Stanley Mcchrystal Quotes

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.

The crew’s attachment to procedure instead of purpose offers a clear example of the dangers of prizing efficiency over adaptability.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

describe resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.

Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.

Education is resilient, training is robust.

I would tell my staff about the “dinosaur’s tail”: As a leader grows more senior, his bulk and tail become huge, but like the brontosaurus, his brain remains modestly small. When plans are changed and the huge beast turns, its tail often thoughtlessly knocks over people and things. That the destruction was unintentional doesn’t make it any better.

Our actions, particularly interventions, can upset regions, nations, cultures, economies, and peoples, however virtuous our purpose. We must ensure that the cure we offer through intervention is not worse than the disease.

A leader’s words matter, but actions ultimately do more to reinforce or undermine the implementation of a team of teams. Instead of exploiting technology to monitor employee performance at levels that would have warmed Frederick Taylor’s heart, the leader must allow team members to monitor him. More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency. This is the new ideal.

the rules and limitations that once prevented accidents now prevented creativity.

Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg.

You can’t roll up your sleeves while you’re wringing your hands,

Success is rarely the work of a single leader; leaders work best in partnership with other leaders.

Organizations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed.

fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.

We do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Eventually a rule of thumb emerged: “If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal,” you could do it. Soon, I found that the question I most often asked my force was “What do you need?” We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot.

We must be bold . . . as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network.” With that, we took the first step toward an entirely new conversation.

sharing information would help build relationships and the two together would kindle a new, coherent, adaptive entity that could win the fight.

All leaders are human. They get tired, angry, and jealous and carry the same range of emotions and frailties common to mankind.

The teacher who awakens and encourages in students a sense of possibility and responsibility is, to me, the ultimate leader.

If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win—what would you do differently?

The second high-profile Trump critis was retired General Stanley McChrystal, who had commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan a decade earlier. McChrystal had recently appeared on CNN and called Trump immoral and dishonest.

McChrystal never should have been hired for this job given the outrageous cover-up he participated in after the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. He was lucky to keep the job after his 'Seven Days in May' stunt in London last year when he openly lobbied and undercut the president on the surge. But with the latest sassing, and the continued Sisyphean nature of the surge he urged, McChrystal should offer his resignation. He should try subordination for a change.

Today’s rapidly changing world, marked by increased speed and dense interdependencies, means that organizations everywhere are now facing dizzying challenges, from global terrorism to health epidemics to supply chain disruption to game-changing technologies. These issues can be solved only by creating sustained organizational adaptability through the establishment of a team of teams.

In this book, you’ll naturally look for common habits and recommendations, and you should. Here are a few patterns, some odder than others: More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice A surprising number of males (not females) over 45 never eat breakfast, or eat only the scantiest of fare (e.g., Laird Hamilton, page 92; Malcolm Gladwell, page 572; General Stanley McChrystal, page 435) Many use the ChiliPad device for cooling at bedtime Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor

As the demands of the positions differed, and as I grew in age and experience, I found that I had changed as a leader. I learned to ask myself two questions: First, what must the organization I command do and be? And second, how can I best command to achieve that?

There’s a temptation for all of us to blame failures on factors outside our control: “the enemy was ten feet tall,” “we weren’t treated fairly,” or “it was an impossible task to begin with.” There is also comfort in “doubling down” on proven processes, regardless of their efficacy. Few of us are criticized if we faithfully do what has worked many times before. But feeling comfortable or dodging criticism should not be our measure of success. There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.

In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.

McChrystal's defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men—(the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary)—must put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire the serially insubordinate general, they reasoned, because that would undermine the mission in Afghanistan, and if that happens, then Obama would be further weakened. So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can't punish the military because that would make him weak? It's the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses.

Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

we now live in a world where risk exists everywhere, but we have never been safer.

In the military, where we love abbreviations, we have a term for the one element in a situation that holds you back—a limfac (limiting factor).

we needed to promote at the organizational level the kind of knowledge pool that arises within small teams.

Today, a staggering 93 percent of those who work in cubicles say that they would prefer a different workspace.

All the efficiency in the world has no value if it remains static in a volatile world

unpredictability is the hallmark of complexity

Leaders are empathetic. The best leaders I’ve seen have an uncanny ability to understand, empathize, and communicate with those they lead.

People are born; leaders are made.

Effective leaders stir an intangible but very real desire inside people. That drive can be reflected in extraordinary courage, selfless sacrifice, and commitment.

Henry Mintzberg, author of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: “Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg.

In a leader I see it as doing those things that should be done, even when they are unpleasant, inconvenient, or dangerous; and refraining from those that shouldn’t, even when they are pleasant, easy, or safe.

So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine.

Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their new insights. Just as empowerment without sharing fails, so does sharing without empowerment.

As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents, like our Task Force. But this is easier said than done.

Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage.

years ago, a Fortune 500 firm was expected to last around seventy-five years. Today this life expectancy is less than fifteen years and is constantly declining. The Fortune 500 list of 2011 featured only sixty-seven companies that appeared on the list of 1955, meaning that just 13.4 percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 were still on the list fifty-six years later. Eighty-seven percent of the companies simply couldn’t keep up; they had either gone bankrupt, merged with other companies, been forced to go private, or fallen off the list completely.

It had been in 1985, through the headsets of a helicopter being flown by a veteran Night Stalker named Steel. Being called a customer put me off. It felt too much like business, too transactional—not how warriors should think of their comrades. I soon came to see that the Night Stalkers’ constant use of the term was a skillful way of reminding themselves that they existed to support and enable the forces—the customers—whom they flew. The culture that formed around this word was one of the Night Stalkers’ great strengths.

These and similar moments from our military’s past were on my mind as the enemy in Iraq appeared ever more sinister. I sought to emphasize in my force, and in myself, the necessary discipline to fight enemies whose very tactic was to instill terror and incite indignation. Maintaining our force’s moral compass was not a difficult concept to understand. Armies without discipline are mobs; killing

In no class of warfare,” C. E. Callwell had written a hundred years earlier, about the “small wars” of the nineteenth century, “is a well organized and well served intelligence department more essential than in that against guerrillas.” The same qualities that made intelligence so important when countering guerrillas then—the difficulty of finding the enemy, of striking him, and of predicting his next move and defending against it—were increased a hundredfold when trying to counter terrorists in the age of electronic communication and car bombs.

The wisest decisions are made by those closest to the problem — regardless of their seniority.

Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other.

The insights of resilience thinking are applicable to many domains in which people are searching for a way forward in the face of uncertainty. The key lies in shifting our focus from predicting to reconfiguring. By embracing humility—recognizing the inevitability of surprises and unknowns—and concentrating on systems that can survive and indeed benefit from such surprises, we can triumph over volatility. As Zolli puts it, “if we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats.

Room for the River accepts the reality that floods are inevitable, representing a shift in mentality from making the Netherlands floodproof to making it flood resilient.

Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.

Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.” If you have enough foresight to know with certainty what the “right thing” is in advance, then efficiency is an apt proxy for effectiveness

NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.

We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise. Our entire force needed to share a fundamental, holistic understanding of the operating environment and of our own organization, and we also needed to preserve each team’s distinct skill sets.

The issue is not that teams never work, but that team dynamics are powerful but delicate, and expansion is a surefire way to break them.

As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working … than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each … adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers). This limitation leads to a kind of tribal competitiveness: victory as defined by the squad—the primary unit of allegiance—may not align with victory as defined by the Task Force.

The investigation after the Challenger disaster had especially harsh words for NASA’s organizational practices, but the subsequent, efficiency-focused program ushered in during the 1990s, called “Faster, Better, Cheaper” (FBC), took NASA further down the path of carelessness, reducing the “inefficient” ties that had defined the Apollo approach.

This is the difference between “education” and “training.” Medical school is education, first aid is training.

Education requires fundamental understanding, which can be used to grasp and respond to a nearly infinite variety of threats; training involves singular actions, which are useful only against anticipated challenges. Education is resilient, training is robust.

At a Chicago-area IT consultancy, he collected a billion measurements in one month—1,900 hours of data—and found that engagement was the central predictor of productivity, exceeding individual intelligence, personality, and skill.

When he shifted the coffee break system from being individual to being team based, interaction rose and AHT dropped, demonstrating a strong link between interaction and productivity. As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity

Our goal was twofold. First, we wanted to get a better sense of how the war looked from our partners’ perspectives to enhance our understanding of the fight.

Bonds of trust began to form. People from different tribes began to see increasingly familiar faces. Even strangers were now, by extension, part of a familiar and trusted unit entity, and received the benefit of the doubt.

The critical first step was to share our own information widely and be generous with our own people and resources. From there, we hoped that the human relationships we built through that generosity would carry the day.

The first was that the constantly changing, entirely unforgiving environment in which we all now operate denies the satisfaction of any permanent fix. The second was that the organization we crafted, the processes we refined, and the relationships we forged and nurtured are no more enduring than the physical conditioning that kept our soldiers fit: an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.

At the heart of southern biases stood an uncomfortable reality: southerners could not justify an economic model that was dependent on enslaved labor without being biased against the enslaved people themselves.

The words of the French political philosopher Montesquieu get to the heart of the relationship between religion, economic models, and white supremacy: It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.

They couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance. —Major General John Sedgwick, immediately before being shot and killed at Spotsylvania Court House, May 9, 1864

Communication: How we exchange information with others Narrative: How we tell others about who we are and what we do Structure: How we design our organizations and processes Technology: How we apply machinery, equipment, resources, and know-how Diversity: How we leverage a range of perspectives and abilities Bias: How the assumptions we have about the world influence us Action: How we overcome inertia or resistance to drive our response Timing: How when we act affects the effectiveness of our response Adaptability: How we respond to changing risks and environments Leadership: How we direct and inspire the overall Risk Immune System

we were failing to create useful bonds between one team and the next.

THE “NEED TO KNOW” FALLACY

Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.

The habit of constraining information derives in part from modern security concerns, but also from the inured preference for clearly defined, mechanistic processes—whether factory floors or corporate org charts—in which people need to know only their own piece of the puzzle to do their job.

In battle, refusal or hesitation to follow orders can spell disaster. But at the same time, the rigid hierarchy and absolute power of officers slows down execution and stifles rapid adaptation by the soldiers closest to the fight.

the sheer tactical complexity of special operations almost guarantees that at least one critical variable will come loose between planning and execution.

The creation and maintenance of a team requires both the visible hand of management and the invisible hand of emergence, the former weaving the elements together and the latter guiding their work. Programs like BUD/S are designed to foster emergent intelligence that can thrive in the absence of a plan.

BUD/S builds trust between members, beginning with the seemingly arbitrary demands to walk to meals together and ending (for those who complete training) with SEALs willing to place their lives in one another’s hands.

Journey to the Plain July 1972–June 1976 I was raised to respect soldiers, leaders, and heroes. They were who I wanted to be. They were why I was there. And in the unblinking sunlight of an August morning at the United States Military Academy in 1972, the colonel in front of me looked like the embodiment of all I admired. Hanging on his spare frame, his pine green uniform was covered with patches, badges, and campaign ribbons. Even the weathered lines of his face seemed to reflect all he’d done and all he was. It was the look I’d seen in my father’s face. For a moment I could envision my father in combat in Korea, or as the lean warrior embracing my mother as he came home from Vietnam. He was my lifelong hero. From my earlier memories I’d wanted to be like him. I’d always wanted to be a soldier. Yet the colonel’s words were not what I wanted and expected to hear. As he stood in front of me and my fellow new cadets, he talked about collar stays, the twenty-five-cent pieces of wire cadets used to secure the collars of the blue gray shirts we would wear to class during the academic year. As he spoke, we tried not to squirm under the sun. Our backs were arched, arms flat to our sides, elbows slightly bent, fingers curled into tight palms, chests out, chins forward, eyes ahead. Mouths shut. I was five weeks into my education at West Point. We were still in Beast Barracks, or simply Beast, the initial eight-week indoctrination and basic-training phase during the summer before the fall term of our freshman year—plebe year, in West Point’s timeworn terminology. There were not many full colonels at West Point, so it was rare for cadets, particularly new cadets like us, to interact with them. It seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to hear from a man who’d done so much. But he wasn’t discussing his experiences and the truths they had yielded; he was talking about collar stays.

The truth is that the queen is a larva factory. Her sole job is to produce new ants—a critical role, but not a managerial one. The myth survives because of our assumption that order is always directed from the top down.

catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

Gentlemen,” he said, “soon you will begin to wear the class shirt. You’ll wear it every day of the academic year and, per uniform regulation, you will secure your collar with the collar stays that have been issued to you. “It may seem insignificant to you now,” he continued, “but you’re here learning attention to detail.” For the next few minutes the combat-seasoned colonel compared neglecting to wear collar stays with forgetting ammunition for our soldiers in combat. Focusing on even the small things, he reasoned, develops a leader who never neglects the critical ones.

a tree that branches at every variable outcome (if they fire when we arrive, choose path A, if not, choose path B). But when dozens of saplings shoot out from those branches every second, the possibilities become so overwhelmingly complex as to render complete contingency planning futile.

NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.” It also proved that the cognitive “oneness”—the emergent intelligence—that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. This runs counter to the standard “need-to-know” mind-set.

the key lies not in the number of elements but in the nature of their integration—the wiring of trust and purpose.

To understand the challenge, we’ll go to factory floors with Frederick Winslow Taylor and look back at the drive for efficiency that has marked the last 150 years, and how it has shaped our organizations and the men and women who lead and manage them.

Fast-forward to March 17, 2014, when the Los Angeles Times was the first news company to break a story about a nearby earthquake. Their edge? The article was written entirely by a robot—a computer program that scans streams of data, like that from the U.S. Geological Survey, and puts together short pieces faster than any newsroom chain of command could. This program earned the paper a few minutes of lead time at most, but today, those minutes are critical.

The heroic “hands-on” leader whose personal competence and force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations has been overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity, and interdependence. Even the most successful of today’s heroic leaders appear uneasy in the saddle, all too aware that their ability to understand and control is a chimera.

They were doing things right, just not doing the right thing.

opening speaker began his remarks by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the plane is no longer the problem.”*

Attempts to control complex systems by using the kind of mechanical, reductionist thinking championed by thinkers from Newton to Taylor—breaking everything down into component parts, or optimizing individual elements—tend to be pointless at best or destructive at worst.