Podcast Interview: General Paul Funk

Episode Summary

General Paul Funk, a retired four-star general who led the coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and later commanded the Army Training and Doctrine Command, grew up an Army brat on bases including Fort Hood, the son of a three-star general. He planned to stay in the Army for three years, but he loved team sports and came to see the military as the greatest team ever assembled. A great team, he says, listens, develops its own shorthand, and presses each other for excellence. He draws on James Kerr’s book Legacy, about the New Zealand All Blacks, and its idea that you are just the body in the jersey and are responsible for leaving it in a better place. That line is the last of Funk’s Fundamentals, the 40 principles he collected over what he describes as a 42-year career.

On rising in a career, General Funk lists hard work, sacrifice, lifelong learning, some luck in who you work for, and mentorship. He distinguishes mentorship, which improves your current performance, from sponsorship, which recognizes potential and speaks your name in rooms you are not in. Marty Dempsey, whom he met in Desert Storm and who became a lifelong friend, was willing to sponsor him in rooms he was not in. His practical advice is to do the boss’s work first, because then you have time for your own goals.

For General Funk, the essence of leadership is understanding people, because people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. He says trust takes years to build and can be lost in a moment, and he recalls the saying his father coined as his division commander in Desert Storm: talking ain’t fighting. He calls time the one finite resource leaders cannot get more of and says how you spend it training your organization is the essence of what a leader has to do.

General Funk led the coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and he says the key was understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each partner. Nations joined with caveats, such as fighting in Iraq but not Syria, and a leader has to know which caveats help and which not to push. He sometimes used another nation’s looser information restrictions and put a message out through its media as a proxy.

General Funk says he is now working with Larry Smith, whom he describes as a former chairman of Tokyo Electron US, on a military talent pipeline in central Texas that prepares veterans for high-paying jobs. As a commander, he would ask soldiers why they joined and why they stay, and says the answer to the second question is almost always people. He tells of a young nurse who had been living in her car when an Army recruiter found her, and who later built a walking blood bank that collected 27 liters of blood in about an hour. He says he never had a bad day in the Army.

What You’ll Learn

Never fight a fair fight: bring overwhelming capability to a problem, as General Funk describes in Desert Storm, where overwhelming combat power decided the ground attack in about 100 hours.

Onboarding is the one place you have everyone’s attention, General Funk says, so leaders should explain their vision to new employees, even for one hour a month, which he says will save man-years.

People learn through significant emotional experience and repetition, General Funk says, so effective training should define clear tasks, conditions, and standards for everything the mission requires.

Every time you think you’re somebody important, General Funk says, try ordering around somebody else’s dog, because behaviors matter and you cannot fake how you live your life.

Simplicity is the most important and most overlooked principle of war, General Funk says, because it lets a sergeant and squad execute complex tasks when they understand what the boss several levels up wants.

Be positively intrusive in people’s lives, General Funk says: asking leading questions is how a leader makes a positive impact.

About General Paul Funk

General Paul Funk is a retired four-star Army general who led the international military coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and served as commanding general of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, which oversees the training of Army forces. Over a career of nearly four decades, his commands also included the 1st Infantry Division and Fort Riley, and III Corps and Fort Hood, where he was born. He compiled Funk’s Fundamentals, a list of 40 principles from his career, and says he is now focused on a military talent pipeline in central Texas to help veterans move into high-paying jobs.

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