Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Team Of Teams 20240622

Time, and the process of her coming to grip with the idea that she had the second son that wanted to serve and she tells the story, its very meaningful and now she is completely supportive of him, but but it was a really difficult dream for her. Im really proud of her of being willing to tell her story. Well, we are coming to a close. Is there anything else you would like to add just about your book and where is it available and who do you hope picks it up . It is Available Online at all the major online retailers, amazon, barnes noble. Its available, target has an online. Its available at costco. Its available at exchanges and its available in barnes noble for example ill be at fort hood assigning this week with my purple pan. I encourage, if you are a servicemember or have been a servicemember, i encourage you to buy this book for your mom for mothers day to show her that you value her support. Its for moms, its for people who want to understand this life that we live and its for anybody who loves the military. Well thank you so much for joining us a lane. It was lovely talking with you. Thank you it was great talking with you as well. With the senate in the august break, we will feature book tv on weeknights starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. For the weekend, here are a few tv special programs. Saturday we are live from jackson mississippi for the iraq and our girl mississippi book festival beginning at 11 30 am eastern with discussions on harper lee, civil rights and the civil war. On saturday, for whatever for, we are alive from our Nations Capital for the 15th annual National Book festival followed on sunday with our life indepth program with former second lady and senior fellow at the American Enterprise institute lynn cheney. Television for serious readers. Coming up on the next washington journal, a discussion on education reform. Our guest is campbell brown, journalist and cofounder and editorinchief of the 74. A website dedicated to education issues. Then environmental activist then environmental activist Aaron Brockovich on the role and response to the waste spill in colorado. Washington journal is live every morning at 7 00 a. M. Eastern and cspan. You can join the conversation with your phone calls and comments on facebook and twitter. Next retire general Stanley Mcchrystal talks about his book. He is joined by the book author at the event held earlier this year. It was at the washington board of trade. He is is cofounder of the Mcchrystal Group. On behalf of contest spotlight, it it is my privilege to introduce you to our deaths. Some of the most successful organizations in the u. S. Are working with Mcchrystal Group to understand and compete in a more complex environment. Their new book, team of teams new rules of engagement for complex world focuses on Team Leadership with emphasis on empowering others, engaging employees, managing through technology and a leading in a time of increasing complications. General Stanley Mcchrystal cofounded Mcchrystal Group in january 2011 to deliver Innovative Leadership Solutions to american businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging dynamic environments. A retired fourstar general, general mcchrystal is the former commander of both the u. S. And International Security Assistance Forces afghanistan. And the nations premier counterterrorism Counterterrorism Force joins special Operations Command. Chris fussell is the chief of Network Management at Mcchrystal Group leading the sales, marketing and client relation team. Chris served as eight account during mcchrystals final year in the special Operations Command where he witnessed firsthand the special Operations Community transformation into a successful, agile network. Today general mcchrystal and Chris Fussell will address modern military action, the the Islamic State and how these lessons really do apply to the world of business. Please join me in welcoming general mcchrystal and Chris Fussell [applause]. Gentlemen, good morning and thank you so much for honoring us with your presence. We certainly appreciate your years and years of service and leadership on behalf of the country. Congratulations on the new book and i would like to hear a bit more about it and heres why. People at the Senior Leadership levels of the military dont necessarily make easy transitions to the Business World. I tell you, you, after reading more and more about the navy seals, it reaffirmed my decision not to be a navy seal. [laughter] not that that was ever an option, of course im reading about all of the training, all of the training, all of the training. In my mind, becoming an abc a was meant to be the olympic athlete. It was meant to be for the best of the past as it related to the physical specimen. Theres a huge part of that, but its very clear that you and the general put this together with your team and it was much more about teamwork so forgive the informal nature of the discussion this morning but i would like to start with you about lessons of a navy seal and the dependency is seemingly more about team and less about this sharpshooter individual. We use a few examples in the book to talk about the stereotypes of not just an abc sales but the special Operations Community in general which has gone so much attention over the last decade or so. The reality is and what we try to bring out in the book is what makes these groups so effective is not the elite nature of the individual. There is a certain bar that one must have to pass to get into these groups, but what made us on the battlefield is really the integration of all the strong personalities into a team. Other special operation units start at a very small level. How do you integrate all these personalities to make it an Effective Team on the battlefield. That is what we faced overseas and what they oversaw was how do we scale the effectiveness of all these small teams onto a global level enterprise so we can really see a globally connected network. That is a new type of conflict. So you created team of seals, a team created out of experts but then on the team side of things, if theyre not good teammates they sort of washout. Now you are left with a team, a highperforming team. In the Business World we may have high performing teams but we dont get them to perform being micromanaged. Its pretty interesting approach. Within this book on a team of teams that couldve had a subtext that could have been how not to micromanage but trust your team. If you trust your team. If you spend over time all these resources and training creating a test trust worthy team, where is this disconnect that they arent trusted enough to let them do it . It is sometimes misunderstood because you can have teams that have these extraordinary capabilities. Cure favorite commando movie. One in this group of commandos gets sent somewhere and they have this adventure and somewhere along the way they meet a beautiful woman and they