The Greatest Risk Isn't Failure. It's Standing Still.​

0:00I would argue that artificial intelligence and data are national power. We need to treat them like a domain. So air, sea, land, space, cyber, information are all instruments of national power in terms of a domain. So we've got to treat AI and data the exact same way. I don't think you normally go up to someone that works in this film and you say, hey, did you know that your role is actually one that results in national power and national security? And I think they kind of turn their head a little bit and go, well, I've never thought of it that way. Well, we need to. We need to as a nation. The story of enterprise AI adoption is increasingly a story about organizational pressure and not technological maturity.

0:40The tools exist. In many cases, the data exists. And increasingly, the capital exists. And yet McKinsey's latest state of AI research shows that only 6 % of organizations are realizing meaningful enterprise-wide financial impact from AI. And only about one in five have fundamentally redesigned workflows to accommodate it. That gap between possessing the technology and organizing people to create value from it is a leadership gap. And on today's episode, we're talking to retired United States Air Force four-star General Mike Minahan, who understands intimately what it means to confront that gap when the stakes are considerably higher.

1:16When General Minahan took command of Air Mobility Command, he assumed responsibility for nearly 110 ,000 people that made it their mission to move troops and supplies, refuel aircraft in flight, and bring wounded service members home from battle. But his challenge was not just to keep that massive operation running. It was to prepare it for a future that had not yet arrived, and to push an enormous institution beyond the processes, assumptions, and risk aversion that could prevent it from being ready when that future did. As you'll hear, General Minahan describes the work of leading that kind of change through four words, will, wither, weather, and when.

1:54Will the change into existence, wither the resistance that rises against it, weather the criticism that follows, and eventually, when? Those lessons apply directly to enterprise AI, Because transformation only works when leaders redesign how work gets done, establish clear priorities, and give people permission to challenge the status quo, and personally own the risk they ask their teams to take. So settle in. This is going to be a great episode. This is the AI Proving Ground podcast from Worldwide Technology. Let's jump in.

2:30Well, General Minahan, thank you so much for making the time today and joining us here in studio. How are you? I'm doing well. It's a pleasure to be here. I apologize for it taking so long. We had tried to do this last year. It's an honor. I've had multiple interactions with worldwide technology, and I just think it's a treat personally and professionally. So thanks. It's an honor to have you here. I do want to ground our conversation today in the Mobility Manifesto, which you authored a few years ago, September 2022. Very inspiring document and lessons that extend far beyond the airfield, at least as I read and digested it.

3:05Just to set the table, take me back to that time. Why did you write it? What were you thinking? And what did you want to get out of it? Yeah, sure. A couple of contextual points here to start out. The first would be in late 2021, I took command of Air Mobility Command. Air Mobility Command is about 110 ,000 people, just shy. Total force, guard, active duty reserve. It has about 1 ,100 airplanes, so it's just an enormous flying op. It's the largest flying op in the world. And it does the missions. It's like the offensive line for America. I love quarterbacks. I love running backs. I love wide receivers, but I love the O-line more.

3:42I love the O-line more. I say that because it's true. My son played O-line in college, but it's also a great analogy for this. So we do all of the airlift, so all the cargo and passengers. We do the air refueling, so the flying gas tank. We do the flying hospital, the air medical evacuation. And we do all the things on the ground to make the magic in the air happen. So you've seen us in action during the withdrawal from Kabul and the Afghanistan retrograde. You saw us in action running equipment and guns to Ukraine after Russia invaded Ukraine. You saw us in action. We did a big exercise in the Pacific called Mobility Guardian.

4:22You saw us in action supporting Israel after Hamas did what it did. You saw us airdrop in Gaza, humanitarian supplies to people that were starving, the retrograde out of Niger. So I'm painting a picture here as there's pretty high ops tempo. That was just three years, and there's much more than just that. And then the exquisite support that it It supplies the joint force for operations in Iran twice now and certainly the Venezuela ops. So we enable everybody else's success. We're the most relied upon force in the history of warfare. We project America's power and America's hope. So that's Air Mobility Command.

4:57I don't say any of those things from a position of arrogance. Just I say that from a position of we're the enabling force and we want everybody else to be successful. Context number one. And context number two is there's actually another manifesto called Beyond the Manifesto. And truth be told, I'm writing the third, which I'm going to call a mobility manifesto unplugged because unplugged is I'm out of uniform and I've seen some different perspectives now, but also there's a need to build on those first two. So one of the best things a leader can do is set a very aspirational vision, detest the status quo and always strive for what's better.

5:37There's lots of ways to do that. I gave you those series of operations that played out over three years of my command. And that manifesto came out very early. I did a presentation in front of the Air Force, Air and Space Force Association, also called the Mobility Manifesto. I didn't get in trouble for it right after I did it, but after my order leaked, if you're aware of that incident, I had an order that leaked. And then they went back and watched the tapes of that presentation, and I got in trouble for it. I got retro troubled. But the point is, is that we have got to ensure that the force is ready to do the missions that are tasked, okay?

