Sea Control - Sea Control 222 - TOPGUN's Leadership Lessons with Guy Snodgrass & Graham Scarbro

Episode Date: January 10, 2021

Links:1. TOPGUN'S TOP 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit, by Guy Snodgrass, Sep 15, 2020.2. "Take a Seat at the Campfire: TOPGUN's Top Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit," by Graham Scarbro, CIMSEC, January 10, 2021. 

Hey folks, Jared here. Two episodes this week. If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to go back and check out our interview with Representatives Elaine Luria and Mike Gallagher on Congressional Perspectives on Battle Force 2045. Today we have CIMSEC President Jimmy Drennan in the hosting chair, filling in on short notice to interview retired Navy fighter pilot and author Guy Snodgrass, alongside fellow Top Gun grad Graham Scarborough, discussing Guy's most recent book, Top Gun's Top 10 Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit. As always, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. This week, they have two of the surviving commanders of the Falklands War, Michael Clapp and Julian Thompson, discussing the campaign. Finally, from Sea Control, The Bilge Pumps, to Project Trident,

2020 was a banner year for SimSec. If you've enjoyed that, please consider supporting our Right Fight Win holiday donation campaign via direct donations on our website. Make SimSec your preferred nonprofit on Amazon Smile so you can support us while you shop. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men.

Hello, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. You can tell a few things from my intro. One, I am not Jared, your normal host. Jimmy here, and as I usually sit up in my ivory tower as the president of SimSec and that ever wants to do the work. But today I wanted to chat with our two guests who happen to be friends and colleagues of mine. Two, from my time hack, you could guess that we are talking Naval Aviation today, specifically Top Gun, the Navy's Advanced Fighter Weapons School. And three, from my poor execution, you can tell that I am not a Top Gun graduate.

But my two guests are, we have the author of the new book, Top Gun's Top 10 Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit, retired Commander Guy Snodgrass, callsign Buss, who is also a former Top Gun instructor, and we have fellow demigod of the sky, as he puts it, Commander Graham Scarborough, callsign Heed. Gentlemen, many of our listeners and readers will be familiar with your writing. For our broader audience, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your backgrounds. Buss, let's start with you. Yeah, thanks, Jimmy. Great to be here with both you and Graham. So as you alluded to, I spent a vast majority of my career in the U.S. Navy as an F-18

pilot. So I did that for a little over two decades, had a chance to deploy to Operation Iraqi Freedom and see some combat operations there, and then had served two tours of duty in Japan, the second as a commanding officer for a strike fighter squadron that's part of the forward deployed naval force. And then I also had just by luck and timing a chance to do some really cool out of the cockpit stuff. The first time I was in the Pentagon was as the chief speechwriter to chief of naval operations, Jonathan Greenert. And then I came back for my second tour in the Pentagon to serve as the chief speechwriter and director of communications for former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Right. So I've got a really good look at kind of the breadth of U.S. national security and foreign affairs. So I'd say that's me in a nutshell. And I appreciate you may not be a graduate of Top Gun, but you nailed the time hack.

So well done. All right. Thanks a lot, Buss. And Heat, over to you. Hey, thanks, Jimmy. Thanks for having me. Good to connect with you and Buss again. I am a active duty naval flight officer. I've been flying in the Super Hornet community for about 16 years now. I've done operational tours on both coasts out of Lemoore and Oceania, currently stationed in Oceania. and I graduated Top Gun in 2013. Excellent. All right. Well, thanks, guys. Let's just get right into it. Buss, let's talk about your new book. Most of us are familiar with Top Gun, or at least its reputation and its cultural image. But you take the reader a bit deeper and offer lessons that everyone can apply in their daily lives. What was your motivation sharing these leadership

lessons? Yeah, well, I think it's twofold. First and foremost, you know, reading was such a huge part of my career, part of my life. It started when I was young. And I do believe what my former boss, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, that is, if you're going into a job and you haven't read at least dozens, if not hundreds of books about it, then you're functionally illiterate. So reading is such a big part of gaining the knowledge base you need to succeed. And I think that's just the ground truth, no matter what profession you're in, no matter what you're doing in your life. The second thing is tied directly to my experience as a naval aviator, just like HEAD, both from the F-18 community, but across the aviation community writ large, you know,

