For about 13 years, Mark Patrick has been working on the Joint Staff. Some people know what that is, but for those who do not, it's essentially the staff for the senior military officer of the Armed Forces. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the president's military advisor and the Secretary of Defense's military advisor, so he is expected to provide the best military advice in all circumstances to the President. About 2,000 staff in a wide variety of locations assist in this task, some military and some civilian. I have known Mark for several years, and he qualifies as a true OxyMoron -- someone who can operate with a broad sense of vision and mission but is simultaneously able to translate mission into plans and tactics that actually get done. And Mark does so in what is clearly a low stakes environment in which there is never any second guessing or anything that goes on of any consequence.
Critical background facts about Mark:
Favorite TV binge watch during COVID - I have to say like my binge watching is influenced by who I'm hanging out with, so my wife and I have been watching a lot of The Mandalorian because my son is really into it.
Surprising item on your Spotify playlist - I think people would be weirded out by my playlist. I’ve played guitar for years and my kids all play instruments. I’m a child of the 70s, so you would see all the usual stuff there. On the unusual side, my daughter did her semester abroad in Lyon, France. I also studied French and as a result you'd find a bunch of what I would call French cafe music. And then she took a trip to Portugal so we started talking about Fado music and that's in my playlist. My eldest daughter's boyfriend is Italian and Cuban and so you'll also find a bunch of Bossa Nova. But the most surprising might be an ear worm of a song called Les cactus from a 1960s album by a guy named Jacques Dutronc. It is a Friday afternoon kind of song.
Favorite book over the last 12 months - As I contemplate a possible life after the federal government, a friend recommended The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, which I have read cover to cover and marked up a good deal. And here’s a totally random one. I was walking through Annapolis and came upon one of those little free street libraries, shaped like a boat because it was Annapolis. And my eyes fell upon this book called Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. Amending my previous Spotify answer, because of that book you can also find a lot of Appalachian style music on my playlist.
1 - Where do your best ideas come from? How do you maintain a creative edge?
I rely on having a broad network of diverse and talented folks, especially in areas that I know I have a gap. It is really just a constant conversation. And then you must build in some white space to process the ideas you hear, because ideas are iterative. They often start with something sort of nutty, and then you talk about them. And suddenly you realize that someone in the network has done something like that before. Finding that white space is the hardest part for me. That’s one of the reasons my hobbies are creative, because it helps get you out of the grind of office life.
2 - How do you validate what you think is a great idea?
If an idea is not original, I look around to see who has tried it before in an environment like mine. After that, I'm going to try to pilot it small and scale it if it works, so that's not a very big revelation. As you start to scale, ask other people, “What do you think about this?” As I've gotten older, I know where I think I'm pretty good and where I have gaps, and I want to try to get people to fill those gaps. So, it's a collaborative thing -- an iterative thing -- but at some point you just need to take the leap.
3 - When you begin to pursue a great idea, who or what pisses you off?
I remember a conversation that I had with Paul Engel a few years ago on the AIIM board. He said to me, “Mark, you have cognitive complexity,” by which he meant that I had an unusual ability to fit all sorts of disparate skill sets and things together into a strategic outcome. But his real point was that not everyone could think like that, and I realized that was the source of a lot of frustration. In the information management business, you need to have that cognitive complexity to see how records management and knowledge management and data analytics all work together. The Joint Staff relies on our ability to give senior decision makers the best, fastest, most rigorous, and historically consistent information, and it depends upon the integration of all these skill sets. And they don't always play well together. When I'm interacting with somebody and getting frustrated, I try to keep the image of an orchestra in my mind, and my job is to get them to understand how their part fits into the broader piece.
4 - How much do you worry about failing?
As a military guy, you grow up dreading failure. But you are also motivated by it; it's what gets you up in the morning committed to pay attention to detail so that you don't overlook something at a critical moment. But you can't be paralyzed by it; you just have to mitigate the risk. There's a certain adrenaline rush when you take a managed risk. The Teddy Roosevelt speech about the man in the arena comes to mind:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
A person named David Bray comes to mind -- you can find him on social media -- when I met him, he was the CIO at the FCC. In his talks he focused on creating a safe space for people to fail in -- a sandbox where you can try new ideas, because if you're going to be innovative, you must be able to fail. One of the challenging things in my environment is that there's not a big appetite for any kind of failure. That makes it tough; you must create that. Otherwise, you just must be perfect all the time and that is never going to work.
5 - What do you consider to be your secret sauce?
I think it is a combination of resilience and a desire to have some adventure, to take some risks. If you look at the great achievers in any field, you usually hear their great successes. But the real story is all those mistakes that you made to get to that success. And I guess the last piece of advice would be to put your ego aside, because we're all humans. Your people need you to be something based upon the enterprise you're engaged in. You have to figure that role out and embrace it.
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See also:
THE OXYMORONS - S1E1 - ATLE SKJEKKELAND, INFOTECHTION