go and they blow something up and one of them or two of them get back alive. The thing about it is, you see that you think that all of the power is in that little group. The interaction between them. There is truth in that, but once they sort of launch on this operation, the idea that they are pretty autonomous, that is not todays world. Todays world is this wonderful cohesive small group that can do extraordinary things with pers decision but only do it if they are part of this network or larger team that can get the information that they need in very rapid and can constantly guide what they are doing and respond to what they find on the target. The night that we killed the man we were after for two years, that night we did 17 more raids to take advantage of what we had learned from doing the operation. The only way you can do that is if you have this team of teams that are absolutely connected, not just by information technology, but connected by relationships and whatnot so suddenly you call up the seals and you say this is what we know, go. Then we dont necessarily act on trust but this deep connectivity that you built between the teams and suddenly you have the ability to operate. You cannot micromanage that. A. A leader might think that they can and there are some people here, probably not here but some people that might have multiple spark forms, smart phones and you think you can pull all of it together and you can micromanage your vast internet prize. I would say i couldnt. I used used to sit in the operation room and we had 12 screens. We could have 12 operations going on all at the same time. I could see could see everyone but from a predator you get full motion and then you could talk to them if you wanted, but the reality is you cant micromanage that. All you can do is be aware, get smart about it and pump information down so organically the organization manages itself. So they are still knocking on your door late at night saying general may i, general could i, general is it okay if i do this. You are processing all of this. You must this. You must love being a leader if theyre knocking on the door at three in the morning. They are asking for permission or reviewing things you went one step further and said im not actually adding value to this equation so im not sure if youre upsetting the apple cart as much in business or military or both, but i tell you you really did ramp it up within this work and id like to hear more about those middle of the night knocks on the door, but what from that made you think this would be good for business to know . Just a little bit of background, when you take command of an organization, just like when you move into a new job anywhere, you want to feel relevant as quickly as you can. The first time may come to you and they go great leader, heres the problem, make a decision. The temptation is you want to make a decision because you want to be relevant. I was a Major General at this time and i take command of this Diverse Workforce and they come to me with approval for every operation. I do that thing where you look and act like you think that you have no clue. Then you say yes or no. They would do this and we had one thing in our requirements that set every time we wanted to drop a bomb on a terrorist leader, because there were some places you couldnt get to do that, they had to come get my approval. We went to bed just about don because we fought all night. Inevitably about an hour later they would locate this guy and they would come in and knock on my door of the plywood hooch and they would say we want to drop a bomb and at 50 years old, i just i just woke up and hadnt got much sleep, and i get on the side of my bunk and i look at these slides and aerial photographs and ill ask a couple questions. Then i will say do you think we should do it . And they say well we just woke you up, what do you think . Then i would give this okay, go forth and do it. I thought about it and my value add was zero. They were the ones who got in the latest information, they were on the ground and yet it slowed it down because they had this operation but if they had to go wake me up, that is just slowing the process. I asked why do you do that. They said thats our process and our requirement. I said stop it. Stop asking me, just do it. They said just do it. They said well we have to because youre responsible. I said im always responsible. It doesnt matter. Just stop it. Now this is what were going to do. Im going to give you every bit of information that i have, turn it toward you and i minute talk to about how i think about these operations so you know in terms of the big strategy, these are the things that go through my mind. You just put them in your me and mind and make the decision. A lot of people came to me and said this is dangerous and youre gonna have younger people making decisions and making mistakes. The reality is we not only didnt make more mistakes and we got much faster, obviously, but faster, obviously, but Something Else happened. They owned it. Think about it, if someone comes to you and says should we do a or b and you say be and it goes badly you say boss had a bad day. If you look at them and say use your best judgment telus what you did, they walk away and think wow, i have to be very thoughtful on this. That thoughtful on this. That was very helpful in our world. It did another thing for me, it opened white space. It stopped it stopped me from being in the weeds on those things and allowed me to be a little more thinking about wider issues. So when you lay this book out, there are variety of different episodes. Some of them are air line are created as it relates to the crash of a jetliner or landing a plane in the hudson rivers. There were very specific team, team, team things that get in there right from the start. Talk to us, just a bit if you what about the team concept. You are hearing from the general as we are hearing from the general, the way you were brought up in the military was command and control. How much has it really turned things on its head being or is it being the flavor of the day question . What we really knew and was in our dna was in the creation of these small teams. We tried to create teams at any successful organizations, you you will find these really small teams. Stans point is that the problem we face is how do you scale between these different silos in which all these small teams operate. For us what we see in an industry is when you go up a level or two levels and when you get to the senior level, youre looking at radically different tribes in the silos. Were talking about integrating the legacy of the seal team culture in with the iranian culture and air force culture and spinning it out to all the different people we had to work with, fbi and so on. We had to realize we were not going to win this conflict if we keep fighting as these small teams. To integrate with one another i have to accept the fact that you might look at the problem differently. You might have a different