[00:00:01.040] - Jason Smith
Over 200 times, over seven years of doing this, we'd have the same conversations where the exec would just say, I love what we're doing here, but I just feel like I'm leading these Veterans into a burning house. The culture that they're going into, we know that their TAPS programs are not preparing them properly. We know that the culture is going to force them to assimilate in ways that they can't comprehend. A lot of these people are going to struggle and fail.

[00:00:25.010] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. I'm your host, John Berry, CEO of Berry Law. Today's guest is Jason Smith. Jason is an Air Force Veteran, a business consultant, and a nonprofit leader for Veteran service organizations such as Four Block and the former Bunker Labs. Jason is also a recent graduate from the George W. Bush Veteran Leadership Program. Welcome to the show, Jason.

[00:00:50.680] - Jason Smith
Thank you so much, John. I'm so happy to be here today.

[00:00:53.800] - John S. Berry
Well, I'm excited to have this conversation. We talked about Veterans in corporate America and the opportunities for Veterans. And of course, just like the NCO Corps, small businesses are the backbone of America. But to get Veterans involved, we got to work with everything, the big business, the small business, the nonprofits. So let's dig in. Tell us what your mission right now is, Jason.

[00:01:18.760] - Jason Smith
I'll start with a story. As you mentioned, I've been a nonprofit leader in the Veteran space for many years, and I kept having the same thing happen over and over again. When I would go and run some Veteran transition event with the corporate executive leaders at these organizations, I mean, the big companies you already know, PWC and Delta, invariably over 200 times, over seven years of doing this, we'd have the same conversations where the exec would just say, I love what we're doing here, but I just feel like I'm leading these Veterans into a burning house. The culture that they're going into, we know that their TAPS programs are not preparing them properly. We know that the culture is going to force them to assimilate in ways that they can't comprehend. A lot of these people are going to struggle and fail. Over and over and over again, these conversations kept leading to the same place until these senior leaders really understand what Veterans bring to the table. It will not become a corporate initiative to make this environment any different for the Veterans in corporate America. And quite honestly, it's really a 90-10 relationship.

[00:02:25.020] - Jason Smith
It's 90% the Veteran's responsibility to show up ready. You wouldn't expect anyone to Alter the entire workflow of an organization for just 5 to 10% of the corporate population. But what we're hoping to do in this initiative and what I've been working on through the Bush Institute at the Veteran Leadership Program, we've developed a plan to build a collaborative community to collect and share the stories of what's truly happening to our sharp top-tier Veterans inside of corporate America and combine that with stories and testimonies from senior leaders, senior executives who've seen Veterans, who perform at the highest level to bring value to their corporations so that we can help evangelize what that invisible category of Veterans, those sharp top-tier Veterans, really bring to corporate America and help give them the guidance through experts and organizational leadership to really learn how to transform those cultures, to be more supportive and more inclusive of top performers like the Veterans coming out of the military today.

[00:03:24.800] - John S. Berry
How do you do that? At a very micro level, a Veteran can go out Start their own business and learn on the fly. But if this is corporate America, you have large corporations who need to get results for shareholders. They want to tap into that Veteran leadership potential. But there's a big learning curve here. How do we get around that?

[00:03:43.680] - Jason Smith
Absolutely. The learning curve is huge on both sides. There's dozens and dozens of organizations right now working to help the Veterans prepare themselves, help them to integrate and to assimilate into corporate America. They're doing that through many different means, primarily through small group education programs like Four Block, allowing them to get some experience and exposure by hosting those events inside of corporations so they can see and meet people who are in corporate America and start to pick up some of the things they need to understand. On the other side, it's a little bit more difficult because these large organizations are so hard and so matrixed. Trying to reach the people who can really affect change requires education at many different levels. What we're trying to do is make sure that we create this collaborative community, starting with this period of time in the first half of 2026, of gathering as many stories from their peers, from other senior executives, and from industry experts, both in business and academia, who are talking about the value that Veterans bring and some of the organizational leadership science behind what it means to build an organization around top performers.

[00:04:52.200] - Jason Smith
These are the top performers, whether they're Veterans or not. Once you build an organization that can actually incorporate more of the opinions and the advice from those high performers. They've shown in the existing research we've studied that that makes a more performant organization. They run leaner. Individual excellence goes up. If you can create environments for that peer coaching and for that internal consulting to make the organization better. That's a lot of dominoes to fall. So the first step for us is to collect as many interviews from people like you who've had exposure to many different organizations, many different corporations, and many different levels of Veterans to capture their real stories. And that's what I was hoping to do here today, is just hear some of your insights as to what you've seen about the story of Veterans of Corporate America today.