you have major phases of flight. You prepare for your flight. You get ready for the mission. You conduct the briefing, which is important. You do the mission execution, which as we all know is where the rubber meets the road. And it's very important. But the most critical aspect of any flight is the debrief, because that's where you can evaluate how the mission actually went. You You get a chance to look at truth data because when you're moving fast, regardless of your platform, things always happen that you just weren't aware of. So you get a chance to look at the truth data. You get a chance to listen to your tapes and watch the ground truth, and you compare that to what you thought happened. And so in my case, I realized going through Top Gun and especially in successive tours after that, it was just great.

I mean, I was surrounded by men and women who cared deeply about being masters of their craft. They wanted to be the best at their job. And as I kind of compared some of the lessons I had learned with what I experienced and witnessed with Secretary Mattis, the CNO and other senior leaders, you know, it kind of passed that sniff check. So I thought, let's put together something that would be succinct and easy read for basically all walks of life, let alone the U.S. military, and then just get it out there. It's a way to kind of plant a seed for people who may be early in their career and wondering what are some additional tools they can throw in their toolkit as they progress through their own career path. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, you can see as you read the book, you can see the influence of Secretary Mattis in particular, but just in general, all the leaders that you mentioned that you've worked with. And I know Secretary Mattis talked about the importance of reflection, and that's something that you can see come through in the lessons that you share in your book. Heath, you're a fellow Top Gun graduate.

Do the lessons in the book resonate with you? And if so, which ones in particular? Yeah, I think they definitely resonate, right? The stories are situations that I think most aviators will find familiar. They they faced them or will face them or something similar. So as I read through the book, I found myself kind of nodding and been consistently being like, yeah, I've been there. Yep. I know someone who's been there. So the stories themselves definitely resonated, even though the circumstances may differ. And I think that was part of the book's appeal to me was that they were presented in a way that was familiar to me as an aviator, but also accessible to a reader who may not have any aviation background. They're not kind of crazy stories of like out of adventure comics of daring do and, you know, wild scenarios.

It's kind of basic everyday things that happen in aviation that make you who you are. I think my favorite sort of lesson out of the book is when Buss talks about don't confuse activity with progress. And I think that's something that in the military we all struggle with a lot because everything seems so important all the time. And you have to really kind of figure out what's important and what's urgent and make sure you don't burn yourself out. And that becomes more essential. I mean, it's essential from the newest recruit to the most senior admiral. You know, you have to make a differentiation between those things and decide where to spend your focus and decide where to trust your people with those things that are maybe not important or urgent to you, things that you can afford to delegate. I think my favorite story I think is in Chapter 1 where Buss tells the story of what's called the Rush Ride. So if you haven't read the book, that's sort of like if you want to instruct a Top Gun, you fly out to Fallon or maybe the Top Gun instructors are at your base.

You fly a mission. You do the whole thing, brief, flight, debrief, and it's a chance to kind of show them that you have what it takes to succeed as a Top Gun instructor. and um bus tells the story that he gets done with a debrief and basically feels like he he blew it and man ever i think every single aviator in the world has felt that where they get done with it and they're just like well that was a total disaster like i just wasted everybody's time and like i'm gonna go hang my head in shame and shut myself in the closet for the next 1000 years and the instructor was actually really generous because what mattered was that bus was able to debrief that flight, diagnose the problems, figure out what went wrong and what went well

and how those contributed to the overall impact of the mission. And I think that's so important because we will all experience failures and how you react to those failures is really what makes you who you are, right? In our successes, we're all sort of similar, right? I think people generally respond to success the same. It's how you respond to those failures and that sort of hang dog mindset that you get after blowing something where you feel like you have to make a good impression. Well, if you can diagnose that and bring some good out of it, then even if the person that you're with doesn't recognize that, you can recognize it and move on. And that's a cultural trait in naval aviation that I've definitely been on both sides of. I've had to be the one

