The Leadership In FastTime® Model emerged from our research and hands-on work with hundreds of leaders in the Fortune 500, as well as leaders of non-profits, government agencies and the military. An especially useful source has been the leaders of the Desert Storm air campaign—one of the most successful campaigns in military history.  Because of its size and complexity and the fact that it was such a rapid victory, it contains valuable lessons for meeting the Execution challenges of the New Normal.

We presented what we learned from Desert Storm in the book Winning In FastTime, which I co-authored with Colonel John Warden, the architect of the air campaign. During one of our writing sessions, I asked Colonel Warden a seminal question, “How would you describe the success formula of Desert Storm?” He paused for a moment and then crisply replied, “Think Strategically, Focus Sharply, and Move Quickly.” This summed up in six words a proven approach to rapid success in a complex, fast-changing environment.

About John Warden

John Warden, co-author of Winning In FastTime®, has been described by military thought leaders as “the leading air power theorist in the U.S. Air Force in the second half of the twentieth century” and “one of America’s premier strategic thinkers.”

His impact on the future of air power is still being assessed, but several distinguished military historians, officers, and other experts have concluded that Warden defined the very terms of reference for the 1991 Desert Storm military strategy and thereby introduced a new approach to the conduct of war.

Warden has been compared to famed aviator Billy Mitchell. Warden, like Mitchell, is “a thinker on a grand scale; a rebel who constantly sought ways to improve himself and his organization without having the patience to explain his reasoning or seek consensus; a revolutionary who refused to take political and personal sensitivities into account in his eagerness to change things fast, and a gentleman of unfailing integrity.”