Our man Rear Admiral Mike Rogers (1810)

with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen at a briefing. Mike Rogers is the JCS J2, intelligence officer for the “baddest Chairman ever” (according to Admiral Mullen’s trainer – Dave).

The Issue of Accountability

I hope actually in the time you’re here (Air Command and Staff College) you really do chew on this and have some healthy debates and discussions about it – is the whole issue of accountability. It’s how I grew up, it’s why I stayed in, it’s why I love command. And there isn’t anybody at any level of seniority that wouldn’t tell you, you know, that their worst day in command was better than any other day they had anywhere else, and that their worst day in command, some days, you know, there was a hand that reached in to save their careers and they got lucky.

That said, we are accountable for our commands at every level, and that message is very important. That’s a very important message right back to – and I’ll speak specifically to the chiefs’ position, and having been a chief of a service, I do understand that. And when you lose that accountability, when accountable officers don’t step forward and say, it’s my command, okay, and my command – in Navy terminology – is aground, and when you are aground, you know, you walk off the brow. That’s the rule. We know that. So the accountability aspect of all that is also really important.

Command is the lodestone

In the military, (Admiral Mike) Mullen told the (Wharton Business School) students, command is the lodestone for leaders. “It’s the pinnacle,” he said, adding that accountability is fundamental to the joy and challenge of command because commanders find themselves having to put together teams to accomplish the missions they are assigned.

Command is built around trust – both up and down – and hinges on choosing the right people, Mullen said. The hardest job he has had in his 40 years in the military has been selecting personnel for the various missions, he told the audience.

Few people succeed by just “winging it,” the chairman said. He urged the young men and women to have a strategic plan and follow it. Leaders without a strategy or a plan are the ones who fail, he said.

Information is crucial to military and business success, Mullen said, but he noted that the more senior a leader becomes, the more removed he or she is from what’s really going on.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Admiral Mike Mullen in a 3 October 2008 address to Wharton Business School

Nothing more important

“There’s nothing more important … to what we do than leadership. It covers the full spectrum of our people. It covers the full spectrum of our missions. It covers what we’re doing now and how we look to the future.”

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff