On Entrepeneurship and Officer Retention

I figured I'd post a couple of items that fascinated me when they were published during the course of the last couple of years.

First, as I've found myself in a very entrepeneurial mindset over the last year or so, I found How to Get a Real Education by Dilbert author Scott Adams to be fascinating. Adams discusses lessons in entrepeneurship and other topics that he learned in college through activities, vice actual coursework. When I was an undergrad, I found that many of my extracurricular activities taught me far more than many of my required courses. That goes for both practical and abstract lessons; for example, working as a DJ at the campus radio station offered me lessons in technical troubleshooting and keeping good records, as well as teaching me followership and cooperation with people with whom I had little in common. While Adams' points don't apply directly to security, I've found that security professionals often benefit from experience and methods that are found outside the classroom.

Second, Dr. Tim Kane authored an excellent article in The Atlantic, entitled Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving. The Heritage Foundation hosted a discussion on the topic. I found Dr. Kane's discussions of the standards by which we ought to be measuring our officers (and, by extension, our officer candidates) poignant. My own goal of becoming a naval officer ended in its infancy in part due to the Navy's standards, and I have known a number of my peers whose careers have either stagnated or ended due to the military's sometimes arbitrary standards for officer recruitment and retention. Dr. Kane's research raises questions about whether the current standards are best suited to produce and retain the best possible officer corps for our military. Both the article and the discussion are excellent.

That's it for today.

Time to Play Catch-Up

As followers of the Operation Highlander blog will already know, I've got quite a bit on my plate right now. That said, I'd like to start paying a bit more attention to this blog. Most of what I'm currently involved with on a daily basis doesn't apply directly to the major functional areas of risk management, but a lot of the news stories I follow for school or for my own situational awareness relate back to one functional area or another.

I've also found myself working on some cool projects in my spare time that can tie back into risk management. One of them was the Google Reader project I mentioned in my last post. Another has been manipulating the data in my GPS using Wikimapia, Easy GPS, and Windows Notepad. (I find that I rarely need anything more than a web browser, Notepad, and Microsoft Excel to complete most tasks.) The GPS work relates back to an article and slide deck I read a couple of years ago about honesty traces, which can be a great Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection technique.

Anyway, I've got a good backlog of links and topics for this blog, I've made an effort to get ahead on posts for the Operation Highlander blog, and I'm in good shape on my school and extracurricular projects, so I'll try to spend the next few weeks posting some content to this one. I hope everyone out there finds it helpful.