Which talks about the fact that there were really two american revolutions, there was the revolution that we all know about, then there was a second revolution that took us from the articles of confederation to the constitution as we know it, principally fashioned by four of our founders. And then last but not least my alltime Favorite Book happens to be one that i wrote. This is shameless selfpromotion, but i wrote a novel published by simon schuster, got wonderful reviews. Not only did i write it, but im going to have to read it again and again and again. So thats my Summer Reading list as we given the summer. Booktv wants to know what youre reading this summer. Tweet us your answer, booktv or post it on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Youre watching booktv on cspan2. Next retired u. S. Army generali Stanley Mcchrystal talking about how lessons he learned on the battlefield can be applied to the professional world. On behalf of comcast spotlight, it is my privilege to introduce you to todays special guest, general Stanley Mcchrystal and chris fuss el. Some of the most successful organizations in the u. S. Are working with Mcchrystal Groupin to understand and compete in a more complex environment. Theixr new book, team of teams new rules of engagement in a complex world, focuses on Team Leadership with emphasis on o empowering others, engaging employees, managing through technology and leading in a time of increasing complications. General Stanley Mcchrystal cofoundedge Mcchrystal Group inde january 2011 to deliver Innovative Leadership Solutions to american businesses in order to help them transform and succeed inic challenging dynamic environments. A retired fourstar general, general mcchrystal is the former commander of both the u. S. En and International Security assistance forces, afghanistan. And the nations premier military Counterterrorism Force joint special operationsf command. Chris fussell is the chief of Network Management at Mcchrystal Group leading the sales, marketing and client relations teams. Teams. The general Operations Command where he witnessed firsthand the special Operations Communitys transformation into a successful agile network. Today the general will address modern military action, the Islamic State and how these lessons do apply to the world of business. Please join me in welcoming the general. [applause] i appreciate your years of leadership on behalf of the country. I tell you after reading more and more about the navy seals. Im reading about all of the training, all of the training and in my mind becoming the navy seals was meant to be the olympic athlete was meant to be for the best of the best efforts related to the assets related to the physical specimens and there is a huge part of that. I would like to start about the essence of the navy seals and the dependency that is more about the team and less about this sharp shooter individual. Of the reality is coming and we try to bring out in the book what makes these groups so effective as the delete feature of the individual. It is effective on the battlefield as it continues today the integration of all both strong personalities into a cohesive team. It starts at a very small level how do you integrate these personalities to make an Effective Team on the battlefield. How do we scale the effectiveness of the teams into the Global Enterprise so that we can defeat a globally connected network enemy. So the rangers and special forces you created the team out of experts, just the highest of the highest. But then on the team side of things if they are not a good teammates they sort of watch out and now you are left with the team with a High Performing Team and in the Business World we may have High Performing Teams but we dont let them perform. We micromanage into an interesting approach. And general, whats in this book on the team of teams could have had a subtext that says how to trust your team if you spend all the time and all the resources in Office Training creating a trustworthy team, where is the disconnect people are trusting them enough to let him do it . It is sometimes misunderstood because you can have teams that have these extraordinary capabilities. Pick your favorite commando movie. This group gets sent somewhere and then along the way they meet a beautiful woman and then they go and blow something up and one or two of them get back alive. You see the interaction between that and theres truth about that. They are pretty autonomous. That is not todays world. Todays world is this wonderful cohesive small group that can do extraordinary things with precision of candidate as a part of the network larger teams that can get the information that they need and they can respond to what they find on the target. To take advantage of what weve learned from that operation. Its built between the teams suddenly they have everybody to upgrade. A leader cannot micromanage created a might think that they can and there are some people here who might have multiple smart phones, two or three computers, and ability to put in all of this information and you are so good you can micromanage your vast enterprise but i cant argue i couldnt. We had 12 screens. We could have 12 operations going on at the same time and i could see every one of them. You could talk to them if you wanted but the reality is you cant micromanage that. All you can do is be aware of it, get smart about it and pump information down so that organically the organization manages itself. So they are still knocking on your door late at night saying general, may i come is it okay if we do this then you are processing all of this. They are knocking on the door at 3 00 in the morning and they are asking for that permission reviewing things. What is your recommendation which is a wonderful approach. But taking it one step further i am adding value to this a patient, so im not sure if it is as much business as in the military or both but i tell you you did france get up in