Transcripts For CSPAN2 General Stanley McChrystal On Team Of Teams 20240622

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 wouldve a set and say okay based on what we talked about yesterday, heres all the things we did. Heres what ive done in the last 22 hours. Get the reaction of the organization and then reset again and we stayed on that cycle for years and years and years, seven days a week 7,000 people dialing dialing in and that is what allowed us as a Global Enterprise to make realtime small decisions faster so there were certain things that were not discussed and a few other elements but really it was pretty wideopen. He wanted to make sure the information is being communicated in realtime so that it was useful because if it is four hours later or ford four days later it relates to the transparency and the communication. And you are exposing more information to more people so where is the problem and what was the balance on that and how comfortable do you sleep after opening it up that wide . When we opened it up we almost opened up to every piece of information but not every piece of information. Clearly there are some things you have to protect. We protected resources and we went in to give them the source of that. We didnt talk about the internal personnel actions those are not appropriate for that kind of venue but Everything Else we put out there in civic and for 90 minutes at a Business People in dc, the state department everything. We have a plywood little headquarters and we had a room about almost the size as the man operation center, screens on the wall. You can talk to everybody. The information is constantly pumping and so the idea was Everybody Knows everything all the time. That is impossible. But if you think about it we create the structures in the organizational chart you want and say how this information go . Search and information goes up to the chain and they make a decision that goes back down again. At the time it takes to do that and the filtering effect it has at each level is pretty dangerous when we found out it was fatal. By the time it got sucked down the instructions were wrong because even if they were brilliant when they were made they were not appropriate by the time they got down and second, it would be filtered by people sometimes not for the nefarious intent with Different Levels of competence we found when we were very transparent we didnt take up the level of responsibility for decisionmaking. Everybody got to see it so suddenly the order you got from your supervisor you now have context from the big picture. Its made a lot of supervisors because it forced them because everybody is seeing it and then also identified people that were not up to the task and some people are not up to the task but it gave you this opportunity because everybody is marinated in the information to not have to go back and this 90 minute thing was end a mechanical brief somebody would Say Something and i would say okay heres what i think i heard, and correct me if im wrong i would say heres how im processing that and they could hear that and then then then i would say it seems to me that we will probably want to do this about it and i wouldnt make the decision because i try not to make a lot of decisions and then i would go to the person responsible and i would say you think about it and tell me what youre going to do. But what would happen if Everybody Knows the logic train in following the could fix it if i was wrong but they also knew because other problems that came up which were similar they didnt have to ask permission or come back or say what are we thinking . Theyve got the framework updated on a dalia basis. And i was for you if there is a cfo in the room and people out of a paper and pencil and do 7580 too on the ours was the most efficient thing that we did. When we started started with 50 people and it was at least 7500 when we gave up and people were fighting to get in and we recorded it everyday so if you were on a different shift, you could go on your computer and just watch it and go wherever you were in you could watch it on your laptop anyway. And take you from the battlefield to the board room and to the corporate setting. You referenced henry ford and really almost the Industrial Revolution and then we get to the technological revolution but there are things called limiting factors in your speech. Can you talk to us about where you saw the limiting factors and what you have done and what you are doing now for . Wheel is typically used the term limiting factor because the military is a different setup. But as we call them it wasnt highvalue assets comes with helicopters are in short supply there are more Ground Forces and so in the old world, the idea was i wanted to get the helicopters and i dont care about that other unit and so we broke that paradigm and said it doesnt matter that batting average if we are losing the series we need to figure out how to pay the team and how to share these assets. That was a sort of step number one that was not giving some of the assets to someone else. But that still didnt get us there to move fast enough and so the real sort of epiphany step came and we said i need to understand this other tribes view on the situation as clearly as i understand my own and that was done to these large transparent forms for all i could tie together in the strategy and we had a common purpose about what we were trying to accomplish and then it made sense to say for the next 20 hours you are clear because what is going on is much more important than what im looking at. I wouldnt be able to see that so then i would understand this is a more important thing to do in the next 24 hours so why dont you take all of my stuff for now and based on i now understand the objective youre going after i can predict you would probably be done in time for cutting back half of those assets so i can get a little