Shoot, Move, Communicate — The Basics of Business
This morning I found myself thinking back to my time augmenting with the SEALs in Afghanistan and reflecting on what actually separates people who perform at a high level from everyone else. From the outside, it’s easy to assume those people know some advanced trick or have access to some secret technique that others don’t. But what I saw again and again was something much simpler. The people who could make things happen in complex environments almost always had an incredibly firm grasp of the fundamentals.
In the military, the fundamentals are simple: shoot, move, communicate. Everything else builds on that. No matter how advanced the mission, no matter how complicated the environment, those basics never go away. If you play an instrument, it’s the same thing. The best musicians in the world still practice their scales. Mastery doesn’t come from escaping the basics. It comes from returning to them over and over until they become second nature.
That got me thinking this morning about business. What are the fundamentals of business? What are the equivalent of shoot, move, communicate for the work most of us do every day? When you really strip it down, most of our work comes down to something surprisingly simple: speaking and listening. Even reading and writing are really just extensions of those two activities. Our days are filled with conversations—meetings, phone calls, emails, messages—where the core activity is communicating with another human being.
If you can speak in a way that truly impacts others, and if you can listen in a way that truly understands them, an enormous number of other things suddenly become possible. But most people misunderstand what speaking and listening actually are. When people speak, they tend to think they’re simply delivering words to another person. The assumption is straightforward: I said it, they heard it, message delivered. But if you look at the results people produce in the world, it becomes pretty clear that’s not how communication works.
People miss things. They misunderstand things. Sometimes they don’t hear what you said at all. The reason is simple: most of us imagine we’re speaking into an empty vessel. We assume the other person is sitting there waiting to receive our message exactly as we intended it. But nobody is an empty vessel. Everyone is already full—full of their own concerns, their own interpretations, their own plans for what they’re going to say next. They’re thinking about the project that’s due tomorrow, the conversation they had earlier in the day, or the point they’re about to make in the meeting.
So when we speak, the real work isn’t just saying the words. The real work is speaking in a way that actually lands for the person who’s listening. It means recognizing that what matters isn’t what you said, but what they heard. That requires us to account for how our words might be received, interpreted, or misunderstood.
Listening has a similar challenge. When we listen, we also imagine we’re neutral observers simply receiving information. But that’s not true either. When we listen, we bring our own opinions, judgments, expectations, and interpretations into the conversation. Most of the time we’re not truly hearing what the other person said. We’re hearing our version of what they said. We’re filtering it through everything already going on in our heads.
Which means the basic work of business—the work that happens in every meeting, every email, every decision—comes back to these same fundamentals. Learning how to speak so that others can actually hear you. And learning how to listen so that you actually hear them.
These may sound like simple skills, but like shoot, move, communicate, they’re foundational. When the fundamentals are strong, everything else becomes easier. When they’re weak, no amount of advanced strategy will make up for it.