[00:05:36.600] - John S. Berry
Yeah, it's been a fascinating journey, right? So I take you back to 1999. I am a first lieutenant at Fort Hood. I'm an infantry support platoon later at this point, and I'm looking at my options, and I'm seeing all my peers getting recruited off of active duty. At this point, you have the tech boom, and there's not just Silicon Valley, but there's a Silicon Valley of Texas, near Austin, where there were a bunch of job opportunities. And so I saw a lot of my peers get recruited simply because they had leadership ability, and a lot of them had engineering degrees. And so corporate America loved those junior leaders and loved bringing them in. And so I think about half the lieutenants in my battalion actually got out before becoming captain because they saw these opportunities. And for some of them, it went well. For some of them, it didn't. And sometimes the skills translated, other times it didn't. But now we fast forward to my experience with Veterans who have stayed in a little bit longer than three to four years. And it seems the longer you stay in and away from corporate America, the bigger the learning curve has been.

[00:06:45.020] - John S. Berry
And so I've had some friends get out and get their MBAs and struggle. A good friend of mine was actually at Northwestern Kellogg Business School and working for a large corporation, and he got fired. He didn't have the skills. And he learned from that, and he became an entrepreneur. But I think there's a... My experience has been in the entrepreneurial world. And when I left the military, I knew that I was going to be a lawyer. I knew that I was going to run a law firm. And so I had a paper route since I was 10 years old. I knew how to deliver services. I knew how to collect AR. I knew the basic things. But in an entrepreneurial world, it's very much like, I think, being an infantry lieutenant, where the plan is going to fall apart, and you have to be resilient, and you have to be able to work with people. You have to work with your peers, and you have to work with subordinates, and you're going to hire people who are more skilled than you have more experience, just like that platoon sergeant. When I was a young lieutenant who was, I'm in charge of him, but he's 10 years older than me and has 10 more years of experience in the military.

[00:07:52.020] - John S. Berry
And so as we look at our opportunities, I think going into the civilian community after military service, entrepreneurship is great because we can forge our own path and we're not afraid to fail and we're going to learn lessons. And a lot of Veterans that go into entrepreneurship do really well. I think one of the bigger struggles for what I've seen, and I have no personal experience with it, but I've had Veterans come to work for me who've worked in corporate America. Some of the struggles that I hear about are that they're used to being in the military, a big bureaucracy, but the culture is so much different. And for instance, performance culture isn't as important as maybe being savvy enough to, I think, speak the right language and handle things when there's not a clear chain of command. And so, I've seen this where former officers who are highly intelligent get passed over for promotions. And they just said, hey, I'm going to get out. I'm becoming an entrepreneur because I can't win here. And maybe that's part of it. Maybe it is the entrepreneurial world is a better opportunity for them, but it may just be that they don't have the skills or they have to tone down some of who they are.

[00:09:09.240] - John S. Berry
I don't believe in that. You are who you are, be yourself 100% every day. But what I heard was, hey, I'm trying to hold people accountable. I'm trying to hold people to the standard, and I'm getting pushback. I've noticed that happens in bigger organizations. Now, in a smaller entrepreneurial organization, everybody has a scorecard. Every position, we should be generating revenue to some degree. And so accountability is a real thing. But what I've heard from some of my peers who left corporate America to come to the entrepreneurial world, say, I thought that I was prepared. I showed up like an officer. I showed up neatly dressed. I followed the standard. I exceeded the standard, and I still didn't succeed. And I felt that my leadership skills were not appreciated. And to some degree, if you're going in knife-handing everybody, that's probably not going to work. You have to learn to do the softer open palm when you use those gestures with people outside the military. So I think part of the lesson was that there is a... Being political in the military means I think keeping your boss happy. And there are people call people brown nosers and stuff like that.

[00:10:21.960] - John S. Berry
But at the end of the day, you wanted to keep your boss happy. And if you were on a staff, you worked with peers who wanted to work together. If you were on a military staff, I'm not sure as a captain in the Air Force, if you saw this, but I certainly saw this as a major in the army and in the National Guard was, I would go into these staff meetings and we had to work together as a team. We weren't siloed. Yes, the major staff project was an operations project, but Intel had to participate, logistics had to participate. And as all the staff functions came together, it wasn't just one sections problem. It was everybody's problem. We were a leadership team solving the problem. And that just happened there, I thought, very easily in the military. Now, that's not to say there weren't careerists and people who we would call blue falcons out there trying to show up their peers. I ran into several blue falcons. But as a whole, as a staff, we all wanted to work together. You weren't getting a special bonus at the end of the year. You were worried about your OER, your OPR.

[00:11:22.980] - John S. Berry
You're worried about how you're going to be evaluated. But nobody was going to pay you more money based on your performance. And so, I think for my friends, like I said, that went in the corporate world, they said, I'd rather be an entrepreneur and control my own destiny. And so a lot of them got out. But that's been some of what I've seen. And for a lot of our team members at Berry Law who have come from larger organizations. I hear the same stories where they feel like they did their best to fit in, but the culture just wasn't for them, either because it was too bureaucratic or they just felt It felt like their contributions were not appreciated.