culture of how you treat people and how the problems that looks to you. For to you. For us to get across that boundary we had to start developing true collaborative, trust based relationships. That broke years of bureaucratic design. It changes the org chart where theres not even overlap. There is not duplication of efforts but there are relationships. You relationships. You hit on the interdependencies repeatedly. The army doesnt always play as well as navy, the seals not always with the rangers and then you drove it very hard to make sure they understood that they were in the same family. There were were interdependencies and they could share. They could have relationships. How did that work in the Operations Side of things . How did that work from your perspective of pushing new culture . What it felt like on the ground was, if you go back to some of the earlier days, 2003 or 2004 when we were still trying to get our head around this problem we still had this team focused mentality. It was give me my space and tell me what you want to accomplish. There there were pockets. Then we suddenly had to realize the onus is on me to form a relationship with the person who is may be two or three lanes over on the battlefield. The way he was running the organization created this broad sense of accountability. As the system matured we saw the same thing happen in industry. People at low level now realized they were incentivized to get ahead because ive been given all these authorities. Its up to me now to create the relationships and suddenly im coming to Senior Leadership with complex solutions. You are obviously a student of military history. You go back to admiral nelson and you have a great example there. You have drawn on a lot of business and the entire manufacturing process and how that was revolutionized. Then you find yourself as your reading about the revolutionary war in the minutemen and the redcoats who were hanging out with trees and theyre going after them and they are sitting ducks. You sort of felt like we were sitting ducks. The game had changed and we werent ahead. Now we have Better Technology and better this and better that and better this but boy theres a heck of a piece and it catches you differently and youre not feeling like youre not you need to be. This challenge was always to get a people trained and outfitted properly at the right point in time. You had to get this armoring from point a to point b which meant you had to be organized and disciplined because it had to be predictable. If you said this you had to be able to predict what the effect would be. We went on through that and we took it through first world war, Second World War and incredibly mechanical wars in some ways. If you were big enough big enough and you were efficient enough, you could win because you built a bigger machine. The first gulf war, when i was was over there it was clear that Saddam Hussein put his army on the golf tee and he just let us line up on it because every strength we had he played two. That that was extraordinary. We got this feeling that we had advanced technology that they didnt have Global Positioning system, precision strike weapons, night vision, we had this technological over him match. We thought we are better trained, better organized more efficient. We go into iraq in the fall of 2003 and it works beautifully. But then within about six weeks you start to see the situation in iraq deteriorating for a lot of reason. Then in the early fall you start to see al qaeda there. Originally everyone thought it was Saddam Hussein in his followers but it wasnt. They leveraged frustrations of the sunni population to create a terrorist insurgency. insurgenc. But those two things together and it will grow. Normally that would be less than a match for the kinds of forces we had, to particularly to particularly with the technology and whatnot. In the fall i took over the special Operations Command which described as americas most elite. Just extraordinary elements. We start doing operations and were doing operations and were doing very well. Every raid we do is exquisitely executed and were very successful. But the situation keeps getting worse. So we are doing everything weve been taught. Were doing it better than ever and the situation continues to deteriorate. Against an enemy, al qaeda and iraq. We were told they are not that good. We are told they are not particularly well trained. If you think about the political narrative that they push, its kind of absurd. Its realism and their behavior was abhorrent. Theyre Getting Better and better. As soon as we studied the problem, what we found was, and i think it was by luck, they intersected with a luck, they intersected with a change in the world. It was a change in the world driven by two big factors. Interdependent and speed. Were not exactly sure what that means to all of us every day. Interdependence, things are connected in ways they never had before. Think of your supply chains, your conductivity for your banking, your information, everything and just a very simple way, al qaeda would put off a car bomb in baghdad, for example and there would be three vehicles. There there would be three vehicles. There would be a lead vehicle, a car bomb vehicle driven by the lucky car bomber and then there was a third vehicle whose primary role was to film it. Within minutes they would upload that to the internet and they would pass it to pakistan where it would be produced fairly professionally, ratchet back in and it would be on the internet. Suddenly people who werent there to see it and witness the carnage, they felt it. They. They felt in north africa and young people started to think hey, i want to be a part of this. The interdependence of actions started to be just incredible. An entity that had this network like association not a traditional hierarchy. We kept looking for it and trying to say whos mr. Big and will take them out and solve this problem. Thats not what they were and thats not what isis is. They are this franchise alike, constantly shifting resilient thing. If you try to take that on with even and exquisitely good hierarchy, you lose. You try to do your hierarchy betting and you say will speed this up and do this better and fight harder. Chris and i were together and we did all that. Then we came to the conclusion, you cant win that game with this kind of team. What you have to be is this networked group. Then we run into the problem chris described, we have these wonderful small teams who have a tribal instinct. They like everybody but anybody that aint them. In the book we describe the point at which everyone else sucks. [laughter] you know the other team and you even know the people right there but everybody else, just by definition sucks. How do you cooperate with people you dont know and trust. You cant know them all because we had 15000 people across 27 countries doing it all. You cant dont mall. We did a bunch a bunch of things to try to create virtually and through effort, try to create a