Black man in a white coat comes out in september of 2015. The author is dr. Damon tweedy. You are watching booktv on cspan2. You are watching booktv on cspan2 are next retired u. S. Army general Stanley Mcchrystal talking about how lessons you learn 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 Fussell. So those 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, focuses on Team Leadership with emphasis on empowering others, engaging employees, managing through technology and 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 environment. I retired 4star general, general mcchrystal is a former commander of both the u. S. And International SecurityAssistance Forces afghanistan. And the nations premier military counterterrorism force, joint special Operations Command. Chris fussell is the chief of Network Management at Mcchrystal Group leading the sales, marketing and client relation teams. He served as aide to general mcchrystals final year amending the joint special Operations Command where he witnessed firsthand the special operations communities transformation into a successful agile network. Today, general mcchrystal and Chris Fussell what does modern military action, the islamic state, and how these lessons really do apply to the world of business. Please join me in welcoming general Stanley Mcchrystal and Chris Fussell. [applause] gentlemen, good morning and thank you for honoring us with your presence. Certainly appreciate your years and years of service and leadership on behalf of the country. Congratulation on the new book, and id like to get 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. And i tell you after reading more and more about the navy seals, it reaffirms my decision not to be a navy seal. [laughter] not that that was ever an option, but chris, im reading about all of the training, all of the training, all of the training. And in my mind becoming a navy seal was meant to be the olympic athlete. It was meant to be for the best of the best as related to the physical specimen. Theres a physical part but its clear you and the joe put this together with your team that is much more about teamwork. So forgive the informal nature of the discussion this morning but i would like to start with you about the essence of the navy seals and the dependency is seemingly more about team and less about this sharp shooter individual. Sure if this. We just two examples in the book to talk about the stereotypes of not just the navy seals, a special operation commute in general which is gotten attention over the last decade or so. The ongoing conflict. The reality is and what we try to bring out in the book is what makes the script so effective is not the sort of elite nature of individual. Theres a certain bar that one must pass to get into these groups but what made it so effective on the battlefield and contested is really the integration of all these strong personality into a cohesive team. And for us and other special operation units it starts at a small level. How do you integrate all this process to make an Effective Team on the battlefield. That was a tradition for many years. What we face overseas and what general mcchrystal oversaw was how do we scale the effectiveness of all these small teams onto a global level enterprise so that we can really defeat a globally connected network enemy which was a new type of conflict. So you create a team, seals, rangers, special forces. You create a team of experts, just the highest of the high. Button on the teams i think they cannot particularly good teammate a sort of washed out. Now youre left with a team, a high performing team. And in the Business World we may have high performing teams but we dont let him perform. We micromanage the its an interesting approach. General, within this book on a team of teams that could of had a subtext that said how not to micromanage them, instead trust your team get if all the time, all these resources and training creating a trustworthy team, where is this disconnect that people are not trusting been in a to let them do it . Is sometimes misunderstood because you can have teams that have these extraordinary capabilities. Pic your favorite commando movie. The bridge under river kwai with a go, pick and this group of commandos gets sent somewhere and in this adventure somewhere along the way they meet a beautiful woman and they go and they blow something up. Wanted to then get back allies. To think about is you see that and you think all of the power is in a little group, the interaction between the. Theres truth in that once they launch on this operation if the ideas okay, they are pretty autonomous. Thats not todays world. Todays world is this wonderful cohesive small group that can do extraordinary things with precision and all, cannot do it if theyre part of this network larger team that can get the information that they need in very rapid, consummate guide to what youre doing, then respond to what they find on the target. Tonight we killed zarqawi we didnt have time for two nephews. We killed them. That night we did 17 more raids. To take advantage of what we have learned from doing that operation to the only way you can do that this if h if you gos team of teams that are just absolutely connected. Not just by Information Technology but connected by relationships and whatnot so you get somebody call the seals and say okay, this is what we know, go. Absolutely on trust but on this deep connectivity that you built between the teams suddenly have the ability to operate. A leader cannot micromanage about. A leader might think that they can and are some people here, probably not here, but some people the might of multiple