piece of what i want to accomplish the next 24 hours. You multiply that by ten, 20 Ground Forces thinking like that all the way around the world on end into the leadership talks about recapturing the life space when he went you went into these large forms and it wasnt a man in argument with this force over here we need you to arbitrate and who is going to get the assets. Its dont even worry about the conflict weve come up the next 24 hours but weve got all these things done because youve given them the authority and we would continue pushing in that direction to say pulled the reins and tell us to slow down. So then they bring out bags of evidence it is said to them over in the corner some with postit notes that no one gets there for a day or two or three. You have some disconnects not just processes but a technician im sorry i was supposed to get to the bag. I wasnt supposed to do anything with it i was just leaving it there. Some other team is going to. With those disconnects working through that added real talent and capabilities and speed to the entirety of the equation its very clear its laid out in the buck that you did find not just efficient these operations but the silo mentality is something you face in life or death situations, so talk to us a little bit about breaking down the silos and it seems like a large part of it is relationship based. You will push people to create relationships. Thats probably one of the things that translates most directly into business is this because for good reason if you acoustically thats why we try to go back. What it looks like if you are trying to sort of follow the thought process in a network like all qaeda and isis. Traditionally you would have different agencies looking at one wants to go and sort of understand the macro theory behind the organization independent one is going to go out into the realtime ground intelligence and what is going to go and put a force against that organization to defeat on the battlefield. But these are Major National organizations that have these big planks between them. And we call it this because you have a sort of staring off deck that you literally shut your eyes at his critical moments between understanding the organization into seeing it and doing an objective and then bringing back the objective to feed the cycle again and then the same thing happened in business and so what we had to do was realize the young intelligence operator that would traditionally sit in the organization back in dc. It is the objective of someone in the door to fight and all qaeda fighters lets integrate these people forward and get them as a true relationship based part of the team and a suddenly you fast forward that mentality and walk into one of the headquarters in 20062007 and it was a mix of operators. Thats what we see in the industry. It is a marketing plan to understand the Current Conditions in the leadership on the fiveyear strategy. Its anywhere fast enough to keep pace with the environment. Let me pick up on that and lead into this next part of it. In the book there are diagrams out overloaded with technical speak or military jargon. Thank you very much i try to keep up as best i could and integrate charts and graphs. Everybody knows the word chart is top topdown. Top down. He is the ceo at the top and then the different departments and vendors the next one thats the commander of teams. But then there is a team on this and this and this and whomever in the finance Department Communications they play well together but then theres the team of teams and that chart is a mess but heres what i would like to read and then turn it over to you. We need every member of task force to know everyone else they just need everyone to know someone on every team so that when they thought about how to work with with a with the units next door or their intelligence counterparts in dc with a friendly face rather than a competitive rifle so i would like to hear more from you about the shared mission so that has an Important Role to make sure everyone is on the same page so it is a relationship across the teams. What you dont know. Most of the kids in the Kennedy School he said youre in the army and i said i am and he said thats curious because you seem sort of smart. [laughter] i said thank you. He wasnt antimilitary. He just had absolutely no had i come from his world when you think about the problem if you face if it is complicated. If they dont understand that it works the same way every time. Its predictable because the complicated search is to work a certain way. If your problems is complicated you can do what we call the mutually exclusive but collectively exhausted. That means you take a task and break it into its parts reductionism comes as everybody with everybody does a unique thing that nobody else does. If you get a complicated problem where you know what the output is coming you can create a efficiency and as long as things dont change, your good. But think of a sailing ship, of admiral nelson. It was about 300 feet long, 26 miles, 37 sales. You have to constantly adjust it and they had to fire the cannon at the right time so that it wouldnt go up over the enemy ship. 850 sailors all doing this simultaneously all the time. Now suddenly because the work tweaking the citizen to complicated publishers to be a complex problem and if you think about the problems you face in Business Today if it was your competition was the same, customers are the same, market is the same you could get efficient and that would be good. Then you could life would be pretty easy. Once youve figured it out and got efficient enough that would be great. But a complex problem is different because you think of one that simple. Think u. Rack them up on the Billiard Table put them in iraq may get one more and im going to get it. You say this is pretty mechanical. Im going to hit something. Think about it. 15, actually 16 but have to be perfectly round. The table would have to be an impossibly flat. The room would have to be no air circulation and the would have to be perfectly precise in how you hit to predict where they would go because just because you have 16 the combinations of the variables go through the roof, so you cant predict what will happen so our argument in the book is where efficiency was great was plenty for a long time for the Industrial Age efficiency was good the military was good and that pleases because it could be efficient enough to solve the problem and now we are in a complex environment that changes so fast you still need a foundation of efficiency but adaptability is where you have to be because because you are always facing a different requirement. Your business requirements today are probably completely different from what they would be a year from now and get we are are hardwired to think that way in our organizations as we put the duty proficiency and processes and are not normally function or structured that way. So what what youre arguing is that what we had to do to become a team of teams. So if you are coming and i into use this analogy for leadership if you think of yourself as a chess master and youre going to control your pieces over 64 squares on the chest and you are giving them against another asked her okay youre all youre all right but what if you are across the table youre 16 pieces think of themselves and they communicate among themselves in real time and they dont have to follow any rules that is what we are against so we have to take a step back and say okay you have to take a different approach. They all have to be able to think and communicate and then we have to create and ecosystem so that we can do that better than anybody else. So wall street and around the world they decide to move headquarters to pick over the nano second of Technology Faster to be altogether trade faster. You have the speed with which things are being done and you also have the technology. There is a piece in the buckeye notated that would book i notated that would be the transition from the battlefield from the military to the corporate because we moved from the data point. If he they understood very little of this in 2004 we kept trying to predict because that is what we knew the Good Management to be. The organization are encountering the same problems. Management practice art unable to cope with volatility. So you really do see this as a revolution and management to keep up to tuesday i had all of the rules need to be looked at and beyond that some of them need to change in the office setting, the communication to the speed with which you stay ahead of technology, the shared purpose and rest. Do i have it right . You just decide where youre going to be on this. This isnt an idea that we had when we said we will search this. Not by choice but by experience starting in 2003 we were losing the war. Losing the war was unacceptable to us and of course we are sending bodies home and so it was viscerally important to us. We didnt change because we thought it was a good idea or because there was a vision we were going to go here i had no idea idea when i took over i was prepared to be that chessmaster the situation was so much different and so much more complex that we started changing. Then as it started to work more and more. And when chris joined the he studied it the study did and went to civilian firms to see whether our experience was unique in the military thing that happened and we found that isnt the case at all. We were a military manifestation of a new situation environment we are all operating in and we are all struggling to deal with it. Our first clients were a long and garden company. Great people. But the things carried forward were now under threat because not just the housing collapse but Everything Else and we found the traditional structure of what they were selling back to the Research Development to produce the things assign those were not communicating well so they were not producing. They didnt have a sense of it and they were not marketing that way he caused you have some lawn and garden products in a certain part of the year and when everybody in the spring is giving it to be efficient and effective and adaptable during the period because its never goes like you think its going to go. You start your competition. So you have to be able in thimble to do that. You dont think a lawn and garden is doing that but thats with a what they transform to. So as we were a part of them we learned and they took different versions of what needed to become this organically responsive things and we found this is absolutely sector agnostic. You were at bloomberg the other day. You had so much as it relates to technology companies, finance companies, on and garden companies. All across the board. When you look at it how reluctant our people to be this transparent. How reluctant are they to knock down the barrier and say this is the workspace everyone gets to sit at the table together instead of your cubicle . Its interesting. It starts at a leadership level and im sure this will make sense to everyone in this room obviously. The willingness to admit that there is a massive shift going on is what drives the organization. Some want to fight it and say i can keep going. Others are depending on the speed of the industry. Technology moves fast. The technology has massive pressures in the last few years so theres Different Levels to manage. So we did and didnt thought we were going to change into and once it was identified as the issue so i think the organizations around the same way that they were in the 90s and everyone has to adapt to this in some way because the world is changing and the speed of the change is exponential for the traditional systems that come down in the traditional bureaucratic system you couldnt move fast enough if you had