6:13The biggest responsibility commander has is to put a team on the field that's ready to win, okay? It's not just compete. We have to put a team on the field that's going to dominate, okay? So we owe it to our elected officials. We owe it to our president. We owe it to the joint force. We owe it to our airmen. We owe it to the joint team, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. We owe it to all their loved ones to be exceptionally ready. And hopefully we're so ready that there's no adversary that would want to take us on. But should they decide to take us on, we're so ready that we just decisively defeat and we make short work of it.

6:52So that manifesto is getting after that. And so did the order that I wrote that got leaked in early 23. It was about a commander setting a vision for aggressive improvement and readiness, ensuring that they knew that I wanted them to take risks, ensuring that they understood what my priorities were, ensuring that they understood what their role was in the grand scheme of military power, and then most importantly, giving them the responsibility, giving them the authority as much as I could to move out on their own and aggressively. And so that's where that mobility manifesto was born from. Yeah.

7:31And not to downplay any of the stuff that you're talking about with that three years of just absolute constant attention to what's going on around the world, I'm going to walk a fine line here and try to parallel this with business transformation, with AI transformation. A lot of the principles that you mentioned within the manifesto or that you just mentioned now, those are applicable in a business setting. Yep. Yep. Yeah, but it's like you listened to the last session I had with the worldwide technology veterans, right? The applicability of the principles in the military is completely congruent with all sectors of America.

8:08In fact, I would argue that artificial intelligence and data are national power. We need to treat them like a domain. So air, sea, land, space, cyber, information are all instruments of national power in terms of a domain. So we've got to treat AI and data the exact same way. So the same aspirations, the same leadership principles, the same priorities, the same risk-taking that apply to things of national security and national power also apply in this domain. I think we have some work to do there. I don't think you normally go up to someone that works in this film and you say, hey, did you know that your role is actually one that results in national power and national security?

8:54And I think they'd kind of turn their head a little bit and go, well, I've never thought of it that way. Well, we need to. We need to as a nation. Yeah. The manifesto certainly had a lot of urgency to it, a lot of calls to action to test the status quo. Right. Right. How do you lead through that period of time to push for urgency, but also not make sure that things kind of go off the rails and there's not just chaos and people trying to maneuver to meet that vision? Right. Well, the number one rule of leadership is you have to be present to win. So you can't just, you know, give an edict and walk away from it and just kind of hope it turns out okay.

9:29Okay. So this presence really matters. And so presence is not just that I'm sitting at the head of the table and I'm doing updates and taking briefings and something like that, but you're a participant in the operation. You're a participant in the vision. You're a participant in the creation. You're a participant in the discussions that talk about risk and opportunity. So here's a pretty good thing. The number one operational decision I've made as an operational commander at the four-star level is, do I commit a force or do I preserve a force? And I think this is universal. I also think it's timeless.

10:09When you think about what Spruance and Nimitz and the team did, Battle of Midway, when you think about great military battles, you think about, hey, do I commit my force to this course of action or do I preserve it and wait for an opportunity that might be greater. I mean, that's really the essence of what operational commanders to do. So I think that anything that helps us get clarity on that opportunity and risk is 100 % essential. The commander never walks away from the obligation to express priority and express the amount of risk that we're willing to take. So if you look at the manifesto, and especially if you combine it with the order that I had that leaked in early 23, where it says, if you are comfortable in your training, then you're not taking enough risk.

10:56And then it said, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but I'm not interested in spilling blood or scraping paint. Okay. That's an airplane analogy. I don't want to spill blood. I don't want to hurt, maim, or injure anybody seriously. And I don't want to scrape paint, which means I don't want to damage an airplane. But up to that, go for it. Go for it. And there might be a time where I want you to take the risk that is associated with more severe loss. But for now, where we're at, this is what I want you to do. And then most importantly, the most important thing is I've got your back if it goes wrong.

11:28I mean, we cannot punish people for asking them to do exactly what you wanted them to do. So don't say China, China, China, and then recoil when we start handling China, China, China. Don't say accelerate change or lose, and then all of a sudden recoil when people actually are accelerating, changing, and going after the things that actually give us victory. So you have to back up the team that's getting it done and not act surprised when they're actually going for it, and then not be disappointed when they fail. Turn that failure into moving forward. Yeah, and you talk about expressing, you know, from leadership top down, expressing expectations, vision, support.

12:06That was all a tone that was picked up in the manifesto as well, and I got the sense that it was a very purposeful tone you took. It was not, it was very much not like strategy document. It was aggressive at times. It was bold. Is that the type of tone that you think leaders need to take within the business setting when you're taking on a transformation as big as something like AI or the risk it involves and things like that? Yeah. We talked about this in the last session too, and I think it's a good one. I have this thing called the four Ws, right? When you're expressing change, you've got to will things into existence as a leader.

