What Vietnam’s field improvisations teach business leaders about workarounds, bureaucracy, and the people closest to the problem.
For years, I have done business audits where I sit down with people in different positions across a company and ask painfully complicated questions like, “What’s making your job harder than it needs to be?”
You would think I had asked them to explain quantum physics while juggling steak knives.
Not because they do not know the answer. They always know the answer. Usually immediately. Usually with examples, dates, names, screenshots, side stories, and a level of emotional detail that tells me they have been carrying this around for months, sometimes years.
The shock is that nobody asked.
The person doing the work knows the tool that is slowing them down. They know the approval step that adds no value. They know which software field exists only because someone in a conference room thought it looked impressive. They know which customer complaint keeps repeating. They know which report nobody reads. They know which “new process” added three more steps to a job that was already held together by duct tape, caffeine, and one woman named Susan who knows where everything is.
But somewhere higher up the chain, someone made a decision.
This person may have had a title, a dashboard, and possibly a vest with the company logo on it. What they often did not have was any recent experience actually doing the job. Or watching the job being done. Or asking the people doing the job whether the brilliant new idea would help or just create a more expensive version of the same old circus.
This is not rare.
This is Tuesday.
And it is why I cannot stop thinking about a strange little corner of Vietnam War history involving Navy SEALs, MACV-SOG, blue jeans, pantyhose, mud, leeches, and the ancient management principle that the person closest to the problem usually sees it first.
John L. Plaster’s SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam is one of those books that pulls you into a world most organizations would rather pretend does not exist: the world where the official plan meets reality and reality punches it in the mouth. Plaster was a three-tour SOG veteran, and his book helped bring public attention to the covert operations of MACV-SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, a top-secret Vietnam-era special operations unit. The publisher describes SOG as an all-volunteer force drawing from Army Green Berets, Air Force Air Commandos, Navy SEALs, and others, operating behind enemy lines in some of the most dangerous parts of the war.
The U.S. Army’s own history gives us the line every business leader should tattoo somewhere discreet but visible during budget meetings: SOG reconnaissance teams had “considerable latitude” with tactics, uniforms, and weapons, and captured enemy equipment was often used.
There it is.
Latitude.
A beautiful word. A dangerous word. A word that terrifies organizations that believe control is the same thing as competence.
SOG operators were not given latitude because military bureaucracy had suddenly discovered jazz. They were given latitude because their missions demanded it. They were operating in Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and other places where the official map, the official uniform, and the official process did not always line up with survival. In that environment, strict adherence to a bad assumption was not discipline. It was stupidity wearing a helmet.
The same pattern showed up among Navy SEALs in Vietnam, especially in the Mekong Delta and other wet, miserable places designed by nature to remind human beings that we are mostly made of water and poor judgment.
Some SEALs wore Levi’s instead of standard-issue jungle fatigues. At first glance, this sounds like myth, style, or some early form of tactical influencer branding. “Today’s loadout: Stoner 63, cammy top, Levi’s, and just enough facial hair to upset a colonel.”
But the reasons were practical.
Coffee or Die Magazine quotes retired SEAL Kirby Horrell saying the men started using pantyhose because “the leeches couldn’t bite through them.” Horrell also said SEALs began wearing Levi’s with their camouflage tops because the jeans lasted longer. Jim Berta, another SEAL Team 1 operator, explained that mosquitoes had trouble getting through denim, that “mud didn’t cling to Levis” like it did to camouflage pants, and that jeans did not have the large side pockets that filled with water when men came out of rivers and canals.
A Medium piece by Chris Danforth, drawing on SEAL-related accounts and National Navy SEAL Museum material, similarly reports that some Vietnam SEALs preferred privately purchased Levi’s 501s and 505s, sometimes wearing pantyhose underneath for protection against leeches, mosquitoes, and other insects.
Now, a man in Washington or Saigon could have looked at that and said, “That is not regulation.”
And he would have been correct.
He would also have been missing the point so badly that the point would need to file a missing person report.
The issue was not whether Levi’s were standard issue. The issue was whether the standard issue worked in the environment. The mud did not care about the procurement process. The leeches did not care about the uniform manual. The river did not care that some committee had signed off on the pockets.
This is the part business leaders miss all the time.
The customer does not care how the process was designed.
The warehouse does not care what the software demo looked like.
The employee trying to finish the job does not care that the new workflow made sense on a slide deck, especially if the slide deck was created by someone whose last operational hardship was a weak hotel Wi-Fi signal.