smart phones, two or three computers. You have this ability to all this information here so good you can micromanage your vast enterprisenterpris e it but i would say i couldnt. I used to sit in operations in every 12 screens into. Chris would be there. We could have 12 operations going on all at the same time. I could see everyone of them because from a predator you get full motion of the deal. And then you could talk to them if you wanted but the reality is you cant micromanage to get all you can do is be aware of it, get smart about and pump information down so that organically the organizations manage is itself. Spit so they are still knocking on your door late at night same general, may i, gender, could we . If we do this, and then you, your processing all this. You must be loving being a leader. Theyre knocking on the door at 3 a. M. Theyre asking for permission. Or really redoing things to you and way of of saying give me the intelligence, what is your recommendation . Which is a wonderful approach. One step further, im not adding value to this equation. Im not sure if youre upsetting the apple cart as much in business or in a military, or both. You really did ramp it up within this work and id like to a bit more about those middle of the night knocks on the doors but then what from that made you think this would be good for business . And just a little bit of background to we take command of an organization, just like when you move into a new job anywhere, you want is irrelevant as quickly as you can. The first time the country and take a great leader, heres a problem to 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. I take command to first task for any company with approval for every operation. I do that thing where you look, and act like your thinking because you have no clue. Then you say yes or no. They would do this every one thing in our requirement is that every time we want to drop a bomb on a terrorist leader, go someplace and you could get to, they had to come to get my approval. We went to bed just about done because we fought all my to go to bed at dawn, about an hour later they would look at the later they would look at the sky and coming to knock on my door. I lived in a plywood huge and they would say we want to drop a bomb on joe bag of donuts. Im 50 plus years of old. I havent got much sleep. I get on the side of my blog and look at the slides, aerial photographs and all i got. Ill ask them a couple of questions and that i was a do you think we should do it . They said well, we just woke you up. What do you think . And i would give this thing, okay, to forth and do it. My value add was zero. Because they are the ones ive gotten this latest information, they were on the ground and get it slowed it down because they had this operation. If they have to wake me up and get me to opine for a while, that is just slow the process. I asked them why they did it . They said that our process, thats our requirement. I said stop it. Stop asking me. Just do it. They say, but we have to because you are responsible. Is that im always responsible. It doesnt matter. Just stop it now. Is what were going to do so. Im going to give you every bit of information you have, turn it toward you and im going to talk to you how i think about these operations so you know in terms of big strategy at all these things, these are the things that go through my mind and you just put them in your mind and make a decision. A lot of people came to me and said this is dangerous, you have younger people making decisions, make more mistakes. The reality is we not only didnt make more mistakes and we got much faster obviously, but Something Else happened. They owed it. Think about it. If somebody comes to you and says should we do a or b. And you say be and it goes badly, ago boss had a bad day. But if you look at them and say use your best judgment, tell me what you did. They walk away saying ive got to be thoughtful on this. That was helpful in our world. He did another thing me but it opened the stage. It stop me from being in the weeds on those things and allowed me to be a little bit more thinking about wider issues. Chris, when you lay this book other upright at different episodes, some of them are airliner created as relates to a crash of a jetliner or landing a plane in the hudson river. The other episodes that were very specific military but teen, teen, teen gets in the steadily right from the start. Talk to us although they did they would about the team concept because you hearing from the generals, the way youre brought up in a military was commanding control. How much does it will turn things on its head or is it kind of the flavor of the day . For us what we knew really well was in our dna was the creation of effective small teams. We draw examples from team to team with this is not uncommon if you look inside any Successful Organization and go down to the ground level. You will find effective small teams. To stand support, the problem we face is how do you scale sadly between these different styles of which all these small things operate. For us and what we see in industry is when you go up a level or two levels and when you get to the senior level you are looking at radically different tribes inside of these different silos the it was the case in military. Talk about integrating sort of legacy of the seal team culture in with the army ranger culture, and with air force culture and then expanding out into all the interagency teams would work with, fbi, cia, et cetera. Everyone we found, had to realize we are not going to win this conflict if we keep fighting as a set of small teams. Now to really integrate with one