Exploring the career and life journey of... Barry McManus

HYPHENCould you tell us a bit about your career journey? It sounds like your progression through the ranks was perhaps a bit unorthodox considering where you started!

Barry McManusI joined the military in 1980 and entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Australia, which essentially was a military university. To be honest, I’m still surprised that I graduated! I was allocated to the Royal Australian Transport Corps as a logistician, but I did a lot of other things as time went on, such as quite a few roles in education and training.

I started as a junior military officer in transport regiments, then became an instructor at the transport school, teaching officers and senior NCOs how to run transport and logistics units and operations.

Things changed when I was selected to become a United Nations observer in Lebanon and the Golan Heights and took a secondment to a UN team in Yugoslavia – particularly Sarajevo – in 1992.

HYPHENCan you describe what it was like going into a volatile environment like that?

Barry McManusI was part of a team of 60 military observers from around the world and Yugoslavia was challenging – it was a nasty place. From a professional point, it was about diplomacy – we were trying to calm two warring factions, report what was happening, and support peace efforts.

During that time, I was responsible for taking over Sarajevo Airport. We had six military observers, a handful of French marines and a couple of French airport technicians and we had to open the airport for UN flights. It wasn’t easy – we had three days there after taking control before we were replaced by an entire Canadian infantry battalion.

There was also another incident where we were escorting part of the unit into Sarajevo when our convoy was shelled by artillery, which blew up one of the jeeps in front of us, so we had to protect the vehicle and extract an officer and his driver. The officer ended up in later years being the Commander of the Canadian Army, and his liaison officer – who worked with me at the time – ended up being his military assistant when he was the Commander of the Army. It just shows how small the global military system can be.

As a result of my efforts in Sarajevo I received a United Nations Commander’s Commendation, which helped bring me to the attention of people higher up in Australia.

Hyphen It sounds like that experience accelerated your career trajectory – what followed that experience in Yugoslavia?

Barry McManusI attended the Staff College in the UK, which is a military university that typically trains people with 10 to 12 years of service; the course is used like a filter process to identify people to move on to higher positions.

That was a great year doing what was ultimately a masters-level finishing course and led to me becoming the senior instructor for transport and logistics at Australia’s brand-new Army Logistics Training Centre. I was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became an instructor at the Australian Army Staff College, teaching young officers for two years.

These appointments led to me being selected to command one of Australia’s then brand-new multifunctional logistics battalions, and for my two years of command, we spent 15 months on operations – some of that time was in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony under Indonesian protection that was facing all sorts of trouble, and some saw us provide support at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

HYPHENThose sound like two very different jobs! Can you tell us what was involved in each?

Barry McManusMy battalion was part of the logistics effort, which initially meant supporting the extraction of a UN military force out of East Timor to the Northern Australian city of Darwin. That turned into an intervention where international forces deployed into East Timor to stabilise the situation, so it was similar to Yugoslavia.

My organisation initially operated the logistics hub in northern Australia for about five months then went into East Timor for six months to close out the initial operation and its mandate into a UN-controlled peacekeeping force.

We ran the Dili port, which meant looking after supplies coming in and going out, and we distributed imports – fuel, food, ammunition, and general supplies – across the island so we were supporting 10,000 international military and UN personnel. It took a while to introduce a new UN logistics network but after we handed that over, we left East Timor in June 2000.

After a month’s break, we became the logistics battalion supporting the Sydney Olympics and Paralympics. We provided transport for officials, and supported military units that were doing explosive detection, and provided site managers for all Olympic sites – they would coordinate supplies, transport and communications between sites.

Things changed three days before the Olympics, though, when we were asked to provide a bus service. Someone had built this fantastic computer program to manage the buses in the most efficient manner possible. In theory, it was brilliant; in practice, it created all sorts of problems.

Drivers had no idea which of the supposedly optimised routes they were on, so they were often late, got lost or missed stops. It was a similar story when the buses came back each night – there was no process to get buses ready again and drivers would wander around a two-acre site each morning with no idea where their bus was to begin work.

Instead, we put a soldier behind every driver to help them navigate and just made them experts by driving one route all day. We also set up teams to look after buses at the depots and created a distribution network. It was very simple transport planning, all done by hand, but it worked – it shows not everything has to be complicated.

Barry McManusI returned home to Australia, back into the training world and ran the Tri-Service – the Army, Navy and Air Force Staff College – a defence masters-conferring university, as part of the Australian Defence Colleges Network.

I had an international team of instructors – army, air force and navy – and students from about 40 countries. I was lucky enough to be the head of that university for a year, which was way too short for my liking. I was reappointed into a job in Defence Central. That role saw me look at defence future capabilities and investments – essentially, how did defence need to be organised for the future and what technologies and capabilities should be investigated and invested in?

