Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 46

The Defense
Entrepreneurs
Forum

Developing a Culture
of Innovation
Lt. Col. Curtis D. Taylor, U.S. Army, and
Maj. Nathan K. Finney, U.S. Army

The official White
House portrait of
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
( James Anthony Wills)

Lt. Col. Curtis D. Taylor is an armor officer assigned to the Advanced Strategic Leadership Studies
Program, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He served as the commander of 3rd Battalion, 66th Armor
Regiment in Paktika, Afghanistan and Grafenwoehr, Germany. He holds an MMAS. Previous
assignments include tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maj. Nathan K. Finney is an Army strategist and former armor officer currently serving in the
National Capital Region. He was a founding board member of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum.
Maj. Finney holds two M.P.A. degrees from Harvard University and the University of Kansas,
and a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Previous assignments include tours in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
When you combine a culture of discipline
with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the
magical alchemy of great performance.

—Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies
Make the Leap … and Others Don’t

O

n a chilly afternoon in October 1920,
two young officers who shared a
duplex at Fort Meade, Maryland
gathered with their wives for a leisurely dinner
that likely changed the course of American
history. For years, these two officers held an

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unpopular, almost heretical view—that tanks,
used with only limited success in World War
I, held the key to victory in any future ground
war in Europe. Their names were Capt.
Dwight Eisenhower and Maj. George Patton.
Both officers had suffered criticism for their
ideas. In Eisenhower’s case, his 1920 article in
Infantry Journal about armored forces won
him a stern condemnation from the chief of
infantry, who assured him that his unorthodox opinion guaranteed a career climax as
the head coach of the Fort Meade intramural
July-August 2014  MILITARY REVIEW