that's diagnosed my own failures. And I've had to be the one that pumps the brakes on someone else and said, okay, well, hold on. And how they respond to that failure, how you respond to that failure is absolutely telling. And so I like that story. That was a good story. I totally agree with you. The story that Buzz tells about the rush ride in the first chapter really sets up the rest of the book very well. And it's such a relatable story. The idea of having to learn from failure. Naval aviation does it so well. And I think that we can apply that in our daily lives, whether professional or personal. And that's one of the things that I took away from the book. Kind of along those lines, the idea of debriefing, Buss, you mentioned that it's so

important in naval aviation. And Keith, you wrote a review of the book for SIMSEC. And as of this recording, and we have not published it yet, but we will soon. You call the book part leadership lesson and part cowboy time. Can you tell our listeners what you mean by cowboy time? Yeah, for sure. So if you picture kind of the old west, right, and you picture a bunch of cowboys out riding the range, at the end of the day, they all sit down, they make camp, they make a fire, and they they sit around and they just talk right and what they talk about is who know it's kind of left to the imagination right um but they're they're they're just sitting around chit-chatting around the fire talking about the fire or talking around the fire right and and so cowboy time is

those moments when um you pull up a chair in the ready room it's you and a couple of your uh your buddies or maybe some senior folks and some junior folks it's just a mix of squadron personnel And you just start talking, and the conversation can go in a million different directions. You can talk personal stuff. You can talk professional stuff. You can talk about lessons learned. But what it really is is informal mentorship. It's an informal debrief of just life, right?

Good ideas about new policies or tactical changes or strange things you see in the airplane that are lessons learned, those sorts of things turn into our cowboy time, right? And so it's just the idea that you sit around and you talk about what's happening and you pull lessons out of that as a group. And so when I read the book, that's sort of what it reminded me of. It reminded me of sitting in the ready room with a bunch of your buddies, just having a conversation, talking about, man, you won't believe what happened to me in the jet the other day, or you won't believe this email I got, or how do we fix this problem? And it's amazing how many important things happen in those sort of informal ways. There's a famous story of a World War II fighter pilot, Jimmy Thatch, who invented a basically war winning tactic called the Thatch Weave using matchsticks at a wardroom table. Right. That's cowboy time. And it it changed the outcome, arguably, of the air war in the Pacific. And so there's a, you know, it's an informal conversation between friends, and yet at the end of it, everyone kind of walks away and, you know, maybe has something to think about or something to act on or some way to, you know, change the course of careers or even the naval aviation. Yeah, that's great. I love that. And, Buss, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Is that something you were going for? Were you thinking of this as cowboy time when you wrote the book?

Well, yes and no. I'd say the approach that Graham just mentioned is spot on. Anytime you can break down barriers, right? The Naval War Colleges and most of the war colleges are other institutions that attempt to do the same thing where you go to class and, you know, business casual. You're not wearing your uniform so that you get away from rank. That's the genius of cowboy time as he describes it. You know, some of the best lessons I learned was when you would go to the officer's club. and you would i mean you break down those barriers so you could be a relatively new lieutenant jg in a squadron and you've got a strike group admiral in that in that room but because you're having a

loose conversation and sharing a beer you know it breaks down those formal barriers and allows you to have a more fruitful conversation you learn a lot using that technique and then you can apply it as you move forward and of course the expectation being that as soon as you exit that type of a very informal atmosphere yeah i mean you you know you go back to rank is important where you reside in the hierarchy is important. So it's not an excuse to forego the formalities of your position, but it does give you a safe space to explore and ask questions that you might not feel comfortable with in a professional setting. So for the military audience, yeah, absolutely. But it's fun too, because there's perspective, right? I mean, it's very easy.