[00:12:03.400] - Jason Smith
You nailed it. You hit so many key points there, and I just want to aim in one of the biggest points. My primary work outside of this side project is working in entrepreneurial education for Veterans, and I cannot encourage more Veterans to get into the entrepreneurial journey enough because just remember that all of the major corporations that feed all of our children and grandchildren today started off as small businesses, and some of the best entrepreneurs in the world are always going to be Veterans. The reasons that you mentioned about why some of those even senior executives or future senior executives in corporate America who are having stellar careers choose to leave is exactly what you talked about. It's not necessarily about the technical skills, about being a better lawyer or engineer. It's having that cultural competence and to vibrate at the right frequency to move up in this matrixed organization. Politics, as you said, is not a meritocracy in most of corporate America. And so there needs to be a level of education. As you would think, when you're moving to the military, you go from your squadron officer school to air command and staff college.

[00:13:09.960] - Jason Smith
There's always that progressive level of education to tell you how to become a general officer, walk you through those steps. And those gates for professional education don't just include skills, but you remember, they included a lot of the cultural knowledge that you needed in order to adapt and grow as an individual to be the type of person to, as I said, vibrate at that right frequency and move up. That becomes a challenge in the military. We are a protected class as Veterans, not only because of the challenges we face in combat, but we are coming into the corporate world with certain cultural differences that become impediments, little glass ceilings in the way that we interact with leadership, the way that we relate to power moving in the corporate world that causes some of those promotions and some of those opportunities to pass us by, not because that individual is not capable, but somehow they just didn't vibrate at the right frequency. What we're arguing is that there's a missed opportunity here for the corporations, for the senior leaders to allow those unknown biases to overlook these top performers only because they're not the same good old boys and don't feel the same as a civilian counterpart who in some cases might be less qualified technically, who may have done less in their career, but they just happen to play that game right.

[00:14:27.900] - Jason Smith
If we can make it a policy inside of a corporation to seek out certain performance-based character attributes, that that organization is traditionally going to pick people outside of that normal comfort zone of politics. We're trying to use these conversations, these experiences that people have really had Real truth is in more anecdotal evidence than just data will show. The more stories we can gather, the more examples we can show of what Veterans can do when they really are Veterans, the better we're able to show those senior leaders in corporate America that the Veteran character attributes mean more revenue, more performance for the organization. I can give you an example. One of the executives at Cox, who's a collaborator for this project, was telling a story about another senior exec who came to him who happened to not be a Veteran and said that, I want to start this Network Operations Center, and I want some Veterans. Okay, sure. I'll give you some Veterans. No, I want all Veterans, absolutely every person in this entire organization to be a Veteran. And so with the work, this individual is in talent and development happened to go in and find throughout the organization the Veterans that they needed and few from the outside.

[00:15:38.080] - Jason Smith
They built this entire organization, 100% of Veterans. With that team, within a few months, that NOC became the highest performing of its kind in the entire globe for this major corporation. It's just an example of what can happen when you allow Veterans to be Veterans. Because you put two together, it allows them to create a microculture around themselves and to integrate a lot of the aspects of that culture that we were able to live in when we were in the military. In that environment in which you had a lot of people who had that shared experience, they were able to get to the same levels of efficiency and individual performance that let that team as a whole be the highest performing team of its kind in the globe. Now, again, there's other examples everywhere, and that's the reason why so many people are fighting to try to hire more Veterans. The challenge becomes What do you do when the Veterans are hired? How do you get the culture to make it easier for those who are doing their best to progress their careers? How do you make them a top priority to be seen as a needed class of employee for senior leadership versus a needy class in hiring?

[00:16:46.000] - Jason Smith
That's where the disconnect comes. Maybe you've seen in your time some opinions, some narratives that are out there that are holding people back in that respect. Maybe some things you've heard from the people you've talked to about the way Veterans comport themselves the way they show up that are challenges to the way that people perceive them in corporate America today.

[00:17:05.460] - John S. Berry
Yeah, well, there's a lot of problems in corporate America. The good thing is the market usually solves those problems. The companies with problems usually go away. But I have seen some of the problems have been these really... In the military, look, I really like the OER, OPR system where not everybody gets a top block. Now, what I don't like about it is needs improvement is what's called a referred OER, and you have to get permission mission from your boss or your boss's boss to actually say something negative in someone's annual report. But what I like about the military annual report is, as an officer, I knew whether I was top block or middle or bottom third. And what I liked is the grading had to be substantiated with facts. And so it wasn't a lot of soft, gooey stuff. And what I've seen in these 8, 10-page annual corporate evaluations, there's a lot of soft, gooey stuff that doesn't really matter, doesn't move the needle. And so inevitably, what happens is everybody's pretty much rated the same, and then it comes down to playing favorites. So if everybody gets the same rating, then who's going to be the favorite?

