Hear Mike Conwell’s interview with the Mason Enterprise Center about entrepreneurship:

MEC in the MEC with Mike Conwell: Making Entrepreneurship Core at the Mason Enterprise Center

When in college, Mosby was put on trial and sent to jail for pulling a gun and trying to shoot the school bully.  Mosby became interested in law and instead of holding a grudge against the prosecuting attorney, he became his friend. Mosby learned about the law and ended up studying under this prosecutor to eventually become a lawyer himself.  This was the first of two key times that Mosby became friends with his adversary.  After the Civil War, Mosby knew the war was over and that it was time to start the healing.  He reached out to help President Grant and was appointed to his cabinet.  This launched Mosby into position to be the ambassador to China, then lead him to be a very successful lawyer in Virginia.

 Upon the start of the Civil War, Mosby was a simple private but understood the importance of networking and gathering competitive intelligences.  He was constantly talking strategy with officers and was quickly working up the ranks before he was captured and jailed in Washington, DC.  In typical Mosby fashion, he befriended the guards and talked with them about strategy and all aspects of the war.  What he was doing was not only making his stay in jail more comfortable, but he was also gathering intelligence no matter how small and from across all ranks. 

When Mosby was released, he used his connections with officers to talk with and debrief General Lee about the information he gathered while imprisoned.  Lee was so impressed he promoted Mosby and gave him his own men to start a new type of guerilla warfare that was very successful in disrupting the Yankees in the Middleburg, VA area.  His unconventional warfare allowed his team of only 12 men to disrupt large battalions from the north.

 So what can we learn from John Mosby?

1. Befriend or at least find out what you can learn from your advesaries.
2. Capture and learn as much information as possible about your competitors and what is happening in your industry.
3. Know the importance of networking with those around you.
4. Don’t always follow conventional thinking – think differently.
5. Turn failures into success.  Look at you current situation and think about how you can use the failures to move forward.

Another strong leadership tool that Lincoln implemented was putting his ego aside and placing people on his staff that fundamentally disagreed with him.  We all want our ideas to be accepted, but if everyone around you consists of just “yes people,” then it is time to get some fresh eyes on your ideas.  Respectful disagreement is a great way to redefine your vision for everyone to follow, and not just those that support you.  This kind of disagreement will also help you better defend your position when you are working with those that challenge or disagree with you.  I am not suggesting that you find those who disagree with you just for the sake of disagreeing, but find those that might have constructive opposing views and see where they are coming from.  You don’t have to change your stance or position, but I guarantee your position will be much stronger for doing this.

Consultants are a great resource because they don’t have as much stake in the game as your employees do, however, they have the same goal to help you succeed.  It is much easier to bounce your ideas off of an outside consultant and get their view, instead of someone who is worried about moving up the corporate ladder or how their opinion will affect their next raise.

 When doing Six Sigma you need to collect a lot of data and use statistics to help fine tune your process.  However, I have seen many companies and skilled consultants collect this information and make interpretations of that data without looking at how it affects other measurements or processes.  You need to understand how those measurements work with other measurements or processes.  This is a concept behind the Balance Score Card and the Digital Dashboard.  How changing one number affects the other numbers or process.

 For example, the Steeler’s football team has a horrible record of getting their quarterback(QB) sacked.  If you look at their stats you would think they have the worse offensive line in football even though they won the super bowl last year.  Well if you just looked at those stats you would start replacing the offensive line and still end with the same results or worse.  However, if you look at the sack stats with other measurements you actually get to see the bigger picture like they throw more then other teams and their QB holds the ball almost twice as long as other QB’s allowing him to make bigger plays and get more yardage – which in the end is what the offensive is trying to achieve.  So just looking at one measurement and making changes base on that can be very harmfull.

Another example is when I did knowledge management and helped many companies setup their portals to share internal information.  One company that I worked with counted their portal as a success with 70% of this company hitting their web site one week after it was created.  They bragged and got articles written about how successful they where in trade magazines and other publications.  Yes, if you just put up a portal and 70% of the company is using it in one week then that is a successful.  However, the content that got 90% of the hits was the companies march maddens results.  Now if the intent of the site was to create good moral in the company then great – that was not the intent of the portal.

So just looking at measurements and making adjustment base on that measurement and not understanding how it relates to others could cause serious harm.  You must understand all the measurements and process and how changing one can and will affect other process in your company.