team of teams, but its not one big team. A team cant be more than about 100 people because you cant know everybody. You have to create ways where you get the quality of team by creating a team of teams and that is at the leadership and management challenge. What changed . I can get you to world were one and maybe world war ii but youre going over and finding that the approach thats been taken is markedly different. That we are no longer the minutemen, that they are and when they figure out the way we like to approach it they do Something Different in the next building. They they will have a machine gun at the top of the stairs and they will do, if they know you, night because you have the night vision goggles they sweep the field after dusk. So thats a shifting landscape. You can do things theyve always been done and yet youre trained in the military to do things pretty much the way theyve always been done, tried and true. What sort of went off . Was it the difference between that and white boards . Was was it the amount of casualties . What has changed on the complex side and why we believe this is universal with the point where trying to make with human beings, cell phones, youtube, chat rooms, chat rooms, its simple. Al qaeda is not better or worse than other insurgent groups, terrorism is not always warfare, but they can see, heres a heres a way to react. Heres how their operating and they can get that to a global audience in a covered chat room in real time. Suddenly they have a new technique that pops up all around the globe. That is radically different. The question of how you react to that is how do you accept the fact that now everybody is interconnected. Our old bureaucratic systems are not going to work. The idea that we present in the book and the term we didnt use and special operations is shared consciousness. So, others at the top determine that Everyone Needs to have a clear understanding of this problem as it changes in real time so how can i empower these small teams to connect as a network and then move in real time. I need to invite them on a cadence that moves faster than the enemy network to hear everything im thinking. Understand strategic impact and how this affects gia geopolitical operations and so forth. Then you on the ground, on a daily basis, we had every day for 90 minutes, everyone in the organization, so thousands of people around the globe are invited to a teleconference. We talk a teleconference. We talk about it in the book which we call operation intelligence. You could sit through that 90 minutes, listen to all the Senior Leadership down to the tactical level as needed and understand what had changed in the last 24 hours and then, from that point on, you were free to move within your space in complete autonomy for 24 hours. Then we would reset and say based on what we talked about yesterday, here are all the things i did. Heres what ive i did. Heres what ive done in the last 22 hours. We stayed on that cycle for years and years. Seven days a week, thousands of people dialing in and thats what allows us suddenly as a Global Enterprise to make realtime decisions faster than the enemy. Its like transparency, transparency is part of it but there are a few things that were discussed like personnel and other elements elements but you wanted to make sure information was being communicated in real time so it was useful because if its four hours late or four days later theyve moved on. 1 as it relates to transparency and sharing of communication, the things at risk are exposing more information to more people so where is the leak . Wheres the problem . Where was the balance on that . How comfortable did you sleep after opening it up that wide . When we opened it up. When we opened it up we opened a lot of it up but maybe not all of his up. We protected intelligence with spies. We didnt talk about internal personnel actions. Those are just not appropriate for that type of venue. Almost Everything Else we put out there. 7500 people a day for 90 minutes a day. So you come out of your nice Corner Office for that. I didnt have a Corner Office. We had a room about this size as the Main Operation center with screens on the wall but everybodys in the open area. They can go talk to anybody and the information is continuously pumping. The idea was Everybody Knows everything all the time. Now thats impossible but if you think about it, we create these structures and you say how does information go . Well some goes through the chain to the silo to the top and then it goes back down again. The time it takes to do that in the filtering effect it has at each level is pretty dangerous. We found out it was fatal. One by the time it got back down the instructions were wrong because even if they were brilliant when they were made, they werent appropriate by the time he got down. Second got down. Second it would be filtered by people, with Different Levels of competence and everybodys got a thing, we found when we were very transparent people at all levels got the information. You didnt take out the level of responsibility for decisionmaking. What you did what you did is everybody got to see it so suddenly the order you got from your supervisor, you now now had context from the big picture. It made a lot of supervisors better supervisors because it forced them because everybody is seeing it and it also identified people who werent up to the task and some people arent up to the task. It gave you this opportunity because everybody marinated in the information to not have to go back instructions. This 90 minute thing was not a rigidly mechanical thing. It had some things we covered that were normal but we also had a conversation among the whole command. I would do this thing called think out loud. 70 would Say Something and i would say okay heres what i think i heard and correctly if im wrong and then i would say heres time processing that heres what i think about that. Then they could hear that. Then i would say it seems to me were probably going to want to do this and i wouldnt necessarily make a decision and then i would go to the person who might be responsible and i said you think about it and tell me what youre going to do. What would happen is Everybody Knows the logic train im following. They could fix it if i was wrong but they also knew because of other problems came up that were similar, they didnt have to ask permission and ask what were we thinking in the command. They had that framework updated on a daily basis. If there is there is a cfo in the room, cfos pull out a paper and pencil. 90 minutes a day they do the math on the hours, it was the most efficient thing we did. We started it was 50 people and when i gave up it was at least 7500. People were fighting to get in. We recorded it every day so if you were on a different ship, you could go on your computer and just watch it. You could go could go wherever you were, if you are not in one of the rooms you could watch it on your laptop anyway. Let me then take it from the battlefield to the boardroom and to the corporate setting. You referenced taylor and henry ford and really the Industrial Revolution and then we get to the technological revolution, but there there are things called limiting factors in your speech and blinks. Can you talk to us a little bit bit about where you saw the limiting factors in what you had done and what youre doing now and companies . What are some of these blanks and why should people be aware . We use the term limiting factor, all talk about the expenses on the battlefield because the military is certainly a different set up. The resource constraints are different. They were things like certain highvalue assets. Helicopters are in short supply. You always have more Ground Forces than you do helicopters so when the old world, the idea was i want to a, just get all helicopters given to me. I dont care about the other unit. We wrote that down and said hey it doesnt matter what your batting averages, ruth losing the series and need to figure how to play as a team. Okay well figure out how to share these assets. That was sort of step one. Now im im comfortable with giving up some of my resources. The real epiphany stuff step came when we said i need to understand, this other tribe view on the situation as clearly as i understand my own. We went through these large transparent forms so we could discuss the common purpose about what we were trying to accomplish. Then you incentivizing it make sense to say for the next 24 hours you are clear because what youre looking at is more important than what im looking at right now. I may not have been able to recognize that that was more important to thing to do in the next 24 hours if we hadnt been talking. Now i now i understand the objected youre going after and you will probably be done in time so i can get a little piece of what i want to accomplish in the next 24 hours. You multiply that by 10, 20, 30, 20, 30 Ground Forces thinking like that, all the way around the world for years on end, suddenly you running to these large forms. It was dont even worry about the complex logarithm that we come up in 24 hours and how we share it because weve got all these things done because youve given us the authority and you continue pushing in that direction until you pull back the reins and telus to slow down. There are notes in the corner, some postit postit notes and some in the bag, but no one gets them for a few days. You see some blanks. There were some disconnects. There were not just processes but recognition that okay my was supposed to get the bag. I wasnt supposed to do anything with it but im just leaving it there and some other team is doing it. Those various doing it. Those various disconnects, those blanks, working through that had a real talent and speed to the entirety of the project. Its very clear, episode after episode that laid out in the book, that you, that you really did find not just efficiency of operation, but the silo mentality in the Business World traditionally would have all these agencies to look at the macro reasons why then one will go to the realtime intelligence then another puts of force against that on the battlefield. These are Major National level organizations because they have us staring object but you shut your eyes at the critical moments between understanding to see realtime then to bring back what matters is a paying happens in business so the young intelligence operator with a Different Organization back in washington d. C. Fight the fight are every bit as critical what is happening as someone in the kicking in the door. So lets integrate tipple these people forward as the true relationship based part of the team if you walk into our headquarters, it is up next of operators going on helicopters and 22 yearold with a nose ring and a purple hair recall the of the star wars bench because of a betty integrated for a common purpose. We see that industry that our beautiful verticals better highly effective the lower down and you go but if your r d teams understand current market chip strategies but no one can control that from top down fast enough to keep pace. So go into the next part there are diagrams that isnt overloaded with military jargon. With great charts and graphs. Harris is the ceo at the top then the commando teams. Those are whoever in the Marketing Department play well together. But then that team of teams and that chart is a mass. Would need every team member of the task force to a river by deals . We needed someone to know everyone and every team so if they work with that unit as the department of the friendly face. I would like to hear about a leader has a very Important Role in that regard but then you go across teams. What you dont know or harriet dont know is a mystery most of the kids in the Kennedy School five was talking to him he said you were in the army . He said i. M. I am curious because you seem smart. [laughter] he was not antimilitary but it had i come from his world is set a lot. But if the problem they face is complicated to richer in the key and pressed the button they could not fix it if they had to but it works the same way every time and is predictable because theyre designed to work a certain way if you said it is complicated mutually exclusive collectively exhausted it is called mece see you break into its parts said everybody does the unique saying and then they are bolted together and it works. If you have a complicated problem you can tweak that for efficiency as long as they is dont change you are a good. Fame of lord nelson nelson, 300 feet long 26 miles of rekeying 37 sales you had to constantly adjust it because they had to fire that cannon just at that time. All doing this simultaneously. The assembly that is not a complicated problem but suppose to be complex fig of the problems you face in Business Today is your competition was the say or your customers were the slaves used to be really efficient than that would be great. Once you figure that out to be efficient evening of but that is different putting 15 balls in iraq but then to figure out 5916 balls have to be perfectly round the room has to be no air circulation it will have to be precise to predict where the balls would go because just the tissue have 16 balls those variables go through the roofs you cannot predict what will happen. The argument is it was plenty for all longtime the military was good and General Motors you could be efficient in enough to solve the problem now were in a complex environment that changes so fast still we a foundation because you are always facing a different requirement. To be completely different although we are now wired to think that way they are not normally structure that way. That is so we had to do to become a team of teams this entity that is resilience one person cannot do it. I use this analogy for leadership if you think of yourself as a taskmaster controlling those pieces playing against another master of the 16 enemy chess pieces with a shared consciousness and they dont have to follow any rules. Suddenly