Minter Dialogue with Sir Mark Carleton-Smith

In this episode, I sit down with Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, former Chief of the General Staff of the British Army. We explore his journey from the rugby pitch to leading military operations across the globe. Mark shares insights on geopolitical shifts, the changing nature of warfare, and the challenges facing Western democracies. We discuss the importance of resilience, both societal and individual, and the role of history in shaping strategic decisions. Mark offers a candid perspective on leadership, emphasizing character, trust, and the ability to empower others. The conversation touches on the complexities of modern conflicts, the need for adaptable armed forces, and the crucial balance between hard and soft power in today’s world.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To find out more about Sir Mark Carleton-Smith:

• Check out his Wikipedia page
• Chartwell Speaker Page for Sir Mark Carleton-Smith

Other sites:

• Check out my chat with Karin von Hippel, the former Director General of the RUSI

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Sir Mark! Well, well, well. Who’d have thought, a few years on, from the times when we used to hang out on the rugged pitch and I’m sure in a few pubs, tap and the like. Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Let’s start with a little fun question, as in, who is.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, it’s a very interesting question. Maybe one ought to spend longer at various stages in one’s life reflecting on, you know, the nature of. Of wisdom and the process of maturing and whether Mark Carleton-Smith, aged 60, 61, just recently, just is. Is this is the same Mark Carleton-Smith, aged 18, when we were on the rugby pitch and. And did that young man. Was it a natural linear progression to the older man today? And we’re a product of our genes, we’re a product of our experience, we’re shaped to some extent by our contemporaries and the crease in history that we’re destined to occupy. And I’d like to think that we’re a product of our values and our education and the examples that we’ve been set. I think a very significant part of me is the product of my parents. It’s also the product actually of the very privileged education that I really enjoyed and the environment in which I flourished. And then it’s a product of the life that I chose to lead, which was not to live a life that was safer on the sofa. I didn’t want to be watching the headlines of the 10 o’clock news. I was much more excited at the prospect of actually being behind those headlines. I wanted to be making the news. And it so happened that I had always harboured an ambition to be a professional soldier, which wasn’t entirely countercultural because there was a long streak of service that ran through my family anyway. But leaving university, I certainly had no sense that I would, 40 years later, you know, have served an entire career as a professional soldier, or indeed had no sense that I would live through the challenges of a changing strategic geopolitical picture. And as a generation, you know, I’m also probably the product of living through several strategic inflection points. And in my professional life, you know, the first one that I felt most keenly was 1989 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And with that came the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. So, the Europe that we knew and understood changed fundamentally. And then the second macro inflection point was probably 9, 11, by which stage I was in my mid-30s, had been a professional soldier for about 18 years, felt that I was at the height of my professional powers. And of course, that led very rapidly into the subsequently ill-fated and calamitous interventions into both Iraq and Afghanistan. And by the time I was leaving and thinking about my retirement, I was running a major institution in the British army and watching the very deliberate military buildup of Russian power. And a Russia in the Persona of its president was no longer a status quo power that was moving into deeply revisionist and revanchist mode, led by an individual with a very high risk appetite and tolerance for international criticism, you know, seemingly relishing his status as an international pariah. And I think I and my other professional colleagues felt that this was a fundamental change and it was going to lead to the reordering of the geometry of European defence, security and energy policy, at a minimum, and almost irrespective of the nature and character of any subsequent American president, that this was fundamentally a European problem. And however it ended, and of course today we’re still unclear how this may end, it is almost certain that Europe will own more of the problem. And Western Europe particularly, you know, has plenty of its own problems. And even if one concentrated briefly simply on the military aspects of this problem, Western European countries have hollowed out their armed forces, having taken effectively a holiday from history and that peace dividend in the early 90s. And therefore, we lack the capabilities that are necessary to restore credible deterrence, security and stability in Europe. But this is going to be the obligation required of us in a moment in American political history when America is certainly reluctant, increasingly ambivalent about shouldering this burden, much less tolerant on European freeloaders, and very insistent, particularly in the Persona of President Trump, very insistent that a rich and capable Western European has more than sufficient resource to underwrite its own security without an over reliance on the American taxpayer. And whilst that will be tough for European politicians, it’s not as though this hasn’t been coming for a long time. And despite the occasionally disinhibited rhetoric of President Trump, who speaks in much more vivid and colourful language on this issue, it’s no more or less than the same message that we were hearing from Presidents Biden and Obama, indeed before that, and I suspect you could start this back even further. So, it has been an abdication of European political leadership into allowing us to sink into an over dependence on the United States. And in some respects it’s been a failure in American grand strategy to have allowed wealthy West Europeans to concentrate on welfare states rather than the primary responsibility of their own security. And we now live in a world where the rules-based order which has never been self-organising or self-sustaining, it’s always been underwritten by the United States and it’s predominantly, albeit not exclusively been underwritten by American hard power. And the United States today and tomorrow is reminding certainly US Europeans that they are as much a Pacific power as they are a transatlantic power. And American soldiers were stationed in the Philippines and Sumatra long before they landed on the beaches of Normandy, let alone became embroiled in interventions across the broader Middle East. So, this is a reordering and it’s one that’s going to be an exceptional challenge to European statecraft. Whilst the US does reorientate itself to the much more significant and strategic challenge of the 21st century, which is managing their relationship with certainly a more assertive and an occasionally more burdensome belligerent China. And we’re going to live with the implications of an era of great power competition. And this is what strategic competition with revisionist powers feels like. And balance of power considerations are once more the currency of strategic exchange. I personally believe we’re now living in the post unipolar moment in a whole range of old and rather more comfortable assumptions have given way now to a series of much more acute global morbidities that probably pre-existed but now as a product of the geopolitical changing landscape. In some respects the consequences of a global pandemic feel today much more transparent and much more acute. And nobody can insulate themselves from it. No region or continent or country is immune from it. And a sense that geopolitical considerations which might only several years ago have been a discretionary side dish for senior leaders or the C suite today feel much more like a main event. And one might even go so far as to say that geopolitics is the new G. It’s the new G in ESG and we all need to get onboarded. And so, that, you know, is a series of strategic trends and experiences that I’ve had the privilege and the opportunity to be sheep dipped through the balance of my professional career. So, the, you know, the Mark Carleton-Smith that emerges now, you know, is, is the product of, you know, in a sense that personal and professional development, much more pragmatic, much more realistic, my strategic antenna much more acutely tuned to these geostrategic trends, really the product of my experience.