to go through six steps of approval and then back down before you could move. We got back down to a few hours and it was still too slow. So the same thing happens in the industry and it depends on a piece of whatever space that you are in that alternately everyone has to go through this. We know more about everything in it. Of the world in many respects has become less predictable. Such unpredictability is happening not in spite of Technological Progress but because of it. Talk about of technology you reference your granddaughter. Everybody with news on technology now you are seeing it in the corporate world. How fast is the pace of change how big of a deal this Technology Revolution. Then on the response about what lessons did you pick up that needed to be shared . Once we realized that was the core of everything because there is so much more Information Available to everyone. So i will start with the military history on this independence day, nominal poorest macro level. But if i was an observer in world war ii i am looking to and i think this is true. Im looking for a few very big data sets where is the german tank battalion. When you find that you can do a lot with that and so my role in the military at that level and in the industry is to find these big chunks of data, feed them in the machine and someone will come up with a strategy and then pushed it back down to those at the tactical level. You can do that because the system is doing the same thing. In a faster rate it is going to win and so you for all different supply chains that can do that. When we tried to take that mentality to the networkbased in the environment as that we all face now what you found was okay because of the piece of information flow is important new data every single day and so the traditional system of incentivizing is just just sent up the chain and eventually somebody out there will figure out what to do with it. While there wasnt some supercomputer of top. Just humans further and further up the chain. So, no one could collect it all. So as we put in the transparent inclusive forms what you ended up finding is that people could become human filters on the information and so here is my 1,000 new data sets but because i understand what we are doing i they are doing i could be the filter and say here are the four that matter rightparen and the next day it will be another four and i can constantly update what information im putting in the system and im not wasting anyones time and if ama takes everyone a little bit of time to get used to this. You offer twice the amount the information you needed to for example in the 90 minute forum. That was repetitive from what we talked about last week. Make sure your paying attention to those things and you can see people getting the purple in the system. Everything they said was worth listening to because it tied directly to the strategic goals of the organization and also to what you are facing on your side of the battlefield. That was a major shift for us. General you hear that and the Technology Revolution and as i mentioned your granddaughter and the world shes going to be growing up in, how big of a deal as the shift and how do peoples they had . One of the things we have have to does not go on a fools errand. We have to collect more data and figure out what people are going to buy and what they are willing to do. We are going to get a lot of information and that is going to be valuable but the reaction as things change because everybody gets information now. We tell a story in the book and we go to the 26yearold guy named derek in 1882 he goes to a north african marketplace. Hes frustrated and start criticizing the government pretty harshly. The local police know who he is but they cannot collect on his cell phone or computer because they dont exist. So they cant know much either because they cant connect to other agencies efficient. So hes talking from the top of the fruit box to the number of people that can hear them and they do know that as word of mouth may affect some people that its going to go pretty slowly and they will have plenty of time to see and respond if it causes a problem than we fast forward to 2010. He gets frustrated with how hes built with by local administrators. Then he liked himself on fire two and a half weeks later he dies. His cousin takes a still picture, they take some video, but will protest within 90 days they are done in egypt and theyve started to descend into the tragedy. Now they were there but nobody could predict that his act otherwise irrelevant to us with the relevant to all of us and still today and possible to predict because it goes viral and who knows what is going to designate. And that is essentially the point. More people get more data all the time, therefore it affects their decisionmaking more rapidly so youve got this constantly changing thing. We want to say if we get more information we are going to get our arms around this problem. The reality is information is going faster than our ability to get our arms around and we need to understand that. Dont try. There was a time when an educated person in the world essentially could read every book available on a certain body of knowledge because there were not that many. So what we have to do is respond to and ive met the constantly changing thing and grabbed the date of that we can. Its going to be different every moment. Its the different formations the board of trade had an opportunity at the 1812 north Street Building in the region to be at the top to watch this. So im watching them come down into the first, second and third they had been one that. As i am reading through your work, the pace of change is lightning speed. A big part of what you cover really has to do with the trust everybody is on the same shared mission you have the relationships across the teams and that youre communicating with that information exchange. Do i