New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World - Team of Teams

Excellent writing style. The many ways of tying things together from headquarters to the team on the battlefield is unique. The methodologies are forward looking as well. After all the mistakes we have heard made, it feels good to actually know that many things went well many times. The leadership principles are really nothing new. As much time as the General talks about these principles, they area really Platoon Leaders Course 101. That is what knocks it down from 5 stars to 4 for me.

Readers who are looking for a collection of war stories distilled down to fortune cookie cliches on management should look elsewhere. McChrystal and his co-authors have crafted a book that is deeply thoughtful and highly analytical. With case studies drawn from battling terrorists and airplane disasters the book at times has the heart pounding feel of an episode of 24 -- while still dispensing observations worthy of the Harvard Business School.

Change is difficult at any level and with any sized team because people are inherently reluctant to it. McChrystal shares an impressive “recipe” for not only impacting change for large organizations, but also simultaneously touching the hearts and minds of individuals.

I'm impressed with the depth and quality of the General's intellect. I'm proud of his having served The U.S. A nd contributing his talent in such an honorable fashion. It's sad his CIF is so shallow not to continue using the talent of this outstanding soldier and citizen.

This book reads like a clancy novel. It does a great job of building the "before picture" and asymmetric nature of warfare in the middle east and tells an engaging story about organizational transformation, empowerment and intelligent risk taking.

My take of the advice is the following

Easier to execute when the organizational objectives are simple and understood by every one in the organization

Promote deep interaction across teams to encourage information sharing.

No single individual at the top can comprehend and make decisions - so empower every one to be able to make decisions.

I felt it took a while to make the point. This book is not for everyone, only people at higher position can pull something like this. The bureaucracy is too powerful for the layman person.

And who will that work in a corporation? But a person from the HR next to a programmer next to business analyst next to graphic designer?

In really life, people hate CC emails.

It seems the general likes the Black Swan and Antifragile books by Nassim Taleb.

Really liked some ideas this book had on sharing information and giving people necessary power to act based on their knowledge.

Also interesting thoughts on higher leadership how they had to think their own way of doing things.

Definitely would recommend this and Extreme Ownership as package!

A thought provoking book on how to lead, manage and organize your workforce to meet the speed and challenges of a networked world. The old functional boxes of the 20th century’s command and control organization structure just don’t work well in networked world of the 21st century.

The anecdotes that support the theses are interesting. Unfortunately, no new ground was broken; no new insights revealed. You get better results when ( spoiler alert )
a) everyone pulls together in cooperative efforts and
b) it is better to have a holistic perspective on all elements of a mission.

The new wave of management approaches presented in the context of dealing with an effective terrorist organization in Iraq certainly leverages the expertise of the authors in getting their message across to the reader.

General McChrystal’s “Team of Teams” is plagued with much hyperbole and anecdotes that often don’t prove whatever point the general is trying to make, and yet it is a highly compelling and intriguing read. If nothing else, the first part of the book will introduce the concept of leadership and management in a complex environment to an audience that will read the general’s book because of his notoriety, people who wouldn’t be inclined to read an academic book or article about complexity theory itself.

While interesting, the general’s ideas of “shared consciousness” and “empowered execution” seem mostly impractical, strictly personality-driven, and unsustainable over any significant length of time (NASA’s program to land a man on the moon in the 1960’s being offered as an example.) Implementing these concepts requires an initial and incredible investment in building a team (he uses the US Navy Seal team as the ideal example). Most organizations have neither the means nor the will to make such an investment in something that could take years to reap the benefits from.

Still, I’m sure this book will provide inspiration to many current and would-be leaders who may believe they can buck the status quo and actually transform their command-driven companies into teams of teams.

Way too much military (I get it, he's a general) meandering anecdotes, and not enough real time private/public sector 'how to'. My $20 could have gone on a better business book. The author is still a very cool character..

