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How to Make a New
Band of Brothers to win in GWOT or Hi-Tech War: the Quad Model, by Mark
Hagerott, CAPT USN,
See below for historical case study and view Quad-OTIS model©hagerott2009
Developing Leaders in Complex Technical Organizations:
An Historically based model for Personnel
Managers
(Quadrant Model for Leader Development)©
"Yet in
reality the remedy is simple and obvious. All that is needed is to make the
line officer and the engineer the same man, by throwing both corps into
one."
Theodore
Roosevelt, Under Secretary of the Navy, 9 December 1897
“…strict
attention paid to training the human mind in specialties is the only path
that leads to higher attainment.”
Congressman
Low, NY, during debate over naval officer reforms, 1899
"But we are
told the naval officer to-day is a 'fighting engineer", and this mockery of
truth has been accepted by the profession."
Stephen B.
Luce, RADM, USN (retired), 1911
*
Summary
Technological and social change holds manifold implications for human
resource (HR) systems. This essay will introduce a tool for understanding
the tradeoffs and challenges involved in the process of leader development,
especially in large complex organizations. To illustrate the workings of
this model, the development of the professional naval officer corps will be
examined. It will be argued that the crux of the problem faced by leader
development systems today is an old one, almost five hundred years old, at
the least. Personnel managers have struggled for centuries to groom and
prepare new generations of leaders to lead the complex organizations of
their day. In this struggle there came to exist a tension between the need
for specialized knowledge and integrated knowledge on the one hand, and
between technical and operational knowledge on the other. The dual tension
created a complex dynamic in leader development systems. A model which I
call Quad-OTIS (Quadrant Leadership:
Operational-Technical-Integrative-Specialized) can help personnel managers
display graphically, in a quadrant structure, the tensions and tradeoffs
they confront as they build their new generation of specialists and senior
leaders necessary to run modern organizations.
What is Quad-OTIS,
hereafter referred to as the 'Quad model'? The Quad model is a tool to
help managers prioritize resources and plan human resource development
strategies. As environmental, social, and technological factors change
around an organization, it is incumbent on personnel managers to
continuously reassess and rebalance the leader development system to ensure
it is meeting the needs of the organization. Leaders often think of
rebalancing in binary terms: "either I can cultivate more specialized
skilled personnel, or I can develop a more generalist or integrative
leader." This tradeoff/challenge is depicted in Figure 1.
At the same time
personnel managers are confronted with and often grapple with a second
dynamic: the need for personnel with technical knowledge, and the
need for personnel especially adept at less technical, more operational
responsibilities. This tradeoff/challenge is represented in Figure 2.
The Quad Model
allows a manager to synthesize the problem-solving dilemmas, and move from
solving two problems in isolation and seek to solve both together. The Quad
Model combines the two spectrums to produce a quadrant structure where the
interdependences and tradeoffs become more intuitively evident. This is
accomplished by turning Figure 2 vertical which yields a transitional Figure
3, and then superimposing one spectrum over the other, thus creating the
Quad Model, Figure 4. Starting at "12 o'clock high" is the 'operational'
end of the spectrum, at six o'clock is the 'technical end'. At three
o'clock is the 'integrative' end, and at nine o'clock is the 'specialized'
end of the spectrum. Taken together this yields an easily understood
quadrant structure of leader-types, Figure 5.
Figure 1: Degree of Specialization or Integration
Figure 2: Degree of Technical Content
Figure 3: Tilt Figure 2 vertical to gain a new
perspective
Figure 4: Quadrant Leadership Model:
Operational-Technical, Integrated-Specialized
Figure 5: Knowledge Areas by Quadrants: Technical
Specialist, Operations Specialist, Technical Integrator, Integrative
Operator
How it Works: an Historical Illustration
In modern complex organizations it is sometimes difficult to fully
appreciate the tradeoffs and challenges of a particular HR strategy. That
is where history can be helpful. This same problem of tradeoffs and
challenges was confronted centuries ago, but while the problems were
fundamentally the same, the patterns were not obscured as they are today by
an avalanche of data and numbers which have become commonly available with
computerized and networked databases.
