Often, we base our view of what will happen in the future on what has happened in the past. That is a bit like trying to drive a car while following directions being given by someone looking out the back window! Tricky!
However, notwithstanding the folly of future gazing, I am going to give it a go. My money is on more success for Inzpire in 2016 and the next giant leap forward. We will undoubtedly face the usual storms and squalls associated with growing a business but I am certain that 2016 will be a good year for Inzpire, perhaps even a defining year.
How can I be so confident? Because, over the past 3 years, Inzpire has gone head-to-head with several global multinationals in increasingly fierce competitions for key UK military contracts and, on just about every occasion, we have won! Yet, how can that be? How can a Lincoln-based organisation of around 100 people win against the sheer power and might of organisations with hundreds and thousands of employees, global reach, and immense resources at their disposal?
I suspect it has a lot to do with the sort of people that you find at Inzpire: a small band of exceptionally determined men and women who genuinely understand their customers. Virtually everyone here has a distinguished military career behind them. We have around 800 years of cockpit time in our full time team, several DFC’s and hundreds of thousands of flight hours on just about every type of aircraft imaginable. We have a huge number of QWI’s, AWIs, QFI’s and AHWIs, not to mention all sorts of other military expertise. When we say that we genuinely understand the military aviation operating environment, it is not a soundbite, it’s the truth. That truth is fundamental to our competitive strategy and the source of our optimism. The marketing guru Philip Kotler once said that “truly understanding your customers is at the heart of good business”. We wholeheartedly agree; it’s so much easier to empathise with your customer when you have walked in his/her shoes.
Our entire organisation is deeply suffused in a military culture and ethos. This is a very good thing because, in many respects, business and warfare are similar. In both, there are objectives to be achieved, strategies to be developed, opponents to be overcome, tactics to be employed, resources to be used effectively, and people to be motivated. The British military is self-evidently rather good at all these things and we at Inzpire have imported proven military competitive philosophies into Inzpire’s commercial operating model.
For a start, we believe in agility, fast decision and surprise. These are classically military attributes. Our OODA loop (Google “OODA” if you have never heard of it) is very fast! We can often make important decisions in an afternoon that huge multinational defence companies take many months over. In military aviation, speed is life. We think that applies in business too.
To embed agility and speed at Inzpire we use the concept of Mission Leadership to accelerate our decision making. Mission Leadership is the military approach to empowerment that is best summed up as: “Don’t tell people how to achieve things, tell them what to achieve and let them surprise you with the results” (General George S Patton). The idea is that leaders should leave execution decisions up to the executors; they should push decision making as far down the organisation as they can. Leaders should set the “Vision”, “mission” and “strategy” but decentralise the execution. We really try hard to employ this approach at Inzpire and our staff regularly amaze us with their ingenuity and success! We believe that the best way to find out if you can trust someone, is to trust them and see what happens. We believe that good leaders gain authority by giving it away. Thinking like that is a super lubricant – it makes things happen very fast.
Coupled with agility, we believe in the power of narrow focus. We understand what we are and what we are not. We believe that, if you chase 2 rabbits, you will catch neither. We understand that we are a military aviation business; we simply don’t want to be all things to all men. Everything that we do is connected to military aviation in some way – even the air-land work we do. Military aviation is our unifying theme. And we are going to keep it that way. By concentrating on what we are good at we know we can compete with anyone in our space.
We also believe in Manoeuvrist thinking. This is the powerful military idea that is at the heart of how Inzpire operates. It is the other side of the Mission Command coin, and closely linked to it. In essence, it is about communicating a clear and well considered CEO’s intent (specifying what are we trying to achieve and why that is important) combined with giving other leaders within the organisation the freedom to deliver that intent in whichever way they see fit. This gives Inzpire’s leaders the freedom to “manoeuvre” – to seize the initiative, to apply local strength against local weakness, to take risks and to outflank the opponents (because sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way there). It is all about strategic patience (think of a cat waiting outside a mousehole) and about targeting our opponents’ conceptual and moral components as well as their financial, commercial and technical capabilities. It is ju-jitsu, it is using our opponents’ size against them, it is striking at the heart of their will and cohesion.
We also believe in another military mantra: integrity of purpose. We see this as the need for our work to have real meaning. Unlike many businesses, Inzpire is not just here to make money, important though that is. Profit is a by-product of what we do, not the driving force. Our deep underlying purpose - the very reason that Inzpire exists in the first place - is far deeper than wealth creation. It is about creating a “revolution in the defence industrial relationship”. Indeed, #revolutionindefence is a hashtag that you will frequently see on Inzpire tweets. The way we see it is this: the defence industrial relationship has gone wrong. It is characterised by suspicion, mistrust and broken promises. There have been too many cost overruns, quality failures and missed deadlines. As former military personnel ourselves, we were on the receiving end of a lot of that. So our fervent aim now is to be totally different, to be a new sort of defence company. We want to re-inject old fashioned values like “honour”, “honesty” and “trust” back into the military-industrial relationship. This is a powerful motivating factor for our staff who are, at heart, deeply loyal to their military roots. This fundamental driving purpose informs just about everything that we do. It is the centre of gravity of our business success.
Finally, we invest in and respect our staff. In the ten years since we were founded we have only had a handful of people leave us. Our staff turnover is exceptionally low by any standards - and there is a reason for that. We try to give our people autonomy, freedom and opportunities for mastery in their work. We pay well and provide some very nice benefits (including share options, private health care and private dental care) but we see staff retention as being about more than just money. It is about a shared vision. We try to make this shared vision real. At Inzpire, everyone knows that our vision is, within 15 years, to be the most respected and admired defence company on planet earth. It is important to note that, nowhere in that vision, is there any mention of profit or size; it is all about respect and admiration.
These simple things are all part of our DNA: a military ethos, understanding our customers, fast decision making, a focus on excellence in military aviation, mission leadership, the manoeuvrist approach, a clear integrity of purpose and respect for our staff. They are 8 pillars that have served us well in the past and will serve us well in the future. They are enduring, they are meaningful, and they are real.
And that is why I feel very optimistic about what the future for Inzpire in 2016.
