Personal Relationships as a Business Driver when Assets are Minimal

Another lesson from Afghanistan… Go back to the 1980s and the locals will tell you how they ran the Russians out of Asmar, Afghanistan despite the Soviets having a large garrison, fighting positions in the mountains, tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, etc. To put it mildly, the U.S. and ANA forces were spread so thin in 2008 that we didn’t have many of those things or have them accesible in a timely manner. It occured to me very early that we couldn’t shoot our way out of this environment. If we didn’t have the traditional assets that make militaries successful then we would have to use tactics that would allow usto increase security through personal relationships.

Lots drinking chai and talking was more important than guns in many ways

We spent nine months with this aim: Get the ANA trained up enough to run protect their area on their own, support the local governance, employ locals to build, cook, and clean around the camp, and meet and treat people well. The whole idea was to create security by improving lives. My thought was that people don’t want to mess a good thing up when they have it. We engaged the locals, employed those that we could, sought advice, stayed humble, and treated the mission like a marathon.

Did this mean that we had a peaceful walk in the park for nine months? Hell no. We were shooting it up whenever we needed to… but the gambit for success was not violent in nature. I believed that people are peaceful when they have something to lose. Personal relationships can open up a world of assets and multipliers that aren’t obvious at first. I believed that success was not based on the outcome of firefights but instead by the reduction in their frequency. We weren’t successful because of what we did but in what we allowed the locals to do.

Traditional business is the same way. If assets only mattered, market leaders would never cede their control of the markets. Personal relationships and asymetrical thinking can upset a better-supported company/brand if the following things are true:

1. People are empowered to make decisions at their levels.
2. The KPIs can’t be traditional in nature. Focusing on improvements in brand satisfaction will be a lot more important when operating on a tight budget.
3. Treat everything like a neverending 12-round fight because you will lose rounds but it is okay if those rounds are supporting a successful long-term strategy.
4. View networking as an access point to either gain more information or more assets. Good networking goes both ways.
5. You will never win by playing the same game that made the other company successful. You have to disrupt the game in a way that is advantageous to you.

Bottom line, when you are low on assets, build on personal relationships; this will open up new assets and new ideas. The roots of human relationships and ideas run very wide and deep. Settle in for the long-haul and don’t give in to the idea of challenging the competition head-on. It workd for me in Afghanistan and I am going to make it work for me in the business world as well.