Beginning around the time of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution,
senior HR leaders (the kings and queens and their advisors) found it
necessary that their military leaders be able to employ increasingly complex
technological systems over larger and more complex geographical and social
domains. To be able to develop new military technologies, technical
specialists were sometimes needed. To employ technologies in the field,
brave and tactically adaptive 'operators' were in demand. As fleets and
navies grew larger and more complex, and there arose a nascent 'systems of
systems', there was an increased need for integrators, officers who 'bring
it all together', both on the sea and in the dock yards. While this need
became evident fairly early on, the harder question was how to develop such
capabilities in the military-naval leaders of the day.
In those early
days, navies were the most hi-tech and complex organizations on the planet,
and not surprisingly the English became cutting edge innovators in the realm
of maritime leader development. The English, by deliberate analysis or
chance, realized there was a tradeoff or tension between 'specialized
knowledge' and broader, more general-integrated knowledge. This tension was
depicted on the Quad Model, Figure 5. The persons who fought and sailed
were located in the left two quadrants, that occupied by 'specialists'. In
the sea service, the earliest form of command was divided among
specialists: the specialist 'land warrior' came aboard ship to fight with
pike and sword, and the more technical specialist 'tarpaulin'sailor, or
'Jack Tar', sailed and navigated the technically complex system known as the
ship, or galleon. The 'tarpaulin' did not consider himself to be responsible
for naval-military tactical decision, only for technical ship duties of ship
navigation and transport of the 'warriors'. The English eventually found
this arrangement to be unsatisfactory. But how did they change the model,
and how was this important? And, more importantly for today, how did later
generations of personnel managers reconcile the need for specialists and
integrators in their organizations, and what strategies did they adopt that
remain relevant today?
Figure 6: English Naval Reforms Create the Integrative
Officer: the Midshipman
How Navy's Developed Quadrant Leaders? How
Navy's moved models between and across Quadrants?
The naval
commander is particularly sensitive to the effects of changing technology,
in no small part due to the nature of the problem of command. The senior
officers who occupy the upper levels of the command structure are faced by
issues that are fundamentally different than those addressed by
specialists. The senior operational commander, unlike the specialist, must
come to possess a capacity to integrate and synthesize, to make judgments
about the larger whole.
Specialized education provides a commander with awareness in a narrow field,
but broadening education is the tool that enhances the commander’s capacity
for synthesis in judgment. A perennial problem, then, is to strike the
balance between specialized education and training and more broadening and
general education that provides the foundation for the synthesis and
judgment of the whole, to include the non-technical and human dimension of
war. During centuries of technological change, navies have made and remade
their commanders using a combination of strategies and adjustments, a mix
that was contingent upon unique circumstances of the time.
Navies did not adopt any one personnel strategy in response to technological
change. The idiosyncratic responses, however, appear to align with one of
three general types of responses. Navies convey new technical knowledge to
the commander via a strategy of
specialization,
merger,
or some combination of strategies, to include what might be described as
educational
accommodations.
In the first strategy,
specialization,
an organization subdivided its knowledge-holders to create around the new
technology a new group of specialists who advised but did not necessarily
rise to command. In the second strategy,
merger,
the organization merged two or more groups of knowledge holders and created
a new commander whose identity was a synthesis of formerly independent
groups. The command implications of
merger
were less clear-cut than a strategy of
specialization
and could include a shifting balance of power between the groups that
harbored old loyalties. Lastly, there is a mixed strategy of
accommodation
and adjustment that did not subdivide officers along specialist lines nor
try to effect an outright merger. A strategy of
accommodation
consisted of training, education, assignment, and promotion innovations that
combined to inculcate into the existing pool of commanders the desired level
of understanding of the new technological innovation. Though this last
strategy may exhibit fewer outward manifestations—no dramatic mergers to be
deliberated by the King, Parliament, or Congress, no independent specialist
groups emerge to challenge older groups—the effect on the thinking and
values of the commander could be profound in the long run.
