Laurie Baedke (00:02.838)
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke And today I am really delighted to welcome back a guest who's been on my show a handful of years back, Lieutenant General retired, Mark Hertling General Hertling, Dr. Hertling has become a friend and I am just maybe president of his fan club over the years. But let tell you just a little bit about Dr. Hertling.
He served for 38 years in the United States Army as a tanker and cavalryman, leading at every level from tank platoon leader in the East West German border to commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army. He served nearly three years in combat zones, including during Desert Storm and multiple tours in Iraq, where he commanded the 1st Armored Division during the surge. He was a graduate of West Point. He also holds multiple master's degree and a doctorate in strategic leadership.
Following his military career, Mark brought his leadership to healthcare and we are so grateful for it. He served as the senior vice president for a major health system in Orlando. There he designed and led an award winning leadership development program for more than 1400 physicians, nurses and administrators. He's the author of another book, Growing Physician Leaders. And today he continues to teach as a professor of practice in strategic leadership at the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College.
and he is a trusted voice on leadership and a very active contributor to many media outlets. Most importantly, perhaps in fact, Mark is married to his best friend Sue. They have two sons, five grandsons and two granddaughters. Today, General Hertling has joined me to talk about his brand new book, If I Don't Return. But before we dig into the book, set the stage for the listener. Let's get to know you, Mark.
Before you were General Hertling, who were you and what experiences shaped most of your sense of duty?
Mark Hertling (01:59.764)
We're not going to go there yet, Laurie. I'm going to talk about you for a second. I have to tell your audience that I first met you a couple of years ago at a Women in Medicine Conference, as I recall. And I was just struck by your incredible speaking abilities, your communications, your intelligence, and just what the business community calls executive presence. But I'll just say presence, because you wowed an audience with some facts and figures in the way you presented.
And ever since that time, I've said, I've got to get to know this person because she's awesome. And you've proven to be that. So thanks for not only being a professional colleague, but also a friend. OK, to go to my, what do you want me to tell about my background? My, OK.
Laurie Baedke (02:43.923)
Yeah, just fill in color commentary before you became General Hertling, before you became Dr. Hertling. Who were you and how did that shape the path that you've undertaken throughout your career journey?
Mark Hertling (02:49.422)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (02:57.292)
Well, truthfully, I was a poor kid from Missouri and didn't have enough money to go to college. So I had a high school guidance counselor who suggested I go to West Point. And going to the military academy at West Point, which was supposed to be four years of education and then a five-year commitment, turned into a 41-year career, four decades in uniform, and loved every minute of it. Before I left,
As an 18 year old from Missouri to New York to go to school, I had never been on an airplane and never been outside the city of St. Louis. And by last count, I've now had the great honor of traveling to 123 different countries, doing some wonderful things with a variety of great people, seeing all sorts of things all over the world and having a real blessed life, to be honest with you, Laurie.
Laurie Baedke (03:37.046)
Anything?
Mark Hertling (03:50.744)
So that's quick in a nutshell, my background. A lot of time, as you mentioned, in the armor community, tanks and cavalry in Europe, about a third of my career was spent in Europe. and I lived there and our boys grew up there for the most part. And it's just been a great life. And in retirement,
I was given a great opportunity by a healthcare system to come work for them on a unique initiative they had. And through that initiative, I got sucked into doing some things that the chief medical officer wanted me to do of helping his physicians grow. And he told me at the time, he said, you know, all the stuff you're doing for the hospital in terms of what they hired you for is gonna pale in significance to what we're gonna do in physician leadership journey.
It turned out to be correct. He was spot on target because I've found kind of a renewed passion in digging into leadership, first in healthcare and now in strategic leadership for business folks. And it's been a whole lot of fun. And I get to talk to people like you too, which is tremendous.
Laurie Baedke (05:03.344)
I love it. Well, I love your infectious positivity and just your zest for life in general. And I can't wait to talk about your book.
because that's the primary reason that you're here today. But let's stay for just a minute in the space of, you know, your unique military leadership career and how you've parlayed that to working a lot with physicians and other leaders. But before we started recording, you and I were talking just a little bit about the fact that, you know, many of the listeners today, most of them in fact, haven't served our nation in the military. And many of them are physicians and
for all of our physician colleagues, neither you or I are physicians, but we work and live with physicians so frequently that that lived experience of a military service man or woman or a leader or a physician leader, it is kind of opaque or curious and very unknown to many, but there are so many similarities. And I'd love to just cue you up to talk a little bit about
why it has been so fulfilling and meaningful for you to work with physicians and equip physician leaders after you spent your journey in the military in ways that you were serving and rising up to challenges and undertaking things that most of your fellow citizens anywhere didn't really understand or know much about. What are the similarities there and how has that shaped
your work and what have you learned?
Mark Hertling (06:37.614)
Yeah, that is a terrific question. And I sort of had a dunking in health, because the Army sent me to get a master's degree at Indiana University in exercise physiology and kinesiology so that I could teach in the very cerebral PE department at West Point. So I was kind one of the teachers of cadets for a three-year period, which was an assignment.
But so I had this very strong interest in the human body. My first course at Indiana as a grad student was an anatomy course where they issued us our own cadaver. And we were able to experiment with the different bodily systems. And it was fascinating to me. getting into the leadership piece of it, though, when I went to work for Advent Health, the hospital I worked for, my
The office space next to mine was the chief medical officer. And he was a great guy. We became fast friends. And he would come in every once in while while I was doing my job that did not relate to physician leadership. He would bring problems to me. Hey, how would you deal with this in the Army? How would you address this physician that was doing this kind of thing? So we would have discussions about leadership. And one day he said, you know, we've been trying to start a physician leader course here for about five years.
And everybody we brought in has kind of a pat approach that is a business model, but it's not directed toward the uniqueness of health care providers. He said, you're a general, you've done leadership with a lot of organizations, could you put something together? And I said, well, Dave, his name was Dr. Dave Morehead. said, Dave, I can try, but I need to feel out the culture a little bit more. So for about a month, I just walked around the hospital, unbeknownst to everybody I was doing, and just
watch things and saw how people interacted. And at the end of that, we came up with a plan for this program that we developed that was geared primarily to healthcare providers, but not just doctors. It was the course we had developed with doctors, nurses, and administrators, which received a whole lot of pushback from the HR person at our corporate headquarters saying, why are you mixing them all together? Well, you mix them together so they form teams.
Laurie Baedke (08:41.997)
You
Laurie Baedke (09:04.174)
Mm-hmm. you
Mark Hertling (09:04.814)
and they understand each other and they don't miscommunicate and they see each other's points of views. And we started doing the course and it turned into something that was really making some cultural differences in the healthcare society we were in, the system we were in. A couple years later when I went off to get my doctorate, I studied it using two different hospitals and two different classes.
a class with all doctors versus a mixed class of doctors, nurses, and administrators. My hypothesis was, as I taught leadership, that both would improve in the measurements that we were looking, but my hypothesis said the mixed group would improve greater than the singular group. And that's exactly what happened. So it was a matter of understanding that teams are pulled together and create space.
Laurie Baedke (09:32.15)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (09:58.946)
because they know each other, they communicate well, and they can see each other's points of view. Okay. So going to your other question about the comparison between healthcare and the military, what I found in my assessment as I walked around the organization, I kept whacking myself in the head saying, man, the similarities of healthcare to being a soldier are off the charts. First of all, they're both part of a profession.
Laurie Baedke (10:15.609)
Okay. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (10:29.006)
They both have standards of conduct. have values and ethos. They have a unique set of skills, which all professions claim they do, so that no one else in the society can do what they do. You can discipline and dismiss fellow professionals. And what's fascinating between all the other professions, like the legal profession or teaching or accounting, all the professional bodies, engineering.
The similarities between healthcare and the military is incredibly important because they're the only two professions that deal in life and death in very different ways. So to be a member of either one of those professions, you gotta be pretty damn good at what you do. So there is that requirement to understand your service to your citizenry and your nation is such that
The extremes can happen if you're not very good at your job. And what I saw as the only big difference is that as a soldier, a lifelong soldier, every school I went to, every course I went to, there was a requirement to learn the art, the science of the trade, the science of military operations, but also the art of leadership. And compared to medicine, it's all about the science, not so much about the leadership.
Laurie Baedke (11:47.278)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (11:55.532)
And in fact, Dr. Morehead, the guy that talked me into doing this program, which changed my life, he said, you you're working on this other thing the hospital hired you to do, but this additional duty of teaching doctors and nurses and administrators leadership in healthcare is gonna far outweigh and outlast the things you're doing in this initiative. And he proved to be correct. It's become a passion as you well know, having been with me a couple of times at different conferences.
Laurie Baedke (12:23.539)
Yeah. Yeah. that's so fantastic. Thank you for kind of breaking that down. And I couldn't agree more. And you and I and the majority of our listeners know also there is an abundance of confirmation in the research. The literature tells us that diverse teams win and succeed, right? And diversity in so many different ways. And in healthcare, teams are multidisciplinary.
Mark Hertling (12:44.099)
Right.