Team of Teams is a fantastic read on navigating the complexities of today's world using lessons learned from the best this nation has to offer. This book takes the reader on a journey that outlines the origins of modern management practices, with its traditional focus on efficiency and scientific management; reveals the shortcomings of this type of thinking in today's increasingly complex world; and provides principles for effective leadership derived from lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To say that this book, however, is one derived from - and intended for - military endeavors would be to miss the point. Much of the content reflects a diverse treatment of management and analysis principles. For example, the authors' treatment of traditional, efficiency-minded management practices is derived largely from a historical analysis of Frederick Taylor's "The Principles of Scientific Management." Taylor's principles were born out of efforts to streamline the construction of hydraulic machinery and culminated in a widespread belief that "an effective enterprise is created by commitment to efficiency, and that the role of the manager is to break things apart and plan 'the one best way'" (McChrystal et al., 46). His practices rapidly spread and, despite attacks on his treatment of individual workers, Taylor's influence is still seen today in our understanding of business management and military discipline.

This book, however, presents a compelling interpretation of today's world that calls for a fundamentally different approach to management and leadership. Whereas antiquated thinking would tell us that the complicated operations of business and military operations would eventually succumb to increasingly efficient operations, McChrystal and his team reveal a world that is complex and defies the predictions of familiar and comfortable thinking. Using works such as Friedrich Hayek's "The Theory of Complex Phenomena" as well as examples drawn from ecological interventions and "Big Data" analyses, the authors illustrate with surprising clarity the complexity of the world we live in today.

McChrystal and his team articulate an approach to management that is built upon their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the collective experiences of other highly effective teams throughout history. "Empowered execution" is their response to today's complex world, and their approach is detailed in both personal and historical examples throughout the second half of the book. Perhaps just as important is the book's treatment of the characteristics and companions of empowered execution. Drawn from lessons learned in war, McChrystal and his team distill their experiences combating a dedicated adversary in an unprecedentedly complex environment into a series of principles that complement and support this new approach to management and leadership - principles that any leader wishing to advance their organization should read, reread, internalize, and implement.

This is a very well written book on what is one of the biggest problems facing any organization today; dealing with rapidly increasing complexity because the rise of new information technology. Book presents one of the best historical overviews of the problem I have read, and also proposes an interesting solution. I run a kitchen cabinet shop in Toronto, and I face all the same problems. (although they do not have life and death significance) The only short fall of the book is that it does address the fact that most businesses do not start out with the human raw material McChystal did. He had the luxury of working with Navy Seal types who were the most highly trained well equipped and motivated experts at their craft in the world. His solution to the problem of complexity is to take those sorts of people and give them more information and then the freedom to do what they do well. But those people have already spent years in highly disciplined training. How does a coffee shop or a cabinet shop deal with the problem of complexity, working with run of the mill people. If you take McChrystal's model you would need to have your workers undergo years of intensive, highly disciplined training before giving them the freedom to execute solutions to problems. But small businesses need to get people generating income in the first week. When I figure it out I will write my book.

Every leadership and other self help type book claims it is different from what came before. This one truly hits the mark. Part history lesson and part mentoring, General McChrystal's guide distills the lessons he and his team have learned throughout their storied careers into easily internalized instructions. Emphasizing flexibility and adaptability over rigid hierarchies may be intimidating in an uncertain business environment, but McChrystal argues it is the only way to thrive. Empowering your people encourages creativity, healthy risk taking, and higher morale than the 'mission statement' driven corporate culture could possibly engender. Leading from the front through positive example, and trusting your people, can create incredible outcomes.

Fairly early into the Team of Teams the authors explain that this is not a war story. While it's true that the common thread in the book is how General Mc Chrystal worked to get the army more able to adapt to a decentralized, agile enemy, there are are also stories from commercial aviation, NASA, and corporate America. While there is a fair amount of military history in this book, there is also a discussion of the history of manufacturing process improvement, office space, and even personal stories about gardening.