In the early modern period (circa 1500s), when faced with increased
technical innovation and rising complexity, navies spawned multiple
specialties, to include pursers (finance), surgeons (medicine), and
chaplains. In
questions of command, however, the benefits of specialization were less
clear, and European navies adopted different policies with drastically
different results. Europe of the 16th century witnessed perhaps
the most profound challenge to long-held more specialist notions of
command. The Spanish fleet continued to adhere to the older pattern of
specialization:
the mariner-seaman piloted the ship, and the warrior-commander fought from
the ship. The English, however, adopted a new approach: a strategy of
merger
of the two specialties of mariner and warrior, ultimately in the person of a
‘midshipman’. The ‘midshipman’ learned both practical seamanship and
practical martial arts and was groomed to command both ship and the
warriors. (See Figure 6) The innovation of the merged commander proved a
success and contributed to the English victory in 1588 over the Spanish
Armada (though other scholars date the transition later in the 18th
century and believe it to have been somewhat more complex than described
here).
Regardless, the merger (or amalgamation) of seaman and warrior affected more
than the outcome of Anglo-Spanish naval battles. The English strategy of
merger
became an important case that was studied by American naval reformers in the
late 19th century.
Two hundred years after the innovation of the midshipman, naval command was
confronted with a new challenge: industrialization and steam. With
industrialization came increased organizational complexity. To cope with
increased complexity, military organizations of most western nations adopted
a strategy of greater specialization: the commander came to rely on a
growing group of officer specialists.
The US Navy followed this general pattern and adopted a strategy of
specialization,
giving rise to two corps of officers: the operational and tactical 'line'
and the technical specialists of the 'engineering corps'. (see Figure 7)
But the decision to confine the two sets of leaders to their respective
quadrants was not problem free, and resulted in considerable tension.
Figure 7: Navy 19th Century Model: the
Operational "Line" and the Technical "Engineer"
The rise of engineers prompted disputes with the 'line' regarding multiple
problems, to include questions of ship design, bureaucratic organizational
structures, finances, wardroom privilege, to name but a few.
But the most vexing problem area was over the question of command: what
would be the identity of the officer who would command, who would lead in
battle? Masland and Radway observed: "The rise of these specialists
produced a crisis over command at sea. By sending his crew aloft, the
captain had once controlled the movement of his vessel and confirmed his
authority over his men...the rise of a separate corps of officers who alone
understood its mysteries, by destroying this unity of knowledge, threatened
to destroy unity of command…."
The officer corps would struggle for a century over the questions of how
much should a commander trust to his engineers and how much did the
commander himself need to study and understand of the new engineering.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, perhaps best known as a naval strategist, devoted
considerable attention to the implications fossil fuel machines might pose
for 'line' officer education and development.
Mahan feared a resurgent form of 'technicism' in the personae of
coal-dusted mechanics and their machines, which were then proliferating
across America and the sea service. A particular danger to the profession,
Mahan warned in an 1879 essay, was if the Navy attempted to blur the lines
between 'line' officers and the engineers.
Mahan argued that naval officer education must be primarily education in the
profession of war, a profession he interpreted to be centered on combat
operations, not upon the technicalities of machines. Given his operational
bias, it was not surprising that Mahan advocated that technical specialists,
especially steam engineers, remain subordinate to the operationally-minded
‘line’ officer.
Mahan feared an excessive focus on the machines and things mechanical would
narrow an officer: “The necessarily materialistic character of mechanical
science tends rather to narrowness….”
An overly mechanistic and scientific approach to command, he argued, eroded
the human and moral aspects of leadership and tended “to promote caution
unduly; to substitute calculation for judgment; to create trust in formulas
rather than in one’s self.”
Mahan’s arguments about the limits of technology, especially the steam
engine, exerted a powerful influence on the Navy.
His arguments were, however, not uncontested. Mahan's writings provoked
spirited rebuttals by leaders of the engineer corps who saw their type of
officer, the engineer, to be ascendant in the Navy and in war.