another im going to have to accept the fact you might look at the problem differently, you would have a much different culture to treat people, how you engage with the conflict, how the problem looks to you. And for us to get across that boundary where to develop true collaborative sharing base, trustbased relationships which, of course, broke years of bureaucratic design. It changes the entire org chart. Thats not overlap, does not duplication of that but its the relationships, the key interdependencies. Hit on the interdependency repeatedly, that the seals, bute police dont necessarily work as well with the fire, the army doesnt always play as well with the navy. The seals maybe not always with the rangers, and then he drove very hard to make sure that they understood that they were in the same family, that they were into dependencies and they could share. They could have relationships. One thing oneupsmanship but how did that work in the Operations Side of things . General, how does that work from your perspective of pushing a new culture speak with what it felt like underground was a to go back to some of the earlier days, 2003, 2004 when we first started to get our heads around this problem, add an isolated team focused until the. Gavgetting myspace, and, tell me which want to accomplish a become we did, success in those pockets but then to the transition and connect the line she realized the onus is on the to form relationships with the person is maybe two or three lanes over on the battlefield. The way general mcchrystal was running your position created this broad sense of accountability. As the system matured and we see the same thing happened in industry, people are low and midlevel realize i am incentivized to get ahead of the thought process of the Senior Leadership on the ground because now i am empowered, i have the accountability. Its up to the tikrit the relationships and im coming to Senior Leadership with complex Solutions Rather than constantly requesting permission. You obviously are a student of military history, general. You go back to admiral nelson. You have a great example their of the chips. You have drawn on a lot of business, the entire manufacturing process and how that was revolutionized. And then you find yourself, take a sort of agile is get brought up and you about the revolution work and the minutemen, the guys lined up with the red coats and hanging out entries in going after them and they are lined up sitting ducks. You sort of felt like we were sitting ducks. The working, if you will, had changed, and we were not ahead. Now we have more technology, better this, but at the end of this. But boy, theres a heck of a peace in your what it catches you deadly, we are not what we need to be the can you expand on that . If you go back to military history the challenge was to get a group of people trained and outfitted correctly to the right place at the right time and you needed mass because each person didnt have much combat power project to get this vast army from point a to point the which major to be organized and disciplined and changed the command because it had to be predictable. If you said this yet to be able to protect what the effects would be. We went on to the and to get through first world war, Second World War incredibly mechanical wars in many ways. But if you are bi big enough and youre efficient if you could win because he built a bigger machine, a more awesome machine, you crush your enemy. Thats essentially what happened. Probably the apogee was the first gulf war. When im over there essential it was clear that Saddam Hussein put his army on a golf tee and to let us up on it because every strength we had he played to which was extraordinary. We got this feeling that we had come advanced technology that they did have, local positioning system, precision strike weapons, night vision, unmanned aerial vehicles. We have this technological overmatched and we have is organizational overmatched in better trained, organized, more efficient. Sounds pretty good. We go into iraq in the fall, or the spring of 2003, and that works. It works beautifully. But then within about six weeks you start to see the situation in iraq deteriorated for lots of reasons. Then in the early all, late summer early fall you start to see alqaeda and to richard and with the ipod with Saddam Hussein and his followers but it wasnt. It was the arrival of alqaeda under zarqawi to leverage the frustrations and the sunni population to create a terrorist insurgency. Put those two things together and shut this thing grow. Normally that would be less than a match for the kinds of forces we had com, particularly with Te Technology and whatnot. In the fall i took over joint special Operations Command which have this wonderful collection as was described of americas most elite counterterrorism forces. Just extraordinary element. We started operations in which doing operations and doing very well. And berated we do as exquisitely executed, and most of them are very successful every raid. This situation keeps getting worse. We are doing everything weve been taught, doing it better than ever and the situation continues to deteriorate. Against an enemy alqaeda in iraq which on the face of it is not that good. They are not particularly welltrained. If you think about the narrative, a political narrative that they published it, its kind of absurd. Its nihilism and their behavior was aboard. But theyre Getting Better and better and so as we study the problem what we found is, and i dont think my design, i think it was by block, the intersected with the change in the world. A change in the world driven by two big factors. One, i