12:38You got to just will it into existence. You got to wither the internal resistance that comes from within you individually and from within the organization, you've got to weather the personal and professional attacks. And if you can do all those three Ws, then you can win. So, you know, there is an, you know, there's, you know, today's day and age with social media can bring on some scrutiny that you're not used to. It's not easy to wake up and see your name in the Drudge Report or NBC News and other things. But those are the type of things that you have to endure if you're going to do big change.

13:11Go back to the big changes in the United States of America and think about the leaders that ensured those things. Think about what a Abraham Lincoln does. Think about what an Eisenhower does. Think about what a Reagan does. Think about what a Martin Luther King does. Think about what a Benjamin Franklin does. And if you really go back to those people, it's a power of personality to see things through, to endure everything else I talked about, will things into existence, with or whether, and if you can do all that, you can win. And so this personality actually plays into this whole leadership thing.

13:47It doesn't mean that we do things when it's easy. It doesn't mean that we only do things when it's popular. It doesn't mean that we only do things when we're properly resourced, properly manned, have enough time. I mean, we all live in an environment that's got a lot of challenges. I've never been in a unit once in my entire career that had enough money, enough airmen, or enough time. And so it's not an eloquent way to say, suck it up, buttercup. It's your turn to go through this thing. But we get paid to overcome those obstacles. I don't think there's a country better on the planet than the United States of America.

14:20I think our innovative spirit, our audacity matters. I think we need more audacity. And then the last thing I'll end here is we need less safe play. You know, I call it a safe play. I don't like the safe play. The safe play generally ensures that you don't do a lot of harm. You don't do a lot of good, but you just kind of do all right. But we let down our mission and we let down our personnel when we do that. You know, we've got to put mission and personnel before a career and actually drive hard to get to that aspirational place, not in a reckless way. Yeah. Not with recklessness. No, those are fantastic points.

15:00I'm going to put a pin in that because I want to revisit that in a moment. But one of the key tenets of the manifesto was airmen are the magic. Airmen are the magic. People are the heart. When you're leading through a transformation, I think a lot of businesses can say this is people first. We're putting our people first. What does people first or what does people-led transformation look like from a leadership? Yeah, there's been a debate. I've heard this whenever you go to a professional military education or get into a philosophical to say, hey, what's more important, mission or people? And I've discovered it's the same thing.

15:32Mission and people are the same thing. So I'm not interested in a discussion on what's first. I mean, the reality is if I've got to instruct people on what's more important, mission or people, then I've probably got to find someone else to get after the job here. You can't do the mission without the people. and then certainly the people without a mission are not aligned for unity of effort. So I can describe what works for me. You're going to have to pull me back before you have to push me in on getting things done. I'm going to maximize the authorities given to me, and I'm going to drive for that aspirational place.

16:09It's one of the things about, I chuckle a little bit about my Air Force career, but if you didn't like me at year 31, then you weren't paying attention for years one through 30, right? All of those experiences built towards what I considered to be a task given to me by my leadership, combined with the experiences that I had, combined with my internal desire to take the mission to the next level. So this aspirational push your limits, sit in front of the head of the table, express your priority. And it's important that you do that as a leader. Express priority. Have you ever worked for someone that everything was number one priority?

16:52No, sir. You've never have? Well, they're just as hard to work for as someone that expresses no priority. The results are the same on both ends, right? If you have no priority, it's chaos underneath. If you have everything's number one priority, you have chaos underneath. So this ruthless prioritization of what's important, the ruthless paying attention to how you adjust those priorities based on what's going on. I talked about we never have enough time. Well, varsity teams do it all together. Last cheesy analogy for just this phrase. I love them. Keep them coming. Last cheesy analogy is nobody pays to see a juggler juggle bowling pins.

17:28Who cares? Man, I want to see the bowling pin, the running chainsaw, the crying baby, and the flaming towards. Juggle that. That's real life. Yeah. Okay. That's real life. So show me that you can multitask across different priorities. Show me that you can understand the difference between unrelated data points in a trend and when you need to adjust priorities and show me that you can motivate your people to get along board on that. In the early stages of my quote unquote manifesto, I had people follow me back to my office and say, Hey boss, I'm trying to save you from yourself. I'm trying to save you from yourself.

18:03I'm like, okay, time to find you a new job. I mean, there's plenty of leaders to pick from. You're talking about now, so all that, have a focus, have a priority, that's making a strategy from a leader clear, the vision clear. But then you also said strategy is not enough. Strategy is not enough. bias toward action, which I love that phrase. Tell me what you think bias toward action means, not only from how you phrased it in the manifesto, but what that should mean in an everyday business landscape. Yeah. Okay. So let me tee that up, but then remind me on bias towards action again. Let me tee it up with this.

