3 Lessons from Uncle Sam's Misguided Children

I've been rereading MCDP-1, the Marine Corps doctrinal publication on warfighting.

Useful (but atypical) reading for an entrepreneur, I know.

I keep coming back to it because it distills Sun Tzu and Clausewitz into something you can actually use in business.

Hard truths about how smaller organizations defeat larger ones.

That's (all of) us. Smaller, outgunned, facing competitors with more money, more people, more everything.

Three ideas hit me differently this time through, and I thought I’d share them.

Lesson 1: Speed comes from letting go

The manual distinguishes between speed and tempo. Speed is how fast you move. Tempo is how fast you complete entire cycles of decision and action.

A big company might move fast on any single thing. But they're slow at the cycle…observe, orient, decide, act.

Meetings about meetings. Approvals on approvals. They're stuck in their own mass.

Your advantage isn't running faster. It's completing the whole cycle before they've finished talking about it. Your competitors are operating on an old version of the world which is a huge disadvantage.

BUT you can't do this if you're involved in every decision.

The manual calls it "mission tactics"—you tell someone what needs to happen and why, but not how. You let them figure it out.

If you’ve heard me speak (ad nauseam) about “end states” - it's this concept.

When someone on your team solves a customer problem in an hour instead of waiting two days for you to weigh in, you're operating at a different tempo. You're running a fast decision cycle. That's where you can win.

Lesson 2: Don't fight where they're strong

The manual is blunt: attrition warfare is when you pit strength against strength.

The bigger force usually wins. Maneuver warfare is when you avoid their strength entirely and hit them where they're weak.

Small businesses die in wars of attrition. Price wars. Marketing spend wars. Features wars. You will lose these. You don't have the money to fight and win this game.

The text talks about "surfaces and gaps." Surfaces are hard spots—where the enemy is strong. Gaps are soft spots—where they're weak, exposed, or nonexistent.

FIND THE GAPS.

Maybe the big competitor has a huge sales team but terrible service after the sale. Gap.

Maybe they have every feature but their product is impossible to use. Gap.

Maybe they serve everyone okay but nobody really well. Gap.

Don't go where they're looking. Don't fight on their terms. Find what they can't or won't do, and own it completely.

Lesson 3: Intent survives when plans don't

Plans fail. Markets shift, customers change their minds, suppliers flake. The manual acknowledges this: in chaos, rigid plans become obsolete almost immediately.

Their solution is "commander's intent"—a clear statement of purpose. Not the ten-step plan, but the WHY behind it.

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

When everyone on your team understands the intent, they can adapt.

If the plan breaks (and it will), they don't freeze…they improvise toward the same goal.

I see businesses fail at this constantly.

Someone hands down a detailed plan, the situation changes, and everything grinds to a halt because nobody knows what they're actually trying to achieve. They only know the steps, and the steps don't work anymore.

If your team knows WHY you're doing something—the real purpose, not just the task list—they can figure out a new path when the original one disappears. The business stays coherent even when everything's falling apart.

It's not about being a general

I'm not suggesting you run your business like a general.

But the problem is the same: how do you win when you're outsized and outresourced?

You don't win by being bigger. You win by being faster, more focused, and more adaptable.

You decentralize decisions so you can move at tempo. You avoid their strengths and attack their gaps. You give people intent instead of instructions so they can think instead of just execute.

The Marines figured this out because they had to. They're always the smaller force… and so are we!

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

We've been ripping the podcast lately and have gotten some wonderful feedback and really significant growth.

Check out this episode to get a taste for the kinds of things we're talking about:

I can’t believe its been 16 years since Khost!