When your work becomes the war: Welcome to the era of 'Top Gun' CEO

Increasing number of companies are turning to military-style training to prepare executives to handle uncertainty and flux

Emma Goldberg
 
“Your company is about to go on a rescue,” declared Christian Boucousis.
 
“One of your company members went out to do reconnaissance and was shot down. Now you're going to rescue your teammate and bring them home.”
 

Boucousis, a former fighter pilot, is CEO of an organisation called Afterburner, which promises to teach “the same precision and accuracy as elite military aviators” to corporate clients. His firm has worked with Nike, Pepsi, Bank of America and many other brands. These businesses aren't struggling to save teammates shot down by enemy squadrons. Their problems? Market competition, shareholder pressures, employee turnover.

 
Some corporate executives find it thrilling, though, to spend a few hours feeling less like C-suite dwellers and more like Tom Cruise. Even for a significant cost: Afterburner’s “Top Gun Experience” training starts at $10,000 for a small team and can climb to $100,000 for a larger one.
 
“If you lose sight of the airplane you're fighting against, you lose the fight,” Boucousis said. “We use that as a metaphor - if you lose sight of your business objectives, you're not going to achieve them.”
 
There are a lot of metaphors at work in this growing field: The office as battlefield. Landing the plane in a tough quarter. Rallying the troops for a product launch.

 
Work is war — or it can feel that way to certain CEOs. To meet the moment, it's the era of “Top Gun”-style leadership training.
 
Many business leaders responded to the past few years of uncertainty — workforce churn, return-to-office struggles, economic flux — by bringing softer, more emotional conversations into boardrooms. Some encouraged open discussions of employee mental health in the office. One CEO, drawing backlash, even posted a selfie on LinkedIn showing tears streaming down his face after he laid off two employees.
 
Others went in the opposite direction, embracing a new style of corporate machismo.

 
Corporate offices have long been filled with signs of aggression. Many of those came under scrutiny amid a push for more diversity and inclusion in the corporate world. But during times of economic pressure, the chest-thumping can sometimes come back in full force, some experts say.
 
Firms have long valued military experience in hiring. Hollywood has for decades valorized military leaders as the ultimate examples of strength. But now, corporate executives are actually playacting as military members.
 
Women can and do participate in these trainings, but many of the companies offering them are run by men — a source of concern for some management experts, who say workers are looking for more empathic leadership styles, not hyperaggressive ones.

 
Military veterans, such as Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, are unsurprised that a period of workplace chaos is pushing companies to rethink management, sometimes in extreme ways.

“The pandemic revealed that we need better leadership,” Willink said. “When people aren’t coming in to work and you no longer see them every day, you have to use better decentralised command.”
 
Whether Navy SEALs wisdom translates to a product release, though, isn't clear. “The question is —is it meant to be fun? Is it meant to be photographed? Or is it meant to be impactful?,” Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of management training firm Raw Signal Group, said of professional development.

 
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a financial technology company called Constellation Digital Partners brought its employees together — some meeting in person for the first time — to simulate a NASCAR pit stop. The training was facilitated by Over the Wall, which was started by Andy Papathanassiou. Constellation’s roughly 30 employees gathered in their office parking lot around a green race car.
 
The employees took off lug nuts with an air wrench, hoisted off the car’s tire, swapped in a new tire and got the lug nuts back on. They were dripping in sweat, sunscreen and grease, looking like the harried pit stop crew members of Cruise's movie Days of Thunder. “It sounds silly for me to say, but the hardest part is actually getting the tire on,” said Kris Kovacs, CEO. “What that teaches you is you've got to preplan. Hard things, if you practice at them and preplan, become easier and easier.”

 
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