18:44When I came into Air Mobility Command, I read the old commander strategy. It was fantastic. In fact, it was so fantastic that when I read it, I said, I'm not going to do a new one. I'm just going to get after, you know, my vision here. And what I discovered about, I took over in October, I discovered during the Christmas break, I kind of came, I kind of went, man, you know, I don't have the grip and the traction that I want here, despite the presence, despite the expression. And so we did an offsite. And I said, leading up to the offsite, you guys probably do offsites here. I know you do. Plenty of them.

19:20Is I said, assess where we are on the old strategy.

19:28And they're like, okay, we'll get that done next week. That week goes by, hey, we need another week. And then that week goes by and it's, hey, we need another week. And I know the answer now. I go, they don't know where they are on the strategy. We as a command don't know where we are on the strategy. So at the offsite, as best we could, we had some sort of assessment of where we were on that old strategy. But more importantly, and this is my mistake, right? I should have gripped that new command with an instant new strategy. But it actually worked out good because we self-assessed together. We wrote the new one together.

20:09And then that strategy, which dovetails wonderfully with the manifesto is what carried me through the next three years. And if you think the manifesto is aggressive, the strategy is even better. And it actually lays out the framework. It's a classic military commander's intent. It's got all the things in there, in states of what we're actually looking for, the amount of risk that we're willing to take. It sets the guardrails. And so what I'm getting at here is the participation of the staff in that. Okay, so now you've got the vision. Now you've married it up with the strategy. Now they've bought into the creation of the strategy.

20:45And then the last thing I'll talk about is I want to talk about what I called cross-threaders. Cross-threaders were, I have found out that regardless of the size of the organization that I've led, that you really count on about five people to really drive things forward. And the magic of a staff is always the airman, And the magic of any institution is it's people. But there's five people that really see it, understand it, can run with it without direction, that have the leadership skills to drive it, not only in the lane they're in, but cross lanes. So I created a team called the Cross Threaders.

21:24These Cross Threaders were intentionally put in positions in the staff, not traditional. And thus the term cross thread. and to drive friction intentionally, to drive outcomes outside of the normal status quo, to drive a product and address the process to ensure the product gets delivered. Think about that. Normally, we throw things into the normal process, and then we kind of scratch our heads when it turns out less than optimal outcomes, as opposed to, hey, man, this is what we want. Now, reverse engineer the process to ensure that outcome. That's where we went. And that's what those cross threaders did for me.

22:04And that sounds like a good recipe for innovation, essentially. Yeah. But to get back to bias toward intent, if you're wanting people to lean in, potentially take a little bit of risk, but in the spirit of innovation, how do you balance that? Or how do you put guardrails on it, if at all, to make sure that things don't go completely? You do have to put guardrails on it. You know, for the cross threaders, you know, I said, hey, here's the deal. First of all, you have access to me anytime you want it. You have my authority. And I want you to kind of make the rest of the staff mad at times. And then I want you to work yourself out of a job.

22:43So that means that, you know, just like I said, you provide friction, but you provide friction forward and you establish processes that deliver the outcomes without having to have a cross-threader. When I say present to win and the boss is at the head of the table, that means that these things are routinely discussed and the entire staff hears from me what my priorities are, what my risk levels are, what my guardrails are from me. I mean, the document's awesome, but I don't expect that people are flipping through the mobility manifesto or my strategy. I have a number of times. Yeah. It's great.

23:17Yeah. I think so too. But I don't think day to day, my team was doing that. But I'll tell you what they were doing day to day is that they were listening to me at the head of the table. and when I wasn't there, my deputy, and we were all marching, you know, strategies can get critiqued, you know, good or bad. And, you know, there's people that are, you know, you know, strategy gurus and all that stuff. But I mean, the purpose of a strategy is to drive unity of effort towards a goal. And I think ours did a good job on that. And, you know, it's hard stuff. This is, you know, I was a chief of staff of two large four-star staffs before I became commander of Air Mobility Command.

23:53So I know what staffs are like. They're humans. I mean, And humans aren't perfect. So I use, again, for another analogy here, a staff is like playing with an autopilot that's inoperative and out of trim. So you're not – are you a pilot? I am not. So trim means the airplane, when you take your hands off it, if it's trimmed up, it's just going to keep flying straight. And what I'm saying is it's out of trim. So as soon as you take your hands off it, it's going to turn or descend or something like that. And the autopilot's enough. It takes intentional strength and concentration to keep a staff moving in the right direction.

24:31The second you take your hands off it, it wanders a bit. It's just the way it is. I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So that intentional strength and concentration is what commanders provide. This episode is supported by Red Hat. Red Hat offers enterprise-grade open-source solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible, enabling organizations to build and operate hybrid cloud and cloud-native applications at scale. Accelerate your open hybrid cloud journey with Red Hat's industry-leading platform. And to keep with that trim analogy, that's what the cross-threaders were for, is to maintain.