have it right then what else would you add . That absolutely right in a small team pick any mall team. You can trust each other, you throw the ball up, somebody will catch it, and your transaction costs are low. I of you ask somebody, you dont check it on your team. You need a resource, you just give tout each other. But think of our world now. Security requirements. The transaction by the fact that what we dont trust we check so many things, put all these things in, it kills us. When we put false silos in, silos that on necessary that increase the slowness, the filtering, the number of people that have to check something it slows you down so much you back dinosaur. You just cant move fast enough. And so what we argue is inside those mall teams you have probably got that already. If you dont you work on that. But we know how to do that. What we struggle with is taking a team of teams when you scale it and creating that across organizations, and the end over the date management and its leadership and. How so expand on that. You hit about efficiency repeatedly the book bun on management leadership, and at the structure of organizations how do they need to adapt . If you have an organization where, inside each of your teams, silos whatever you call them they eave a different definition of their success and they might be incentivized for that. The might be incentivized to have a high batting average but not whether the team wins. You think what you pay people tend of the year for. Thats one thing. Other times just their culture will pet them in a mode of operating that is different or harder for other elements to interact with. That where leadership has to break that down. What we did a number of things, we created shared consciousness around the video teleconference, and then parallel to that we had 15 chartrooms operating all the time. So as were doing this video teleconference, people are chatting across the entire command with more information. Theyre asking questions. I heard this mentioned were going to do more. Youre trying to create this lateral flow of information, all the time, that gives them the sense that this is one entity, and not only one entity from a shared mission but one entity from a shared capability. You can learn from other parts of the organization like that, and you get over that hesitation to do that. And of course as chris mentioned, you share resources as well. We are going to open it up for questions in a second. Chris, did you find decisions being made faster and better or did they take longer to reach a decision because its now information overload . Good lord, have to sit through another 90minute briefing. I already know the answer. That is the battlefield and now with the companies you have been encouraging them to be more communicative. Thats right. And as stan mentioned earlier he didnt make a lot of decision being the Senior Leadership team, which is true. The majority of the decisions were on a 24hour cadence happened at the ground level. If you try to keep every decision at your level which is what a traditional work chat shows, you have to think out loud you have to invite people understand how the organization is thinking as a collective, and now youre empowered with that to make the realtime decisions. But as stan mentioned, at the leadership factor, even if we define the problem early on, seals need trust rangers threestar generals say we need to trust each other. Check in and see how thats going, okay, boss, we trust each other. What does that mean . What he did was okay, now were all included in this big conversation. Okay seals if your ranger buddies fail or werent able to execute a target because you knew something or had something they could have used and you didnt give it to them, you wrong. And were in public accountable. How did it go . Wishes didnt get anything done because we didnt have enough helicopters. Chris, what did you do you should understood the onus on us is to reach across and give them the assets bus youre not playing bill the new rules or you dont understand the context of whose priorities matter on a given night. So you can quickly identify the problems. You deal with who you have but you find through the Work Overseas and the work now with companies, its not just the top leader its the team of teams but you have these team leaders do you find they need to be changed out . Do they need to be tested to see if theyve got the aptitude to be the team leader in this new environment . No, interestingly the majority of the younger folks maybe a few years younger than me and down, this is how they think. They live in an interconnective world. Theyre waiting for the Senior Leadership to catch up they want to be invited to strategy context and thats where it picks up speed immediately. The real comfort is 40plus all of us that say i have to get my head around the fact i cant just live in my very comfortable silo anymore. Were going to open it up now. Way have hearing about zap zappos and theres no real management, its everybody. 