When the fate of the world hung on the decision of one man....

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

You can find out more about this pivotal day and its commemoration here, here and here. You can listen to General Eisenhower delivering his D-Day message to the troops here.

Tom Peters makes an excellent point when he asks:

Why does the Army, from recruit to general, train and train—but, mostly, the private sector does a smidgeon of individual training and virtually no unit training, let alone combined unit training?

I spent countless hours training during my Army career. Some of it was general; physical fitness training and marksmanship, for instance. Some of it centered on battle drills; developing instinctive reactions to common battlefield occurrences. And some of my training focused on preparing for specific missions.

All military units conduct this training, but the High Performance Units I was associated with excelled at training. They excelled because they understood and incorporated the 5 Rs of High Performance Training:

• Resources. High Performance Training is resource-intensive. It requires an investment of time, money, material, and personnel. For instance, one High Performance Unit I served with expended more ammunition for training in a month than similar units went through in a year.
• Realism. High Performance Training is realistic. Our training for a specific mission would include traveling distances equal to what we would travel during the actual mission, under the same conditions as we would likely encounter and culminated at a rehearsal target site built to look as much like the actual target as possible.
• Rehearsals. This is also referred to as the "crawl-walk-run" method. In training on especially complex tasks we would start with the basic individual tasks and methodically work up to the full unit tasks. Rehearsals were also used anytime live ammunition was to be used; we would train first with blank ammunition and not switch to live ammunition until we had mastered the drill we were conducting.
• Repetition. Practice something often enough and it becomes a subconscious, reflexive action.
• Review. One of the most effective tools for improving performance is the after-action review. Our training always ended by talking through what we did, why we did it, what worked, what didn't, and what we could do to improve our performance.

The effectiveness of the 5 Rs was driven home for me when I attended a briefing on the accident rates of aviation units involved in Operation Desert Storm. Prior to deployment, aviation units that I would consider High Performance (based on their consistent use of the 5 Rs, among other factors) had an accident rate that was somewhat higher than their counterparts. After deployment, however, their accident rate was substantially lower than units that didn't strictly adhere to the 5 Rs.

The 5 Rs of High Performance Training are as applicable to business as they are to the military. Adopting and adapting them for your specific needs will help you move towards High Performance Success.