Our P&L Statement Was in Lives

Allen West was born in Atlanta in 1961, by his own account in a segregated hospital, in the same neighborhood that produced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His father was a corporal in a segregated Army in World War II. His godfather was a Tuskegee Airman. In 1976, the bicentennial year, his father told him at fifteen that he would be the first officer in the family. He put on a junior ROTC uniform that year and did not stop wearing one for almost three decades.

Twenty-two of those years were active duty. He commissioned through Army ROTC at the University of Tennessee, commanded an artillery battalion out of Fort Hood, led 650 soldiers in Iraq, and later returned to the region as a civilian advisor to the Afghan National Army in Kandahar. He then represented Florida's 22nd district in Congress, sitting on the Armed Services and Small Business committees, the first African American Republican to represent Florida in Congress since Reconstruction. The highest per capita zip code in the country, Palm Beach Island, was in his district. He is now executive director of the American Constitutional Rights Union, the organization founded by Reagan attorney general Ed Meese, and host of the weekly Steadfast and Loyal podcast.

This is a business conversation, and West spends most of it teaching. The five C's of leadership: courage, competence, commitment, conviction, character. Commander's intent broken into purpose, method and end state, and why an operation briefed that way survives its own plan falling apart. Why the 100 percent plan always gets beat and the 65 to 70 percent plan wins. Why the weekly after action review, good, bad and ugly, is the practice most businesses are missing. Why the leader's job is to get off the X and decide, and why refusing to decide is the worst option available in an ambush or a quarter.

He still carries the worn 3x5 cards he carried as a battalion commander. Cool heads always prevail. Soldiers don't care what you know, they want to know that you care. Issues come with two recommendations. Leaders know what right looks like. Respect is earned and not granted. Leaders take responsibility, never credit.

The history is not decoration. He takes about 25 college students to Normandy every year and had just come back from the 82nd anniversary of D-Day when this was recorded. He walks through John Buford at Gettysburg reading three days ahead of the battle, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ordering a bayonet charge as a professor of rhetoric with no ammunition left, the stealth helicopter that went down on the bin Laden raid and the team that continued the mission anyway, and the carrier Yorktown steaming back out of Pearl Harbor in two weeks against a six month repair estimate. Every one of them lands on the same point: brief the intent, train past the plan, and let people move when they hit the boulder.

He is direct about what he thinks government owes a business owner, which is conditions and a level playing field rather than a definition of success. He is just as direct about quarterly earnings myopia, and why a company aiming at the 25 yard target loses to an adversary thinking in 50 to 100 year cycles. He makes the same argument about defense procurement, where an off the shelf sidearm took the Army nearly two years to select while China went from zero aircraft carriers to three.

He also nearly died. Six years ago on Memorial Day weekend he was hit on I-35 at 75 miles an hour, took 21 stitches in his face, and stayed off a motorcycle for four and a half years. He rides again.