Laurie Baedke (12:51.004)
Obviously, we are all, regardless of our discipline, we tend to attract to like, right? And it seems more efficient on the surface to be around people who think like we do and do the same things as we do. But in order to accomplish the complex work of medicine or a military undertaking or anything else, it requires diversity of thought, diversity of temperament.
diversity generationally, diversity gender, diversity in our racial and ethnic compositions or cultural backgrounds, that diversity brings richness and it brings the tensions and the harmonies and dissonance that's necessary to be truly effective and truly sustainable. But
Mark Hertling (13:36.206)
Can I comment on that for a second? Because you're absolutely right, and this is a drum that I've been beating, because we have some people in our society right now saying diversity is not so good. And I was in an organization, the US Army, that treated diversity as a true art form and something we were wanting to get. And all the research, as you said, that I've read says the same thing. And the last point you made about the cultural differences
Laurie Baedke (13:47.52)
Indeed.
Mark Hertling (14:04.568)
Boy, it's certainly there in the military and it's even more distinctive in healthcare because there are various cultures that come together in America that bring such strength through different ideas. And one of the things that I took away from one of the women in medicine conferences that we both go to is the results from women surgeons.
Laurie Baedke (14:17.428)
Yes. Yes.
Mark Hertling (14:30.434)
you know, not to cause any problems, but they're across the board much better than male surgeons. So you would think one another would be learning, you know, why those results are different and what culturally or diversively, I guess that's not a word, but you understand what I'm saying, is contributing to better results from one sec versus the other.
Laurie Baedke (14:34.306)
Indeed.
Laurie Baedke (14:44.747)
Yeah.
Yep.
Laurie Baedke (14:52.382)
Yeah. And I just think one of the, one of the ways that we do that, either we are forced into a diverse program or conversation that broadens and, and, makes more rich our understanding or individually, have to both intentionally, but also often courageously seek out to understand the perspective or lived experience or
unique journey of someone who is very different from us. And that is, again, I said intentionally, because it's probably not something, cognitively from a neuroscience perspective, we're not built to actively and seek that out, but it's necessary. And then it requires courage as well, because none of us wants to suffer a gaffe or a misstep. And there is heightened risk when you're speaking to someone who is terrifically different from you.
Mark Hertling (15:22.656)
Absolutely.
Laurie Baedke (15:49.054)
especially in racial or ethnic or cultural domains. But generations, of course, mean, so much is written and there's just huge bodies of research around generations in the workplace and with good reason, genders in the workplace and for good reason, right? And it just requires a lot of intention, but this is where curiosity, humility and empathy all come in. And those are three attributes I tend to think are supremely important.
but they're the ones that get called soft skills and they get patted on the head as nice to haves and not the tough, hard, important skills, right?
Mark Hertling (16:27.778)
Yeah, I would much rather connect with someone with a lot of humility than someone who has a lot of swagger. They're just more fun to be around, me personally. I don't know about other people. You mentioned the cultural piece of this. There's a great book I would suggest to your listeners that you've probably read it called The Culture Gap by a young woman named Erin Meyer. And she talks about how if you don't have an understanding of various cultures, your organization is going to fail because you're just not communicating very well.
Laurie Baedke (16:34.933)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (16:57.71)
I would highly recommend that work. I recommend it and ask my graduate students in an MBA program to read that, and they all come away with a renewed sense of understanding how to work in multinational corporations. But in the military or the medical field, we've got to do that.
Laurie Baedke (17:16.116)
Yeah, well, I wholly agree. And I love a quote by Maya Angelou that says, do the best that you can until you know better. And then when you know better, do better. And humility and curiosity and just humble inquiry are such important things because for me, the more I learned, the more I realized there is that I still need to understand. the Dunning-Kruger syndrome is quite the curse if...
you have all the confidence in the world that you know everything and you don't need to know anymore, then the gaps and deficits in your own awareness are glaring. And I don't think that I will live long enough on this earth. I'm positive I will not live long enough on this earth to know everything that I need to know or understand everything that I need to understand.
Mark Hertling (18:03.512)
When I started my doctoral program at this school, the Crummer School of Business, they appoint a professor and an upperclassman, a second year student, as your mentor as you start the program. So I was going to a cocktail reception before the course started. And my mentor was a woman named Rhonda Bartlett. And here I am, a big shot general just coming out of command of US Army Europe and spending X amount of years in combat and running large organizations.
Over a of wine, asked Rhonda, said, hey Rhonda, what am I gonna learn in this program? And without skipping a beat, and she was older like me, not quite as old as me, but she was in her early 50s, and she said, Mark, you're gonna learn just how much you don't know. And that sentence has stuck with me ever since because as soon as you think you know it all, you know very little, to your point earlier.
Laurie Baedke (18:57.396)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay, well, let's let's shift directions because you and I am sure could fill multiple more hours talking about leadership philosophy. But you have a brand new book coming out the day that this episode is going to publish. It is dropping the following day. I'm holding it up. I'm privileged to have an advanced signed copy. You wrote a book. Yes, If I Don't Return and this book is based on journals that you kept.
