Back to work

Yesterday, the 2014 Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise ended, so today I went back to my normal job as a company commander. I can't say I learned a lot from this year's exercise, but I did learn one thing: PowerPoint slides for generals are different than those at the battalion level.

At the battalion level, slides are about showing that you're on top of things -- that you know all the details, and can discuss in detail what you're doing to deal with problems.

At the general officer level, however, detailed slides only give your audience points to seize onto. The more information you give, the more questions you get asked. And when you're a general, you probably don't already have a lot of those details -- you end up with "homework," and no general likes that.

I learned this because my task for UFG was to draw up one PowerPoint slide per day for one general to brief to another general. That's it. One slide per day, and my shift was 12 hours long. I guess it was a pretty important slide to have me pulled away from my company for two and a half weeks.