Minter Dial: Love that story or the, the way you wove that story in my head. Lots of thoughts came up in the. In the realm of quackery or funniness, the G of G Wiz and of course there’s the G1 as opposed to the G7 and. But let me just angle on one piece of your personal story, which is to what extent do you believe in free will? You talked a lot about the things you are a function of your function of your genetics, your experiences. Sam Harris says that there is no such thing. Where do you place the cursor on free will in your life?

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, free will’s crucial to leading the life of one’s own choice. The extent to which, as a young man, one truly recognises the nature and shape of one’s character is uncertain. One’s an ill formed and as yet incompletely developed human and person. But I think one embarks on a journey and the bolder one is about exercising one’s free choice and assuming a degree of personal agency over the tectonic shifts of the world in which we’ve lived and the vicissitudes of the geopolitical turbulence. I am a believer in human agency and the ability of individuals to think through the complexity of the world, to establish clear and achievable visions and then to motivate and lead organisations and people. And that we’re not either entirely powerless or hopeless and simply the subject to these shifting tectonic plates. And I think it’s crucial in terms of developing one’s own character that one does exercise one’s choices and make one’s mistakes, but then to create the time and space to reflect on them because those are the experiences that build in wisdom and experience which is very difficult to short circuit. And people, we are, we are as a species not good at learning other people’s lessons. We’re much better.

Minter Dial: My hand in the fire, yeah.