Mark Hertling (19:18.218)
I have one too.
Laurie Baedke (19:25.29)
during your service in several combat zones, Desert Shield, Desert Storm and others. How did those journals talk about those journals and how did they then become this book decades later?
Mark Hertling (19:36.366)
Well, I'll tell the story. I'll try and make it as short as I can, but it's a great story. During Desert Storm in 1990 and 91, when we deployed, I was in Europe and Sue and I had two young children, Scott and Todd, and they were eight and 10 years old at the time. And we were told before we deployed, as soldiers sometimes are, even though the war turned out very differently, that because of our mission,
I was in a cavalry squadron, is something that's out in front of the organization trying to do reconnaissance. They said we would probably suffer up to 50 % casualties in our unit. And my thought at that point was, hey, if I have a coin flip chance of returning, I need to find a way to teach our young boys how to be men and write some things for them that they might recall if their father doesn't come home.
And it was from my wife too, a little bit to tell her about the man that she married if I didn't come home. So I, on a daily basis, before the war started, while we were in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, I would write just a passage every day, a one page journal entry with a point of view of being a teacher to our son. So I would write about curiosity or culture or friendship or emotions or fear or love or...
you know, how do you pick a mate, you know, when you're older, you know, who do you date? So that in the years forward, they could look back on that and say, hey, here's what dad said, thank him for this. And then during the war, I wrote about the war and the experiences of combat. And then after the war, I talked about the results of having gone through a conflict of post-traumatic stress and, you know, Iraqi generals that I met and torture chambers that we found and those kind of
horrific things that are all part of conflict. The spoiler alert to this, Laurie, is that I did survive. I came back home. Our children were still young, so they had no interest in reading this book, this journal. So I threw it in a footlocker, and it was soon forgotten. So a couple years ago, our youngest son, Scott, asked my wife, Sue, where the journal was that I wrote during the Desert Storm. Now, he's now...
Laurie Baedke (21:49.121)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (21:58.862)
40 years old and has been in combat on his own. And unbeknownst to me, he took that journal and typed it up into a Word document and put some pictures in it from that time that he had. And on Christmas morning of 2024, when all the grandchildren were finished opening their presents and we were all wiped out from waking up way too early, he came up to me and presented me that box with the document in it. And it was...
Laurie Baedke (22:11.734)
. You
Mark Hertling (22:27.342)
Obviously pretty emotional for me to relive and thumb through that thing that I had written 35 years earlier. But then he said something to me. He said, dad, my brother and I understand what you were doing with this journal. He said, you were giving us something in case you didn't come home. He said, but now it's time to expand it. He said, you've had a whole lot of experience in combat and in healthcare and in all sorts of other things. He said,
Laurie Baedke (22:35.99)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (22:55.82)
Now you've got to expand this book so your grandchildren know who you were. So I think, Laurie, to be honest with you, he didn't think I would do it. But I immediately started the next week after they all left our house and went back to their homes. And in about a six-month period of time, I wrote this book, taking each. And it was easy because I had an outline based on the journal entries.
Laurie Baedke (23:19.734)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (23:22.04)
So I just elaborated more what I had learned since then on the same things like friendship and culture and emotions and fear and combat and intelligence and those kinds of things. And it just flowed very easily. I sent it to him and he thought it was terrific. And then I had a buddy of mine here in Orlando who suggested I publish it. I sent it to a publisher.
The guy said, yeah, we get a lot of books in, give me a couple of weeks and I'll get back to you. And the next morning about eight o'clock, he called me and said he was up all night reading it. He says he thinks he wants to publish it. So that's the story of the book and it's now available on or it's, right now we're taping a few days before it's available, but it's out for pre-order and it released on the 10th of March.
Laurie Baedke (24:14.881)
Yeah, my goodness, that's an amazing story for multiple reasons. I love that, you know, something that was really important and poignant in the way that life happens kind of got tucked away and almost forgotten, collected some dust for
a pretty long period of time. And then I appreciate how your son found it and brought it to life, but then how it found new legs as well. And one of the things that I've enjoyed as I've been reading it, I'm only about halfway through, but you have added reflections. Obviously you've laced it in with now your perspective of several decades more of life and maturity and wisdom, but also then kind of looking back in the way that perspective gives you the privilege to be able to
Mark Hertling (24:32.077)
Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (25:00.072)
extract learnings and you're sharing those in the form of reflections with the reader. And so I'm curious, I mean, for someone who's listening, who might be thinking, what would I get out of this? A soldier's journals from war to his sons, like maybe just say, what do you think that you most want for readers to take away from the lessons that you've learned and now shared in this form?