The most outspoken opponents of Mahan were the Engineers in Chief, the
senior engineers in the navy, who fiercely promoted their technology and the
engineers. Charles Loring, Engineer in Chief of the Navy, and later
President of the American Society of Naval Engineers, levied blistering
personal attacks on Mahan and those like him who did not embrace what he saw
as the deterministic role of technology. In considering Mahan and others
like him, Loring in the President’s Annual Address to the American Society
of Mechanical Engineers in 1892 wrote that they failed to appreciate the
decisive role of engineering. Loring claimed that they had “... but
scantily drawn attention to the immense influence upon modern history by the
steam engine. They follow in the same well worn ruts giving dubious
description of battle, names of monarchs....and the whole array of puppets
who seem to push the cart of time, while they are only flies upon its
wheels."
Loring, however, retired as Engineer in Chief before the issues of personnel
reform came to a head. His replacement was unlikely and unexpected, one
George Melville.
Melville was an outspoken and articulate advocate for the advancement of
naval engineers. Writing an article in 1896, entitled ‘The Engineer in
Warfare”, Melville quoted at length a sympathetic European author: “…there
is strife between the deck and the engineer officer. While the role of the
former is growing less every day, that of the latter is constantly
increasing in importance. Everything is engines in the Navy. We refuse to
admit it, but strife does exist, and it is only when compelled and forced
that we give the engineer due rank and authority.”
Activist engineers helped Melville raise the profile of engineers, but they
did more: they shifted the overall model of 'line' officer toward the
'technical specialist' quadrant previously occupied by engineering
specialists. As a consequence of their efforts, the 'line' officer would
become, by law, as much an engineer as he was a tactician or operator. The
shift in 'line' officer toward a stronger technical and material identity
came with the Act of 1899 when politicians adopted a strategy of
merger:
they merged (or, in the word of the day, amalgamated) the 'line' and the
engineers to form a common officer model. This model decisively linked the
navy's concept of operational command with the technical requirements of the
engineering profession.
*
Merging Operational and Technical Expertise into One
The Navy had for almost a century struggled with the implications of the
steam engine and the need to reconcile the competing demands of the ‘line’
operators and the engineers. At the end of the 19th century a
particularly ambitious and young Under Secretary of the Navy, Theodore
Roosevelt, was looking to make his mark, solved the 'problem' by merging the
'line' and 'engineer' corps into one. In September 1897 he began a
correspondence with a one-time engineer officer and then engineering
professor from Harvard, Ira N. Hollis, who had published in the
Atlantic Monthly
a plan for the amalgamation (merger) of the 'line' and engineering corps.
Roosevelt introduced Hollis to the Secretary of the Navy, John D. Long, and
not long after their first meeting, Long authorized Roosevelt to convene
what was called the Naval Reorganization Board in November 1897. Roosevelt
promptly invited Hollis to advise the board.
A mere four weeks later,
in December 1897, despite the initial objections of senior engineers,
including Melville, Roosevelt's board recommended to the Secretary a plan
that mirrored in almost every respect Hollis' plan for amalgamation or
merger of two, previously distinct types of officers.
The board recommended amalgamation using language very similar to that used
by the Harvard professor, arguing that "... every officer on a modern war
vessel in reality has to be an engineer whether he wants to or not."
The report dismissed notions that amalgamation might yield negative
consequences and argued instead that though for generations it seemed "...
very difficult to hit upon the right expedient...Yet in reality the remedy
is simple and obvious. All that is needed is to make the line officer and
the engineer the same man, by throwing both corps into one."
The main argument for amalgamation was an historical analogy to the English
navy in the 16th century. The need for amalgamation was more
asserted than analyzed or argued.
Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill interpreted the Act of 1899 not as a victory
but as a step backward. In their critique, engineering was an increasingly
complex field of knowledge that required specialization. The amalgamation
of engineer and ‘line’ placed excessive knowledge-demands on a single
officer, and as a consequence, the merged officer would be both a less
effective operational commander
and
a less knowledgeable engineer. Congressman Low, NY, a vocal advocate of
this view, portrayed merger of 'line' and engineer as a step back because
“…strict attention paid to training the human mind in specialties is the
only path that leads to higher attainment.”
