The Value of Milken
“These “soft skills” are characteristics that define great organizations — military units, startups, or corporations.”
In May, I attended the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in Los Angeles. I have attended many conferences but Milken was different. It was the best conference I have attended.
With dozens of topic-specific forums, Milken programming covered an impressive range of global issues. From health to sports, from veterans’ transitions to the future of credit markets, participants from seemingly unrelated industries engaged one another in challenging conversations.
But Milken was particularly interesting because of a theme interwoven throughout the entire conference — global human capital.
Every business leader I spoke with described a similar challenge: finding enough great employees.
Their challenge is our opportunity.
The United States military does an exceptional job training its members. From day one, service members are taught leadership, discipline, and resilience. People often call these “soft skills,” but that misses the point. These “soft skills” are characteristics that define great organizations — military units, startups, or corporations.
Additionally, the military operates a constellation of technical schools. Men and women in service become linguists, intelligence analysts, and systems managers — people with “hard skills.” Outside of the top technical schools, what other organization can technically train its members at scale?
These skills — hard and soft — translate well and directly to non-military professions. Top employers — Citigroup, Amazon, Uber — understand this and are capitalizing on it.
By investing in the deep (and growing) pool of veteran talent, Milken is accelerating this transformation in industry.
Several years ago, my friend Matt Driskill and Milken executives started the Milken Military Leadership Circle (MLC), a competitive fellowship-like program for active duty military officers. The MLC is an impressive group representing all military branches.
For MLC members, the conference was a good way to interface with industry leaders, test and improve their personal pitch, and receive constructive feedback. Perhaps more importantly, however, the Milken Conference highlighted an important truth — employers need talented employees, whether or not they served, and will pay for them. This is not always well understood by transitioning military members. We often undervalue ourselves.
On the last day of the conference, Matt and Milken executives brought together several dozen stakeholders to discuss and debate best practices and next steps. It was all about problem-solving and action — recruiting and hiring, entrepreneurship, investing, and public-private partnerships.
This is the value of Milken.