Mark Carleton-Smith: But then one has to reflect on them and, and lessons are not learned unless they reshape one’s character, one’s behaviours, you know, one’s choices and you know, part of this is an intellectual exercise in exposing oneself to as broad and wine wide and as diverse a range of experiences, of people of opinions and impressions at the same time matching that with one’s own personal experience. And some people by nature are more empathetic and more reflective than others. Some people, you know, live in the moment and for the moment and are much less concerned about necessarily wondering how they’re preparing themselves for the future. I’m a believer in my experience that the future which is inherently unpredictable and uncertain, does favour a well-prepared mind and those who are able to think through as to what the subsequent challenges over that strategic horizon are likely to be. And for our generation and those that come behind us, that will include how to navigate the accelerating pace of change, which is itself the product of the technological revolution which has always happened. But maybe what marks out our time from what’s gone before is just the tempo and the pace of that change. And to recognise that the advent and combination of quantum science with artificial intelligence isn’t going to accessorise how we live our lives and in many respects fundamentally transform it. And because of the nature of exponential change associated with artificial intelligence, this confers a major strategic advantage on first movers. So, those who can culturally adapt and adopt all the advantages that technology is beginning to throw up are going to be those who then enjoy this exponential advantage. And the corollary, of course, is that I think it’s going to leave vast tracts of humankind behind, who, once they’ve fallen behind, are never able to make up this exponentially growing gap. So, we may find ourselves living in an increasingly polarised and binary technological world of the haves and the have nots.

Minter Dial: As opposed to the unipolar that you mentioned before. I wanted to put a few things together, the dots if you will, that I’d like to connect. The first is you referred to Putin as tolerance for risk, which he’s capable of dealing with the unpopularity, the bad things that people say about him. Second of all, you studied history and it seems that you mentioned this idea of the holiday that we took from reality or the holiday from history. At some level, people no longer study history, capital H, or very few people. 2% now at Oxbridge read history as opposed to 8% just 30 years ago. And then finally you mentioned that we learn through our experience, which kind of undermines the idea that we can learn through history what happened in the past because it didn’t happen now. So, how can I learn from someone else burning their finger by invading Russia again, as two people did, without success? So, how do you, how do you dice slice this in terms of how we should go forward? Do we need a higher tolerance for risk? Should we be studying history or should we just be plunging into the cold water and finding out how cold it is for ourselves?