[00:18:18.370] - John S. Berry
Look, I was just... Some company tried to sell us this software, and it was, you rate everybody a one, two, or three. Well, if you do that, guess what? Everybody's going to be rated a two. And it's like how Veterans are used to, Hey, We're competitive. We want to be competitive on our promotion list. We want standards, we want metrics, and we want to achieve them. We want a clear, achievable goal. And in the right high performing organizations, that is the absolute best mindset. That is going to build the absolute best culture because it is a meritocracy, and high performers are attracted to high performers. Often in large organizations, this gets diluted. And so people didn't like what Jack Walsh said about, allegedly said about, firing the bottom 10 %. But I was reading a book about top grading. How do you hire the best people? How do you decide who to promote? And the thing was, What Jack Walsh allegedly said was, no, he said, I didn't say that. I said most people should fire the bottom 10 %. And the reason for that is because you want to spend your time with the people at the top and the people who can get to the top and the people already at the bottom, as a leader, you're wasting your time.

[00:19:33.120] - John S. Berry
I thought that was smart because you probably remember your time in the military as an officer where someone told you if a leader, if a subordinate wasn't performing, it was a leadership issue. And that wasn't always true. There are great Veterans who come out and do amazing things, but we also had some dirt bags in the military, and they didn't make it. There's a reason why they stayed E4. There's a reason why they didn't progress. And so not every Veteran is going to be a superstar. But the military did a pretty good job of figuring out who earned the promotion through professional education, through results, and through experiences. And as I look at some corporate cultures or some organizations are big enough where they can have that same level of onboarding, training, and then mentorship. But where I see it is a lot of Veterans fall off there. It's like, well, where's the ODP? Where's the professional development that we got as officers? Where's the professional development in corporate America. It's like if you find a good mentor, you get it. If you don't find a good mentor, you don't. I think the question is for the Veterans making the transitions, where are you going to get that mentorship?

[00:20:42.710] - John S. Berry
You can go out and find it, and that's Great. But I have yet to see a system where someone says, Hey, now that you're a Veteran in this company, we want to show you how you can use your skills to become even more valuable. I still haven't seen that yet.

[00:20:56.980] - Jason Smith
Yeah, there's not enough of it out there for that, especially late stage in your career, translation of skills, especially when you've done so much more in the military, you were major. You've done more than a lot of senior managers have done in their corporate career in the level of responsibility, budget authority, management of people, and complex situations. There's been so much that needs to be pulled into that description of what you add and how you add value, that there's not a lot of that education, especially the later people go into their corporate career or people have had long military careers. In the realm of military transition education, that is a huge gap. But additionally, as a pincer movement, as much as we have to put that 90% or 80% on the Veteran to be able to describe that and explain that in the language of corporate, in the language of corporate speak, to explain their value. There needs to be a pincer movement to the other side of the pendulum to help the organization understand the value that Veterans bring, to help the senior leaders make it a policy, make it edicts that we're going to explore this particular group of people for what they bring to the table.

[00:22:08.920] - Jason Smith
That education pathway is difficult. Opportunities like this to have national conversations, to get the coverage and spread these conversations, and more importantly, start discussions about it is going to be critical because of the way corporate leaders think and attract information or take in information. We need to make sure that these conversations are going to be where they're looking because without that willpower from above, in corporate America, it's very difficult to try to institute change. So that leadership authority or that willpower from the commander's intent needs to be present for something to be a cultural change that everyone's going to be a part of. What we've seen as well, you talked about something very interesting, is that a lot of times that whole playing favorites thing has no very clear defined pathway, that the process, the steps are not standardized. I had a conversation yesterday, and one of my interviews was with an organizational psychologist. The best way to get high-performing teams, even with a lot of high-performing individuals on that group, to get them to gel as a high-performing team, you have to create, as we had in our culture in the military, very clear objective standards of performance, where there's a definition of this is what's going to get you a top third or middle third.

[00:23:23.240] - Jason Smith
This is exactly how you move forward, where those standards are very clearly defined. We know from Air Education Training Command that a sixth grade education level as a minimum standard is how well they got to clearly define those standards. That creates for a team a sense of emotional safety that they know this is where I stand and this is exactly how I can progress myself. Objectively, anyone is going to rate me the same. It becomes, in that case, a meritocracy because the standards are so clearly defined. Without that, it leads to this fear and uncertainty and doubt that just whittles down to everybody just doing themselves. It makes everybody a lot more selfish inside of that team. We find that that increases the wrong competition for people to try to do non-job-related things to increase that favoritism, but not necessarily mission-focused things to increase their objective demonstrations of value to the company. When we can take those as an attribute of the military culture, it doesn't mean that you have to make a company more militaristic. Trying to show that that actually generates more revenue from increased individual performance is the whole goal of this mission, to make sure we get enough of these stories where that has happened.