The message in this book is that command and control structures don't work in complicated, information rich environments that deal with complex problems. Had Mc Chrystal been delivering this message in the context of a corporate environment, you might dismiss this as another instance of someone who happens to have a favorable situation singing the praises of agility. That he's talking about battle command situations, the canonical top-down environment. gets your attention.

I found both inspiration for seeking ways to improve, and practical advice about how to structure teams and be an effective manager in this book. While not about agile per-se, I think that there are lessons here that apply to those trying encourage agile adoption in a non-agile situation, and also for those looking to scale agile.

This is the story of how General Stanley McChrystal brought Wall Street trading floor working practices (which have existed for decades) to the battlefield in Iraq.

The general implemented the trading floor business model on the battlefield in Iraq because he had to. When you have to respond to a distributed network of terrorists (or are put in a "winner's curse" competition with other dealers to buy or sell a bond) you cannot plan your reaction. Either there’s somebody ready to be deployed in the field who can react in real time and feed back all intelligence in real time to other assets in the battlefield (marketplace) who will act upon it in real time, or you may as well give up. McChrystal woke up to the fact that he was facing complexity every bit as much as a trading floor does that’s pricing tens of deals for tens of types of customers at the same time and that the top-down structure was not fit for purpose in Iraq.

No matter how strong his navy SEALS or Army Special Forces were, “whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of interface failures.” (p. 151) In his words (p. 74), “unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction.” To defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, the military would have to move from “doing things right” to “doing the right thing.” This was not going to be about refining a process down to the last detail, but about having the right people in the right place armed with the right information and letting them figure it out.

I’ve spent more than twenty years on trading floors, here’s how it all works:

Each desk is comprised of three to eight traders who know each other well, have worked together for years and trust each other blindly. Each trader specializes in a very narrow set of securities or derivatives he knows inside out and each can count on his buddies to cover for him out of his own book when the circumstances dictate he should.

There’s as many desks as there are products to trade. The desks acknowledge each other and work together seamlessly to do transactions that cut across more than one specialties.

Example: Suppose a new issue needs to be brought to market. The syndicate desk will act as the new bond’s midwife, guiding the issuer as to the best pricing and timing and carries the eventual risk of any unplaced bonds on its books. The syndicate desk can count 100% on multiple sales desks to place the new issue and it can count 100% on the swaps desk to take away all market-directional risk the client would otherwise bear. The swaps desk, in turn, can 100% count on immediate execution of bond and futures hedges from seamlessly (often electronically) connected bond and bond futures desks. Everybody sits in one room and within earshot of each other. Everybody is part of a small desk, but there are unofficial, unwritten and constantly revised protocols for how the desks will interact.

There is a morning meeting for the whole trading floor (with participation from Japan), delivered over the stentor and another global (that means London and New York) meeting at seven thirty New York time. The economist speaks and previews today’s data, all desk representatives speak in a formal order to discuss new supply (auctions or syndications), market trends, the biggest flows and where they reckon the market is going. This is called “market color.” The sales desks follow with the most important business from the day before and any important transactions that are coming up. Everybody knows what’s coming and how it fits together. Everybody can interrupt the meeting, more than a thousand people. The Monday morning meeting is typically done out of New York. Sometimes a high-up guy attends and addresses the troops, and this is done in an auditorium and is fed through to the stentor for those who are on their desks.

The heads of desk all meet regularly with one another and with the head of the entire trading floor, both formally and informally. There is tension between the sales desks and the trading desks, because the sales desks mainly get compensated for volume. No good way has been invented to measure the profitability of trades, but it’s plenty easy to see if the competition is doing the business and business does not much happen in the absence of profit.

Senior management merely choreographs these interactions. It fosters exchange of information, listens to the salesforce to find out what the customers are doing and to the best traders to find out how it all makes sense. Eyes on, but hands off.