this work and i would like to hear a bit more but what made you think that this would be good for business until now . When you take the command of the organization and move to a new job anywhere you want to feel relevant as quickly as you can so the first time they come to you and go heres the problem, make a decision the taxation is the one to make a decision to be relevant. I take command of this task force and the company for approval of every operation and you act like youre thinking because you have no clue. But they would do this and we had one thing in the requirement because there were some places you couldnt get to. They had to come get my approval and we went to bed just about gone and inevitably they would locate him and they would come in and knock on my door and say we want to drop a bomb and im 50 plusyearsold and i havent gotten much sleep. I get on the side of my bunk and a big area photographs and stuff like that. I ask them a couple of questions and then should they do it . It was zero and they slowed it down because they had the operation because they had to get them to opine for a while but its just slowing the process. So i asked them why do you do that . Thats that requirement. And i said stop it. Stop asking me. And they said we have to because your responsible. And i said im always responsible. It doesnt matter. Heres what we are going to do. I am going to give you every bit of information and im going to talk to you how i think about these kind of operations so you know in the big strategy in all these things these are what go through my mind. And you put them in your mind and make a decision. A lot of people came to me and said he will have people you will have people making decisions and make more mistakes. The reality is that they not only didnt make more mistakes, and we got much faster obviously but Something Else happened. They owned it. Think about it if somebody says should we do a worthy and then it goes badly they say he had a bad day but if you look at him and say use your best judgment and tony would get if they say i have to be really careful on this and that was helpful in our world. It allowed me to be a little bit more about the issues. When you lay this out, there are a variety of different episodes as it relates to the crash of a jetliner playing in the river they are very specific military but it kind of gets in there rightparen the start. Talk to us as you would in the concept because you are hearing from the general as we heard from the general the way that you were brought up in the military is the command and control. How does this really turned things or is it the flavor of the day . For us but we knew was that creation and so it isnt uncommon. You find these small teams. For us what we are seeing in the industry as well as when you go up a level or two you are looking at radically different tribes inside of these different silos talking about integrating the culture and then expanding fbi, cia etc. And what we found is we have to realize we are not going to win this conflict if we keep fighting the different teams. So, now to integrate with one another i have to accept the fact you might look at the problem differently. You much debate, have a different culture the way that you engage in the conflict. And for us to get past that barrier we had to start developing true collaborative trust relationships which of course broke years of bureaucratic design. Its not even overlap. Theres not a duplication but theres the relationship, the key interdependencies. But the seals they do not necessarily work with fire the army doesnt always play as well as the needy or they may not always with the rangers and then you drove very hard to make sure that they understood they are in the same family that they were interdependencies and that they could share and have relationships with. But how did that work in the Operations Side of things. What it felt like on the ground is when you go back to some of the earlier days 2003 2004, you still have an isolated team focused mentality. Tell me what you want to accomplish in that space and i will do it and there was success in those pockets but then they had the transition. Its on me to form relationships with those on the battlefield at the way that the general is running the organization they created a broad sense of accountability. And as the system matured and we saw the same thing happening in the industry to people at the low and mid levels realized i incentivized to get ahead of the thought process in the leadership on the ground because now i have been accountability and it is up to me to create the relationships and suddenly im coming to the senior going to the Senior Leadership of complex Solutions Rather than requesting permission. Hispanics obviously a student of military history, you go back to the admiral and have a great example. You have drawn on a bus business for the entire manufacturing process and how that has revolutionized and then they are lined up and we felt like we were sitting ducks. The game had changed and now we have more technology but there was more in here where it catches you differently and we are not where we need to be. Can you expand on that a little bit . The challenge was always to get a group of people trained and outfitted correctly to the place at the right time because each person didnt have much combat power. So it meant you had to be organized and disciplined and changed because it had to be predictable. If you said this, you have to be able to predict what the effect would be. What we went through first cold war Second World War incredibly mechanical war in many ways but if you were big enough and efficient enough, you could win because you built a bigger machine and that is essentially what happened. The apogee of that was the first gulf war. Essentially it was clear that Saddam Hussein put his army of golf tee and let us just wind up on it because every strength we had a. We are better trained, we are more