Reality does not salute the org chart.
The Army eventually had to study the wet-terrain problem formally. In the Mekong Delta, the 9th Infantry Division was losing combat effectiveness to skin disease and foot problems caused by rice paddies, swamp land, canals, and constant exposure to water. In Sharpening the Combat Edge, the Army describes Operation Safe Step, a medical research effort to control and minimize foot problems. In fiscal year 1969, skin diseases of the foot and boot area accounted for an average of 47 percent of combat man-days lost in the division’s maneuver battalions. The official account says, with refreshing bluntness, “We needed a quick fix.”
That sentence should be framed in every executive conference room.
Not because businesses are war. They are not. Let’s not do that ridiculous thing where someone compares a missed sales target to combat. Nobody needs to storm a hill because the CRM has duplicate contacts.
But the pattern is the same.
There is the official system.
Then there is the real environment.
And when the two collide, the people closest to the work start modifying the system.
They create side spreadsheets. They text photos. They keep private checklists. They save old templates. They call the one person in accounting who actually knows how to get a vendor approved. They build little unofficial bridges across the holes leadership does not know exist.
Then leadership discovers these workarounds and says, “Why aren’t people following the process?”
Wrong question.
The better question is: “What is the process failing to understand?”
I have seen this in almost every kind of business. A sales team using a private spreadsheet because the CRM is too slow, too cluttered, or too obviously designed by someone who has never had to close a deal while sitting in a parking lot between appointments. A warehouse team texting photos because the inventory system says the part exists, but the shelf says otherwise, and the shelf has a better track record. A customer service rep keeping handwritten notes because the approved script answers questions customers stopped asking three years ago. A project manager running a shadow checklist because the official workflow is beautiful in theory and useless in motion.
This is where companies get themselves into trouble.
They treat workarounds as disobedience before they treat them as information.
To be fair, not every workaround is brilliant. Some are dangerous. Some create compliance problems. Some hide defects. Some make the business dependent on one heroic employee who knows how to keep the circus tent from collapsing. That is not innovation. That is a hostage situation with email.
But many workarounds are field intelligence.
They are the first honest evidence that the system has met the real world.
The official process is what the company believes is happening.
The workaround is what the company knows is happening.
And in my experience, the workaround is usually where the truth lives.
This is why business audits can be so revealing. I do not start by asking only the executives what they think the problem is. Executives often know part of the problem, especially the financial symptoms. Revenue is down. Margins are squeezed. Turnover is high. Customers are frustrated. Projects are late. Everybody is very busy. A consultant has already used the word “alignment,” which means the invoice is about to get larger.
But the people doing the work know the texture of the problem.
They know where the delay actually happens. They know which approval is fake. They know which manager creates bottlenecks because everything needs to pass through his kingdom, population: one ego. They know which customer promise the company keeps making even though the operation cannot fulfill it. They know which tool would save two hours a day. They know which step should be automated and which step absolutely should not be automated because judgment matters.
And yet, shockingly often, nobody has asked them.
A company will spend six figures on software before spending six minutes asking the person doing the job what would help.
This is the part that makes me want to gently place my head through drywall.
Not violently. Professionally.
The irony is that leaders love to talk about innovation. Innovation workshops. Innovation committees. Innovation off-sites. Innovation roadmaps. Innovation labs with glass walls and chairs that look like dental equipment.
But in many companies, the most useful innovation is already happening quietly, unofficially, and without permission.
It is happening in the workaround.
It is happening where the field is adapting faster than headquarters.
The Army’s own Vietnam history makes this point plainly. In Tactical and Materiel Innovations, Lieutenant General John H. Hay Jr. wrote that Vietnam was a “war of innovations,” with different equipment, terrain, enemy methods, and rules from previous wars. The same summary notes that improved equipment was rushed through development and that “successful ideas originated in the field.”
Successful ideas originated in the field.
That is the line.
Not in the committee.
Not in the binder.
Not in the quarterly transformation initiative.
In the field.
The field always finds the friction first.
In Vietnam, the field was mud, jungle, monsoon rain, rice paddies, canals, leeches, enemy movement, disease, and missions that could not wait for institutional elegance. The Army’s own description of the terrain makes the operational problem obvious: flat rice paddies and swamps in the Mekong Delta, canals and streams, heavy rainfall, heat, humidity, monsoons, deteriorating movement and communications, increased maintenance and disease problems.
In business, the field is different, but it is still the field.