All decisions are made in real time by the most junior person on the floor who is qualified to make them. Management’s role is to stop him out if he’s losing, give him more rope to hang himself if he’s winning and compensate him, promote him or fire him at yearend based on an assessment of his performance. Management manages people, not individual trading decisions. If a trade is big enough that management finds out about it, you really should consider passing on it and there had better be some awesome outside PR benefits to winning it.

The model is very much a “team of teams.”

So General McChrystal had the epiphany that his team would have to abandon the command-and-control structure and morph into a network. A network that would be just as networked as Al Qaeda’s, but, better. He visited Michael Bloomberg, a former Salomon Brothers trader, head of technology at Salomon and eventually founder of a trading systems empire and got the blueprint. He put together the whole thing, soup to nuts:

1, he recognized that every attack would be different
2. he anticipated that solutions would have to come out of a bottom-up result of interactions, much like Al Qaeda’s
3. he decided to emphasize connectivity and trust over reductionist precision
4. he recognized that there would be efficiency costs to this approach and was prepared to take the associated criticism

He did not start from scratch. He already had some amazing teams under his command. Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, intel analysts, all had solid, tightly knit, professional and highly trained teams going, but the task was to make them work together (though I don’t think the word “Marines” comes up once if you do a word search; we all have our prejudices).

Job #1 was to create a “shared consciousness” and he did it exactly how you’d do it on a trading floor, using communication protocols that were first established by NASA to launch the Apollo project. He got himself a massive space and turned it into what Stanley Kubrick would call a “war room.” He ran out of there daily one-hour long meetings that he chaired himself, inviting everybody to the table. Not only all three forces, but also the CIA, intelligence, airpower controllers, medical staff, everyone. He covered the walls with screens bringing back footage from ongoing raids, logs of captures, maps of recent gains and losses, casualties etc. and made the room the permanent office for himself and his top lieutenants, with people arranged to sit in a U around them. No cubicles, no special room for General McChrystal.

The point was that anyone in the room could have the latest information, pretty much at the same time as his or her commanding officers. Takeup was far from immediate. Lots of the seats were initially left empty. But over time, this became the place you had to be, because that became the best way to be current. Eventually everybody joined, including the Intelligence folks, as the process “developed its own gravitational pull” and “the information shared was so rich, so timely, and so pertinent to the fight, no one wanted to miss it.” (p. 168)

Job #2 was to build trust between the teams he commanded. “Each agency feared that sharing intelligence would work against its own interests. Competition between agencies made them reluctant to provide information; what if a partner agency did not reciprocate?” To get there, he instituted an embedding program, whereby he forced teams to send some of their best players to go work with other teams. “If you won’t miss him, don’t send him” was the rule. Often these people would be given menial tasks by their host teams, but because they had been carefully selected they invariably ended up having a lot to offer. And over time, not a long time, connections of trust between the teams were formed around the embedded emissaries. Everybody at every team could say with no exaggeration that he knew and trusted somebody in each of the other teams.

And that’s how the structure came about of a “team of teams” with “shared consciousness,” a shared purpose and widely shared information who could act as one.

Soon enough, the results started coming in. The number of raids the team could successfully execute leapt by an order of magnitude. And previously unheard of stuff like follow-on targets became a daily reality. But also treason, as megabytes and megabytes of information found its way onto Wikileaks. General McChrystal does not dwell too long on the Bradley Manning affair, but it has to be recognized as a downside of the approach he took. On the other hand, he did get Zarqawi and he makes the case very persuasively he never would have without applying his method.

The biggest epiphany he had though, was to do with his own role. Once the team of teams was up-and-running, he realised his authority to order raids was actually in everybody’s way.

Job #3 became to redefine his job. He had to let go. “The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.” So he reluctantly devolved his powers to sanction raids to the lowest operative who could reasonably expected to make the decision. The thinking was that the extra speed would compensate for the possibly inferior decision making. He was in for a surprise. The empowered and informed leaders in the field actually obtained better, more precise results than they’d done before, when he’d been masterminding the attacks. He thought he’d give something up to gain something more important. He actually got both.

