The Pursuit of Scrappiness #10 - David Holahan (ex-US Marine) on applying combat experience in Iraq to business, 6 leadership principles & making 500 decisions a day under stress
David is a retired US Marine Lt. Col. with real combat experience in Somalia and Iraq, where he commanded a unit of 1 200 soldiers. He then served as the Defence Attache to Latvia in Riga. Since retiring from the military David has been applying the lessons he shares in this episode to both secure millions of USD in contracts for the businesses he worked for as well as to teach leadership both in Europe and the US.
It turns out there are more parallels in business and military than you may think. In this engaging episode, David shares the learnings from his military career that will help you in your day-to-day combat with deadlines, KPIs, and competitors.
By listening to this episode you will learn:
- To get enough sleep, otherwise, you’ll make bad decisions
- That stress for a person in a business can be as high or even higher than for a soldier, so needs to be addressed and managed to ensure performance
- To make a plan based on carefully considered assumptions, execute the plan, measure performance metrics and reiterate the plan
- To be serious about being good at your job - prepare, make notes and use them as cheat sheets in real business situations
- David’s 6 leadership principles
- The importance of clarity in communication. Especially in remote work times if needed, make the other person repeat what you said to ensure no miscommunication
- To set expectations on performance from the start and regularly articulate those expectations to achieve better performance from your team
- To never tolerate lies
- To invest your time and effort in creating a team identity
- Centralized planning and decentralized execution. Make sure your team knows what exactly needs to be done, and empower them to take care of how to do it
- To reward initiative and accept failure instead of celebrating failure
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from NexPay > https://paynexpay.com/