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, I think the implications of dealing with a range of authoritarian, certainly, and one wouldn’t be going too far to describe as near totalitarian regimes such as those in Moscow, in Tehran and Beijing, is that they are set on their path of establishing and in some respects re establishing their own spheres of influence separate to any originally American backed global order, which they would describe as merely code for Western hegemony and characters such as President Putin do display these very high tolerance for risk. And with that comes, I think, a greater risk of strategic miscalculation. And I think that’s true with respect to the American relationship with Russia, but it’s certainly true of the American relationship with China and the extent to which you institutionally, we learn from history. I think we want to hope, really, that we do, because I would hope that the Chinese Communist Party is learning from events today in Europe that wars are very easy to start. They’re very much more difficult and complex to end, let alone to end satisfactorily on one’s own term, because once started, wars develop a logic and an algebra really all of their own. And they come with a range of very unpredictable consequences, as we, after all, discovered in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And I would hope that a mix of that historical precedent and lesson, when matched, for instance, against a couple of Chinese strategic precepts, such as they deeply believe that the acme of skill is to win without fighting, and that war and warfare are major decisions on behalf of both party and state. Because if you embark on them and you lose, you run the risk of not just losing the state, but also, of course, losing the party that. That will calibrate and discipline their approach to international relations. I also think history is important, that we have seen parts of this movie before. I think the threads that are occasionally determined with respect to are we living through another 1930s moment can be overdone. But I think what we know about dictators and what we know about bullies is that appeasement strategically doesn’t come to a satisfactory, advantageous end, that they do need standing up to, and revolcist countries like Russia will continue to exploit until they’re stopped. And one of the reasons why, I think, particularly Europeans today are so concerned about Russia’s attempted illegal annexation of Ukraine is that we don’t believe that Russia’s ambitions are limited to Ukraine. There is unfinished business in Moldova, in Georgia, across the wider Caucasus. And it wouldn’t be necessarily going too far to suggest that President Putin doesn’t even harbour ambitions around the Baltic states, for instance. And if he achieves a measure of success in Ukraine through his attempted forcible annexation and the use of armed force to impose a sphere of influence and to undermine not just the territorial integrity of Europe’s largest country, second largest country, if you count Russia as you know, a European nation as well as an Asian one, and to compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty, then you cut to the heart of the logic and the principles that have sustained a rules based international order. And suddenly we live in a world where might is right and the strong do what they will, and as they say, the weak suffer what they must. And if Ukraine finds itself with an illegitimate and bogus peace superimposed on it, that doesn’t create a durable and sustainable political settlement, it more often than not incubates the seeds of the future war. And of course we have seen that play out badly in Europe before. So, I think, apropos your question, the world is full of risk takers. The greatest risk is a strategic miscalculation. But we do have some principles and some lessons from history that today’s generation would be very ill advised to ignore. And I think one of the risks today for the international community is that we have in the nature and the personality of the American President, you know, a man who is disinclined to be interested in quite a lot of that history and who sees the changing geostrategic landscape predominantly, if not exclusively, through an economic lens, who doesn’t necessarily believe in not only the rules based international system that was designed by the United States, that was underwritten by the United States, was an extraordinary, magnanimous and strategic gesture on behalf of the United States in the post war world of allowing themselves to be constrained by these rules, but a man who doesn’t necessarily believe in the power and the significance of multilateralism and alliances in a way the previous generations, and that is fine if you are a, if not the single most powerful nation on earth, other medium and smaller sized nations such as our own, we actually have to play by the rules and we believe in the strength of multilateralism and alliances because independently we don’t have the strategic inventory that can manage these range of proliferating risks and threats. We can’t manage this on our own. And frankly, I would argue that nor can the United States. And I would hope that as we get close to some major strategic revision around the nature of deterrence, security, energy and trading relationships, that the United States recognises that we can all agree, America first in the way that we would argue here for the UK first in Paris, France first. But none of that means alone.

Minter Dial: Indeed, I was listening to President Trump’s speech to Congress and I was marvelling at this association he makes between the soul of America’s back. And he equates that directly with economics, which was an interesting parallel. You also mentioned hard power. And in this light it’s interesting that the soft power aid American influence through media and so on seems to be less valuable in today’s times. And. And the other comment I had sparked in my mind was you mentioned Pacific American, which is kind of iron ironic for the name of an ocean, as well as in wartime where we are dealing with these dictators and new world orders, it feels to me that you would probably have a strong opinion with regard to what’s considered or called the Freeman Mirage, which is that hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. You kind of alluded to it, I would say, in the way that you expressed it. To what extent do you think that can hold true?

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, I. I think it. In many respects, it does hold true. And I think, as I’ve mentioned, for. For all the occasionally inflammatory rhetoric, there are some cold, hard truths with respects to what the American President is articulating. And amongst other things, he’s articulating what a lot of Americans believe, which is why they elected him. And despite the fact that often it might appear an unwelcome or occasionally even an unprecedented message, particularly for Western Europeans, it’s important that that message is not just heard but listened to, because it breaks through. And it’s had a very remarkable effect, of course, here in Europe, even in the first month of President Trump’s second term. And so, the strategy of flooding the zone is breaking the mould. And if, indeed we want to measure achievements and outcomes as opposed to simply activity and inputs, you have to say, in the first five weeks of this American presidency, he may or may not be closing in on a deal and a ceasefire. At a minimum, that brings the most destructive war in the last 80 years in Europe to at least a temporary halt, that he has forced Europeans to spend more on their own defence. And he’s, in a sense, giving the wider international community a good scrub. And he’s been very clear on what.