Mark Hertling (25:00.206)
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (25:28.75)
Well, the very first lesson is if I could do it all over again, I would keep a journal from my whole life just to look back and remember things. So your listeners who are younger should maybe start writing a couple of notes every day about what's happening to them. But truthfully, Laurie, I was down talking to the publisher a couple of weeks ago, and it's a company called Ballast Books. That's the people who published it. And they mostly publish
military's types of works, not completely, but most of them, some leadership, some children's books and things like that. the CEO of the company, we were sitting around having a cup of coffee and he said, you know, this isn't really a military book. He says, it's more a book about leadership and life and family. He says, and then it gets to the military. And he says, what you do a great job of doing
Laurie Baedke (26:16.866)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Hertling (26:22.262)
is not only addressing the first three topics of leadership, life and family. He said, but if you're one of the 99 % of Americans that haven't lived in the military or haven't worn the uniform, you learn an awful lot about the intricacies of serving your country in uniform that you don't know. And he said, the majority of our citizens don't know what the military does. And this is a pretty good and fun tutorial on
the kinds of things you're asked to do as a soldier. So that's what I hope people gain from it is not just the leadership lessons and the lessons about strong families and family ties, but also what does the military do for our country? And so you have a little bit of an understanding of that as well.
Laurie Baedke (27:09.509)
Yeah, and that perspective is priceless, always. One thing that really kind of struck me as I've been reading is that I can see some evolution in the tone of some of your entries. mean, there are entries where certainly your younger self
sounds a little bit more unsure or perhaps even sharing your fear and uncertainty. And then there are times where your older self seems a little steadier. What changed or what are your reflections back on my sense of that tone shift and what lessons does that give to the listener?
Mark Hertling (27:50.998)
Yeah, you're not the first person that's told me that. And the more I thought about it, I've concluded that in the original journal that I wrote in 91, I was unsure of myself. And it was really all about me. I was writing this journal for my sons, and it was telling them the story. And I was scared, just like all soldiers are the first time they go into battle. And I was concerned about never coming home. So it was, how do I?
persevere, how do I save myself so I can go home and start living my life again? As I went into later days in different wars and with more experience, the responsibility and accountability you have as a leader really shifts away from you to others. And at that point, when I was going into combat, it wasn't about me surviving. It was about how do I bring
Laurie Baedke (28:39.446)
Yeah. Mm.
Mark Hertling (28:50.444)
these people home that I'm charged to protect. And what happens if I fail? What happens if I do something wrong and it results in them getting hurt or killed? So you do take on a more mature approach, that's for sure, when you're looking outward as opposed to inward. And I think that's a huge lesson of leadership as well. But you also have the thing that I hope to have portrayed in the book was
Laurie Baedke (29:19.702)
. you
Mark Hertling (29:20.972)
the experiential base of learning more about other cultures, understanding more about information and intelligence, knowing the value of people who are part of the organization and what they contribute, understanding how planning and preparation is critical in any field you're in. Basically, you know, that every day should be
Laurie Baedke (29:46.35)
you you
Mark Hertling (29:49.45)
a learning and growth experience because that defines a really good leader if you learn and grow every single day. But also telling the truth. I don't know, you said you're about halfway through, so I don't know if you've gotten to one section that I won't talk about, but it was a surprise, I think, to a lot of people about an event that happened that I didn't want to tell anybody. And I opened up in the book and talked about exactly what happened. Have you read that part yet?
Laurie Baedke (30:18.904)
I, yep, I just read that last night.
Mark Hertling (30:20.288)
Okay, okay. that's, I mean, even some of my friends who I've given advanced copies to were calling me and they said, can't believe this happened. And maybe I'm teasing, maybe I'm teasing the book a little bit right now, but it's one of those sections that is, it changed my life. An event changed my life in terms of how I approached living and how I approached others. yeah, it has to do with maturity, I think more than anything else.
Laurie Baedke (30:50.752)
Yeah, and that really resonates. And you know that I'm really passionate about mentorship and sponsorship and coaching. And I think so much of our learning and growth happens in our own individual reflection.
But so much of it happens in community and it's in sitting at the feet of or under the counsel of individuals who have been there, done that, or are wise enough and generous enough to share with us. And so much of the good formation that we all need to undertake comes from both reflecting on and learning from our missteps and mistakes. And we will make plenty.
But then as well, know, sitting with the wise, walking with the wise and being in community with individuals who with deep character and responsibility have stewarded their own journeys or been asked to or tasked with stewarding the lives of others in a military environment or in an organizational environment. I wonder what you would reflect back to us about how
You have obviously been contributing as a mentor and advisor and educator to many, but what are one or two of the experiences in your own development that have been most formative as you think about whose wisdom that you have learned from and benefited from?