efficient. In the late summer and early fall you start to see off a end originally everybody thought it was his followers but it wasnt. It was the arrival of al qaeda who buy for h. Frustration in the population to create a terrorist insurgency. But those together and you had this thing grow. Normally that would be less than a match for the forces we had with the technology and what not it was the most elite, just extraordinary elements. And we start getting operations and we are are doing operations and doing very well. Everything we do is exquisitely executed and most of them are very successful. But the situation keeps getting worse. So, we are giving everything weve been taught and better than ever and the situation continues to deteriorate. Against the enemy al qaeda in iraq which on the face of it is not that good. They are not particularly well trained if you think about the narrative. Its kind of absurd and the behavior was a poor and the poor i dont think it was by design. They intersected with a change in the world driven by the two big factors, one was interdependencies and one was speed. We all know things are getting faster and faster but we are not sure completely but that means for all of us every day but interdependence things are connected in ways they never had before. Think of your supply chains and or conductivity for your banking and information and everything. And in a very simple way they would put up a car bomb in baghdad for example and there would be three vehicles, there would be the lead vehicle driven by the unlucky car bomber and then there was a third vehicle whose primary role was to film it and within minutes they would pass it to pakistan where it would be produced, pass it back, the on the internet and suddenly people that were not there to hear it or see the carnage felt it. They felt it in north africa and young people started to get it this is something i want to be part of. Look what youre they are doing so the interdependence of that action started to be just incredible and so the entity that had this Network Association but not a traditional hierarchy we kept looking for it trying to say we will take them out and solve this problem. Thats not what they were. They were a franchise shifting resilient thing so if you take it on with the good efficiencybased hierarchy, you lose and you try to do it better. We will speed this up and we will fight hard. We were together and we did all of that and then we came to the conclusion you cant win that game with this kind of team and so what you have to be is a Network Group then weve run into the problem we have these wonderfully cohesive teams that have a tribal instinct. They like everybody that anybody that aint them. In the book we describe the point at which everyone else starts. [laughter] because you know the team and even though they are right there, everybody else just by definition sucks. How do you cooperate with people you dont know know and trust in people across the 27 countries are doing this. We cant know them all. So we did a bunch of things to try to create, virtually and through a herculean effort in terms trying to be quite many of the properties of the small team across a team of teams because it isnt one big team if you say that is absolutely impossible. It cant be more than about 100 people because you cant know everybody. So, you have to create ways where you get the qualities of teams by creating the team of teams and that is a leadership. So what has changed . Im probably there with the minutemen. I can get you to world war i and i can probably get you to world war ii. But you were going over and you are finding the approach that has been taken as remarkably different now. But we are no longer the minutemen, they are. And when they figure out the way that we like to approach the building they do something in the next building. And they will have a machine gun at the top of the stairs and they will do if they know that you come at night because you have the night vision goggles the sweep in the fields after dusk. That is a shifting landscape. So, you cant do things the way theyve always been done and yet you are trained in the military to do things to much the way theyve always been done, tried and true. What sort of went off . Was that the number of casualties, was that the resistance . Bbi will lead into the difference between the maps and whiteboards. Whats changed on the conflict side is coming and why we bb this is universal in the many spaces its simple. All qaeda is definitely not better and is worse in many other ways. They can see here is the way that we react and heres the way they are operating and they can get that to the global audience in the chat room in realtime and suddenly they can a new technique pops up all around the globe and that is different so the question of how you react to that is how do you accept the fact everyone is interconnected through our old bureaucratic systems are going to work so the idea that we presented the buck and the term we didnt use is the shared consciousness and so others at the top determine Everyone Needs to have a your understanding of the problematic changes in realtime if i am going to be able to decentralize down to the lowest levels which we have all empowered executions so how can we connect as a network independent in realtime . I need to invite them on the cadence that moves faster to tear everything im thinking and understand the strategic impact and how this affects. So so everyday for about 90 minutes everyone in the organizations of thousands of people around the globe were invited to a 90 minute video teleconference that we talked about in the book which we called the operation intelligence and so you could sit through that 90 minutes and listen to all of the Senior Leadership all the way down to the level as needed. Understand what had changed in the last 24 hours and you are free to move inside and complete autonomy for 22 and a half hours and then we we we wou