Minter Dial: His priorities are, very clear and consistent. I want to get into the notions of leadership at the last part of our chat, because what you said sounds like, well, we have to rewrite the idea. It’s about your first hundred days. It’s now about the first 47 days, if you were to listen to what we’re talking about. But in your experience, Mark, you had so many strong experiences, whether it was in Ireland, Northern Ireland, in. In Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, SAS activities, so some really hardcore stuff. And I want to thank you for your service, Mark.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, you’re. You’re generous. We. I don’t. I certainly don’t need thanking and I think a lot of veterans feel that in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, where so much of those campaigns was told through the stories of the dead and the very grievously wounded, it engendered a sympathy for our armed forces at the expense. I think it in of a respect and a support for the mission. And some of that was the product of the debates around the legality and the strategic context of those interventions. But today, I think, you know, veterans certainly appreciative of the gratitude that you have just articulated, but I think it would be, you know, keener in a sense for, you know, the respect for the institution and a sense that they, they enjoy at a minimum, the moral support of the nation. Which is, I think, why, you know, those two campaigns in particular for today’s generation occasionally felt difficult.

Minter Dial: Much like Vietnam in America, I think.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Exactly. You, you look through the old footage and the, the fabulous sort of PBS documentaries on Vietnam and really the war wasn’t just being fought through the steaming jungles of, of South Vietnam. The war really was being fought on the streets of the campuses of the United States and it was lost at home long before it was lost in Saigon. And I think you would say the same today about Afghanistan.

Minter Dial: So, where I wanted to go was with all your experiences today and we’re going to get into leadership in a moment. But there’s always the narrative. There’s stuff behind closed doors. And the challenge for punters like myself who just read the news and never been in these situations where we can’t even imagine the horrors of it all is that we are armchair referees and umpires. We are barely familiar with the true history. We don’t speak any of the local languages and so we can’t see the other sides, if you will. And, and at the same time we’re trying to get rid of tackle in rugby. I wonder how, what, what sort of advice you have or guidance you’d have for a nation who maybe needs to confront these softer realities. We’ve been going through this sort of peace dividend you mentioned towards the. The future. Should we be entertaining national service? Should we be toughening up a little bit more or how do you look at that and maybe add one more piece which is. Calls for transparency, which are so common and popular, but completely in nonsensical in when it comes to diplomacy and I would argue, and, or in, in the way wars are won. You don’t tell everyone I’m going to attack you tomorrow. I mean, some people did, but in general, you, I mean you could possibly Say that the Russians were in full evidence building up for what they did. But where are we? What should we be? Give us some guidelines as to how we should be architecting our society and our youth for tomorrow.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, this does fundamentally, I think, come back to the nature of resilience. We need resilient societies, irrespective of whether we’ve got material military threats to manage and to deter or not. But we’re living through this exponential rate of change, which is very unsettling and very uncertain for all sorts of people. So, this nature of resilience, I think, is an important feature in terms of hardening and toughening up societies, which is not to try and superimpose some warrior culture, but is to recognise that this isn’t a conversation merely around missiles, drones, jets and tanks. This speaks to a country that recognises that its future security and resilience is as much the product of the availability of clean and sustainable energy, the holistic education of its children and its next generation, the integrity of its 5G digital networks, assured access to pharmaceuticals, reassuring some of our more sensitive supply chains, and being pragmatic and realistic about the significance of strategic stockpiling in a more dislocated and disrupted world. And it comes with a range of sort of moral choices for your armed forces. One continues to need to incubate a morality and a nature of characteristics that gives your armed forces and your army the ability to operate when everything else around them is failing, recognising that they’re being invited to operate in near unbelievable circumstances of personal risk and danger, and to deliver to the enemy and apply lethal force. That’s an almost exclusive monopoly and that creates very significant demands on soldiers. And therefore, I think it’s incumbent on governments to only commit to the use of armed force in the most extreme of circumstances. This doesn’t feel like a discretionary exercise. This. I don’t think we went through a period, particularly in the 90s, when the armed force, in the absence of an existential threat, was almost being used to project our values, to superimpose our values on other societies and other continents. And it didn’t work very well. I believe that armed force is really designed to defend your values, to be therefore only used in extremists when you have exhausted all the other alternatives, political, diplomatic, economic, technological. But when you unleash armed force, you recognise that you are inviting people to deliver very lethal effects and they need to be supported by their governments, both legally and in policy terms. And I think my generation are continuing to live through the consequences of the use of armed forces, a much more discretionary effort, but it was almost politically expedient. We didn’t have to win, but it was best if we didn’t lose. And therefore governments calibrated the resources that were available, which never quite got us ahead of the problem. And I think aspects of, in our own terms, international human rights and specific articles associated with the ECHR again, were superimposed on the battlefield a set of circumstances that they were never designed to legislate for. And that has made life, I think, very difficult for the armed forces. I mean, I don’t believe in using the armed forces as an instrument of social re. Engineering. You know, the nature of national service, I think, is slightly anachronistic. You know, our armed forces are now very small, they’re very professional, they’re very highly geared and leveraged. They’re not designed to act as some macro finishing school for teenagers. There may well be other avenues, such as social service and others, where one might mobilise and galvanise a community about acting in its own interests and imbuing tomorrow’s youth with just a. A greater confidence in their sense of identity, a sense of discipline, a sense of wellness and health, about recognising how to stay motivated, how to stay healthy, fitness in body, fitness in mind. I think one hears to my mind almost too much about people reverting to. I have mental health issues. I’m sure you don’t. I’m sure you have challenges in your life and you have stresses and you have some anxieties that are entirely natural reactions to the vicissitudes and challenges of life. And particularly growing up. We just need to. We need to equip you with the understanding and the skill sets to manage that. We don’t live in a benign world. We’re designed. In fact, I think human beings are the most resilient of creatures and the most adaptive. But we’re letting our youth of today arrive ill equipped for the world in which they’re going to grow to full adulthood. And that’s our loss and our mistake. It doesn’t need indulging.