[00:24:38.400] - Jason Smith
I think that the best example comes in that entrepreneurial world. You just see so many entrepreneurs who are out in this new world of uncertainty, and they can thrive, where civilians in the same conditions tend to actually struggle more when there's more uncertainty, but we bring that to the table. We're trying to blend those stories, those examples of where Veterans just have something in them that innately comes out from all the training that they've had and their experience in that culture that is so valuable. If it works in the entrepreneurial space, it should be valuable to bring that initiative and drive into the corporate world to improve the teams. Just getting more stories like that is what we're trying to do in the next few months.

[00:25:17.860] - John S. Berry
That's awesome. I think the agility, the mental agility that Veterans have, I can't think of a better organization to train that agility than to be in the military, where you are in a volatile, always changing situation, where it's high pressure, stakes are high, and lives are on the line. And America's sons and daughters are entrusting you, the military leader, to keep them safe and to give them worthwhile work and a worthwhile mission. There's no greater responsibility in the world there, because the United States military takes the best of the best. And my last job, I was officer, warrant officer, officer candidate, school battalion commander. And so the goal was to help these young men and women get to the next level. And so that was my job. It was amazing. Some got commissioned, some didn't. But it was my job that when they showed up with that gold bar as a second of that, or a silver bar as a warrant officer, that they were competent, that they looked like they knew what they were doing. And more importantly, they were ready to learn and lead. And I think what's happened Now is I can attribute it a little bit more to when I was a major and I became the current operations officer on a division staff.

[00:26:39.920] - John S. Berry
I remember the G3 took me into his office as Colonel just said, Look, the toughest part about your job right now is understanding our capabilities. You haven't been at staff above the battalion level. That's 800 people. You're at the division level now. There's 10,000 people. And the capabilities of these individuals here and the different skill sets are vastly different. And your job is to make sure you understand those so that when we do execute operations, you understand what's going on and you can assist in the decision-making process. And I think that's one of the challenges. You get Veterans who have a wide variety of skills, and some of it is the military schoolhouse, some of it is combat operations, some of it may be in aviation or medicine. And It's what are the leadership skills layered on top of the core skillsets, and how can the corporation use those? Now, once again, I understand any organization has a mission, and anyone who's on the team must contribute to the mission. But you're right. Sometimes where we fail is we are not maximizing our human resources. We are not maximizing the skills of the team members.

[00:27:54.540] - John S. Berry
We have Veterans who could lead and perhaps, to some degree, not only manage the team members and the results, but multiply them, grow the organization, because we all know what it's like to take initiative. We all know what it's like to take risk. We have Veterans who can do that. But I've seen so many Veterans say, That's what I thought I was going to be doing in the corporate world. But I had to get out and become an entrepreneur because I felt so stifled. I felt so shut down that every day I did X, and they wanted incremental growth. And I thought I could provide exponential growth to the company, but no one would Listen. And so I do think for Veterans to learn how to communicate that, but then I also think for large organizations to say, Hey, if we need this skill, let's make sure we understand who in the team actually has it. But I think that's been one of the frustrations I've heard from a lot of Veterans is they come in knowing that they have an amazing skill that is being underutilized, not utilized at all, or worst of all, they feel like nobody knows about it.

[00:28:56.660] - John S. Berry
No one will listen when they try to tell them, This is my skillset, I think I could help.

[00:29:01.000] - Jason Smith
I hear that a lot. I've got a question for you because you in your role as a lawyer, you get to be a close advisor to many senior leaders at various different scales of businesses. Over time, you get some of the same trends that you can pick up from working closely with those types of individuals. And across industries and across different levels of businesses, we're very interested in trying to find out how these senior leaders are currently talking about leadership inside of their companies, among their peers and among their lawyers like you. What are the conversations about leadership sound like in corporate America or just senior leadership across businesses in general? How do those conversations sound whenever they come up in your space when they talk about leadership? What things are you hearing?

[00:29:49.960] - John S. Berry
It's interesting. In talking to some of my peers that are working for large corporations, some of the feedback they get is, you're too direct. That's the conversation. Yet in my world, that's exactly what I want in a leader. So I think that from my perspective, when I talk to leaders and they're saying, Well, I had talked to one guy, said, well, I want to hire a Veteran. I'm going to hire this guy who's a former first sergeant, and I need him to run my company. And I said, well, does this person understand the basics of the company yet? Do they have any experience? Well, no, but I just need someone who understands leadership. Well, I always tell, well, it's probably not going to go well. Give them a little bit opportunity to learn about the organization before you put them in charge of the organization. I mean, even as a new second lieutenant, I remember showing up the first 30 days. The best advice I got was just shut up and pay attention to what's going on in your platoon. Don't make any changes. Unless you see something immoral, unethical or illegal, just learn. And so I think one of the challenges is people see people from the military coming as senior leaders, but they're ignoring that these senior leaders have not developed a basic skillset.