that is what we are against. It is a necessarily be enemy but the environment. And eppley have to take a step back all of the chess pieces are empowered to act then create an ecosystem that we can do that better than anyone else. Those that decide to move the headquarters to pick up a nanosecond of technology faster. You have the speed with which they in Research Done buy you also have the Technology New team in the book is a transition from the battlefield from military into the corporate we have moved into predictable settings like most organizations to understand very little of this 2004 because that is what we learn for Group Management to be. Able to help Companies Cope say you are not just talking about what you would your team put together but you really do see this as a revolution management to stay ahead they all need to be looked at but some need to change the communication and the speed to stay ahead of technology to do i have that right . It may be bigger. It will happen in any way you just decide where you will be. This is not an idea we will research, not by choice but by experience we were losing the war that is unacceptable and were sending bodies home so it is important we did change because he thought it was of a good idea or t9 but i had no idea what a takeover put this situation was so much different that we started first to schaede dash to survive then to win then we did more and more then we became deep believers in the transformation we studied it and have been doing that over four years and what we found is that is not the case at all it is a new situation in a new environment the leros struggling to deal with that. A huge market share great people. But the things that carry them forward not just a housing collapse but other things as well. But then the traditional structure of what theyre selling with the research and development that the silos were not communicating well they were not marketing that is your christmas season. You have to be efficient and effective and adaptable because it will never go like you think it will. You have to be extraordinarily able and nimble to do that that is pretty extraordinary and they took versions of what we did to become this organic and responsive that this is agnostic. Together day as it has so much with the Technology Companies all across the board. How reluctant are they to knock down the barriers that everybody in said of the cubicles . The unwillingness of massive shift going on to drive the Organization Someone to fight thinking they will get ahead of it depending on the speed of the industry said there are Different Levels of pressures to recognize the pressure was clear so that impetus to change was identified as the core issue. There is no way that big organizations are run the same way. Because the world is changing around us every day the speed of that is exponential. The system has come down and five from the traditional bureaucratic system. You could not move fast enough if you had to go through six steps of approval but to go for a few hours but it just depends on whenever space you write in and. Has said many respect become less predictable but that is despite technological process the process but because of it. You referenced your granddaughter of a like to hear, about the implication of technology with the news on technology to see it in the corporate world how big of a deal is technology . What was since picked up that need to be shared . Barrett is so much more information available. But if i was the mitt grade officer there are some data sets of the german tank italians you can do a lot with that. To find a big chunk of data and then put a back dash at the tactical level. You can do that so if you can do them more efficiently so with a different supply chain when we take that mentality but what they found was because of the pace of information i have thousands if not more of data at every single day so eventually somebody will figure out what to do with that. So no one could collect it all. So to put these in the inclusive forms those closest to the problem could say here is the data set but to expect this context of these thousands here is what matters renown that it will be different and it will be different. I can update what information and to put into the system it takes time to get used to this you offered twice the information in the 90 minute forum that was repetitive from last week made sure you are paying attention but everything they said tied directly to the strategic goals of the organization but also the battlefield. That was the major shift. Talk about the Technology Revolution mentioning your granddaughter, how big does a deal is that shift . We have to not go on fools errands we will collect more big data what people do is incorrect we would get a lot of information that is valuable but the reality is that they react to that if when we go to lead 26 rolled view goes into a north african marketplace so he stands on a fruit box to criticize harshly local police know who he is. So they cannot note to a much because they cannot connect to other agencies efficiently but he is talking on top of the of roadblocks to people who can hear him and they know wordofmouth a fax some people they have plenty of time to see a response if he causes a problem but not fast for 2010 and december. Now he is 26 ruled fruit seller if he is frustrated with how he is dealt with by the local lan administrators and instead of standing on a farebox, he let himself on fire to a half weeks later he dies. His cousin takes a picture and a video and within 90 days president mubarak and his government are down in egypt civil war has started in libya, the government of tunisia is gone and syria started the descent. The cause is were there no doubt but nobody could predict that muhammed act a desperate act of a 26 trolled otherwise irrelevant to us would be relevant to all of us and still today. Impossible to predict and who knows what will resonate that is the point. More people get more data all the time there for it affects their Decision Making more rapidly. See you have constantly changing things. Repeatedly get information we will put our arms around a problem but the reality is in the region is going faster than our ability to get our arms around it and we need to understand that. There was a time when an educated person in the world could read every book available on a certain body of knowledge. Nowadays that it is laughable. So what we have got to do is admit the fact it is constantly changing grab but we can but not lock ourselves into a big Strategic Plan to execute because it will be different at every moment. A week and a half ago we had an arsenal of democracy fly over 15 different formations going over the tallest building in the region the top floor was watching i am watching them come down the potomac my thought was the one with that . Go faster. Rise. How does that stayed up . But as a read through your work the pace of change is lightening speed not talking about the