Minter Dial: I’m with you. We are. We must take responsibility for a large part of what’s going on here. The idea of our youth today with mental health issues, you mentioned. Well, we talked about national service and maybe anachronistic. You also mentioned defending our values and, and something that I speak about a lot with companies as well, which is a definition of what we stand for. And rather than the idea of everything being about Inclusion and loving everybody. I feel, especially in today’s world, that the notion of exclusivity has a stronger role to play, which means that we define who we are and define who we are not and what we do not accept, as opposed to rollover and say, well, we love everybody and welcome in. So, this plays out of course when it comes to immigration, but it also plays out into what you mentioned before, this notion of belonging and identity. You can’t belong to everybody. The flag of everything is not a flag. And especially in limited resources where on the outside you have others who are very happy to define their nation, their nationhood and certain set of exclusionary values, ours. In the face of that, the idea of everythingness, globality, peace and love is pretty idealistic.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m sure that’s right. Everyone will have a view, that’s for sure.

Minter Dial: Including you, sir. Let’s, let’s finish, Mark, on the last piece, which is about leadership. So, you’ve led on the field, you’ve led, presumably having been Chief of General Staff, many diplomatic operations, you know, the softer side, or at least the trying to avoid the lethality of war. You’ve dealt with so many politicians, you’re now in a post military existence, as I understand it, but presumably also deeply embedded. What lessons of leadership have you learned? I mean, we can even go back to our rugby pitch as well if you wish. Give us some of what your learned lessons have been about leadership and what’s necessary to be a good leader.