[00:31:02.120] - John S. Berry
Now, I think once they develop a basic skillset, then I think they can transfer it across the organization, across different organizations. You look at general officers. They've been in the military long enough that they are now basically a generalist. They can go do different jobs because they understand the culture of the military, the structure of the military, they understand how it works, they understand how budgets work. They can go to all these different nonfunctional area-specific assignments because they know the organization and they know how the military works. But you come to corporate America, you may know leadership. You may have been a colonel, a general, a Command Sergeant Major. But until you understand how that organization works? You will not be effective as a leader. You can't just come in and say, Well, I know some basic leadership stuff. Let me ask some questions. And look, I have made that mistake. I've hired senior leaders into my organization, and they're really great at strategy. But to execute a strategy, you have to understand the tactics that the organization uses or has used in the past. So the tactics that support the strategy become very important.

[00:32:11.090] - John S. Berry
And just like as we learned in Vietnam, where air superiority became less important when the enemy had bunkers and triple canopy jungles. All of a sudden, the tactics dictated the strategy because the strategy wasn't working. And so I think when you come into a new organization, fresh from the military, there has to be time to learn about the organization, how it functions. You may be a great leader, but if you don't understand how the organization is supposed to work, it's very tough to lead other than giving directional advice and assessments. And so, I think that's one of the biggest challenges I've seen senior leaders coming out of the military, coming into my organization or others, is that they are great leaders, but they still need to take some time and take it on themselves to learn. Now, as an organization, what I've learned is, big thing. It's like when you're training on the range. Familiarization is not expertise. So, when you say you're going to do basic rifle marksmanship familiarization, you may learn how to hold a weapon, how to clean a weapon, basic safety measures. But in the end, you're not going to become an expert with it.

[00:33:21.120] - John S. Berry
That's just familiarization. But if you don't do the familiarization and you just tell somebody to go to the range and start shooting, firing, they're probably going to flag somebody They go outside, and they're probably going to have an issue where their weapon is going to jam, and they're not going to know how to clear it. They're not going to know how to do simple maintenance. So you got to have that familiarization before you just bring someone into something. So give them familiarization, then do the onboarding, then do the training, and then make sure you've got a mentor assigned. I think that's the solution. I just haven't seen a lot of that. People give amazing lip service to these programs, but in execution, they all seem to be fairly myopic.

[00:34:02.660] - Jason Smith
Yeah, we're seeing some of the same things in our research. I'll tell you that the other missing piece is that there are some other softer, you could say, more emotionally intelligent skills that some of those military officers and senior enlisted can bring to an environment as well. I'll give you a story. One of my mentors was a combat controller in the Air Force. Combat control, Air Force Special Operations. So, he was as tough as woodpecker lips, hard as a cough and nail, but you never know it. One of the most soft-spoken and genuine leaders in the world. And no one even knew that he was a Veteran because of the way he comported himself. But in this one situation, he was in this meeting where they had to make some strategic decisions. He made some fervent, very cogent points about why they should go with plan A. Now, he was the boss, the leader of the team. From the back of the room, one of the most junior individuals spoke up, woman no less. It was a small, framed woman that spoke up from the back of the room and was bold enough to push back and make a very short, very detail-oriented argument against his points and raise some additional information.

[00:35:16.880] - Jason Smith
In that instant, after he just finished making this huge passionate speech about why they should go with plan A, he just said, You know what? You're absolutely right. Ditch my idea. We're going with plan B. Moving on. The entire room was just flabbergasted. They've never seen anything like that. How in the world could someone just passionately argue for their point, and then after one person brought in some new information, just switch on a dime? And he explained that It's because I'm mission-focused. I bring this focus on getting it right, not being right. I am emotionally secure in my place in the organization, so I want to make sure we, as a team, get it right to get to our results. And that's the military culture thing that the right leaders, good leaders in the military, bring. That's something that's overlooked. And trying to get people to understand that and see that, that's what we're trying to make happen in this effort. What we need to know is, what does it take to get a senior leader in corporate America or even a very senior and experienced entrepreneur who might be getting it wrong? What things do you have to do in communicating to them to see something that's very counterintuitive or might have some cognitive dissonance?

[00:36:31.240] - Jason Smith
How do you see the best way to get through to those senior people when you're trying to convince them to see things from a different way?

[00:36:37.580] - John S. Berry
I mean, that is a tough, tough question because in the military, we know that if we make a bad decision, someone may die. I think when it comes to corporate America, people are worried about their jobs, they're worried about their futures, and so they want to own that decision, and they want credit. In the military, coming in as a lieutenant, I remember, I think all my squad leaders, they had combat instruments badges from Desert Storm. So they've all experienced combat, and we're getting ready to deploy to Bosnia in the late '90s. I've never deployed before. And so I try to give my operations order, and they tear it apart. But I'm like, okay, cool, because I've never done this before. This is a better plan. And so I think when lives are on the line, it's very easy to pull your ego away and say, you know what? The best plan here is going to win. A meritocracy, right? The best plan wins, the best ideas win. It's not about who brought it up. It's not about your senior, that you have more experience. It's about the best idea is winning. And I think in the military, where we've been in tough situations, whether it's because budgetary constraints or actual deployments, combat situations, where there's no one right answer.

