 Good morning How is everybody this morning enough caffeine? We're gonna the people in the back row. You're gonna be okay All right So that would be if you would move your head in the vertical if you're gonna be okay That would be a good feedback for me. Okay. I see a cup. Okay. Good. Thank you. Okay. Well, it was It is a great honor for me to be back here after helping kick off the the academic year for many of you And thanks for ordering up the great weather When I was here last August I talked to all of you about the relationship between you the professionals and the profession and I hope those remarks helped in some small way frame the year for you as You embarked on your journey Myself I've had the same amount of time as you have except a little bit more focus and a few less papers to write About my journey Admiral Howe spoke to all the entire Navy flags and about half of our senior executives a few weeks ago at the at our all-flag conference And he talked about what the profession of arms means to combat effectiveness and war fighting But then he also talked at his individual level what it meant to be a professional And he traveled on a journey that I can relate to because a year ago Being a professional to him was making sure your uniform was squared away making sure that you were physically fit and So the journey with the help of many of the folks in this room the journey has led us in other Directions about what it means to be a professional. It's not just about skill sets It's not just about PT scores, and it's not just about things that in the past have been easily measured It's the ethical underpinnings that are the true foundation of our profession of arms So it's with great pleasure that I join the symposium with you about the health of the profession and more importantly What's being done across the services and I might add internationally What the services and the militaries around the world are doing to reinvigorate our calling So whenever I talk about the profession I'm reminded of the caliber of those who contribute to work in this field the sheer number of PhDs working on the profession is Staggering so it's with a sense of serendipity that one of my staff read a piece in the New Yorker last week That asked if philosophy can notes Martin. This is going to be it'll turns out. Okay. Yeah, it turns out. Okay Somebody asked in this New York or article. Did you see it? Okay, so you're okay. It ends well is Philosophy it is a great ideas by celebrated thinkers who buy the elegance of the presentation Illuminate for us the most profound questions or does it refer to stuff? And I know this isn't you that's really really hard to follow Especially when certain Brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence Okay, I'll leave it for you decide and I just I'm sorry I just I didn't do the monotone very well because that's kind of not my thing But I'll let you be the judge right so you all had some exposure to that over the past year You get to think about it The health of the profession is an appropriate way to talk about what I've seen in the last 13 months The way the services are thinking about the profession and executing their strategies to develop it Reminds me a bit of a crossfit regime regime. There are people looking at ethical stamina They're talking about agility of decision-making. They're talking about the strength of trust they're talking about the power of vulnerability and the accuracy of leader development in Short the services are trying to get to a point where the profession serves as a personal trainer of sorts To move away from the dad bod of underlying technical and tactical expertise Covered in a layer of unethical fat They're providing you with exercises and a box in which to exercise I want to give you a few examples from across the services starting right here with Admiral Howe's Execution of the leader development strategy a Small group including many of the folks in the front row front two rows here are working with the Navy's 18 tribes To strengthen the elements that we share right so what is the overarching profession do to embrace and Integrate those tribes so just like a strike group and a striking force Integrates each of their tribes to be to produce the maximum combat effectiveness What can we do in our leadership development strategy to make sure we take both the best of our tribes? But yet integrate them with the Navy's umbrella strategy so that we have a unifying force in the profession How do we use things like the special warfare community's teamwork analysis model for example? That's being done by the leadership of communities with input from senior enlisted from junior officers and senior officers Another of our sea service partners the Marine Corps where the Marines I can't tell you last time you're in uniform Okay, so so free Marines. Okay, so Marine Corps as you might imagine is taking a more personalized approach They have defined squad leaders and their classroom instructors as the main targets as Influencers of Marines so they figure if they're trying to put a new leadership development strategy out there and it starts in a classroom They better have the instructors on board So they're not you know using the monotone and kind of just parroting what the Marine Corps thinks is a good idea So the program they are renewing their emphasis on leader development The programs are very selective and the investments are proportional to their impact Another sea service the Coast Guard. We have any Coast Guard's coast guardians in here at least one person couple couple of you Okay, the Coast Guard has done an amazing study at the strategic level Where they went out and they defined what a culture of respect looks like They took their Performance Technology Center took a few people down there looked around the Coast Guard and compared their mod They basically did a mission analysis They said here's what good looks like and then they went around the Coast Guard and looked at how the different bases Compared to that what good looks like culture of respect and they were in the process of debriefing the commandant of the Coast Guard So we're really looking forward to those results Because all too often our lessons learned strategy focuses on the negative lessons learned so I really applaud both All three Navy Marine Corps and Coast Guard for what they've done to help us understand what good looks like Right a little bit easier with CrossFit right never do ever sells there Well, sometimes they show before and after pictures But usually when we're trying to sell a workout routine we show you know somebody that's in pretty good shape So it's helpful to start with what good looks like The Air Force okay, so airman in the room. Okay, great The Air Force is infusing the conversation about the profession Across their their education and training system from basic military training to commander's course Courses from enlisted PMA through general officer and senior executive seven hours. They have a doctor Jeff Smith who's Who's really got a very interesting understanding of what it means to invest in human capital and he takes He takes a lot of examples from parenting and kind and and his basic messages Hey, it's as much about leaders investing in knowing their airmen as it is airmen Taking the time to understand what leadership expects of them. So that's been very very successful I think they've briefed over 50,000 airmen across the Air Force and whenever they come to the Pentagon They invite the joint audience the Army. Okay, so where are my soldiers? Okay, great raise your hands a little higher. Come on. I called