200 people said, that not for me. I cant help thinking that the ceo of zappos is going okay, because thats what we needed to do we need to get people onboard, on the same team, the same message shared values, and heres how we will proceed. It was pretty radical but i think were looking at more radical things coming down the pike, whether its facebook or twitter or amazon, certainly the Disruptive Technologies out there with uber and the rest, you have been in the midst of the highest live 0 disruptive and you have been disrun temperatures and then disrupters. Lets open it up for questions. If you would wake for the microphone. Cspan has been kind enough to come here and will be broadcasting this soon. Im brian gibson, scholar on u. S. Iraq relations. I just have a question for the two of you. How do you think your model will work when trying to tack am challenge like isis with a Multinational Force where you dont necessarily trust all the people that youre working with . Im speaking like iran or some elements of the iraqi government. Ill take that. Isis is doing really well right now, and why . Several factors. One, they are very much in an amorphous organization, theres holding a little terrain but theyre a creation of the environment, and they do that very well. They use Information Technology superbly to put their message out. Theyre very adaptable to what is happening own the ground so they embody a 21st century thing. Theyre only doing as well as they are because theyre in a region where almost the opposite is exemplified. As you mentioned to deal with this you have to have a team of teams, and if you look at from the gulf states to iran to the United States to the government of iraq, everybody that is playing with very few exceptions, at least has a level of distrust and a level of difficulty operating with other parts of it. Inside the iraqi military, thats what we see daily. They got enough weapons enough guys, enough everything, except that interonner ability and that gives you confidence, too. If you lack trust and you are going to do something you wont let go of the side of the pool because youre just not quite sure what is out there. So i think you have hit on the big e problem there right now. The region cannot has not yet been able to come to a collective response because they are all looking at it as a slightly different perspective and with different equities. As isis gets more dangerous to people my guess is that will start to improve just because they have to. And i dont think isis is that strong. I actually think isis is a phenomenon that could come and go quickly. The problem is its the disarray of the political framework in the region that makes any kind of action like that very difficult. Next question. This isnt the callin part of the show. General mcchrystal. Its very good to spend time with you this morning. I just finished battle leadership and i dont know how much that book is taught in the military. How many of the lessons were brought into your book and how many of those lessons are you turning on his head . Im not aware of it. Captains battle leadership, written after world war i. I apologize. Not familiar with it. No. Didnt go to west point. Question over here. General mcchrystal, thank you very much for speaking with us this morning. When you were describing the your changes in the command structure, instead of having junior people come to you and ask you for every single thing taking that over, you expressed a wonderment why they wouldnt do that to begin with . The first thing i thought was they were putting responsibility to you. They wants to make sure they didnt have to worry about making that decision. Now, die centralizing that short is all well and good in the military. Can you imagine how that works in a private circumstance . Do people not want to be able to take over that type of responsibility . It seems easier to push it off to higher level people. I think it varies by area. Its a great point itch dont think the people that were working in my command didnt want that level of authority. They didnt know if they had it. And there are places in bureaucracies and people are in decision avoidance because they dont want to be held responsible for the outcome. But most places i see particularly civilian Companies People are not arguing for that. We talk a lot about a concept called decision space and we work with clients on that, decision space basically works where a Senior Leader says, this is my decision space. These are the things i decide. Everything that is not specifically listed there goes to somebody below mow and if you do it well, the ceo has very limited decision space great big Strategic Decisions some hiring decisions things like that. Then as you go down, people define their decision space and if they do it carfully, its like the constitution, any power not reserved to the ford government automatically goes down. Suddenly you start to tell people hey im not doing it so i expect it. The biggest thing i find in organizations is, particularly in the area of instant communications and all they dont know if they should ask. Because nobody has laid it out for them. So just sort of in defense they go i think we need to do x. Can we do x . If the boss says, yes we can do x, you just defined thats a boss decision. And theyll come to you every time on that. If you respond and say no, heres what i think but those are decisions i want you to make and if you but it takes a lot of discipline to do that. Youll find it pushes it down. The drill of doing decision space at each level is a really good way to discipline across an organization. Everybody can see it. Its a public thing. Somebody bosses say come to me, make all the decisions except the ones that are important. Yeah okay. So im a great believer in defining that. Its not completely its not inflexible. Its not saying that youre not talking and whatnot but its constantly pushing people down the expectation. That was a critical come opinion innocent for the speed function both industry and what we experienced in the military. But it took a little bit of getting used, to certainly at the ground level, and we kid now, everybody says they want to be empowered until theyre actually empowered because its a very uncomfortable feeling empowerment is accountability. Defaulting to im pretty sure i can do this but im going to ask anyway you dot that once and twice. By the third time you have someone saying, mentoring you along and saying, theres 12 of you underneath me if if everyone called me every time were just going back to the old system. So you need to be comfortable making decisions. If dont have the information let me know. Otherwise i expect you to move in the right direction. As you look at what you put in place overseas and year