All three of us on this call are from a military background. That was not my intent. My intent wasn't to write a narrowly scoped book that I could hand to someone who's in uniform, officer and enlisted and say, Hey, you could gain from this. I mean, I wanted to give this to my 13 year old kid. I wanted friends and family to pick it up and say, wow, these are really good anecdotes and stories, which as a lay person who's never served a day of my life in uniform, I can relate. I can, I think they're exciting. I think this is a window into what Naval aviation is like and the exciting world of Top Gun. Oh, by the way, there's lessons that go along with it, right? So So it's the same thing I described when I had written that 2014 white paper on retention called Keep a Weather on the Horizon where I said the secret sauce in my mind was you take a subject matter area that people are really interested in, you underpin it with data, and you wrap it in a compelling narrative.

And a lot of times if you can get all three of those aspects, you'll find that more people are willing to engage with the material in the first place, and they walk away learning quite a bit from it. Yeah, I can hear the speechwriter in you as you say that. And the message is one thing, but how you deliver it is something different and equally as important. And I'm curious, you mentioned earlier that you worked as a speechwriter for Secretary of Defense James Mattis. In terms of applying these lessons that you talk about in your book, I'm curious if and how you applied these lessons that you learned as a naval aviator and as a top gun instructor in an environment that's quite different, still largely within the defense, the national defense, but I think with a lot of people that were not in uniform, so maybe a little bit different in terms of military perspective. So I'm curious if these lessons applied, and if so, how did they apply? Yeah, that's a great question. So did they apply?

Yeah, absolutely. When you think about, like Heads already mentioned, don't confuse activity with progress, right? Not only did the team that I ran, the speechwriters, appreciate that, but other senior leaders in the department appreciated it because you could basically call out the chaff and focus only on the wheat. So that became critically important. the other element, too, that as you think about all these different lessons, they help you succeed at your job, at your role. What I don't think that the lessons really helped me with was accommodating just the sheer difference in how a majority of the Pentagon operates compared to naval aviation is a good example, where I was very used to being inculcated in an environment

like he has already described, where it was risk-acceptant, not as much of a zero-defect mentality. Um, you were, you know, I mean, you want to pursue both innovation. So basically initiative and aggressiveness as my former boss would say, right? So, Hey, come up with great ideas and then pursue them relentlessly. And I think that that works incredibly well in the aviation community, depending on what other background you have, it may be hit or miss, but in the Pentagon, you know, it's a very risk averse culture. And so that's where I think just the ability to innovate and adapt becomes so critically important. It's just because you have to be able to assess the waters in which you swim, determine, hey, what I'm doing, is it working or

is it not working? And you move forward from there. And in fact, in my first book, Holding the Line, I even described one of my failures, which was a relative inability to kind of read the political waters around me and maximize them. I guess you could put it another way and say that I read the political waters. I knew what I had to do to succeed, but my integrity wouldn't allow me to do it, which was to play the political game. And because of that, I didn't find the kind of success that I might have otherwise. And, you know, that's just a little bit of the reality of Washington, D.C. So the fact of the matter is, yeah, I mean, I think a wide audience can pick up this book. They can read some compelling stories. They can consider it and

weigh it against their own experiences. Some they might say, yeah, I recognize that. And others, they might refute it. And the good news is, I mean, that's challenging you to be a critical thinker and to come up with some of your own ideals. And I loved doing that when I was young, coming up to the ranks. I loved grabbing the reading list or grabbing the top three, top five leadership axioms that other senior leaders would put out. And I would kind of challenge it and refine those as I move forward in my own career. While we're on the kind of the topic of your experience at the Pentagon and this book, I was fortunate to read Holding the Line for us and i last year wrote a little bit on that and i felt like if we could get into sort

of the meta analysis of uh top guns top 10 i felt like while reading that book there was some there were moments where i felt i could almost hear you saying through the subtext like this is a different environment at times you felt like maybe you were pining for that cockpit right like you wanted to you were like man the pentagon is so different than the cockpit of the super hornet it came through in the writing a little bit. And I wonder, was that part of your motivation for writing this book was like, after the experience of holding the line, it's like, hey, let's get back to first principles. And let's sort of examine the year and a half in the Pentagon through the lens of the cockpit. And then that kind of produced the book. I just had that