tanks and the jets and the helicopters as much as garments in their cars to set them off and so funds and ied and they play by a different set of rules. But if you talk about the big approach to counter that is trust and relationships and communication. A big part of what you cover hasted do with trust with this data shared mission and you are communicating with that. What else would you add . Absolutely. With a small team you trust each other and finish each others sentences, and your transaction costs are very low because if you ask somebody if you need a resources you give it to each other but think of the world down with security requirements the transaction and cost of what we dont trust, it kills us and when we put false silos down that are not necessary to increase of filtering and the slogans to check something it slows you down so much to become a dinosaur that is the target because you cannot move fast enough so we argue inside the small teams you probably have that already we know how to do that we struggle to take a team of teams to scale that and at the end of the day it is mundane but it is management and leadership. Expand on that. How . You hit efficiency bps in the but of management and leadership how did they need to adapt . If you have an organization where your supported team has a different definition of their success there might be incentivize to have a high batting average but not if they win. But in other times just the culture will put them in a modem operating that is different or harder for other elements to interact with. We did a number of things with shared consciousness around a video teleconference parallel to that 15 share rooms operating at all times. And so people are chatting across the entire command with more information or asking questions. You try to create a lateral arterial flow of information and all the time to give them the sense it is one entity natalie from a shared vision but a shared capability you can learn from other parts of the organization like that. Of course, you share resources as well. We will open for questions and a second so do you find the decisions made faster are better or it takes longer because now it is overload . And the audience are white my going through this . It is the battlefield but now with the companies to encourage them. Thats right. Stan mentioned earlier he did not make a lot of decisions and that is true the majority have been at the ground level because you were empowered and were expected to make informed decisions. If you keep every decision that your level is the best you can do. You have to think out loud and invite people to understand now you are empowered with that but to mention it is a leadership factor even duses seals need to trust rangers we will see how that is going. We trust each other. What does that mean . So now we are all included. Okay if your buddys fail to execute a target because they had he is something you did not give it to them now were all with public accountability. How did it go last night . What to do the helicopters last night . You are wrong you should have given them to him the onus is on you to reach across to give him the assets because you are not playing by the new rules are you dont understand this you can quickly identify the problem. You deal with two you have that working overseas that it isnt just the top leader but the team of teams and you find they need to be changed out with the aptitude . Interestingly the majority of young for folks a few years under that me so in that decentralized fashion. That is where it picks up speed. Then to catch our heads around the fact. We have heard that we will go straight across with no real management it will be everybody. But i cannot help but think theyre saying 0k because many to get people on board with shared values and shared message it does seem radical but we are looking at more radical things coming down the pipe whether facebook or twitter or amazon certainly within your technology and the rest to be at the highest level of destruction but then to respond is what you see in this book. We will open for questions. My name is brian. With u. S. Iraqi relations relations, heidi think your model will work when trying to tackle a challenge like isis we dont necessarily trust of the people you work with . Like iran or elements of the iraqi government. Yes. Isis is doing really well right now. And a look at why. They are very much the amorous organization is said creation of the environment and they do that very well they use technology superbly to put out their message theyre very adaptable so they embody a 21st century fame but theyre only doing as well as they are because they are in the region were almost the opposite is exemplified. To deal with this unique a team of teams looking from the gulf states to the government of iraq iraq, everybody that is playing with very few exceptions alleys as lovell of distressed to operate with other parts inside the Iraqi Military we see that on a daily basis they have enough weapons and guys that they dont have the interoperable liddy. It also gives you confidence if you lack trust and will do something youre not quite sure what is out there so to head of the biggest problem right now the region has not been able to come to a collective response because the all looked at it with a slightly different perspective of equities as isis becomes more dangerous my guess is that will start to improve because they have to. I dont think isis is that strong i think it is a phenomenon that could go pretty quickly but what you have is the disarray of the political framework that makes any type of action difficult. General mcchrystal it is an honor to spend time with you this morning. I just finished the battle of leadership book better know how much of that is used to the military so my apologies but how much of his lessons were brought into your book as well as how many are you turning on his head . I am not aware of it. It was written after world war i. I apologize. I am not familiar with it. I did it go to west point [laughter] ag very much for speaking with us when you were describing your changes of the command structure instead of having a junior people come to you to ask you for every single thing youve expressed wonderment why they wouldnt i thought they didnt want to have to worry about making that decision but decentralizing that authority is good in the military but can you imagine in the private . You dont want them to take over that responsibility it is easier to push a of. I think it varies by area the people were in my command at dont think they didnt want that level but they did not know that they had it. The u. S. Government has a lot that they are in decision avoidance because they want to be held responsible but most places are not arguing for that. We talk about a concept of decisions based that works race Senior Leader says this is my decision space and what i decide everything that is not specifically listed there goes to somebody below me and if