workplace is demographically destined to increase. There's no escape.

A recent and radical revolution in better, faster, and cheaper diagnostics, however, is furiously underway. Our ability to detect the early-onset of cognitive affliction has improved by orders of magnitudes in barely a decade. These tests are not yet foolproof or definitive. But they're improving. They offer important indicators of serious cognitive issues to come. Free, fast, and simple web-based diagnostics already can alert you whether you, or your employees, will likely confront difficult challenges in the not-too-distant future. Is choosing ignorance a sustainable behavior for knowledge-intensive organizations? My bet is, no.

Patients undergoing complex heart operations, clients getting legal advice and venture capitalists investing millions in entrepreneurial teams might understandably want to know the cognitive health of their doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. In fact, they'll probably insist on knowing. In an era of growing global litigation, regulation and accountability, do they have the right to do so? If you seek premium prices from customers and clients for your knowledge-intensive services, they may insist they do. They might even want to administer such tests to your employees themselves. Should you allow?

Would you take such a diagnostic if administered by your employer or a potential client?

Yes
No

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A powerful case could be made that regularly running such tests could be in the organization's best interest as part of its human capital "quality control" investment. Perhaps submitting to such examinations — not unlike drug testing — will become a condition of employment.

While personal and professional pain around the likely loss of one's faculties is unavoidable, the legal and ethical implications have only begun to be addressed. Unless and until meaningful therapeutic interventions, or outright cures, for Alzheimer's and dementia materialize, this diagnostic dilemma will be one of the most contentious and controversial issues confronting tomorrow's workforce. In America, workplace discrimination around disabilities is forbidden — unless that disability directly impacts job performance. For knowledge workers and service providers whose expertise relies upon their mental acuity, the stress of growing older will be compounded by the specter of measurable cognitive decline. As previously discussed, computational prostheses can certainly play a mitigating role in buying time. But — like it or not — one of executive leadership's most difficult duties may be to rigorously examine those who appear to cognitively falter.

No doubt, executives will have to lead by example. Are you ready to take your test?