impression that it was like, let's get back to first principles and sort of take a look at how your experience in the Pentagon was shaped by your career flying the jet. Yeah, that's a great question. And I'd say that, no, not really. I didn't write Top Gun's top 10 in response to the reception to the first book. It was more along the lines of, I did conduct a quick self-assessment and said, I felt like there was a lot to learn from holding the line, right? You've got plenty of people like Bob Gates, James Mattis, you know, H.R. McMaster, who are at the very pinnacle of these organizations who will pump out a book. And, yeah, it's got a lot of great insight, but it's also shaped much like a majority of their careers with I'm going to show you the best parts of what I accomplished. I'm going to minimize the bad parts. You know, I wanted holding the line to be just a very clear, clear eyed look at what it's like to serve as a senior staffer working with these senior leaders, how the sausage gets made, etc. The problem was, is that because of today's current environment, it became perceived as political very quickly.

And I wanted to kind of get back to a place where, look, I mean, when you talk about leadership lessons, especially with something kind of tied to the excitement of naval aviation or of Top Gun, there's nothing political about it. So you're not going to have someone consider the book and say, well, I'm not going to read it because this is either pro or anti-Trump, for example. You can look at the cover and go, that looks really interesting, and you're willing to pick it up and engage with it. So I wanted something that would be widely applicable, that people could really pick up, enjoy, and just get – I do like your saying, though, first principles. The fact that there are, I think, this foundation that you can build of just strong leadership tenants that regardless of what you do or where you go, they're going to serve you well. And so I do think that that aspect of what you just raised and the question you asked is spot on.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks. Another thing while we're talking about kind of where the leadership lessons come from, right, you pick up a lot of leadership books that are kind of purpose-written leadership books and they get into a lot of times it's it's it's people in command who are making these big decisions of you know billions of dollars and hundreds of lives and and one of the things that um struck me about your book that i really enjoyed was that even though you've been a squadron co and you had a successful tenure in your skipper tour a lot of the lessons were

were from maybe your junior officer department head days where i found the lessons more i found the lessons to be kind of more approachable to sort of your everyday reader, right? People who don't have billions of dollars and hundreds of lives at stake, but may face a decision over integrity or may face a decision over prioritization. So was sort of sticking to the earlier part of your career in the cockpit, was that intentional by and large? I know that you pull from across your career, but the bulk of the book is made up of these sort of building block episodes. And I just wanted to get your thoughts on your motivation for kind of pulling from that part of your career to write the book. Yeah, I'd say that part is spot on in that one of the things

Jimmy has referenced, hey, you sound like a speechwriter or you're thinking like a speechwriter. And I'd say that was a great transformative experience in my career because we're all victims of our own background and experience, right? So if you come up through the surface warfare officer community or army cavalry, you tend to up into the point. Yeah, thumbs down, No, you tend to get to a point where up until around maybe colonel or a senior enlisted position where you've interfaced with other parts of your organization, you think like an aviator. You think like a cavalry or an infantry officer. So the nice thing about speech writing was that it forced you to be very broad. I think that a lot of junior enlisted, junior officers, mid-career civilians, I want it to be very approachable.

And everyone can relate to those. Hey, when I was early in my career, here's something that I learned that wound up being very foundational. And I think when you tie it to, as we say in the naval aviation community, lessons written in blood, right, where someone has lost their life or was severely injured, all those things stand out. So share those big foundational stories, share the big lessons that I learned early on that made a significant impact throughout the remainder of my career, that I was able to kind of do a sanity check against other very senior leaders in the administration to say, wow, they use the same style of leadership or they use these same principles. They can apply equally to the newest recruit in the U.S. military as much as they can apply to a cabinet secretary. So there's a sanity check. I think these principles stand the test of time. So let's put them out there and let people, you know, determine on their own whether they, you know, they make an impact in their own life. Thanks, boss. So this next question, I'm actually going to direct toward Heed. In reading the book, I think one of my favorite chapters is titled Never Wait to Make a Difference. and you write, Buss, you write, if I've learned one thing, it's that nothing in life is ever guaranteed. Waiting until the perfect moment to act could mean you never act. He got you a little bit here. You've built a reputation as someone who's not afraid to make well-reasoned criticisms

