Young military veterans are some of our country’s greatest economic assets, yet they are often integrated into the private sector with a sense of emptiness. They find it difficult to reach full potential positive impact.
This is no secret, and it goes both ways: corporate america also has trouble translating the advanced technical language of the veteran into useful business speak. Just ask a CMO about a CADST sometime.
A new breed of hybrid relationships between entrepreneurial communities and veterans may do the trick. With entrepreneurship as a stopgap, organizations are organically changing the effectiveness of veteran integration into business.
Veterans posses high emotional intelligence, leadership under fire experience, and an unyielding commitment to integrity, team and mission success. These are traits readily attributable to successful entrepreneurs albeit in a different realm.
We feel that bringing these naturally symbiotic groups together will yield remarkable results. but requires cross training to enable more seamless interaction between veterans and the business community. This is exactly why Brooklyn Boulders (BKB) and Tactivate were so excited to collaborate with the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF).
DEF is a launching pad for the military community to discuss innovation, Tactivate is a program designed to embed Special Ops vets into start-ups, and BKB is building hybrid climbing facilities and community centers across the country
How do these three organizations provide a platform for each other? Tactivate works with BKB, constantly exploring ways to involve veterans in the business and using the facility as a real-time training ground to show veterans how their skills and training give them a huge advantage in the private sector. BKB plugs veterans into the management model to run the business like a unit.
With the unique environment generated by these special-ops management units, BKB becomes a platform for innovation: organizations like DEF play a very important role in this experiment as their community is made up of some of the most forward thinking minds in the military. In this video we interviewed some of the thought leaders of the organization, and they summed up the synchronicity:
To bridge the gap between the military and civilian business life, we created a model that is a hybrid of each. Both communities stand to gain significantly from their distinct strengths, and organizations like DEF and BKB provide a platform to share those strengths.