Mark Hertling (32:10.61)
my gosh. You know, as you know, I teach an MBA course right now in leadership and strategic leadership. one of the biggest things I learned as a 70-year-old writing this book was how much we don't take enough time to reflect on who we are. And it gets to your point just now. The book is meant for other people to read, and it's my gift to other people who are interested.
But I gotta tell you, if I don't sell a single copy of this book, I'm gonna be happy, because it reinforced in me the requirement to reflect and reflect deeply. And we're in a society today that doesn't do that at all for the most part. I mean, it's one of these kind of things is our lives are so busy and we're bouncing back and forth. We don't do self assessments all that well. So I'm driving my MBA students to do that.
Laurie Baedke (32:48.999)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Hertling (33:08.954)
And I'm using a statement that came from a book I once read a long time ago called Once an Eagle. And the statement is if it comes to a choice between being a good soldier or any good doctor or a good business person, a good anything, if it comes to a choice between being good there or being a good human being, choose being a good human being because that's gonna make you great at whatever you do.
Laurie Baedke (33:34.513)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (33:36.91)
So that's part of the reflection. How do you become the best person you can be so you can help others be the best person they can be?
Laurie Baedke (33:47.91)
I totally agree. I think I saw something written where your publisher described you as kind of a modern day Marcus Aurelius. I don't know to what degree that you're a student of stoicism. I have partaken a fair bit and reflection, of course, is a part of that. But as we think about, so many of the barriers that exist, and I'm raising both of my hands here for high achieving professionals.
Mark Hertling (33:57.435)
Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (34:13.088)
whether they're military leaders or physicians or surgeons or executives or entrepreneurs, so much of the drive is the task and reflection feels so passive and it rarely if ever feels productive in the moment. And so any teachings or guidance for the listener on how you have best mastered
Mark Hertling (34:31.288)
Yeah. Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (34:39.604)
the practice of reflection or how you teach reflection to type A driven individuals who are far too easy, you know, to just fly by it on their list of to do's and think, I'll do that when I'm retired and have time for reflection.
Mark Hertling (34:41.888)
Mark Hertling (34:56.706)
Yeah. Well, I grew up in an organization that masters that. Back in the 80s, the Army changed their approach, and they initiated something called AARs, After Action Reviews. So everything we do, combat, peacetime, garrison operations, anything, if it's a major event, we always do an AAR. Some are more formal than others, but it's always happening. So I teach that technique.
to my MBA students. And we actually bring in case studies from their organizations. And I say, let's AAR this. The after action review is so critically important because it determines what happened, why did it happen, who's responsible, and what do we need to either fix the bad things or polish the good things? And how do we incorporate it into our next approach? What I found working in healthcare during COVID,
Laurie Baedke (35:39.23)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (35:55.166)
working with a team of great doctors in a crisis response team. We did AARs a couple of times a month where we said, okay, this has happened. How would we do this differently if we had to do it again? And then we recorded it. Because what you don't want to do in an organization after you've learned great lessons like healthcare did in COVID under a crisis situation is ignore the things you've learned and just go back to business as usual. And so,
Laurie Baedke (36:16.07)
No.
Mark Hertling (36:24.43)
That's part of it, but it's also, I'm gonna bring up the term you used, mentoring. It's part of your mentoring requirement. If you're truly trusting me, let's give the example as I'm your mentor, if you're truly trusting me as a mentor, I will pull that stuff out of you. How did you do this? How would you do it differently if you did it today versus yesterday? And so that trust that we've developed between mentor and mentee,
really causes a lot of good things to happen is just BSing about your next job opportunity versus how do you grow. So those are a couple of techniques I would recommend.
Laurie Baedke (37:03.259)
I love that. I love that. And I think, you know, asking good questions or having people around you that you trust to ask you good questions. mean, asking great questions is one of the hallmark practices of coaching, right? It happens in mentoring as well, but great coaches are going to either give you feedback or they're going to ask you questions to guide you.
Mark Hertling (37:24.075)
Another question.
Laurie Baedke (37:25.376)
to the best discovery of your own instinct or to trust your instinct or to learn from and then tweak and refine the next time that you step into a difficult conversation or a negotiation or a presentation. So I...
Mark Hertling (37:40.236)
Well, if I can be honest, I learned that from you about five years ago. You gave a presentation, I think it was told, the seven layers of asking questions or something like that, where you peeled back the onion about asking repeated questions until you got to the real intent. And I took a lot of notes during that, so I'm giving you props. And we didn't prearrange this, so it was just a great presentation. I really enjoyed it. Took a lot away from that.
Laurie Baedke (38:07.19)
Yeah, thank you. Okay, our time is starting to draw short, but I have a couple of questions I wanna make sure we don't miss. Kind of shifting to some, not quite yet, not quite yet, but what are a couple of things that combat taught you, Mark, about leadership that maybe corporate America or your civilian counterparts either forget or don't get to see through that lens?