25:11How do you enable that team of five or team of seven or whatever it might be? I mean, in the military, you've got a chain of command, so maybe it's easier to get people in line. But in a business sense, there are people that might not like that intentional disruption. So how do you give that team of five? How do you enable that team? And then how do you communicate to the rest of the organization that, hey, we need to listen to these people? Sure. First thing is you bring in the team of five and you say exactly what I said previous is like, you guys are empowered. You have access to me in front of my gatekeepers, I call them, the team that blocks and tackles for me.

25:50When they want to come see me, they get to see me. So you're empowered. You have access to me. Create the processes I trust you that ensure our thing and then work yourself out of a job and kind of just be prepared. Nobody's going to like you because you're in other people's rice bowls, right? You're in a lane that's not normally out. Now, it's not fair to just do that to the rest of the staff. Now, in front of the rest of the staff, we had a meeting, we had weekly meetings, but specifically to these, what I had them doing, they're once a month, is you express that same criteria to the rest of the staff so they know.

26:33It's like, I don't realize you all may not like this, but you can't get mad at them. I'm the one that's setting up. It's what I want. You know, I realize, you know, one of the things I used to say about being an aircraft commander is it's got to feel like a democracy, but it's anything but. I mean, this is commander business. Commander business, the commander tasked with the mission and the airmen for the mission that they've been given. So you've got to communicate it on both sides and then you've got to participate. You can't just give them authority and then walk away. You can't just unload them on the staff without owning it in front of the staff.

27:10And then most importantly, you've got to take the journey with both sides of the equation. So that means that in front of the staff and the cross-threaders, we have routine interaction and we see those tasks through. Yeah. No, that's insightful. And then they watch it through action. Everybody was watching through action. You know, when I get an update from one of the cross-threaders on this environment, and he's like, sir, for decision, here's the thing. And I say approved, or I say conditional approved, but these other things need to be met. Everybody gets to watch the decision-making, the thought process.

27:39Everybody gets a say. I value the counter argument with two caveats. It better be respectful and it better be timely. Don't lob a grenade at the last second when you've been participating along the whole way in an obnoxious manner and then say, voice something that should have been thing. So respectful, timely, counter argument, I want to hear it all day long, all day long. You have to set the example that way. And it's sometimes hard to hear. Okay. Everybody good? You're good. You're good. You're good. You're not good. Well, I guess we're going to be here for five more minutes. What's on your mind?

28:22If you show impatience, if you push back on what the recommendation is, if you show anger, then all of your credibility dissolves in front of the staff. But if you encourage an environment like that, it becomes incredibly conversational in a good way. It still maintains the hierarchical, you know, the boss is in charge, and then your product is moved forward. I love that. And you're teeing me up along the way. So kudos to you. Maybe it's because I'm following the manifesto's outline and you just have it committed to heart here. But But you wrote, and this is in the spirit of kind of pushing the boundaries of giving you some honest feedback or just kind of going against whatever the rest of the group is saying.

29:04So you wrote, we must create new ways of operating, experimenting, and rehearsing. We must not look at our instructions and processes as set in stone. To do so shows a lack of trust or lack of faith in our airmen. That's pretty provocative for, certainly for a military setting, provocative even in a business setting. Is that the sense of, hey, if you see something, say something, push the limits of what you think is possible, but without shedding blood or marking up the plane, as you said earlier. I mean, take that to the extreme. I mean, take our regulations. Especially in the Air Force, we say at least the flying regs are written in blood.

29:43So that means that when I open up the flight manual to the C-130 or the T-37 or the T-38 or the KC-10 or the C-32, whatever airplanes I was qualified to fly, and you look at a note, a warning, a caution, you look at some of the things we say they're written in blood. That thing exists because somebody was injured or died to make this a comment. But the majority of our regulations aren't like that. The majority of our regulations are bureaucratic, administrative type things. And this is a little bit of a frustration for me, but in a fairly provocative way to say it is, we kind of turned into the institution we mutinied from in the Air Force in 1947.

30:27So in 1947, we mutinied from the United States Army. I'm not saying the Army's bad. I'm not saying it's bad now. I'm just saying we mutinied because we wanted to focus on effects. We wanted to focus on a new way of providing national power, air power, all that. And we were constrained by a bureaucratic system that didn't unleash it to its full potential. That's what we need to do. We need to constantly unleash it to its full potential. We don't need to spend more money doing the same things the same way. We need to unleash it. And those regs unleash it. I'm not interested in spilling blood or scraping paint.

31:06but I'm ready to do things provocatively different. Here's the example. Early in my command, we decided to fly a KC-46, one of the newest tanker that the Air Force has, with one pilot. Armageddon. One pilot. Okay, so think about a plane the size of an airliner, like the one I flew in on last night. Why are there two seats up front? Because they fit. I would contend that a single pilot could fly them. And then my theory was in a fight in the Pacific, we might need to have one pilot resting and one boom operator doing the refueling while one pilot and one boom resting while one pilot and one boomer doing the mission.