you do it well as ceo has very limited decision space some hiring decisions and things like that if they do it carefully it is like the constitution not any power automatically goes down now you tell people im not doing it so the biggest thing i find is the area of the stick communication they dont know if they should ask because nobody lays them out. I think we need to do this. Can we do this . Is the boss says you say it is a boss decision but they will come every time if you respond and say this is what i think the those of the decisions and what you to make them you find it pushes it down and the drill to do decisions is a good way to go across an organization. Some will say come to me and make all the decisions except the ones that our important. [laughter] okay her cry of a great believer and it is not complete not flexible not to say you were not talking but it is constantly pushing them down the expectations. That is the critical component what we experienced in the military. But it took a little bit of getting used to wrap the ground level. The everybody says they want to be empowered and tell they are because really is accountability but then every day has to understand. If that is in place bin you can decentralize i went through on the military side to be brought in the military mindset. I am pretty sure i can do this but i will ask any way he do it once or twice by the third time someone says there is 12 of you underneath read everyone calls me every time were going back to the old system so you need to make the decision let me know and then you can gain access. As you look at what you put in place overseas and what you are Encouraging Companies to consider, how has that held up on the battlefield . Management by wandering around or other techniques but the people who follow you continue this are these the expectations this was a continuum . With the special Operations Command there the third commander after me and they would take even further. But to be honest the guy who commanded was mitt Operations Officer and one in the interim. So we will not really test the hypothesis and tell at generation that was not there with the requirement but more broadly the answer is not much there is so much muscle memory nobody is fired for doing something the way it was done before. Nobody gets fired for doing a conservative approach or for hiring a big name Consulting Firm instead they get fired if they have hired of a Crystal Group who are not known. So makes organizations conservative that way and you do what you know, and what you have done before. The problem is if all your competitors were you but they are not now they come in with no respect how we used to be working from a garage and in some cases they are your customers because of the way of interaction so i would argue you cannot look to do in arms race with your competitor and it is the environment that gets you we used to have a fortune 500 companies now is less than 15 ceos used to have it extended tenure you know, that they do now. So there is this stated that blinks read the that they were not responding as fast as we could. To more questions. Good morning. Thanks to you both first off for your service to our nation and to the cause of freedom. I am hoping you can contrast to things with the first being adaptability or with strong routines in the military since to help with the speed and predictability between units. How oulu do you build within the structure and environment that at the same time they can leverage the strong routine in order to make things happen more quickly with that predictability of the battlefield as well as the corporate buyer rand. How do you bring those together . I can comment from the military perspective. It is a mix of both so that adaptability comes at the organizational level. It is critical because they space will find certain things and their gear. Deal with that a little bit more there are some episodes and examples that if you were not in the military it is not second major but there is a way to pack the rucksack where this is is the same in every once a when the lights go out you dont have to fumble around you know, where it is if you land by parachute or in your bunk, that is not necessarily the way it is done with the discipline in the workplace but to the question is is the muscle memory and the training and the training and the training. Expand on that. It sets the standard for this masterful act at this level of dependability at the individual soldier level with the a idea how can i create these teams . If someone is wounded even though with the s. E. A. L. Team when know which pocket to go to to help him with the gunshot. There are versions of that with every special Operations Committee because it is critical your understand your team. The adaptability peace came at the organizational level so we could be in a more bureaucratic mindset we were not thinking when i see a shifting problem that i need to adapt it realtime to acquire new resources to become a distributed network ourselves or as i see a changing, if you tried to remain in a difficult to approach you always be one step behind. I would argue you have to be very efficient to be adaptable because those things they have to do the same way otherwise you spend all your time to move. That is where the balance balance, is about where you start to get calcified is where your danger is. Have made the call but also as it develops you have to respond and adapt not like all like you say that isnt how it is any longer. Good morning. I am ceo of capital area three banks of the Largest Organization in feeding 540,000 people regionwide not the military but complex. What he said applies to the nonprofit sector. We have been working hard to push accountability down but in organizations we have 130 employees but anyone of any size if you dont have that process like the military to process those decisions, what your thoughts to get the bottoms up feedback . In order to be comfortable to share your Strategic Vision to delegate to have to be sure it isnt out of touch but we dont have that military capacities will ever be interested in your thoughts. Clearly the nonprofit space a lot of people here probably sit on boards. There is a lot of cannibalism so that chlorination becomes a challenge but on the battlefield, it wasnt a huge staff we used a few rudimentary systems to build up to get to where they were or what they were capable of took time the Large Communications to have a conversation that is much faster than most need but how often do we all need to talk . The other was very basic where everyone could upload the information but a system like that applies to what you are talking about just a commonplace and you can see examples but if you have access to the right information independent of any other system, somewhere there is a balance that comes through at that level. I argue it is the then more important that is why people were not notified it one dash motivated by a conversation there may be paid people but