The man tested his balance, stepping gingerly forward on the beam, retreating when the wood started to wobble and shift. Once he had found equilibrium, he shouted back to his squadmates on the other side.
“Knot up the rope and toss it over. We’ll haul this beam across, get our people to the other shore, then come back and get you. Just make sure you have enough slack. We can’t let it fall in the water.”
The teammate on the other side hesitated, weighing the bundle of rope in his hand before reaching back and heaving it over the current. The others, balanced precariously on a log in the middle of the river, caught the rope and began hauling up the beam that they had crossed over. It wasn’t much: 16 feet long, perhaps four inches by four inches thick—slim enough that it shuddered when a full grown man put his weight on it.
With the rope knotted around the far end of the beam, the group in the middle of the river hoisted until the slender piece of wood stood vertically in the middle of their small rocky outcropping, a minute island in an unstable sea. Now they just had to get it to the other shore.
These men and women were on patrol in foreign territory. Their home base lay some 80 miles to the northwest, at the Fuqua School of Business. The mission, Operation Blue Devil, brought 23 MBA students through a truncated version of the recruitment process for the Army Special Forces to expand their business leadership and teamwork skills. The Blue Devils had forged an alliance with the Green Berets.
Within the next few years, the Fuqua students will likely head to jobs as corporate strategists and consultants, but for two days they were potential recruits undergoing the U.S. Army Special Forces Selection and Assessment procedure. They camped out in the barracks at the Special Forces center at Camp Mackall, a swath of soaring pines and sandy plains in North Carolina’s Sandhills region. The camp houses the “schoolhouse” for the Green Berets—one of the nation’s elite unconventional forces. They specialize in entering an environment and working with the indigenous population to achieve a strategic mission. Somewhere among these Carolina pines were full-sized Afghan villages populated by foreign role players, where the Special Forces practice missions before heading overseas.
Businesses and the military have changed their strategies drastically to adjust to the increasingly globalized and digital age. Although businesses focus on disruptive technologies and new markets, the military must face an ambiguous enemy in a global war on terror. The textbook cases no longer apply.
“If you were going to be an Army Ranger, there’s a Ranger handbook,” said Maj. Brian Decker, the commander of Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection. “There is no Special Forces handbook. I exceeded everything I ever learned in the qualification course 10 minutes into combat, minus the ability to think.”
Decker oversees the 19-day selection process that whittles down 3,500 recruits from within the military to 1,200 new members of the Special Forces. His philosophy is that “the best predictor of future behavior is current behavior in a simulated environment.” The training regimen that he helped develop and now oversees creates a simulation of the complex and changing environments that Special Forces operate in while on deployment.
“You immediately are in uncharted territory,” Decker said. “That’s the reason why we put so much emphasis on adaptability: Do you see the utility of your training beyond what it was designed for? Linear thinking is not something that we value.”
Class at Camp Mackall
The day began for the new recruits at 7:30 with breakfast and running. They then spent most of the day conducting exercises on the edge of a vast airstrip, whipped by high winds that kept the temperature cold and might have made things difficult for the paratroopers practicing their craft further down the field. In one exercise, two teams of about a dozen each constructed a vehicle out of available materials to carry a heavy water-filled barrel. Then, they set off on a physical challenge, dragging human-sized sandbags out and back across a stretch of field. The real special forces candidates use sandbags weighing 400 pounds, but the loads today were somewhat reduced.
Later, the MBA students approached one of their most team-oriented challenges: crossing a river together without falling in.
With the bridge-pole standing vertically on the precarious rocky outcropping, and most of the squad members balanced along a log atop the rock, the men in the middle began lowering the beam to the other side of the river. The environment ruled out the possibility of trial and error: any slip-up in the beam’s descent could send it spinning out of control and out of reach.
The stronger members at the center braced the base of the lowering beam as the few men remaining on the near side of the river slowly played out the rope.
“Give us some, slack, more, more—hold it!”
The beam hovered over the stream at a 50 degree angle, swaying laterally. The men at the base adjusted themselves, repositioning their feet on the scant available surface.
“OK, drop it down.”
The beam connected with the ground on the far side, landing with the sort of “thwack” that foretells good things to come. The squad members on the island began to move.
One slim woman shuttled across, barely swaying the beam as she stepped with the poise of a dancer. The rest followed, easing themselves off the slab of wood on the outcropping, pausing when the wood threatened to tip and tumble.
Then there were two men left in the middle, and two men waiting on the original shore until there was space in the middle. All that remained was to bring the beam back and do the whole thing over again.
The duo that remained on the outcropping hoisted the beam back from the shore where most of the squad now stood waiting beneath the airy canopy of pines. The men tugged and heaved until the 16-foot beam was standing vertically with them. They bent their knees and hefted it a little forward to set a fulcrum.
“You got the weight OK?”
“Yeah we can handle it. It’s just a straight shot back to you.”
“All right, send it over.”
The men angled the beam back to the remnants of the team, letting it fall in a controlled slide into the home stretch. One inch, two inches, then faster toward the spit of land on that side of the river until a quirk of gravity or wind sent the beam veering off to the left and into the water. The teammates in the middle of the river lurched forward to stop its errant fall, but were so close to the fulcrum that they could not stop its momentum. Instead, they unbalanced the platform they were standing on and pitched forward into the depths of the river.
These depths were not so deep, though—in fact, the men weren’t even wet. The river was made of woodchips. The Special Forces officers standing by the side chuckled a bit at the sudden demise of this attempt as the MBA students groaned and moved to help their teammates to their feet. Touching the ground meant starting the exercise over again.
“That’s enough for now, let’s move on to the next exercise!” one officer shouted. This environment had proven itself suitably dynamic to thwart these future business leaders. But there would be more time for reflection on the bus ride home. Now it was time to see if their teamwork could spring them free from a POW camp.
Mind Matters
Green Berets might encounter adaptable situations when trying to secure a border town where multiple tribes compete for control with the vestiges of a national government. Second-year MBA student Bee-Lian Quah, who has signed an offer to work in corporate strategy for IBM, had never participated in military activities before, but found them applicable to her leadership in business. The emphasis on communication in tight-knit squad based operations crosses over to consulting, where one’s influence comes not from rank, but from persuasiveness. She also noted that in the business context, leaders selling a new product have to react with prudence to the appearance of rival products or new regulatory schemes, which can throw an initial business plan into chaos.
“What [the Special Forces] look for in selecting these adaptable leaders will be what’s most important as we become leaders in business,” Quah said. “You are still in ambiguous situations where you need to be adaptable and aware of your situation.”
The tasks at Camp Mackall challenged the participants physically, intellectually and psychologically. For all the pop-culture depictions of the Army as a culture of physical prowess and sheer strength, the Special Forces see the physicality as just one part of the puzzle.
The average soldier selected for Special Forces has an IQ of 118, putting him around the 80th percentile of Americans, Decker said. The intellectual tests correlate highly with success in other areas, such as the map and compass navigation task. Special Forces also must master a language and understand the culture of the region to which they are assigned.
In Decker’s words, this requires “an interdisciplinary approach,” much like the approach that Duke takes for educating its students.
“Special Forces is different from a lot of the stuff you see on TV,” Decker said. “It’s less about the shooting... than it is about working with indigenous forces around the world. It’s your ability to influence and navigate that human terrain and get people to work and to do things on your behalf.”
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