Encouraging Companies to consider here, how has it held up on the battlefield . There are the flavors of the day. Management by wandering around or you have the six sigma not a fad but other management techniques. Do the people who follow you general, continue this, and were the expectations from to teams this was going to continue or new guy now we have a new approach . In joint special Operations Command theyre on the third commander after me, and theyve taken it even further. The guy who hands now was my Operations Officer so he was there when we did this, and the two people in the interim one was the deputy and whatnot. So we wont really test the hypothesis until we go to a generation that wasnt there when we had the requirement. But in that organization, more broadly across the military and the government, the answer is, not much. Theres so much muscle memory, right . Nobody gets fired for doing something the way it was done before when it was successful. Nobody gets fired for doing the conservative approach. Nobody is fired for haventing a consulting firm. Instead they get fired because they hire a small one. They dont have a track record. It makes organizations conservative that way and you also do what you know, what you have done before. The problem is, your competitors if all your competitors were you that would be fine, but your competitors arent you. Your competitors are people who come with n with no respect howed use the to be working from grams, complete disrupters, competitors are offer your customers, but i argue you cant look at doing an arms race with your competitor and as along as im ahead of him its the environment that gets you. We used to have the fortune 500 Companies Used to last an average of 75 years. Enough its less than 15 ceos used to have extended tenures. You know they dont now. And so there are all kind of data that sort of blinking red and yet a lot of organizations were just not yet responding as fast as we could. Exactly right. One or two more questions. One up here. One over here. Actually two over here, then. Good morning. Im David Johnson with citizen consulting. I want to thank you both for first off thank you both for your service to our nation, and to the cause of freedom around the globe. Im hoping that you can contrast two things. The first being adaptability, and we talked a lot about adaptability this morning. If you can contrast adaptability with strong routines, im thinking about routines in the military sense routines help both with speed and they also help with predictability, both within units and between units. So if you could comment on how do you build within a structure an environment where people are both adaptive and at the same time are able to leverage those strong routines in order to make things happen more quickly and get that predictability on the battlefield as well as in the corporate environment. So adaptability and retunes how much do you bring those together . Thank you. I can kell in military for sure at the ground level it was certainly a mix of both. So the adaptability had to come at the organizational level. The routine of a small team is critical because you know in the middle of the night i know who that is, i know if i go to their gear where i can find certain things. Chris, deal with that a little more. Theres some very interesting episodes in here, and very interesting examples that if youre not in the military, theyre not second nature. But on a republic zack republic sack, theres a way to pack the ruck zack and its the same so when the lights good out or youre another night you dont have to fumble around, you know where it is and then in your pack, when you land by parachute or youre in your bunk i think thats not necessarily the way its done by any stretch of the imagination with the discipline in the work place, but to the question about but its the muscle memory and the training, training, training. The rangers set the standard, this level of dependability at the individual soldier level the idea being how can i create these teams of multiple individuals and have them quickly understand what they can depend on from the person on their left and right so in the middle of the night if someone is wounded if i approach a ranger today even though i was seal team, know exactly which pocket to go to find his med kit and help him with a gunshot of whatever the case may be. Theres versions of that in every special Operations Community because its critical that you understand and depend on the routine of your team, of the individuals there et cetera. The adaptability piece came at the organizational level. Thats what we were unable to do was to quickly because we were locked in our more bureaucratic mind set we werent when i see a shifting problem, need to adapt in realtime and acquire new resources, create new relationships, et cetera and become a real transcribetive network ours to distributive network, and if you try to remain in a discipline evidence approach youll be one step behind. So i as would merger of the two. You have to be very efficient to be adaptable because those things which are repeated, those things which you have to do the same way certain meetings, have to be otherwise your spending all your time make the machine run. Thats where the balance comes in. Where you start to get calcified into process is where your danger is. Im tempted to call on ken harvey a star lineback irwith the rid skins about the adaptability and training and muscle memory, ken has big muscles. But you also, as the play develops you have to respond differently. You do have to adapt. Its not all like you say theyre all just sort of lined up like the red coats. Thats not how it is any longer. Question over here. Good morning. Im Nancy Wellman ceo of the capital area food bank. Were the regions largest hunger organization, feed 54 00 00 people regionwide. Not the military but very complex, and