Mark Hertling (38:14.99)
Is this a speed round? Is this a speed round? Okay.
Mark Hertling (38:33.91)
The military is unique in that we really truly care for our people, not just for the job they perform, but who they are as human beings. I have a box on my desk. I don't know if I've ever talked to you about this. It's called, on the top of it, says, Make It Matter. And every day I look in this box because inside of it, if I can turn it around without spilling them, there are cards with pictures and stories.
about the people that I served with who made the ultimate sacrifice in combat. And there's 253 of these cards in the box. So their sacrifice occurred 10, 20 years ago in two different wars. And every day I still think about them because, I mean, an 18-year-old back in 2004 would be in his early 40s now. And you say, what would they have been doing?
What would their life have been like? How many people have missed them since? So that whole combination of really being engaged with people, I think is critically important to anyone wanting to practice leadership. The other thing is planning. I'm not a planner by nature, Laurie. I'm more spontaneous. My wife is the planner. And luckily we got married because she keeps me straight. But when you're doing important things,
Laurie Baedke (39:51.675)
Okay.
Mark Hertling (40:00.206)
There's a requirement, I think, to plan and rehearse what you're doing and really have a vision toward what the end state looks like. Where do you want to go? Business people call that the vision or the mission of the organization. And if you don't get that right, you're probably, as I guess it was somebody said, if you don't know what road you're taking, any road will get you there or something like that. The third thing I think is values.
Laurie Baedke (40:23.757)
Yep. Yep.
Mark Hertling (40:29.678)
along with not reflecting as much as we should, most people don't identify truly what their values are, what they believe in. And if you haven't done that, you're gonna become a wind sock in your life. You're gonna bend whichever way the wind is blowing. But if you've identified what you believe in, integrity, humor, agility, adaptability, and you really work on those things in terms of your values,
Laurie Baedke (40:29.942)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (40:59.352)
you're going to be a much more grounded person. So those are a couple of things I'd say just off the top of my head. and one more, one more. And you, I think one time you killed me for this when I said this, when I said leaders don't have the right to have a bad day. And everybody misunderstands that statement. But if you're a leader and you have a bad day, your whole team has a bad day. So you can certainly have bad feelings and have a rough stretch.
Laurie Baedke (41:06.623)
Yeah, kind of a follow up. Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (41:16.502)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Mark Hertling (41:29.154)
But you have to present yourself as always being positive and upbeat so your team feels the same way.
Laurie Baedke (41:33.396)
Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of tees this next question up beautifully because, you know, when you wrote about so many of the experiences that you had and the decisions that you needed to make, some of them were in fact, you know, wrapped in or surrounded with fear and uncertainty. And so what has your life taught you about how you lead, even when you're afraid or even when you feel that
impending sense of imposter phenomenon or just haven't been there before and got to rise up to the challenge, what lessons have you learned?
Mark Hertling (42:12.382)
What I've learned about fear is if you can overcome it with courage in one way or another, it could be false courage, it could be real courage or just a desire to press yourself and push yourself forward. If you overcome that fear, tomorrow you're going to be a better person. It's something that inherently causes you to do things that you don't think you can do.
Laurie Baedke (42:40.502)
Okay.
Mark Hertling (42:41.198)
And most of the time you can do it. And that makes you a much stronger person. I had a guy, you know, if you have a fear of failure, it's going to really stunt your growth. I had a guy one time relate to me that I am a big baseball fan, that if you're a baseball player in the major leagues and you bat 300 for your career average, you're gonna go to the hall of fame.
But if you're only batting 300, that means you're missing two out of three at bats with a strike out or a ground out. So you're failing two thirds of the time, but at least you're trying. So just the ability to try, to push yourself is part of self-discipline, and I think that's another leadership trait.
Laurie Baedke (43:11.862)
Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (43:23.009)
Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (43:27.188)
Yeah, wholly agree. And I know, Mark, you and I both share a strong passion for physical fitness and health and well-being. You're an active champion of physical fitness. You've even served on a president's council for fitness. How does physical discipline shape mental and moral leadership?
Mark Hertling (43:46.2)
Yeah, I think my belief is that physically being fit is a part of your presence. It is who you are. It gives you energy. When you start the day or end the day or however your schedule permits you to work out, if you're looking forward to it or you begin your day that way, you've done something that not a lot of people do. So it puts you at an advantage and it gives you more energy for the rest of the day. I've never seen someone who
is into fitness who's excessively tired by the end of the day. They're always, they may be a little bit fatigued, but they're not wiped out. But it also goes along with two other factors, Laurie, and I think physical fitness is important, but so is social fitness, meeting new people. And so is emotional fitness, experiencing the range of emotions so you know how to deal with them. And intellectual fitness, reading a book when you have a spare chance instead of
Laurie Baedke (44:19.798)
Yeah.
