Corporate Special Forces

The implosion of our financial giants, the eviscerating impact of off-shore sub-contracting, and the constantly expanding encroachment of foreign ownership of icon American companies bear screaming testimony to the urgent and imperative need for business to make a quantum leap in its ability to adapt quickly, innovatively, incisively, accurately, and preemptively to constantly evolving markets and intruding competition. Conventional corporate methods of managing innovation and performance in many if not most American companies, were formulated in, and are still influenced by, a post world war II era of effortless competitive superiority. The primary thrust was to manage resources, control human effort, and dictate corporate politics within a traditional, and at the time, very profitable conservative framework. That model does not work well in today’s world economy. The problem is not that we don’t realize that. We do. The problem is knowing specifically how to transform a traditional company that is invisibly and subconsciously steeped in outdated mores and lethargic work-for-wages attitudes into a fast-moving, hard-hitting, extreme-performance organization. That requires tools, methods, and attitudes that are often unknown, inaccessible, scarce, or too fragmented to be effective. Corporate Special Forces is a business adaptation of the selection, training, and attitudes of Military Special Forces, police SWAT teams, and civilian 911 emergency response units. It provides management with a five-step process for establishing a high-performance mini-culture of innovators, rapid responders, and extreme achievers at little or no cost in three to six weeks, and then sustaining it indefinitely. This is a permanent shift in maximizing human effort and competitive superiority, not another treatise on temporarily improving productivity by fractions of percentage points using quick-fix or fad-of-the-month methods. Corporate Special Forces describes how to create an entirely new, unconventional, self-contained, and extreme performance work ethic as an elite sub-culture operating compatibly and efficiently within the traditional culture. It is driven by task force units (CSF teams) exclusively dedicated to resolving crises, achieving pivotal objectives, and creating breakthrough innovations at a level of speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness that would be impossible for conventional methods. CSF teams are endowed with entrepreneurial empowerment, trained in advanced business skills, and provided unique permissions and support systems. They only deal with critical objectives, one objective at a time, all day, every business day, from inception of the assignment to its successful conclusion. Their achievements eclipse to embarrassing insignificance the fragile results of traditional teams and/or conventional work groups. Corporate Special Forces is also a handbook for trainers. It describes how to locate undiscovered and/or underutilized potential high achievers from within the existing employee base and how to form them into elite teams. It defines adult learning principles, tools, and methods that apply to crisis intervention and high-stakes achievement in a volatile business environment. It provides a template for incorporating those principles and tools into hands-on experiential training methods. Graduates exemplify supreme commitment, exceptional camaraderie, and high self-confidence, similar to their military special forces and civilian emergency-response counterparts.