And thus he realised that he’d have to redefine his job. Yes, he’d have to keep his eyes on the ball. But he’d have to keep his hands off. From the heroic leader / chessmaster he had been trained to be and had dreamt of becoming one day, he had already morphed into a gardener, a man who keeps the correct environment going and merely tends to his garden while allowing nature to take its course.

Which neatly brings me back to the trading floor and the world of investment banking.

The head of the trading floor knows everything, but never has to give an order. He lets traders do their thing. His decisions revolve around personnel, the overall direction of the business, and the allocation of resources, most important of which is compensation.

Thing is, when something wrong happens it is nigh-on impossible to pin it on himl

And so it came to pass that the highest-ranking person who will go to jail for the LIBOR scandal will probably be a 34 year old Aspergers sufferer called Tom Hayes. Legend has it the man sleeps in a Spiderman duvet. Leaving to one side the question of whether he was doing anything wrong (my personal view is nothing in principle, but plenty in the detail) he's finding it very difficult to prove he was acting on the orders of his superiors. But of course the law knows how to follow the money and fully realises he was.

And what does the law do?

Ah, that's the fun bit. It's forcing trading floors across London, Tokyo and New York to abandon the "team of teams" structure they passed on to General McChrystal and is demanding that all banks provide full top-down organograms, of the kind that will allow orders to flow downward and blame upward. And it's forcing banks to hire thousands and thousands of lawyers to ensure they comply with the new structure.

Not only that. Additionally, the regulators are forcing trading operations to ban mobile communications, Twitter, social media etc. from trading floors, while teams of lawyers are trolling over all Bloomberg chats from the past ten years, making any and all communication dangerous, in case it's taken out of context. What's the result? When once traders, with their access to Reuters, Bloomberg, TV channels and multiple chats stood in the center of the information flow, they now find themselves the most isolated from the real world they've ever been. Instead of sitting in the middle of a communication hub, they need to wait till they've gone home to find out from their spouse what happened today in the world.

What will come of it? Very simple. First, those organizations and individuals who have alternatives will exit the business and focus on more profitable stuff, driving prices wider. That's only the beginning. Prices will have to widen even further, to accommodate the fact that the wrong business structure will result in a blunter, slower response to sharper, better informed customer enquiry. Finally, somebody will have to pay for the thousands and thousands of compliance officers, and that's the third powerful force that will drive margins wider.

Will be fun to watch!

Rating: 4.25

Some books have what seem to be random abstract stories. Whether it is Frederick Taylor and his scientific study of how to make things more efficient, or how Admiral Nelson empowered his men to defeat the French at the Battle of Trafalgar by getting everyone on the same page. This book starts out by laying the groundwork to moments in history that changed everything.

When General McChrystal was in Iraq they faced a dilemma. They were so big and powerful and structured that there were struggling to make any headway against their opposition. The Iraqis while not as sophisticated and less hierarchy were able to move quickly and were causing lots of problems for the people of Iraq. McChrystal realized he had to be more of a gardener than a General. He needed his teams to work together, work quickly, and to trust each other. This book explains why trusting more people and not having to run every decision through the highest person on staff can make the whole operation better. McChrystal learned that he needed transparency between teams, sharing intel became key.

A few quotes from the book:

Simple honesty shows and ears respect.

The union of shared consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts.

Einstien said " Our theories determine what we measure"

The examples that McChrystal pulled together to show how great companies need great leadership but still need to be a team of teams include Nasa and Chevy. He points out how each department was working solely on their own project and had little to no interaction with the other department, so when components didn't work together it became highly costly.

Overall one of the biggest takeaways from this book is communication. If you are only focused on your position you may miss out on the bigger picture. You may miss key information that can take your company from being average to being great.