In late 2010, I became the Australian Military Attaché to the United States and Senior Army Officer in the Americas. I really can't speak highly enough of the work, which was all about military diplomatic matters and maintaining and improving military-to-military relations. Part of this job included being asked to lecture at the US State Department Training Facility in Virginia, providing a foreign perspective on international military relations, and lecturing at the US Defence Attaché course and other US military colleges.

This was a fantastic appointment, working across many defence disciplines with the United States and, as it happened, with my Canadian military counterparts.

For my efforts in enhancing the relationship, the United States honoured me with a second award of the Legion of Merit, while in Australia I was recognised for my efforts by being made a Member of the Order of Australia.

After that, I went back to Australia to become responsible for the procurement of army equipment – tanks, guns, bullets, you name it. I transitioned out of procurement and into supporting Australian defence industries with international sales and support the Australian defence industry in breaking into overseas markets, particularly the US, and then in early 2016, I retired after 36 years in the military.

HyphenHow did it feel when you came to that realisation about your career?

Barry McManusBy that particular stage, I knew I wasn't going to be promoted any further, which I thought was pretty fair.

One thing I would tell people is always know your limits because we have an old saying: most people were promoted one rank beyond their capability. I think I was promoted to the level of my ability – I knew there were others who were better than me, so I had a realistic perspective of where I sat and was happy that I had done the best I could in my military career. It was time to retire and look for a new challenge.

HyphenLooking at your military career now, did you have a clear sense of what you wanted to accomplish when you started and how does it compare?

Barry McManusIf you'd told me when I graduated from the Royal Military College back in 1983 that this was where I would end up, I would have laughed at you.

In fact, the day I graduated from military college, I was so proud that I drove home to Brisbane in my uniform. During the trip, I pulled into a service station in a town called Dubbo at about 1 am.

The attendant noticed I was a graduate of the military college and asked what I was going to be. I didn't have an answer – I was dumbfounded – and he said: ‘If you've graduated from that military college, you’ve wasted our time if you don't become commanding officer of a unit’.

It was a bit crazy – this was a random guy in a petrol station in the middle of nowhere! – but that stuck with me. It’s funny to think about that now.

HyphenWas consulting something you had considered before you retired from the military or was it something that came out of the blue?

Barry McManusI was cold-called by [the consulting firm] Kearney within a month of retiring, and I worked with them for five years as a defence advisor.

I worked with a country in the Middle East to upgrade its defence enterprise and establish a defence ministry, and I was a specialist advisor on acquisitions, logistics, diplomatic issues, military attaché networks, etc. We developed an operating model for how their defence entity would work so that was a big project that finished for me in 2021.

I had about six months off, after which Michael [Savolainen] rang me up and asked if I would be interested in working with Hyphen. I’ve worked on a few projects since – now I'm in semi-retirement, doing whatever Michael sends my way!

Barry McManusNone of the jobs worried me. I characterise myself as a generalist – I believe specialists can only see one answer, they want the nirvana specialist solution like in the bus example from the Olympics. They had what they thought was the most efficient solution, but it just wasn't effective.

You can be as efficient as you want, but if you are not effective, you'll fail; if I'm effective and not necessarily efficient, I can still operate, so I put a lot more emphasis on being effective than efficient.

People talk about the logistics network as the tail of the defence business, and between the 1980s and 2000s, there was a great cry about reducing logistics overheads to increase the tooth-to-tail ratio but it's a short-term view and a false economy that needs to be fixed further down the line – there are a lot of examples of this short-sighted view in Europe right now.

If you don't get your big logistics and acquisition issues right, you might have the best tactical military possible, but if it can’t be sustained, it's not that effective. That's the view I've taken into a lot of jobs. I also have a cautious view about change: it doesn't always equal improvement; change just means change. The outcome must be real improvement but often change is just change for change’s sake.

HyphenSpeaking of change, how was the transition into a new line of work after so long in the military? Were there any big differences or similarities?

Barry McManusOne big thing I learned is that you need to talk to the project leader directly, one to one, in most cases if you have a different opinion on something. People feel threatened in a group environment – they don't want to demonstrate weakness or a lack of knowledge – so speaking with decision-makers separately gives you a better chance of getting your point across.

To be honest, that’s no different than it was in certain circumstances of my military career but in the military at home in Australia, I was lucky enough to work for some bosses whose perspective was ‘If you don't tell me in the meeting that I'm doing something dumb and I make a decision that's dumb, then you're part of the problem’ and when a decision was made, we all carried that through. That has not always been the case in consulting; there have been plenty of times when I’ve seen people fail to display what I would call moral courage in their decisions.

