Red Teaming

Red Teaming:  How Your Business Can Conquer The Competition by Challenging Everything, by Bryce G. Hoffman, Crown Business 2017

Don't you just hate this phrase:  Change is hard...  ?  Isn't it just the silliest, the most trite, the most whiney statement a corporate slug could utter?

But Bryce G. Hoffman, author of American Icon:  Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company, as well as a Forbes regular, says change of the type that recognizes the strategic value of change treated as an Olympic style corporate skill, is what companies need to master right now.  We're not talking about a change from SAP to a smaller system, or the ridiculous culture changes many companies impose on workers as they attempt shop floor remakes, we're talking about change as an athletic skill that allows leaders to anticipate and react to stealth changes.  We're thinking about the kind of change two of my clients encountered on the early morning news when they discovered that their companies were in play, on the verge of acquisition - does a number on one's retirement plans, doesn't it?

So what Hoffman gives us as a gold medalist approach to real change skill sets is this book called Red Teaming.  It's a great read, best done quickly with an eye to the next chapter.  Read it as if your corporate life and stock price depended on it. 

For example, if we were to compare web retail strategies ten years back among the major competitors, let's pick Amazon, Walmart and Macy's for fun, what could we have concluded were the most likely change factors that we needed to watch and strategize for?  Would we have picked out Amazon's move beyond a local bookstore to a web-based product mover that engendered generations of loyalty around its new offerings and forays into entertainment?  Or would we have stuck with Walmart's scale and proliferating beat-all-prices strategy, believing that would be enough?  What slivers of movement around Macy's shopping center branding could we have detected that spelled out their attempts at web presence?  Fast forward ten years and it's easy to see where Bezos was taking us.

And that's where Red Teaming offers business leaders a new strategic methodology, more responsive and data driven, to counter competitor and product changes as they are developed. In 2015 Hoffman became the first civilian to graduate from the U.S. Army's red team leaders course, an elite program at Ft. Leavenworth for senior military officers that is recognized as the gold standard for red team training around the world.  There, Hoffman was a witness to how the US military and intelligence sectors developed the tools to drive red teaming, techniques grounded on cognitive psychology and decision making.  It's an exciting and rigorous response to corporate death by planning.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com 

978 526-7348 cell 978 578-5200