31:55That's the theory. These airplanes can both refuel and be refueled. So, you know, theoretically, they can stay up for extremely long periods of time. In fact, we did a mission where we flew on completely around the world. It was over a 40-hour mission. But you can't just go do it, you know, so this gets to the risk, right? So, you know, we understood, you got to understand the risk. We understood every level. We looked at the FAA regulations. We looked at the military regulation, the DOD regulations, the transportation regulations, the Air Force regulations, the mobility command regulations, all of that.

32:28And we said, okay, here's all the things that is saying we can't do this. Okay. Then we mitigated all those things. We took all that stuff. We got the required waivers. We got all the stuff required. I put the crew, we flew in a simulator so that they could work. we had a safety pilot in the back in case, or we had a safety pilot standing in case one would do it. And so the theory was we're going to fly a boom operator in the right seat and a KC-46, awesome KC-46 pilot in left seat, and we're going to operate it. And then I own the risk. I went to my boss and I said, I didn't ask permission. I said, here's the mission we're flying.

33:08Here's the risk as we understand it. Here's all the mitigation techniques. And if it goes wrong, you can fire me. Okay. Okay. So all through that, I get that. And now it gets time to do airspace. Where do I get the airspace? Guess what the Air Force said? We won't give you the airspace to do that because what if something goes wrong? I'm like, all right, well, what about the 99 % chance it goes right or even higher than that most likely? And so I had to go to the United States Army to get the airspace to fly this wonderful mission. And of course it went great, but it shows you the lack of ability to assume risk.

33:45It shows you the journey of the will it into existence, whether the internal resistance, whether the personal or professional attacks. You should have seen the memes about me. They're probably still out there about what's Minahan doing authorizing one pilot? Why is he doing that? Is it about pilot shortage? All these things that distract. No, I'm actually talking about America's combat capability and what we need to do to win in the Pacific. I've got no ulterior motive. I'm not trying to make an influence on the airlines. I'm not trying to provoke the airline unions. I'm simply trying to put my team in a position to win.

34:21So all of those come together and you have to endure it. What do you think the lesson is there for an individual within a company or a business leader within a company that's pushing an AI use case? I'm already kind of drawing the parallel there where it's like, hey, we can't do this here. It creates too much risk. And then you get pushback from security or IT or whatever it might be? Is the lesson persistence? Is it giving clear vision into this is why and here's the mitigation techniques? Or what can we learn from that story? Yeah. The righteous road is lonely and hard. I use this intentionally mixed metaphor, and you have to swim uphill.

34:57I mean, I wish it was different, but that's the way it is. I mean, what you just asked kind of ties it all together, right? It ties risk, risk tolerance, risk acceptance, risk mitigation, risk ownership together. It's the will it into existence. It's the personality that we talked about in people that really change, require a personality that just accepts the hard, lonely road for not, not for days, not for weeks, for months and years. I had a boss in the Pacific and I was fortunate. I just had phenomenal bosses in the Pacific. he used a football analogy he'd say line it up hike the ball run it up the middle for a quarter inch gain and do it again and again and again and again back to that o-line but it's a quarter inch man and that's depressing it's progress play to play it's depressing it is progress but man you It takes a while before you see it, but it's so true of these tough problems.

36:03I mean, God bless him. I mean, he had the personality that inspired us to do that. Hike the ball, run it up the middle. I mean, the defense knows it's coming this way. They know you're not going to all of a sudden drop back to pass and throw it over the middle. Just run it play after play and take that ping, take that punishment, take that, you know, you know, odyssey or, or, or, or test of courage and keep going and keep going. And then, you know, one day you'll get there. And, and, and I truly believe that's the way it is. I don't think, I think very few people, I don't care who you're talking about, talking about Elon Musk, you're talking about the team here when it comes to innovation.

36:43You know, I've not served with someone that just said, yeah, I had this great idea. And it was like the easiest thing ever to implement. And you cannot believe how on board everybody was at the beginning. I mean, it was just the, you know, those environments don't exist generally for righteous journeys. Yeah. So, I mean, what you're talking about there with that story and, you know, in general is just pushing the boundaries of what's possible, being willing to take risk in the name of innovation. One of my favorite words around AI is unlearning. We have to unlearn what we do on a day-to-day basis so that we can build it back up in an automated fashion.

37:20Right. Not so much on technology here, but on leadership. What do you think we have to unlearn about leadership styles or leadership philosophies or leadership in general? What do we have to unlearn in this new world of AI, of cyber, of geopolitical tensions? Like, what do we have to unlearn here? We have to unlearn that taking risk is bad. You know, I think that, you know, especially in the military, we got to a position with the conflicts they were in, not taking away anything from how difficult they were. But we started talking about efficiencies more than we concerned ourselves about effectiveness in all environments.