The best projects I have worked on have been with teams where the partner knows what they don't know and they want input and advice, and a solution is developed. When you work with people from the same industry, you can approach them directly because you might know they understand the background knowledge or the details, whereas others might have no idea so you have to lead them.

That’s where my time in education and training roles comes in useful because, if it’s a crisis over time, you've got to have the patience to let them work it out, or if it’s a crisis in time, you've got to come up with a solution more quickly.

HyphenWould you say the change from a military role to a consulting one has been bigger than anything you experienced while going up the military ladder then? You also mentioned earlier you consider yourself semi-retired – what keeps you motivated to keep working?

Barry McManusTo answer your first question, absolutely, because often there’s not that common level of understanding that you share with colleagues in your own business.

I think that’s why Hyphen’s approach of building multifunctional teams is the nirvana solution for consulting, though. You’re not just adopting an approach from a field expert or some very smart consultants whose experience is in other fields and forcing one side to adapt; putting all sides together and collaborating means they can use their experiences, challenge preconceptions and bring new perspectives, which is incredibly valuable.

To answer your second question, interesting topics and projects keep me stimulated – I don't particularly need to work now but it's nice to work, interact with people and do things if there is something I can make better for someone else.

What attracted me when Hyphen first approached me is that they will find the right expert to help solve a problem but what has kept me happy to be attached to Hyphen is they’re a good bunch of people to deal with – everyone is friendly, open and engaging.

It’s more of a team approach on projects too – we’re in it together and collectively develop a solution and they are so supportive – so that’s probably the most enjoyable part for me. It's about feeling that you’re a part of something that's working collectively and doing good things. My military background valued the importance of working as part of a team, with Hyphen that is exactly how I feel: part of a team.

HyphenHow do you assess the global defence situation right now and how it’s evolving? How do armed forces ensure they adapt in the right way in such a high-stakes sector?

Barry McManusMy major at university was history, so, from a historical perspective, I see constancy – groups with different perspectives rub against each other and can’t find a compromise, so they fight. That constancy also applies to the yin and yang between offensive and defensive weapon systems – which side is winning goes back and forth but it’s always happening.

The difference now is these dynamics change a lot faster, which makes life harder from an acquisition perspective, because when a lot of money is spent on something, you want value from it. Unfortunately, it can become outdated or obsolete very quickly.

Some technologies are evolutionary and can be adapted over time – there are some great examples of items military organisations still use today that were designed back in the 1940s and 1950s and have been upgraded.

There are others that I call ‘dreadnought technologies’, like the British battleships in the early 20th century. These are revolutionary and can make a lot of current defence equipment obsolete – they’re hugely disruptive.

This is a dilemma that governments and defence entities have: is the thing that I'm buying going to be cost-effective and do everything I need? You need to understand the technologies you invest in, and the implications when you think about what you're going to do in the future. Once you do that, then you can get into the loop of continually upgrading and adapting the technologies available. You have to adapt or you become the dinosaur, which is like any other industry.

HyphenTo finish, would you tell us a bit about what you like to do away from your work?

Barry McManusFor the past 10-12 years, my wife and I have been renovating old houses and bringing them back to life so they can survive another couple of centuries – the oldest house we have worked on was originally built in 1639. We also redo landscaping, try to re-establish native plants, and we like to grow our own fruits and vegetables.

I also have a large collection of historical books on military logistics, some of which are from the 1700s and 1800s – it’s just interesting to read how people with different tools would solve problems. I'm also an avid reader of science fiction – science fantasy to be more precise – because I like to go somewhere completely different when I’m reading something.

I used to watch military movies but not now. I remember watching ‘Saving Private Ryan’ after coming back from Yugoslavia and some of us felt uncomfortable throughout, even though it was well made. I've tended to steer away from those movies because I don't need to relive those experiences.

I’d like to leave you with one final point: less than 1% of the population in many countries has been on military operations. Some look at that as if that's a bad thing, as if there is a lack of experience; my view is that if less than 1% of the population has had to deal with that nastiness, then that’s fantastic because things must be going okay.

I don't think you have to create circumstances where people have to experience nastiness to know that it’s something that you don't want everybody to become involved in. Most military guys don't like to talk about the real details of their experiences unless it's with another military guy who can understand the circumstances because there's nothing glorious about it – at all.

Just through my experiences, it’s enough for me to say that it’s something I wish nobody ever had to do. I do hope there are people willing to do these jobs because it’s still something that needs to be done if the worst comes to the worst – but I also cross my fingers that one day nobody will have to go through it ever again. That might be considered naïve by some people but I think it is a goal to continuously strive for.