Though Congressman Low may have been out-voted, in the minds of many
officers his arguments were compelling. Apparently, most professional naval
officers who opposed the bill were never persuaded of the wisdom of
amalgamation. Rather, 'line' officers and engineers supported the bill only
because it was politically expedient. In return for naval officers' and
naval engineers' support of amalgamation, the politicians promised to
ameliorate the unrelated but urgent problem of slow promotions.
The new law blurred the distinction between officers who would command and
those with specialized technical knowledge who had not previously aspired to
command as a matter of course. This change in personnel law shifted the
identity of the 'line' strongly in the direction of those skills and
qualities defined by machines and machine systems.
Figure 8: The Amalgamation (or Merger) of the "Line"
and "Engineers"
Not long after passage of the bill, however, Secretary Long had second
thoughts, and he reconsidered the wisdom of the amalgamation that he,
Roosevelt, and Hollis had pushed upon the Navy. He sounded a cautionary
note. He expressed doubts about the permanence of the merger as a solution
to technological and social change that might soon confront the officer
corps. Long explained that the merger was a decision made for a specific
context, in a specific time. The personnel law was, he wrote, "…framed to
meet special conditions, and so long as those conditions exist it will
produce the results intended; but when they (conditions) change, it will
require revision.”
Secretary Long was thus unsettled about his decision for merger.
Long’s
anxiety sprang from perhaps his intuition that certain major conditions,
those upon which the decision for merger had been made, were about to
change. In particular, the gulf separating engineering knowledge and that
of operations was about to widen considerably. The ability to bridge the
gulf between engineering and operations, already strained in 1899, would
become increasingly problematic as the two fields diverged even more
greatly. At the turn of the century, unbeknownst to many naval and
political leaders alike and recognizable now only with historical
perspective, there was beginning to emerge a new type of engineer, the
scientific engineer, and one who would require increasingly advanced and
scientific education.
The engineering profession in this period was increasingly at odds with
itself: the old engineering practitioners were threatened by the new, more
scientific engineers, and each group struggled to define a new system of
selection, training, and socialization of future engineers.
The Navy leadership had made a profound policy decision to merge two
specialties at the very moment engineering was itself in a state of
professional confusion about what it would mean to be an ‘engineer’ in the
future.
*
Operations vs Engineering: Dueling Educational Institutions,
1900 to 1916
Some
historians have argued that with the Act of 1899 the 'line' officers no
longer needed to fear the engineers, since with the merger the 'foe' was
vanquished.
But in fact, the professional transformation was incomplete. The 'threat'
of the engineers now took a different form: the engineers through education,
assignment and promotion threatened almost like a Trojan Horse to capture
the ‘line’ profession from within, and to shift it downward and to the left,
into the "technical specialist quadrant" (Figure 5, Figure 9). The
architect of the merger plan, Hollis, who would later become the president
of a polytechnic, predicted as much when he wrote: "The line officers fear
that the engineers wish to command the ships. Let the commanding officers
become engineers, and let the engineers rule our ships, then all fears will
be dispelled, and the Navy will quickly become a unit."
The period from 1900 to 1916 was one of experimentation, uncertainty, and
turmoil for the officer corps, a turmoil that was shared by other modern
navies grappling with similar issues, though the US Navy was almost alone in
its adoption of a strategy of merger.
Secretary Long retired and Roosevelt moved on to the White House, leaving
to naval officers the details of the historic merger.
Educational changes at Annapolis came first on the reform agenda: merger of
the engineering and ‘line’ curriculum. In the years preceding amalgamation,
the share of the curriculum devoted to engineering and sciences had
gradually increased. In 1889 Commander Sampson, the Superintendent and a
one-time physics professor, established a system of engineering
specialization at the academy that allowed midshipman in their fourth year
the choice to specialize in either the ‘line’ or in the engineering corps.
With the Personnel Act of 1899 this choice was made moot as the ‘line’ and
the engineers were now, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, merged into
one. Accordingly, the curriculum was adjusted to include engineering course
work for all midshipmen.