37:59So efficiencies within that environment at the expense of effectiveness in the potential environments. So we've got to unlearn that risk-taking is bad. We've got to unlearn that because you fail, because you fail forward, that we need to punish somebody, that someone's going to, hey, that plane crashed, that didn't go right. We spent this money and didn't have a positive outcome. Therefore, we need to hold somebody accountable. I'm not saying there are not times where we do that, but generally we've got to be extremely risk tolerant. Think about the space program and how many times at the beginning we watched rockets do this.

38:39at the expense of human life on a couple, but just kept going. You know, so there is, you know, we have got to do that. You know, in the IT world, we would rather have, and this is maybe more of a military perspective, we'd rather have old systems that are completely ineffective than buy new things and implement them before we understand all the second and third order effects. You know, so we rarely analyze things on the risk of the status quo. What's the risk of the status quo? This is why I came to WWT and why I would introduce to Joe and Jim and the team here. It's because when I came into Air Mobility Command, I realized that our IT infrastructure was not in the shape it needed to be to propel what my aspirational needs were for command and control, data, AI, new ways of doing business, right?

39:32Right. And and so, you know, people go, well, you if you do that, you know, the the Red Ryder BB gun, you'll shoot your eye out. Right. But I but but what about the risk now? What about the risk of the downtime of the systems that I'm running? What about the fact that they're penetrated by adversaries right now? What about the fact that it's so fragile it can't handle the data and the AI on top of it that I needed to think? What about the risk of no decision versus the risk of wrong decision? Let's unlearn that, that somehow a no decision is better than the wrong decision. And it's completely the opposite.

40:11Let's unlearn that we have to buy the perfect solutions. Let's unlearn that we need to get after effective and good enough more than we have to get after effective and perfect enough instead of perfect. Let's get that way. And then let's also get away unlearned, especially in the military, that you got to buy one thing and it's got to last 20 years. How about if we were to throw our phones down right now, right here, everybody got an iPhone? Costs about the same price as when they came out in the early 2000s. It's not much different. Extremely more capable. It's 100 % tailorable to my life. Has the apps that I care about, does the things that I want it to do.

40:54Occasionally I get a little banner that says I did an update. or that you need an update. So the security's pretty tight. It runs fast. And the second it starts slowing down, I can go get some money for that, get a phone that costs just about as much as the one I paid three years ago, yet it's got more power, more things like that. And I'm changing them out routinely. And it's compatible with my computer, my tablet, my car. I mean, why don't we do that with everything? I think the gap would be that we're on the other side, maybe in a business context, you're looking at risk and you're looking at downhill effects.

41:31But one of the things that I love that you mentioned in the manifesto as well, which is we need to be ready before the moment demands it. So is that the mindset that you're saying we need to take? How do you build the muscle memory to be ready for a moment when you've never crossed to that moment? Right. Well, I mean, this is one thing when you serve in Korea, we always talk about fight tonight, you know, because the proximity of the potential adversary or the adversary, probably accurate to say adversary, North Korea, you know, when your family moves to Seoul, South Korea, they're in artillery range of North Korean artillery just living in Seoul.

42:08And so you have this, you know, you have this, you know, hey, we got to be ready to fight tonight, you know, and you're, you have this high state of readiness, but it actually can erode readiness if it's intensely high over long periods of time. Yet you can't let it wander far from that because, you know, it actually could happen tonight. So how do you focus intensity and readiness for something that may happen, blend it in with the realities of the tempo today? You know, I described to you the Ukraine. I described to you the Israel, the Gaza, the Niger, the big exercise we did. And I expressed in this manifesto, I expressed in my strategy.

42:48Yeah, but it's the China, the Pacific fight that could be the big one, and we have to be ready for that. Nobody's going to care about our plans for the future if we lose tomorrow. Nobody's going to care about it. You know, so I get it. It's hard. I get it. You know, I wish it wasn't that way, too. I wish we could focus on that. So the way we blended it in is we, you know, have focus intensity when we could. So, of course, when we were doing Ukraine and doing Israel, especially at the very beginnings of those movements, you have focus intensity on that. And then the second that comes off, you have to rebuild your readiness and you have to go get after the things that relate to the broader spectrum of potential threats, which, you know, let's be clear.

43:35I was hired to my job because of my experience in the Pacific. I was hired into that job to go faster. I was hired into that job because of my experience in Indo-PACOM and worrying about North Korea and China and all that. I'm not saying I'm the world's foremost expert on it, but I know how to get a team ready. And I know that you've got to be sophisticated in your approach. You can't just have the throttle here. There's another horrific airplane analogy. We are good at full power, what we call burners. The plane I fly doesn't have after burners and after I graduated pilot training. So we're good at full speed.

