McChrystal - The Rules…Have Changed

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World – General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell – (Portfolio Books)

History tells us of the mighty Soviet military invading Afghanistan; they are met by a rugged terrain on the order of the surface of the Moon and a collection of grizzled fighters that are relentless in their efforts to hold off and defeat the invading horde. With the help of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. military aide funneled through the CIA and the Soviets stubbornness or inability to adapt to a different fighting paradigm, the seemingly rag tag Mujahedeen tribes send them packing.

Flash forward to the War on Terror and the U.S. Military launching a traditional military campaign of “shock and awe” based on expending massive amounts of military ordinance in an effort to overwhelm the enemy. It doesn’t take the leadership on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq to figure out, that there has been a shift in strategy and they need to respond accordingly with a new set of rules for engaging the enemy.

One of those leaders that came to the battlefield realization was General Stanley McChrystal. Now retired from the military and engaged in the battle ground of business, McChrystal and his co-authors, a pair of fellow special forces combatants and a student from the General’s leadership class at Yale, set out to see how the lessons learned in that battlefield shift could be applied in the business world. The result is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.

McChrystal and company make the case that even with the seeming fire hose of data and information available to leadership types; leaders can’t be “all knowing and all seeing”. It is that loosening of the stranglehold grip on control that will speed the transition from “puppet master” to the “crafter of culture”.

McChrystal’s thoughts on the value of a leaders words vs. their actions brought to mind one of the best leaders I ever worked for who impressed upon me the first week he was in the job of CEO that he didn’t “know everything about what you do…that’s why I pay you to do the job and make the decisions.” He went on to say “I want to move the decision making out of here (as he hooked a thumb toward his office) and over to you.” That was a major shift in thinking from his micromanaging predecessor and it took all of 10 seconds for me to embrace the change and take charge of my role within the organization.

One of the major steps that worked for McChrystal in battle and will transition well to business is “normalizing sharing”. Again it raises the importance of a leaders talk vs. their action; talk of transparency is meaningless without the sharing of detailed information. Technology offered the military a wide range of tools to implement the sharing strategy and the same holds true for business. This information sharing will help leaders avoid a top down management style, defeat business silos and bring people into the process.

Team of Teams is densely layered with real world examples of how the principles can be applied and will have you scrapping the standard org chart because the old rules have changed.

My Share of the Task: A Memoir – General Stanley McChrystal (Portfolio)

If you are looking for a book filled with bitterness at the Obama administration in response to General Stanley McChrystal dismissal, then this is not your book. If you’re looking for a book that responds to the Rolling Stone Magazine piece or the follow up book, The Operators, both penned by the smarmy little weasel, Michael Hastings, then this is not your book.

If you are looking for an interesting memoir full of insight not only into the McChrystal’s long, successful military career, but also a story laced with leadership with a local and global worldview, then this is your book. McChyrstal’s career in an interesting mix of classroom, fellowship training and boots on the ground action. This is not the tale of cooridors of  power, perfumed prince, that is more a product of the Pentagon than the battlefield.

 

In My Share of the Task McChystal delivers intimate details of the strategy and the on the ground execution of the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terror leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal cut his teeth in special forces, so he was not risk averse to strapping it on and spending a night in the ruts. You can feel the regret in the passages that describe a just missed attempt to take out Zarqawi.

The book takes it’s title from the Army Ranger’s creed which reads in part; I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be, one-hundred-percent and then some. That creed rings true in the pages of the book which are long on spreading the credit to colleagues and underlings in place of the, I, me, my approach that’s so typical of these kinds of books.

Along the way McChrystal provides a guide post to leadership of a large, complex organization.