Where the heck would have George C Marshall have picked up all that business expertise?

I think it is the other way around. There were not a lot of engineering schools in 19th century America. West Pointers were doing a lot more than fighting Indians, they were building the Nation. Lots of them were running railroads or building cities and came back to fight the Civil War.

If you read Weigley's "American Way of War" or Hattaway's "How the North Won" they are talking about war as a giant engineering problem, not war as a business.

The American way of war was and still is, an engineering way of war. They used the "P principle" or plenty principle (we always advocated when using demo), make sure you have more than enough!??!

I must strongly agree with Tom that a claim that Marshall patterned the expansion of the U. S. Army on corporate business is a hard to substantiate. Firstly, Marshall had basically no experience in the world of private enterprise and corporate business so it is difficult to see where he found such inspiration?

The re-organization of the Army’s Headquarters and the Office of the Chief of Staff under Marshall was largely inspired by his staff experience under Pershing and his recognition that the Army’s pre-war organization was duplicative, over staffed and inefficient. In fact Marshall’s skillful reorganization was an event that corporations could have learned a thing or two from.

American business practices followed military practices as evidenced by the use of the terms "line" and "staff" throughout business management books before and after WWII.

My best friend's father was General Marshall's aide when General Marshall was the head of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in our PNW. General Marshall has his own, unique methods for running meetings and managing people. One vignette his father told me was that when General Marshall felt that participants in a meeting were failing to pay attention to what he was saying, he would keep lowering his voice towards a whisper until people had to shut up and pay careful attention. He was a gentle man as opposed to a didactic leader.

Later, General Marshall himself, attributed his success in managing the military to his having been exposed to several state National Guard units as an advisor and one who ran Field Training Exercises. He said that this experience gave him a feeling for who the American soldier was and how he should be lead. Certainly this is not a theoretical business management approach. Like a good NCO, General Marshall became a good psychologist who understood who he was working with and what he could expect of them.

Any suggestions to the contrary border on revisionist history. BTW, the former aide became a leader of the San Francisco business community after he returned from combat in the Pacific. He was a very humble man himself, and passed away recently.

Who is he? Is he from the IDF?

An entire generation of British management consultants were open half a century ago to admitting that then-modern consultancy was a straight civilian adaptation -- read "pinch" -- from the lessons learned by the military in Word War I, until the time of that conflict probably the most complex accumulation and direction of humanity the world had ever seen. S

Yes. Shamir seems to have got his point backward.

I'm lucky to work for a boss that is doing the tangible things necessary to foster mission command in his subordinates. Truly lucky (the other battalions are not so lucky).

For example, he has scheduled battalion Officer Professional Development classes (OPDs) in a systematic sequence, with terrain walks (Tactical Exercise Without Troops- TEWTs), in between, and homework assignements for the platoon leaders that is progressively built upon during each OPD. The homework is a mission on the actual piece of terrain that we walk between OPDs. Eventually this will lead to platoon simulated missions in the Virtual Battle Simuation II (VBS2) facility and blank-fire real platoon missions.

I am impressed with my boss's ability to stick with this plan.. It is time consuming, but will pay dividends and will grow lieutenants that can accomplish mission command.

If there are other battalions out there doing this, I'd love to hear about it. This is the first time I've seen such a plan being accomplished.

Did Steve Jobs foster an auftragstatic-esque mentality in his subordinates prior to his death?

As I listen to the pundits discuss how Apple will change with the loss of Steve Jobs, I found myself coming back to the various auftragastatic discussion threads here.

My understanding was that it was Elihu Root who was behind the patterning of US Army after its contemperaneous US business which essentially came down to Taylor's ideas about management... There are several very good history books about this; I am sure you know Aitken's about Watertown Arsenal (Aitken, Hugh G.J. 1960. Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action 1908-1915. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.).

And I am sure you know this article:

Weigley, Russell F. 1969. “The Elihu Root Reforms and the Progressive Era” in William Geffen (ed.) Command and Commanders in Modern Warfare. Colorado Springs, CO: US Air Force Academy.