I won't say how good I think this book is. Rather I will discuss how useful I think it is. I am R&D Director for a mid sized consumer products company and inside this book is a clear diagnosis of issues I have been dealing with and how to resolve them. The issue we have been dealing with is the separation between knowledge and action in our technical staff. Clearly to me, the lesson of this book, the lesson of this experience recounted, is that information about the business at hand needs to be pushed as far into the staff that is doing the work as it can go so that decisions can be correctly taken at that level. This sounds simple but requires a radical change in culture and operating technique that we are currently working on. By God's good fortune, I do not have the duty of leading in the type of environment and to the purpose that General McChrystal had, but the emerging dynamics of information technology and social change are still at work and are putting the same stressors on the hierarchical organizational and functional models. The old idea of information flowing up and decisions flowing down has to be deleted and replaced by a new model of integrated horizontal information flow and devolved decision making. As the book quite simply says, leaders have to first and foremost create the culture that equips and allows the people of the organization to win.

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2003, he was fighting a 21st-century war with a 20th-century military. This engaging book is about the reconfiguration which led to faster decisions and greater results. McChrystal’s mission was to defeat Al Quaeda in Iraq (AQI), but his leadership insights are applicable to business as well.

“AQI displayed a shape-shifting quality. It wasn’t the biggest or the strongest, but… AQI was a daunting foe because it could transform itself at will… Managerially, AQI was flanking us.”

The enemy was a complex network. “Complexity… occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically—the interdependencies that allow viruses and bank runs to spread; this is where things quickly become unpredictable.”

McChrystal realized, “Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency… We were stronger, more efficient, more robust. But AQI was agile and resilient. In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive… Resilience thinking is the inverse of predictive hubris. It is based in a humble willingness to know what we don’t know and expect the unexpected—old tropes that often receive lip service but are usually disregarded in favor of optimization.”

The U.S. military had very effective teams, such as Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. But “meaningful relationships between teams were nonexistent. And our teams had very provincial definitions of purpose: completing a mission or finishing intel analysis, rather than defeating AQI... Stratification and silos were hardwired throughout the Task Force… The blinks were even worse between the Task Force and our partner organizations: the CIA, FBI, NSA, and conventional military with whom we had to coordinate operations.”

“Our goal was not the creation of one massive team. We needed to create a team of teams. It may sound like a kitschy semantic distinction, but it actually marked a critical structural difference that turned the aspiration of scaling the magic of the team into a realizable goal… On a single team, every individual needs to know every other individual in order to build trust… But on a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relationship with every other individual… We needed the SEALs to trust Army Special Forces, and for them to trust the CIA, and for them all to be bound by a sense of common purpose: winning the war, rather than outperforming the other unit. And that could be effectively accomplished through representation.”

“As interfaces became increasingly important, we realized the potential for bolstering our relationships with our partner agencies by way of a strong linchpin liaison officer (LNO). As it turned out, some of our best LNOs were also some of our best leaders on the battlefield… 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… Second, we hoped that if the liaisons we sent contributed real value to our partners’ operations, it would lay a foundation for the trusting relationships we needed to develop between the nodes of our network. We became LNO fanatics. I would spend hours with my commanders hand selecting the bets personalities and skill sets for different jobs… When they understood the whole picture, they began to trust colleagues.”

McChrystal implemented a profound shift from a need-to-know mindset to a culture of information sharing. “The problem is that the logic ‘need to know’ depends on the assumption that somebody… actually knows who does and does not need to know which material… Our experience showed us this was never the case… Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work… We did not want all the teams to become generalists—SEALs are better at what they do than intel analysts would be and vice versa. Diverse specialized abilities are essential. We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise... We dubbed this goal—this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence—shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.”

“Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. Great teams are less like ‘awesome machines’ than awesome organisms.”