The result was that very quickly the entire student body pursued a course
of study that was now two specialties merged together: that of the
traditional ‘line’ (focused on operations, to include foreign language,
history, geography, seamanship, navigation) and that carried over from the
engineering corps’ curriculum, heavily technical, populated with a majority
of specialized courses that prior to amalgamation the ‘line’ had most
severely criticized.
At a rudimentary level of knowledge, however,
merger
appeared to work at Annapolis and the curriculum achieved a rough balanced
between the two former specialties. While educational adjustments at
Annapolis were effected with relative ease, what happened to officer
education and assignments after he left Annapolis remained highly
contested..
The former engineer specialists of the old engineering corps soon came to
the conclusion that the merged curriculum at Annapolis was inadequate to the
needs of modern and rapidly advancing engineering. To their mind, it was an
impossible task for a midshipman to learn both the fundamentals of the
‘line’ and to keep pace with the engineering body of knowledge. Melville
had from the outset appreciated the dangers of amalgamation and actually
thought it best to have kept the engineering corps separate. But as CDR Ed
Beach in 1902 explained to interested naval officers, Melville and other
officers supported amalgamation as the least worst outcome: it may have
confused the identity of the profession, but at least it provided faster
promotion for his officers.
But Melville was never quite convinced of the wisdom of the merger, nor was
he convinced it would prove permanent. After 1899, Melville implemented
educational measures to compensate for the reduced education program of
engineers. He established a graduate school at Annapolis that he hoped
would promote a greater appreciation of engineering by the line, and, with
regard to amalgamation, “…might have a very important effect in making the
experiment
a success.”
The
'line' did not initially welcome Melville’s engineering educational
initiatives. Graduate school policy became a scene of battle between
differing conceptions over the identity of the line officer. The
traditional ‘line’ officers attempted to limit educational programs in order
to exercise more control over the engineers while the technical bureaus saw
this additional education as essential to the continued efficiency of the
Navy.
But even as the 'line' attempted to control the former engineers, the navy
leaders began to concede that advances in the engineering profession might
indeed require some naval officers to receive an advanced technical
education. The Secretary of the Navy’s report of 1900 observed: “It is not
certain, however, that they (the machinists) can fully take the place of the
highly trained technical engineer, upon whom must fall the duty of
designing, superintending, construction, instructing in engineering
branches, as well as supervising the motive power of our great ships. The
officers of this higher type should, in addition to practical knowledge, be
possessed of that thorough theoretical training in steam engineering which
comes from full academic education. The act has not yet been long enough in
operation to warrant the Department in a more extended statement as it its
effect.”
Within a few years of amalgamation the older “line” officers became more
appreciative of the value of graduate education and in fact came to the aid
of the technical bureaus when Admiral of the Fleet Dewey, senior member of
the newly constituted General Board, attempted to terminate naval graduate
education in the first decade of the twentieth century.
But the old 'line' officers hoped the increased engineering education would
be counter-balanced by broader, operational education perhaps gained at the
Naval War College. But their hopes were not realized.
Despite their temporary alliance against Dewey, the line and engineers
continued to compete over their respective share of officer education. To
be sure, machines were becoming more complex, but so too were naval
operations. As a consequence of the Spanish-American War, the Navy had
assumed new responsibilities across the globe, to include Asia and the
Caribbean. The rivalry between the operational ‘line’ and the technical
engineers played out in competing educational institutions: the Naval War
College devoted to integrated operations and strategy, and the engineering
post-graduate school focused on more technical subjects. Given the general
reluctance of officers to pursue advanced education of any type, the
competition for students was acute. The Naval War College remained
undersubscribed throughout this period, but in the year after the graduate
school was established, the shortfalls in students at Newport were
especially evident: in 1910 the War College received no voluntary
applicants while almost 200 line officers competed to attend the new marine
engineering program at the graduate school.
The naval officer corps, through the voluntary education choices of its
officers, was slipping into the technical quadrant. (See Figure 9).
