Military

The Army Is Falling Short in Developing Creative Leaders

The Army is mildly obsessed with innovative leadership, as reflected throughout strategic documents such as the Army Operating Concept and the Army Vision, and leadership doctrine. For example, the Army’s leadership manual extols the necessity of innovative and creative leadership and its associated approaches, solutions, ideas and thinking more than 50 times in just over 100 pages.

Given that level of emphasis, one would assume a corresponding Army focus on the process of developing innovative leaders. Unfortunately, that assumption would be largely wrong.

Army senior leadership has beaten the innovation drum for more than 15 years, coinciding with the wave of business innovation books in the late ’90s such as Tom Peters’ The Circle of Innovation and Clayton Christensen’s original The Innovator’s Dilemma. However, the Army has failed to create and foster in doctrine and practice a culture of innovative leadership in our ranks.