It is the dispatch desk at 7:15 in the morning when three trucks are late and the customer is already angry.
It is the receptionist who knows the new intake process is confusing because she watches customers freeze at the same question every day.
It is the mechanic who knows the “approved” part fails twice as often as the one the company used to buy.
It is the salesperson who knows the quote template makes no sense to customers.
It is the production employee who knows the machine goes down every Thursday because preventative maintenance is scheduled around a fantasy version of production volume.
It is the nurse, the foreman, the installer, the bookkeeper, the route driver, the account manager, the technician, the person in the chair doing the actual work while someone far away updates a dashboard and declares the process “optimized.”
Optimized for whom?
That is the question.
A process can look optimized from above and feel insane from below.
A supply chain can look efficient until the cheapest vendor creates hidden rework.
A software system can look centralized until everyone creates side documents to survive it.
An approval policy can look controlled until it slows decisions so badly that customers leave.
This is where leadership has to grow up.
The goal is not to let everyone do whatever they want. That is not adaptability. That is kindergarten with purchase orders.
The goal is to build a company that can tell the difference between a reckless workaround and a useful field discovery.
When I audit a company, I am looking for those field discoveries. I want to know what employees have already invented because the official system is too slow, too rigid, too blind, or too proud. I want to know which workarounds reduce friction, which ones create risk, and which ones are screaming evidence that leadership solved the wrong problem.
There are a few questions I wish every leader would ask before buying another tool, changing another process, or announcing another initiative with the confidence of a man who has never had to use his own system.
What makes this job harder than it needs to be?
What do you do outside the official process just to get the work done?
What would help you produce more, produce better, or serve the customer faster?
What tool do you wish you had?
What tool do you currently have that you quietly hate?
What step would you remove tomorrow if nobody punished you for telling the truth?
These are not complicated questions.
They are just rarely asked by people with enough authority to do anything about the answers.
And when the answers come, the leader’s job is not to defend the existing system like it is a family heirloom.
The job is to listen without flinching.
That is harder than it sounds because the workaround is often an accusation. Not a personal one, necessarily, but an institutional one. It says: the official process failed us here. It says: the people designing the system did not understand the work. It says: the field had to adapt because headquarters was too slow.
Nobody likes hearing that.
But it is better to hear it from your employees than from your customers, your margins, your turnover numbers, or your competitors.
This is also where AI can help, but only if leaders do not use it as a shiny new way to avoid listening. AI can collect patterns from interviews, summarize repeated pain points, map process gaps, compare what leadership thinks is happening with what employees say is happening, and identify which workarounds appear across multiple locations or teams.
That is useful.
But AI cannot fix arrogance.
A company that will not ask its people what is broken will not become wise because it bought a smarter tool. It will just become a faster idiot.
The lesson from Vietnam’s field improvisations is not that every soldier should design his own uniform or every employee should ignore the process. That is the lazy interpretation. The better lesson is that the environment always gets a vote. The people inside that environment are constantly learning things the institution does not yet know.
The organization can punish that learning.
Or it can study it.
The jungle does not wait for procurement.
The rice paddy does not wait for doctrine.
The leech does not care what was approved in the uniform manual.
And in business, the customer does not wait for your internal process to become convenient. The market does not wait for your committee to reach consensus. The employee doing the job does not magically become more productive because someone who has never done the work added another required field.
Necessity may be the mother of invention.
But bureaucracy is often the father who stepped out for cigarettes and came back three years later with a policy manual.
The real opportunity is sitting right in front of us. Before the next software rollout, ask the people who will use it. Before the next process change, watch the job being done. Before deciding what the company needs, ask the people who already know where the friction lives.
Because somewhere in your company, someone is already wearing the business equivalent of Levi’s in a rice paddy.
They found something that works.
You can call it a workaround.
Or you can call it what it might actually be.
The first draft of a better operating system.
— Ryan Gartrell
Business Audits | Process Improvement | Lean AI® | Operational Strategy
If your company is full of side spreadsheets, shadow processes, bottlenecks, and tools everyone quietly hates, those are not just annoyances. They are warnings. I help leaders find the hidden friction before it becomes a customer problem, a margin problem, or a turnover problem.
Reference & Further Reading:
U.S. Army history of MACV-SOG
SOG – The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam– Book by John Plaster
The Men With Blue Jeans: Navy SEALs and Levi’s Denim
Army study on Vietnam tactical and materiel innovations
Coffee or Die report on Navy SEALs and blue jeans in Vietnam