Mark Carleton-Smith: I think what I’ve learned, Minta, is that leadership is about character. So, it’s about you and it’s about your behaviours, it’s much less about your status and in a sense the position that you hold. So, leadership can be exercised at a range of different levels and in a range of different styles because to lead is also to be followed. And therefore one’s leadership style needs to mature and evolve and reflect the people who one is responsible for and the institutions that one is running. And so, one size does not fit all. It needs to be calibrated to the specifics of the circumstances and the team. I think at its most base leadership for me is really the art of creating power and of creating influence and translating your intent, your vision and your purpose into action through other people. And therefore it’s about getting things done that simply wouldn’t happen otherwise without your intervention. And it’s also about getting more out of people than they really understand they have within themselves to give. And at its Heart, I think it consists of moral courage to be doing the right thing, not just the most convenient or the most expedient thing. It’s about mutual respect and comradeship and it’s about self-discipline. And taken together, those build the crucial litmus test of leadership, which is trust. Because without trust you actually have no leadership, because you have no followership. And it’s a product of professional knowledge, experience and learning matched with dynamism and energy and a magnetism that enthuses the team. It’s about initiative and self-confidence. It’s also about daring to take that risk and be out there. It’s also about having the self-confidence to experiment and to learn, because leadership isn’t static. And I think without risk taking and without lessons learning and without failure, you have no progress. And part of leadership is about driving a relentless pursuit of excellence and innovation and inculcating that culture in one’s teams and in these much more dynamic, unpredictable times. I think any organisation, to flourish, needs to get three things right, needs to get its people right, needs to get its culture right, it needs to get its strategy right and then hold those in combination. And that’s often the product of the example and the vision and the behaviour of the leadership. And then having the self-confidence to decentralise, to delegate and to empower one’s people. And my rule of thumb has always been that the role of the leader is to simplify and to clarify and to remove obstacles, boundaries and barriers for good capable people at the coal face to get on and to do that successfully whilst thinking about the future, you have to decentralise and to pay out that rope and to pay it out to the level of discomfort and when you hit that threshold to then pay it out some more, because on balance you get more out of people, the more responsibility and opportunity that you empower them with. And so, over control and over direction is very stifling. And it’s also very time consuming for leadership, when the core test of leadership is the extent to which it’s thinking about the future and setting the conditions for success for both its people and its organisation in the future. And then I think any leader needs to sort of build the resilience, the resolution and the tenacity to survive in what often are quite lonely positions. You know, the loneliness of command is a real feature, the nature of the buck stopping with you. And that’s where I think leadership is distinct from management. Successful organisations inevitably also are well managed, but that’s a more scientific, data centric approach to managing inputs and outputs, whereas leadership is a human business.

Minter Dial: I love it. Mark, so beautifully articulated. A couple of comments. One is mentioned. Moral courage, mutual respect and self-discipline. What of self-knowledge?

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, I think self-knowledge is one of those crucial factors. I mean, leaders have to have the courage of their own convictions, which presupposes that those individuals have convictions and principles that they feel strongly about in the first place.

Minter Dial: And a backbone.

Mark Carleton-Smith: And a backbone. And those don’t emerge overnight. I mean, your opening gambit this morning, you know, who is Mark Carleton-Smith? Go some way to say, does Mark Carleton-Smith have values? Does he have some tested and proven principles? What range of convictions are you prepared to stand by, stand up for, protect and defend and indeed try and persuade others the merits of. And those are the product of, of learning, of experience, but also self-reflection and self-knowledge of beginning to understand the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own character. What one’s good at, what one’s bad at, what one’s interested in, what one’s not interested in. But then recognising that where gaps exist when it comes to building teams, you don’t necessarily want to build people entirely in one’s own image. You must build and reflect that full range of experience that one doesn’t enjoy oneself or one simply doesn’t have the aptitude for. And so, this really goes to the heart of diversity. And hybrid teams are in almost all respects stronger than monocultures. And by the time of course, I was running an institution such as the army, one wasn’t just responsible for its operational outputs, one was also the custodian and the guardian of the fabric of a national institution. And by that I mean an institution that had a very clear sense of its identity and its purpose. It had an ethos and a culture, it had a history to be protected, but also extrapolated. And it had a doctrine as to how it learned and then applied its lessons. And that my licence to operate was almost entirely dependent on the reputation of the organisation and how that organisation told its own story. Not just to the today serving generation, but also to those to whom we are responsible, the government of the day and civil society. And so, those were the sort of wider range of responsibilities where a senior leader is responsible for creating the conditions of trust in your organisation, which amongst other things is also a product of how you treat your people and how the senior leaders behave around their people. I mean, I think my leadership journey has been one of the most exciting pathways of my life. It’s one of the key reasons why I stayed A professional soldier for the 40 years that I did when I had absolutely no expectation of doing so. It’s because I enjoyed sharing visceral experiences with like-minded individuals, all of whom were of a character and a nature whereby they wanted to live their lives in the out of bound zone and absolutely on the edge of intellectual, physical and moral exhaustion. And that’s been the most fantastic and privileged journey to have been part of.