Laurie Baedke (44:31.945)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hertling (44:45.474)
you know, just watching TV or doing things that are, are, you know, prone, I guess, in your approach. So all of those fitness areas of physical, emotional, mental, social contribute to your overall presence and who you are as a person.
Laurie Baedke (45:02.498)
Yeah, I wholly agree. And just taking that one more notch deeper, what do you think that leaders sometimes underestimate about the connection between physical health or fitness and movement and executive capacity? Because again, research is abundantly clear there as well.
Mark Hertling (45:20.952)
Yeah, its appearance, first of all, mean, as shallow as that may sound, its appearance is how do you look? When people look at you, do they think that person can get the job done because they're ready for it? Just the stature of someone who's physically fit is a contributor to mission effectiveness, as we say in the military. But it also, as I said earlier, it gives you energy.
provides you with a stamina that you can do something that maybe somebody else cannot And also just staying physically fit gives you the physical capacity to move your legs, move your arms, do the things that you need to do. There was a study done after World War I. It was called the Hamburger Study that I learned, not in terms of hamburger meal, but the guy that wrote it was named Hamburger. He did a study that showed
that in the Civil War, generals who appeared physically fit won more battles. Now, I don't know what is conclusions that came from that connection, but just the fact that they were able to inspire their soldiers or be more active on the battlefield or what the causation was. But there was a study, a very naive one, I think, that tend to correlate those two things. And I think...
I thought that was funny when I read the study back when I was a captain about to teach PE at West Point.
Laurie Baedke (46:53.834)
Yeah, no, I wholly agree. And that is, course, you know, it is real, but it's also controversial. And because you and I both know that physical appearance and presence is a piece and it does matter, but it doesn't hold a candle to, you know, character and clarity, know, mental clarity and the type of, you know, the way that our nutrition and our movement and our sleep all pull through to impact
our executive capacity, our ability to make difficult decisions, that stamina to work through long days or really difficult conditions or extraordinary levels of stress and as difficult as it is for me included, that value just cannot be overstated and our habits over the decades compound and we don't get to redo what
was so easy in decades past and sometimes we don't get that luxury or privilege in the future.
Mark Hertling (47:54.83)
Well, if you're physically fit too, you can also achieve more in your lifetime because research shows you're going to live longer too, which is great. Yeah, there was one of the better marketing campaigns in our history. Laurie, see if you can pick it up. You may be too young for this, but the first Army marketing campaign was Be All You Can Be. And it was extremely successful.
Laurie Baedke (48:16.785)
yeah, yep.
Mark Hertling (48:21.034)
I would always say to my soldiers, no, no, no, I don't want you to be all you can be. I want you to be more than you appear to be. So it's taking that physical fitness to the next level of doing more intellectually and emotionally than what you just can be. Take it to where you should be.
Laurie Baedke (48:28.15)
Hmm.
Laurie Baedke (48:39.302)
Yeah, I agree. Last question is, you wrote this for your sons and your sons are now fathers. You have beautiful grandchildren. What do you hope that your grandchildren understand about service or life and leadership and family based on what it is that you've written in this book or what they've watched their grandpa live?
Mark Hertling (49:02.828)
Yeah, I don't think they're going to learn anything from me, Laurie, to be honest with you. They may read the book, and they may get a few tidbits from it, but they've already learned what they needed to learn from their great parents. mean, both of our sons have married well. They have wonderful spouses, and they have a family unit that I think is key to raising children the right way. They're disciplining.
rewarding, they're doing all the things that good parents do and they're part of their children's lives. So that, more than anything else, is what's going to save our society.
Laurie Baedke (49:39.734)
Yeah. more of that, please. And thank you. And Mark, I'm just so excited to finish this book and to see it reach the world. I thank you for your time in this conversation and for all of your important leadership and just as well, my thanks to Sue for sharing her with me for this hour while we've been in this conversation.
Mark Hertling (50:01.006)
Can I ask you one question before we go, Laurie? Because everyone's telling me that there are parts of the book where they cry. Have you cried in the book?
Laurie Baedke (50:08.976)
I'm a weeper. I'm a weeper. So yes, I have, I have already been misty and I anticipate probably increasingly so. So yeah, I'm a crier.
Mark Hertling (50:11.458)
Hahaha
Mark Hertling (50:15.576)
Good.
Mark Hertling (50:19.4)
my work here is done. Okay. Thank you.
Laurie Baedke (50:21.44)
Thanks a lot. No, truly, thank you and carry on my friend.
Mark Hertling (50:25.878)
Okay, thank you so much for having me, Laurie. This was super.
