Yes-if, No-because

One of my eight different bosses (eight, Bob!), the cool one who’s not like a boss at all, today said something about the difference between the Marines and the Air Force that I thought was pretty interesting. He related a couple stories about Marines he’d had to deal with on deployments and so forth and how a Marine just gets a job done and doesn’t worry about whether it’s exactly the right way to do it or not. The Air Force does worry about that, a lot. Too much. Anyway, he said he’d had a boss when he was younger who told him that what he really wanted was to have “Yes, if” people working for him, instead of “No, because” people.

That’s a pretty good characterization. If somebody asks you to do something, do you say yes if? Or do you say no because? We had pretty good chuckle about how the entire Air Force is a no-because organization, and that extends to most of the individuals, too. Marines, of course, are yes-if types, because by the time you finish saying no-because somebody’s probably dead. That’s not true in the Air Force; by the time you finish saying no-because here… well, nothing’s happened. It’s not a really big deal, actually. Seven other people have already given no-because reasons anyway. This goes a long way to understanding the Air Force tends to think of more problems than it solves.

I like the idea of trying to be more of a yes-if person. But it might be really hard. We’re conditioned to think of excuses and not solutions; I see it every day in meetings and just on a personal basis with colleagues—the first inclination, it’s almost instinctual actually, is to examine why something won’t work, rather than to think of how to make it work. What a sad state of affairs. So tomorrow, I shall say yes-if, and never no-because.