much of what you have saved really applies very well throw nonprofit sector, and we have been working very hard on pushing accountability down, soso much resonated. The question i have is in organizations we have 130 employees, but those of any size really, where you dont have the layer the military has of processing daytoday tactical decisions. What are your thoughts on getting the bottomsup feedback in order to stay comfortable with sharing your strategic investigation and delegating, you have to be supersure that your Strategic Vision is not out of touch. That its informed by the daytoday. But we dont have the mill military capacity side, be interested in your thoughts on that. A quick thought. Clearly the nonprofit space is ripe with this, im sure, a lot of folks in here probably sit on boards in nonprofits. Theres a lot of cannibalism now in that space because theres so many people trying to affect different areas so the coordination is a real challenge. On the battlefield the it wasnt a huge staff evident that made all thisve. We used few rudimentary systems it was building up to get to where those systems were capability of doing what we needed them to is what took time but it was large communication forums so pulling the right people in on the right cadence to just have the conversation our 24hour okay dense, thats much faster than most industries need. But to tiger out the balance. How often do we need to talk and who are the right people in the conversation. The other was for us a very basic portal system where everybody could upload their information. Theres a lot of data that went on to that because we were operating in so many different spaces but a system like that applies to Something Like youre talking about. Just a common place where people can share their most current findings. If you have access to the right information and then a dependable system where you can plug in and have the conversation at the senior level, somewhere in the theres a balance that can cult through the midlevel. I argue in the mon frost world its even more important for other reasons. In a nonprofit world people are not motivated by compensation. They may be paid people but thats not a driver. Theres normal my not on a Commission Basis or something. So as a consequence feeling connected to what youre doing is part of the motivating factor seeing the big picture if glory a nonprofit helping veterans or feeding people it can be pretty tiring at times because youre right up close to what is ugly. Its like the private on the battlefield. The private sees things which are difficult every day doesnt see big progress, and so as a consequence they can get very disheart ended quickly. What we found is giving the pick picture was important to them because if theyre doing something, theyre tired cold, scared if theyre not constantly reinforced this is making a difference, this is a contribution it can undercut them. And then you want them to constantly be telling you how difficult it so youre not doing big hand waves on a map makings decisions that seem easy that arent. The opportunities i get at the board of trade are remarkable, and i had a chance to talk with the head of hr for nsa not long ago, and i said how is recruiting he says we dont have a problem with recruiting. We get these Technology Wizards and we say you can work on the coolest stuff that no one else has. When you look at the advances in medicine in many respect theyre driven off of the battlefield. Thats where the biggest appeared vanses have happened over the centuries when you look at the organizational models, people have not looked to the military as an organizationalmontholdle, but having gone through to the book to listen to you today to understand how far ahead you are in certain respects, many respect is, about what the world is facing, translates directly to where things are in the technological revolution, in terms of the speed with which the markets are changing, the world is flat but beyond flat its a whole heck of a lot smaller, and when you look at the opportunities to stay ahead of the game you have brought some lessons back from the battlefield that directly translates to the bins world. Before i went through the book i wasnt sure how it was going to goo. I was like, all right lets get the general and chris and wed love to line them up and thanks to perry and loretta we did. But then to go through the book and to understand hough it directly translates, regardless of the size of the organization. Clearly some do it better than others and some are a little more set up to do it than others but ill close with a comment, a quote from your book. This new world required a fundamental rewriting of the ruled of the game in order 2009, we would have to set aside that many of the lessons of military proceed secure a century of optimized efficiency taught it. You took some very bold steps general, you and your team, and your team of teams to be able to make the changes in the moat important time of our lives over on the battlefield to help us win over there to keep the world safe for our families, for our friends for the ability to do business. Thank you so much for your service. Thank you so much for putting pep pen to paper for this book. Congratulations on the book. We wish you the best and appreciate you spending time to join with people in conversation as they come up to you for some comments but also some autographs. I cant thank you enough for all of that and more. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] there is a Nonfiction Author or book you had like to see featured on booktv . Send us an email to booktv at chance chance doering. 2010 us at booktv or post on our wall, facebook. Com booktv. President ial candidates often release books to introduce themselves to voters. And to promote their views on issues. Heres a look at some books written by declared candidates for president