on you last you should have okay there Thank you. Okay, so lieutenant general Brown Out at the combined arm center, which is under Trey doc and and the army the army Infrastructure has been outstanding and they have been really good at sharing what they've learned Lieutenant general Brown has been spent the last year and had several of his colonels Looking at the human dimension peeling back the layers of what does it mean to be a professional and what does it mean? What does it require to not just survive in ambiguity and chaos, but to thrive in Ambiguity and chaos and the size of the effort that they have undertaken Not only the fact that they have brought in Folks from around the army, but they've also used the hundred behavioral scientists that the army research institute has So they bring a pretty good Not a pretty good a very sound academic underpinning to their work So lastly inside the Department of Defense, so right we had secretary Carter relieve secretary Hegel and Then secretary Carter brought in at the beginning of April brought the former under secretary of the army Secretary Carson secretary Brad Carson came over from army He's the new head of personnel and readiness within the Department of Defense And he refers to secretary Carter as a man in a hurry But I will tell you secretary Carson set out on a course to understand what we need to do For the to develop the force of the future to make sure that Next year the next five years the next ten years the next 20 years We understand what we want out of the force of the future and can attack those hard problems And if you don't think he's a man in a hurry he gave himself and his task force 120 days to get their report to the secretary defense if you don't think he's serious about it I know that we're on day 9 we have 98 days left of those 120 because he starts every meeting with yep We're a hundred we're X number of days into our hundred and twenty days So he is intent on not letting the bureaucracy rule the profession So as I started talking about the profession as a personal trainer of sorts I briefly described some of the equipment and some of the routines that the professions putting into place What I haven't conveyed is the commitment of the people working on these efforts It was all for Wendell Holmes who might have said it best in the great democracy of self-devotion Private and general stand side by side The profession of arms is truly a community of practice Which means it's not about people like me standing up here behind a podium You walking out the door and having not a single thing in your life different You are a community of practice by virtue of who you decide to engage in conversation Not just here in the academic environment though. That's a really good place to practice It's about who you engage when you go back out to your operating units, and I would tell you that's actually the easy part a Senior leader was at an off-site last year and talked about going back to that horrible building He was talking about the five-sided wind tunnel But I will tell you The Pentagon is just a good a place to start a conversation start a community of practice Which is what we've tried to model with my seven-person team. It's just as important to be committed to the profession of arms It's actually harder when you're on staff duty because you think that you don't have to invest anything in your people You're just there to get staff work done that probably that model probably it needs to be flipped on its head What about you what part do you play? What have you done in the past ten months? You've learned about ethical leadership. You've learned about strategic decision making. What are you going to do with that knowledge? I contend that you as professionals have to demonstrate that motivation and be willing to either join or start a community if you Don't see it If you don't see a community of practice, then it's all about you start that community talk about it You're in a position to serve up a steady diet of ethical conversations As opposed to um, you know, I mean, I'm a Red Sox fan I admit that every once in a while the first thing I do is look at the score from last night Okay, but but the conversations right you have time the conversations Engaged in what you've learned over the past year are extraordinarily important and I have I have the odd Opportunity to say that Martha Stewart was speaking at a conference I was at earlier this week and what she actually said is you know, just because The folks who work for you have different educational levels Doesn't mean that they don't deserve the same level of respect I would contend that just like a workout for me is different than a workout from the best The shield or the Marine who's in the best shape your subordinates deserve the same Conversation it's just that my CrossFit regime might be different from some of your CrossFit regimes. That probably makes sense so I Started today talking about the journey of Professionalism and I found this to be a more common theme that you might imagine I've thought about the journey that Admiral Stockdale took, you know He wasn't any different than you or I before he was shot down High degree of intellect, which is I'm sure shared by many of you He wasn't trying to inculcate philosophy into his ready rooms when he was commander of the air group He was doing his duty just like the overwhelming majority of those in uniform today do every day But then an extraordinary event happened and it changed him These are his words. This is not my analysis. These are his words It focused him and made him realize what was important for Admiral Stockdale It was self-respect knowing that in the midst of privation. No one could strip that of him Porter Halliburton also a POW at the Hanoi Hilton Said for him the last freedom was the ability to choose The former British Defense Attaché to the US Royal Commando General Buster house Nearly died actually he did die in fact was resuscitated during a water-skiing accident He described we had a few meetings with him that we really every we've bared our souls He said to our office He needed something to focus on when he was recovering because it was a slow recovery a lone tree Out on a hill in his native England focused him Because it represented his strength the strength of his family the strength of his faith and the strength of his nation That's what brought him back and kept him going through recovery These are what psychologists called significant emotional events. I Would offer that your journey doesn't need to entail one of these Significant emotional events to help you focus The other way the far easier path in my humble opinion is the daily exercise of ethical thought of ethical decision-making and of thinking about who you really are Psychologists such as Dan Ariely have used experiments and brain scans to prove that reminders such as these Will help inoculate against ethical fading That being said Aristotle held that the daily exercise of virtues during one's life was part of euda monia the happiness of life You see it all does come back to philosophy asking those profound questions David Brooks in his new book the road to character describes two types of virtues Resume virtues describe how well you work Whereas eulogy virtues describe how well you live As you might have guessed he argues that we should spend more time working on our eulogy virtues So I would tell you to exercise your moral muscles on a daily basis By doing so you're not only advance yourselves, but you advance our profession of arms and As a side benefit you get to enhance your eulogy virtues Thanks very much