44:14We're good at full off, full idle. So all power, foot completely off the accelerator, throttle all the way back. We suck at the power setting in the middle. Okay? So it's got to be high enough that you're getting things done, but it's got to be set so you don't burn people out. And like I said, if everything's the number one priority, then nothing's the number one priority. So we got to pay attention to that middle. Of course, the team's going to be awesome when we go to burner and full power. Of course they are. You're watching it in Iran right now. Okay? And of course, they're going to be awesome when you cut it off and you come to a full idle, okay?

44:47Hey, you're on leave, go to family, take a break, take a day to kind of reconstitute yourself. Where do we set that? And that's what commanders get paid to do. You get paid to set that so that we are getting the things done we need to get done. We can guarantee to our civilian leadership, to our airmen, to our families, to our mission that we can get it done, but we're not going to be smoked when we get there. I wish there was science in here. It's an art. there is some science to it, but it takes a lot of experience and a lot of willpower to continually do that. Again, I want to create the environment.

45:22Even pulse people go, hey man, where's your throttle setting of your team right now? I need to know. Where's the throttle setting? Hey boss, I'm a nine. Okay. Sustainable nine? Reckless nine? And that's interesting because you mentioned tempo and now you're talking about what pace you feel like you're at. The tempo, whether it's geopolitical or conflict or just updates around the world, that is nonstop, certainly in the AI realm. Things are just coming at you at breakneck speed. Leaders are experiencing this pace just as much and in the same time period, in real time, as individual contributors or people that report up to them.

46:00So how do you see leadership? What would your advice be to leaders who are saying like, hey, look, I'm just as confused and trying to figure it out as you are? Yeah. I never felt confused trying to figure it out. I mean, And the same boss that gave the dive into the line for a quarter-inch gain also said, your leadership and your stamina will be tested. Actually, he's from St. Louis, Admiral Davidson, him and his wife, Tracy.

46:27Incredibly hard to work for in a good way. And I mean that out of a position of extreme fondness for my time working for him and for him. your stamina and your judgment will be tested and it gets to all the challenges we just talked about i mean i'm not confused but i understand the complexity here i understand the challenge you know first of all i grew up in it you know think that i propelled myself to four-star general in charge of a lot of people and bypassed the work you do as a lieutenant you know all the ranks but you know specifically when you get older and you start working on combatant command staffs at the Lieutenant Colonel level, the Colonel level, one-star level, two-star level, three-star level.

47:06That whole journey came with, I own pieces and parts of the apparatus in the route up there. So I know. I mean, I know what it takes. And so you've got to take those experiences and those attributes and got to lay it over for the challenge at hand, the challenge with this team. I didn't parachute into a team that just was waiting for Mike Minahan. I parachuted into a team that had just executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the evacuation of Kabul. And prior to that, every commander prior to me had the exact same chain of circumstance that were very challenging too. So you jump in, you assess quickly, and you lay it over.

47:50Now, that's kind of the team dynamics. You know, from an individual dynamics, it's hard. It's hard. You know, I don't control my pace and my tempo. I survive my pace and my tempo, okay? Especially the last 10 years of my career. So, you know, I think people think you rise up and it gets easier. You know, I didn't have that experience. And not personally or not for the people around me. The general officers, the flag officers, the colonels, all the ranks, you know, everybody's working their tails off. They understand what's at stake. They absolutely have full situational awareness of what it takes to keep this country where it's at.

48:26And so there are things you need to pay attention to. One of the things I talk about is you'll never have balance in your life. You can have rhythm in your life. You can have harmony in your life. But you very rarely can have balance, especially, I think, in the military. I mean, you can't have balance with, I spend 80 % of my time at work and 20 % of my time at home. I go away for a significant amount of times. There was a time in my career where I was heavily deployed. There's no balance there. Now, there can be harmony. There can be rhythm that works. And those are the things that you should strive for.

49:00And then the last thing I'll say about this, you can't show up at home with the remnants of your power and your energy. The passion that you show up for at work at seven in the morning for the morning brief, you've got to come back home and have that same passion and energy for the last 20 % of your day and not just be smoked, worthless, and uninterested in engaging with the people that matter most in your life, right? So your wife, your kids, your dog, all that stuff, and that takes intentional effort. It's a journey, and it's got challenges as well. But that rhythm and harmony matter more than balance.

49:35Rhythm and harmony. Got it. Well, General Minahan, thank you so much for taking the time. This was awesome. Awesome conversation. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your partnership to WWT, and thank you just for being here. Well, my pleasure to be here. Hopefully, this is the first of many. An absolute treat to be around this team. All right. A tremendous thanks to General Minahan for his time and service to this country. His message is that leaders can't ask people to challenge the status quo while protecting themselves from those consequences. They must define the mission, establish the guardrails, own the risk and remain present through the resistance.

50:08This episode of the AI Proving Ground podcast was co-produced by Nas Baker and Kara Kuhn. Our audio and video engineer is John Knobloch. My name is Brian Felt. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

50:24After having the B