of the status quo, big and small, throughout the military and the Navy in particular, And you offer thoughtful ideas for improvement. And like Buzz suggested, you haven't waited until you were in the perfect position or a certain rank. I'm curious, would you tell the next generation of sailors, officers, naval aviators to follow that same advice? And would you tell them to do it any differently? Yeah, that's absolutely great advice, not just in terms of professional writing or whatever else is. You shouldn't wait to act when the time is right for you. I mean, people will ask me, junior officers have asked me advice about starting a family. And my response to them is, hey, the Navy is not going to give you time to make a family. So don't wait, you know, and that's just one example. But if we're talking about writing, right, you can't just sit around and wait for conditions to be perfect before you start acting on what you think is a good idea or putting a good idea out there.

I mean, you may be totally wrong, right? But you again, like we referenced way back at the top of the podcast is you learn through those failures. You put yourself out there. It's a scary thing. the first time I published anything about anything. I mean, about anything. I wrote an article. My first article on proceedings was on red air. That's adversary aircraft that we use to simulate bad guys for air-to-air training. And I got positive feedback and I got negative

feedback. I had people calling me on my office phone to tell me how screwed up I was. And that can be a scary thought. But the thing is, when you're at that junior level, you have a ground view, ground level view of how the policies and how those policies and everything impact you at the end user level, right? So a junior lieutenant, a young sailor has a real view of how policies and procedures set far, far away from them impact them in the real world. And so I would encourage people to yeah absolutely you know take a take a leap of faith and put yourself out there and sometimes you'll get for example on us and i uh blog you may see an article by a by a young midshipman right and there's always going to be someone who comments like back when i was a

midshipman we kept our mouths shut you know that's terrible that's a terrible attitude to take right i love seeing um these young men and women put themselves out there and take a risk you know and And it's very easy to say, well, they haven't seen what I've seen. Well, that's true. But they are learning to think critically about their profession and to take the risk of putting themselves out in the public to have that discussed. And with time and experience, they may find that, OK, maybe I jumped the gun or maybe I made some assumptions or they may hold on to that knowledge and and get to the point where they find themselves able to make a difference because they took a risk early on. So, yeah, don't you know, that's it's great career advice for the for the military in general is don't wait for the perfect time to act, whether that's in your family, whether that's publishing, whether that's asking for that set of orders that you that you that you really want. Right. If you wait for the conditions to be right, you're going to wait forever.

And I think that carries through all from whether it's professional writing all the way through to combat. So, yeah, I like that lesson and I would I would stand by that for sure. Yeah, and I'm going to jump in real quick and just say that I agree with what Graham just said. I think that it's important to never wait to make a difference. Obviously, threw it in his entire chapter in the book. The one caveat I would add is basically to reflect on who you are, your background, basically your standing, right? So we're part of a military profession. And when you get into other professions like, you know, law or medicine, you know, there's a concept called standing.

Right. And so that's do you have the background, the experience and for to describe or to to throw out for public discourse what you're about to discuss? And so I'm not saying you should be overly restrictive and self-censor. And so basically, hey, I'm not the expert here, so I'm not going to talk. What I would say, though, is I've always used this as an example of telling especially J.O.'s, you know, master your craft. Right. Be the best at your job. if you're come whatever background and experience you come from make sure that you're credible there before you start throwing a lot of stuff into the court of public opinion because that's the first question people ask is well who wrote the article and are they credible within their field or not

or do they have standing if you don't you can still weigh in but i think it's worth the little hat tip somewhere in the article just to acknowledge maybe that you're not the expert there's also i think just a great way to really write successfully to help compel others to action is to acknowledge limitations, to acknowledge either, you know, a lack of historic depth on the topic or, you know, because so many times we see, especially younger individuals in an organization, they'll write a really just a rip roaring article, but they don't have the perspective of how did we even get here in the first place, right? So if it's a policy change that you're requesting, well, why was the policy put in place in the first, you know, in the first place? Why