Minter Dial: Spectacular. I think in your answer you, you sort of covered the second piece. You mentioned reputation, which essentially in my commercial world is brand, because a brand on a cow was the reputation of the quality of the cow and it belonged to and, and that sense of belonging and the notion of having a purpose that rides above. Because the issue is when you’re playing, whether it’s a game of hockey or a war, you both want to win, the question is who will win? And I’ve long felt that having some combination or something that allows us to build around a unified purpose which is. Has morality within it, but isn’t a naughty version of morality or a goody two shoes version because it must include lethality if it, if needed, it must include doing some things which are secretive because that’s also how it goes, pushing yourselves to boundaries that you might not have. And in companies today, I feel like everyone wants to win, everyone wants to have more money. So, succeed. But do we have a purpose? And so, maybe in your answer you talk about the need for purpose. To what extent has it been maybe a driving force for you, Mark, in your personal life and specifically in the success you’ve had in doing the leadership that you’ve done?

Mark Carleton-Smith: Well, I think that’s right because the. One has to have, I think, although as one grows up one never reflects on it in these terms necessarily, but there is something about a, a unifying organising principle and purpose to one’s life. However, one might experience that and however one might describe that. I think now looking back through the balance of four decades, although it sounds rather a complicated term, this idea of an organising principle to one’s life and selection and maintenance of the aim being very clear about the purpose and the relevance of one’s activity. And that carries one through the inevitable headwinds and the turbulence and the down times, as well as one, you know, giving one additional pleasures on the good times. And I think incubating that resilience to take the rough with the smooth is absolutely crucial. And seeing things through to an end. I suspect many of my contemporaries, you know, might feel that life didn’t play out Entirely in the way that one thought aged 18. In fact, for most of us it almost certainly has not. But those I think who can take most satisfaction are of a life well lived are those who somehow through a process of discovery or good luck, identified a North Star that meant something to them and resolved therefore a set of behaviours, a set of choices, a set of professional experiences and a morality that one could always justify to oneself and left one with a sense of reward and satisfaction.

Minter Dial: I’m left thinking, mind your energy and the resilience that comes with it. Mark, a wonderful and expectedly wonderful experience chatting with you. I love the word, the clarity of your expression, the breadth of your experience, the generosity and feeling of authenticity that comes through. That’s what I experience. You don’t have to comment on that but it was really very interesting, most soulful and hopefully everyone who’s listened has appreciate that if you have any place that you want people to go to you, you say anything you’d like, plug, cell links, identity, whatever. What else comes to mind to conclude our little chat?

Mark Carleton-Smith: I’m just going to conclude very simply Minta A. It’s been a great pleasure. You’ve reminded me that the logo on your shirt is the Grateful Dead. And if I remind myself of my Plato, I would just reflect that he surmised that only the dead have seen the end of war and therefore despite our best intentions, I think as a generation we need to recognise that we have been indulged in a post war world and we’ve had great opportunities and advantages that I think tomorrow’s generation will find more difficult and that we aren’t necessarily merely the post war generation. It may be that we’ve yet to discover that we are also the pre-war generation and that will be very much more challenging and stressful than almost anything else. That as a society we’ve experienced and that I think is the strategic challenge for us at this particular stage and age in our lives is to support, nurture and guide the young men and women that we once were. Because this is going to be an exceptional challenge to our national and civic society statecraft and we I think have lost some of that discipline and the dialectic around what that might mean for us all.

Minter Dial: Fabulous. Many thanks Mark, see you soon.

Mark Carleton-Smith: Good to see you Minter. Best of luck and thank you very much.