Figure 9: Educational Choices by Officers Pushes
Officer Corps into the "Technical Specialist" Quadrant
The popularity of the ‘material’ schools of engineering caused a growing
unease on the part of those officers convinced the mastery of integrated
fleet operations was the highest calling for an officer.
Retired Rear Admiral Stephen Luce, a founder of the war college, bitterly
complained that the 'line' was unable, if not unwilling, to see the need for
general (integrative) operational education:
"The point I wish to make is the lack of perception
by the naval profession of the proper relations between the several parts of
our system of naval education. Our line officers seem to suffer from a
species of 'mental astigmatism" or the inability of the will to focus the
mental rays effectively upon the subject of naval education. The rays of
the mind are foreshortened, or they are unequal or they are divergent. This
is not uncommon with individual students. But it is very rare when the
great majority of the members of a profession are so afflicted. Our
officers fail to regard the navy as a unit, with several interdependent
parts, just as the human body may be considered a unit made up of
interdependent parts. The specialist can diagnose his own particular part
only, irrespective of all other parts and without regard to the whole. But
he only is master of his profession who can diagnose the entire body and
discern the relations between the several parts and the influence on each
upon the whole."
What Luce was
lamenting was the slide of the naval officer model into the 'technical
specialist' quadrant. He feared that without the matriculation of a
significant number of officers at integrative operational educational
institutions-- like the Naval War College-- the ability of the naval
profession to command and control fleets on a global scale would suffer.
Competing
visions on the part of the U.S. Navy's personnel managers would continue to
push and pull the Navy's HR strategy through the four quadrants for the next
100 years, and in the process remake the successive generations of leaders.
While it is beyond the scope of this essay to catalogue these changes, each
period of change and shift in Navy officer models up to the present can be
illustrated by the Quad model. It is believed that a tool that can help
track U.S. Navy HR strategy changes may prove helpful for other HR managers
in large, technically complex organizations both in government and
industry. end
To
get the entire model and article, write to
hagerott@usna.edu or
click here.
Modern
Concept of Heroism:
Duke
University Alumni Magazine
... The Odyssey celebrate the warrior values of
glory-seeking ... the first to have military
sounds with trumpets and ... became an emblem of brotherhood. It
is the music ...
www.adm.duke.edu/alumni/dm14/hero.html - 32k - Cached
- Similar
pages
War:
The Evolution of War:
www.pe.utexas.edu/Dept/Academic/Courses/SP2001/TC357/chapters/
warev.htm - 44k - Cached
- Similar
pages Warfare has “built up and destroyed
nations, has molded and obliterated cultures, has overrun industry,
commerce, agriculture, learning and art; and ... taking advantage of the
scientific achievements of an uncontrolled civilizations, presents our kind
with the greatest menace that has confronted it since our ancestors came down
from the trees” (Coblentz 9). Since the beginning of civilization, war has
left its mark on humanity; it affects every aspect of human culture and life. (to
continue, click
here
)
The Roots of Terrorism:
www.oneworld.org/ni/issue161/keynote.htm
- 23k GAVRILO Princip’s act of terror changed
the world. On a sunny June morning in 1914 the young Serbian nationalist waited
nervously on a Sarajevo street corner for the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire to pass. When the Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s open carriage rounded
the corner Princip quickly removed a revolver from his coat pocket. He steadied
his shaking hand, raised the gun and fired. The shot plunged Europe into World
War One. The Hapsburg government in Vienna was outraged at what they called an
act of Serbian terrorism and swore to destroy the source of this affront to the
Empire. The rest, as they say, is history.
(to continue, click
here)
Combat Stories:
The Longest Two Years:
The story of an airman, Airman Hirschi, from his first day in the Army Air
Corps to his eventual return to the United States after a harrowing two years
over Germany, in the camps, and on the run. To read the story, click
here.
General Military Interest:
The War on Military Culture - The
Weekly Standard http://www.jameswebb.com/interview/milculture.htm
Modern American Culture and the
Meaning of Memory and Memorial Day.. (click
here)..
Fathers, Sons, and Brothers:
Family Articles/Stories (I/P)