[00:37:59.620] - John S. Berry
But The best answer is going to get the best result. And if we don't get the best result, we're going to have a catastrophic result. So how do we get there? And the best way to do is put our egos aside and say, this is a team and we all have a mission and everybody contributes. And if somebody has a better idea than me, then I want to hear about it. Even if it's a junior person, if this could save lives or this is the difference between success and failure, I can put my plan and my ego aside and say, I didn't have the best plan or I was wrong. And in the military, we learn that. Usually, when we're wrong, we do pushups. There's corrective actions. But we're okay. We're used to failing. We're used to being wrong. And I've noticed my civilian counterparts can't handle that. They can't handle just giving someone else the credit, letting someone else run with it and saying, I'm the leader. Yes, I'm still the leader, but I'm delegating the authority to you to come up with a plan. Now, I That's still my responsibility.

[00:39:00.960] - John S. Berry
If we're wrong, we're wrong, but I believe in you. I think that's what we are told as leaders in the military. I believe in you, and my belief in you is enough. My belief in you, if you don't believe in yourself enough, that's okay. I believe in you enough that I believe we will accomplish this mission. I'm giving you this task, Berry. I'm like, Oh, okay. But that belief, the leader willing to put their rank on the line for us, you don't see that in the corporate world. You don't see someone saying, well, I don't know if this plan is going to work, but I'm going to give it to the junior person to let them make the decision. Why? Because if they're wrong, that's a huge risk.

[00:39:39.640] - Jason Smith
Yeah, that's a lot to have to mitigate. And that's really what we've got to accomplish here. We need to make sure that this train of thought, this new line of thinking is safe, is something that they can really depend on. We need to know what builds that trust. What do People at that level of business and corporate, or as I said, maybe someone who's been very experienced in the entrepreneurial world as a founder, and they've now grown to a very large company with thousands or hundreds of people under them, what do they need to see to make them trust the new information and new ideas that they bring in? What's been successful for you in the past, perhaps, making them really believe in what you're trying to get them to understand?

[00:40:25.460] - John S. Berry
I think part of the problem is you never know whether an idea will be successful or not until till you actually execute it. But I think the thing is having confidence in the individual's ability to execute. Right now, CIO, my Chief Information Officer, was a former Army ranger, qualified CAB Scout. He told me, he says, I'm going to have to treat this next quarter like a deployment. We have some serious stuff ahead of us, and these are my recommendations. He's like, I'm going to go all in, but here are my concerns. I think, Well, you're the leader. I've hired you to do the job. The fact that you're going to treat this like a deployment, meaning you are going to get in there, get focused, and get no distractions, that tells me this is somebody who knows how to be serious about mission accomplishment. I'm willing to let him make the big decisions in that project because he's dialed in. He's closed out the world to focus on the most important part of one of my missions. I'm like, Look, I'm going to give you all the leeway in the world because I know you're going to do it.

[00:41:27.320] - John S. Berry
I know that at the end of this, this isn't going to be a 9: 00 to 5: 00 job. I know that for you, this is a commitment, this is a purpose, and you want to serve the team, and you want to serve our clients. When I see that level of dedication, it's very easy for me to let go of the reins and say, Hey, I have confidence in you. If it fails, it's on me, the leader, but I see the level of dedication. When I see that, the best thing I can do as a leader is to back off. Give them the mission, back off, and then ask how I can help.

[00:41:59.260] - Jason Smith
Got you. There are a few things there. You started off with his previous track record of success so that you had some confidence and credibility in the individual or the source of the new ideas because of their past success. Then you mentioned their focus That they were dialed in, they had eliminated distractions, and they were fully focused on this one thing, whereas you, as the broader leader, were not. So they had the information because of their focus. Then also demonstrated dedication. That he showed that his personal goals were aligned with getting it right and not being right. Those things led to you saying, Okay, if this idea is coming from this source, then I can trust it. And would you say that that's true, probably, of most other leaders like yourself or even more senior leaders in corporate America? Those are the things that they're looking for to trust the new ideas?

[00:42:51.860] - John S. Berry
I've heard this before. Success happens at the speed of trust. It's really trusting the capabilities. I think that's the thing about the Veterans have, is they've been entrusted before. They've been entrusted with the lives of others. They've been entrusted with the security of our nation. That trust should be there. But as you go through the resume, I always like to ask Veterans, what is the hardest thing you've done in your professional career and why? Why did your team trust you? Tell me about a time your team didn't trust you. Tell me about a time where you earned trust. Tell me a time where you failed, but you still maintain the trust of your team. And so I want to get into, can I trust this person? Not just that they will have integrity and do the right thing, but also that they will perform, not only that they have the capability to perform, but that they still have the drive to perform. And I think that to me, you can trust people like that all day long when you know that they've been under similar stress, similar conditions, similar challenges. They're going to get it done one way or another.