was it enacted? What has happened since then? What's compelling this change, right? And I think those are the writings that always seem to grab senior leaders' attention the most is when it's a compelling narrative, you've done your homework, and you have something truly to add to the conversation. And just like Graham said, the best part of that is that, yeah, you've got to be willing to accept some slinging arrows along the way, but you are having an impact. Even if you're starting a conversation, you're having an impact across your organization because you're challenging people to think, some will agree, some will disagree, and that's fine. But that's part of becoming a change agent. Yeah, and I think it kind of relates to another thing you talk about

in the book, you know, this idea that you need to be able to constructively receive feedback and criticism, and the full range of it, right? It's not going to be pleasant, and sometimes it might be painful. But, you know, the example you give of your, I think it was a murder board or you were in front of a panel of instructors and you did your first four-hour lecture for them and you had to, you know, memorize the entire thing and not look at your slides. And you went through it the first time and, or a portion of it, and it didn't go as well as you wanted. And you got a ton of uh feedback pages of notes and criticism and and i and what you wrote in the book which which really resonated with me was it was basically after you took it took a breath and

stepped back you realize you now had a roadmap to success you know you you now had if you didn't take it personally what you had was here's where i can improve and and if i do all these things i can really nail this i think that that's something that can apply in so many different ways when you you get that kind of feedback and criticism sometimes you need to just let it roll off your back it may not even be useful criticism but you know you always want to take a look at it and not take it personally so uh i it really resonates with me there and i'll add real quick one of my favorite things that i've taken from naval aviation is the idea of no sandbagging and And I'm going to badly paraphrase this, but the idea that, you know, you don't want to ever see something that you don't think is right or you feel it's not right and then not say anything about it.

Because if you're in the aircraft and you notice something that could be wrong, you don't say, well, now you're taking ownership of that because you didn't at least ask the question. So I think that's an important piece of this. So, Basso, back to you. Well, I just want to follow up real quick on a point you made, and that was the willingness to accept a debrief. Right. So that was one of the keys at Top Gun. And it's tough. Right. Is we would tell students all the time, don't fight the debrief. We're looking at tapes. We're watching the truth data. This is fact. Right. So it's it's so difficult to separate your ego from the kind of altruistic purpose of a debrief, which is to truly learn. Right. It's not the finger point. In fact, in naval aviation, that's why when you debrief, you use the other individual or the other aircrew's call signs when you're debriefing is to help lessen the sting of, hey, it's not Jimmy that failed. It's Showtime 1-1 did this, and we've learned now that that was the wrong move. You should have done this instead. So the reason why I wanted to jump in was just because I think that it's such a – I've been a student of talent management and retention for, gosh, I guess about 10 to 15 years now.

And I've written about it. I'm passionate about it. And one of the things that has always confounded me is why the values we espouse as junior individuals in an organization suddenly fall by the wayside when you become senior leadership. And I think we saw this play out in real time with the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the USS Theodore Roosevelt because of the coronavirus pandemic response on board that aircraft carrier. And the thing that really stood out to me, look, I mean, there's plenty of postmortem that could happen with that specific incident in time. But what grabbed my attention was senior leaders doing the everyone else's to blame but me. And I think that that was an opportunity lost, especially as you set the culture for an entire service, is to kind of raise your hand and say, look, things are moving fast. There was a lack of clear guidance. We have just as much to learn as the lower echelons have to learn. So we're going to be taking a hard look at ourselves as well.

And again, I think that that's just something for your listeners to consider as they mature in their own career paths, as they move forward, is to no matter how senior you get, find the appropriate avenues, the appropriate times to open yourself up to criticism, to be willing to actually make a true 360 evaluation and say, are we facing a systemic issue? Not because the people I lead aren't up to the task, but because the method in which we're leading the organization could use refinement or be adjusted for better impact. I mean, when you look at Jeff Bezos at Amazon, other senior leaders, especially in commercial sector, you know, Amazon's well known for having what they call a day one mentality. And that's basically a fancy way of saying there's no sacred cows at Amazon. Everything's fair game. If you have a better way or if you have a way to improve a process, if you have a way to make the organization better, we expect you to bring it up to challenge the status quo. And if it has merit, we're going to pursue it because that's the kind of organization we want to have. And I think that all of the military services, the organizations within the Department of Defense, national security, et cetera, not only is it needed to do that.

