Marianne Barriaux writes...
An ex fighter-jet pilot teaches firms how to work with military precision.
The lights go out, music filters through the loudspeakers and rises to a crescendo, spotlights come on, and five men in fighter pilot gear stroll purposefully on stage. You might be forgiven for thinking that this is a stage remake of Top Gun, not a corporate development seminar designed to improve your business. But that is what Justin Hughes, a former fighter pilot and Managing Director of Mission Excellence, is there to do.
Hughes set up the company in 2002 after six years in the RAF flying a Tornado fighter jet, and a further 3 years in the Red Arrows. He was looking to set up a business where he could use what he had learned in the armed services and apply it to the commercial environment. “Clearly the flying is of little or no relevance to anybody else,” he says. “What the skill set really is, other than flying, is about operational excellence. The military is very good at delivering what they set out to do, at a very high standard. So I try to encapsulate what the issues were that allowed them to do that.”
THAT FIGHTING SPIRIT
So what exactly do flying a fighter jet and running a business have in common? The image of Tom Cruise whizzing around the skies is about as far removed from business as most people are from the Hollywood superstar himself.
“Peoples’ opinion of a fighter mission is often governed by the fact that they’ve seen Top Gun and they’ve watched the news,” Hughes says. “What a fighter mission looks like is about 60 aircraft taking off from lots of different bases, lots of different nationalities and different cultures. Some of these people have never met before, never even spoken, and they have to execute something in perfect cohesion and get it right every time.”
It is precisely this type of military organisation, in which thousands of personnel are involved, where the pressure is high, and where failure is simply not an option, that Hughes is now applying to businesses around the country. “A fighter mission is very similar to a lot of businesses, in that they have got huge multi-disciplinary teams who don’t actually have face-to-face contact or communication – but who are all working in cohesion towards a single goal.”
Hughes organises one-off seminars and conferences, as well as longer more in-depth training with individual companies. One of his first major clients was Prudential Insurance, and he has since worked with many blue chip groups, including Merrill Lynch and BAE Systems.
He focuses on three areas where he thinks most businesses need to improve – mission analysis, or the analysis of task execution in a complex environment and deciding where to focus effort; leadership, or how to turn words and vision into effective action and outcomes; and execution, or doing things right, so it actually gets delivered.
WHEN THE PRESSURE IS ON
“Fighter pilots and companies face the same issues. the bottom-line issue is that there is a penalty for failure, except that the penalty is different. In business the penalty is financial and could lead to going out of business or losing jobs. In flying fast jets, the penalty is immediate and potentially terminal.”
Hughes likes to throw in anecdotes relating to his days as a fighter pilot to illustrate how good organisation is the key to a successful outcome in a high-pressure situation. One such example is when his aircraft went off the runway as it landed, due to brake failure. He contemplated ejecting, but made a split-second decision to remain with the plane, which eventually came to a halt, leaving both Hughes and the aircraft unscathed.
“I use that as an example of contingency planning. In a highly pressured mission, when things start going differently to how you planned it, there are generally key decision points.
ON A ROLL
“The learning that comes out of stories like that is that we try and plan ahead for the key decision points we might be facing when things start going wrong. So we make the decisions about what we do at those points before we actually get to them.”
He admits the early days of Mission Excellence were tough, as with most start-up companies. But after three years the company is on a roll, and turned over more than £100,000 last month – more than it turned over in its first year of existence. A half-day conference seminar does not come cheap, costing between £7,000 and £20,000 depending on delegate numbers. But Hughes insists that has not stopped demand for his services, which – although fairly well established in America – are still unique in the UK.
“Our biggest challenge as a business is how to control the expansion. We could take on another five people, but it’s just about focus and keeping things on track. We have five full-timers, three heavily committed associates, and a pool of about 12 contractors. When I started out it was just me, so it makes a change.”