[00:44:05.850] - John S. Berry
And look, they're going to fail from time to time. But on balance, when they have those attributes that most successful Veterans have, they're going to succeed. And the organization is going to succeed, and you're going to be a lot happier because you trust them. You don't have to start worrying about whether they're going to fail, because if they're going to start to fail and they can't handle it, they'll let you know.

[00:44:27.040] - Jason Smith
I love it. I love it.

[00:44:30.000] - John S. Berry
Jason, let's shift gears in the after-action review. Obviously, you know quite a bit about leadership. What's your best and worst examples of leadership in corporate America, in the Air Force, or beyond?

[00:44:41.520] - Jason Smith
Best and worst examples of leadership. I like to always end with the good, so I'll start with some of the bad. I've had several experiences in my life, medically discharged from the military in 2005 for being too good-looking. I've been out longer than I've been in. I've had many more examples of bad leadership in the corporate environment than I did in the military. With all names and dates changed to protect the innocent, I've had some leaders who were focused on their own personal legend. When I worked for one nonprofit as a district executive, it was my job to go out into the community and help this nonprofit raise funds. The moment that I arrived in my territory, there were certain individuals who met me and let me know that they would do nothing, nothing to help me if it was going to help that leader. Throughout that entire experience, that leader was on top of every move that I made to try to make sure that I was protecting their legend. It made me so frustrated that the only reason I stayed any longer is because I still needed to find that next place to go.

[00:45:58.520] - Jason Smith
It was the most miserable experience of my career. I will say that you learn something from good leaders and bad leaders, and I learned a lot of what not to do from that experience because of, I guess you would say that that one key takeaway was focused on their own legend versus any success for their subordinates. However, in the good leadership side, it just had so many great leaders over the years. And oddly enough, in my transition, because it was a surprise, I bounced around a few different jobs. I took one small role working for, at the time, Bradley Morris, now Recruit Military. I was helping Veterans find jobs. And we got some horror stories to share about that. I need to tell you about some of these hiring managers and the perceptions of Veterans in corporate America. But in that time, I was moderately successful until I got my next role. One of the leaders there was a senior listed former Marine. I forget his exact rank, but he was the head of some of the recruiters. He sat down and told another lieutenant colonel who was looking for a job that you're aiming too high.

[00:47:11.160] - Jason Smith
You can't do this role because just like you said earlier in this conversation, you don't have enough experience with the organization. And he blustered and pushed back and all. No, I could definitely. I've done this, I've done this, I've done this. And he sat back very calmly. He said, tell you what, how about I go to the corporate world, and I get one of those senior execs in the role that you're trying to apply for and have them come back to your Marines and take your former job and lead them into combat? No way. Not a chance. He couldn't do it because of the culture, and they would never accept him. He doesn't know how to speak the language, and this and that, and this and that. He just sat back and smile and said, take those words and eat them. Even though that wasn't a lesson he gave to me, by leading that job seeker and passing that story on to me, that has actually stayed with me for a long time, just to recognize your humility. I'm doing my best to approach all of this, no matter how many stories we gain, no matter how many people we talk to or what level of leadership we get access to.

[00:48:10.880] - Jason Smith
We're staying humble. We're staying hungry. We're staying in that constant student mode to just learn and say that I don't know everything, and I'm looking for guidance and leadership so that I can lead others in the future. I think that's one of the best examples of leadership that I've seen in a long time.

[00:48:28.420] - John S. Berry
That is outstanding, Jason Smith. Let me ask you this, where can Veterans learn more about you, Jason Smith, and your current mission and organization?

[00:48:38.080] - Jason Smith
I do have a website up. Even though we're not fully launched our community yet, you can find more about the mission that we're on at futurevetconsulting. Com. Futurevetconsulting. Com is a website that explains what we're doing in those three categories of connecting information, of proving it through small Consulting Engagements and Future to guide people through broader strategic consulting all there at futurevetconsulting. Com. You can reach out to me directly via email from there.

[00:49:10.940] - John S. Berry
Outstanding. Thank you so much for coming on to Veteran Led today. We appreciate your insights about how Veterans can better assimilate into corporate America and what corporate America can do better to utilize our greatest resource, the United States military Veteran. Thank you, Jason.

[00:49:30.160] - Jason Smith
Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.

[00:49:36.180] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we seek to help Veterans build an even bigger, better future after military service. Unfortunately for some of our Veterans, the roadblock to a better future is that they are not receiving all of the benefits that they earned. If you need help appealing a VA disability decision, contact Berry Law.