It's frankly in today's contested environment with so many growing concerns around the globe, our own economic issues at home. I mean, there's just so many challenges facing America right now in this age of increased international competition. We owe it to senior leadership. We owe it to our country to never wait to make a difference, to be willing to jump in and challenge the status quo, because otherwise you're going to hit the tipping point pretty fast. And it's going to be difficult to make the moves down the road you need to sustain our military supremacy. That's a great point. Great point. I appreciate that.

So the one last thing that I'll add, Heed, on family planning is I was always told that if the Navy wanted you to have a family, they would issue you one in your CBAG. So I might have to go back and check with some of my chiefs and commanding officers for my instant days on that one. But it all worked out well. Okay, so, Buss, I want to ask before we wrap up here. I should mention you also serve on CIMSEC's Board of Directors. In the book, you mentioned joining the boards of several nonprofits as a part of your transition out of uniform. What led you to devote your time and energy to groups like CIMSEC after retiring from the Navy? Yeah, I mean, I think for a vast majority of us who decided to sign up to serve our country in uniform or as a civilian, you know, still serving your country,

a lot of what underpins what we do is the concept of putting service before self, right? Servant leadership. And when I reflect back on my time in uniform, those were the elements and the aspects that I love the most, where when you were surrounded by men and women who cared deeply about the organizations they were a part of, and when you can contribute to make an organization that's altruistic even better, I mean, it's a great place to be. So not only do I serve on the board for SimSec. I've had the pleasure of serving on the board for the U.S. Naval Institute and another company called Candorful, which assists service members as they're transitioning out of uniform to get them prepared for their interviews. So basically it's mock interview prep to spin them

up and get them ready to go for when they are applying to different companies. So that's what's been fun is you're not only helping, you know, and giving back, but it's also a chance to once again, you broaden yourself. We haven't touched on it directly in the interview, but I think that's another theme that runs through the book is just the importance of generating broad networks that you're a part of, not only because you get a chance to give back, but you learn. I mean, you gain so much from that experience because, you know, if you're a part of groups that are, you know, that contain people from a wide variety of backgrounds, you're going to be exposed to a lot of new thought that you didn't have when you were just nose down in your professional career

in national security. And so I found that to be not only very rewarding from an altruistic sense, But frankly, very beneficial because you are given an education and that education winds up being very valuable. Excellent. Well, we're glad to have you on the board. We appreciate everything you do for CIMSEC and just the broader national defense community. So unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. I want to thank both of my guests, Guy Buss Snodgrass and Graham Heade Scarborough. So, Buss, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Yeah, so thanks. You can find me on Twitter at Guy Snodgrass. I'm also on Facebook, LinkedIn.

I've got a few more books that are in the works. Currently splitting my time between North Texas and Washington, D.C., doing some consulting and working with the federal government on a couple of initiatives, especially in AI and autonomy. Because I think that's an exciting path that we're on. So, yeah, that's where you can find me. Happy to have people reach out. Always happy to take a phone call or respond via email. Great. Thank you. And, Heed, same question to you.

Where can we find you and what's your next project? Well, right now I'm keeping busy writing periodic book reviews for USNI. I publish a lot with Proceedings and on their blog, so I'm sporadic there. Most of my time is occupied by my day job, which is writing and revising SOPs for Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic. So if you're interested in scheduling the simulators at NAS Oceana or how we regulate parking, that's where my most recent work is going to be published. But I'm always looking for the next idea, next way to put myself out there. So, you know, keep an eye out, and I'll be on paper again before too long.

Well, gentlemen, thanks again for joining us. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Sea Control is produced and edited by Jared Samuelson, Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuiston. Thank you. Oh, my God.