“The most critical element of our transformation… was our Operations and Intelligence brief…When I assumed command in 2003, the O&I was a relatively small video teleconference between our rear headquarters at Fort Bragg, a few D.C. offices, and our biggest bases in Iraq and Afghanistan… We urged everyone from regional embassies to FBI field offices to install secure communications so that they could participate in our discussions… Eventually we had 7,000 people attending almost daily for up to two hours. To some management theorists, that sounds like a nightmare of inefficiency, but the information that was shared in the O&I was so rich, so timely, and so pertinent to the fight, no one wanted to miss it.”

“The O&I also became one of the best leadership tools in my arsenal. Our organization was globally dispersed and included thousands of individuals from organizations not directly under the control of the Task Force. The O&I could not replace a hand on the shoulder, but video could convey a lot of meaning and motivation. Our leadership learned, over time, to use this forum not as a stereotypical military briefing where junior personnel give nicely rehearsed updates and hope for no questions. Instead, it was an interactive discussion. If an individual had a four-minute slot, the ‘update’ portion would be covered in the first 60 seconds, and the remainder of the time would be filled with open-ended conversation between the briefer and senior leadership (and potentially anyone else on the network, if they saw a critical point to be made)… Most important, it allowed all members of the organization to see problems being solved in real time and to understand the perspective of the senior leadership team. This gave them the skills and confidence to solve their own similar problems without the need for further guidance and clarification.”

“The fusion of operations and intelligence (O and I) was the essence of the meeting… The best moments in the O&I were when the briefing touched off a debate between different agencies, or teams, or departments. Perhaps two analytical silos had reached drastically different conclusions based on the same evidence, and we need to reconcile them and understand why.”

“The costs of micromanagement are increasing... I began to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant... I communicated across the command my thought process on decisions like airstrikes, and told them to make the call… Decisions came more quickly, critical in a fight where speed was essential to capturing enemies and preventing attacks. More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority down further, the quality of decisions actually went up.”

The results were impressive. Under the old structure, there were 10 to 18 raids per month. “By 2006, under the new system, this figure skyrocketed to 300. With minimal increases in personnel and funding, we were running 17 times faster. And these raids were more successful. We were finding a higher percentage of our targets, due in large part to the fact that we were finally moving as fast as AQI, but also because of the increased quality of decision making.”

“The term empowerment gets thrown around a great deal in the management world, but the truth is that simply taking off constraints is a dangerous move. It should be done only if the recipients of newfound authority have the necessary sense of perspective to act on it wisely.” In other words, “Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous.”

McChrystal writes about leadership by example. “As a young officer I had been taught that a leader’s example was always on view. Bad examples resonate even more powerfully than good ones… I sought to maintain a consistent example and message… The O&I served as my most effective leadership tool as well, because it offered me a stage on which to demonstrate the culture I sought… I was on live TV in front of my entire force and countless interagency partners every day for an hour and a half. If I looked bored or was seen sending e-mails or talking, I signaled a lack of interest… Critical words were magnified in impact and could be crushing to a young member of the force… ‘Thank you’ became my most important phrase, interest and enthusiasm my most powerful behaviors.”

I am impressed by the general’s sense of empathy. “Over my career I’d watched senior leader visits have unintended negative consequences. Typically schedules were unrealistically overloaded and were modified during the visit to cancel parts of the plan… Invariably soldiers who had spent days preparing a briefing or demonstration for the great man’s visit were informed at the last minute that all of their work had been for naught. It was not a good way to improve morale… 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.”

“Creating and leading a truly adaptive organization requires building, leading, and maintaining a culture that is flexible but also durable. The primary responsibility of the new leader is to maintain a holistic, big-picture view, avoiding a reductionist approach, no matter how tempting micromanaging may be… The leader’s first responsibility is to the whole.”

“Shared consciousness is a carefully maintained set of centralized forums for bringing people together. Empowered execution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organization. Together, with these as the beating heart of our transformation, we became a single, cohesive unit far more agile than its size would suggest… The Task Force still had ranks and each member was still assigned a particular team and sub-sub-command, but we all understood that we were now part of a network; when we visualized our own force on the whiteboard, it now took the form of webs and nodes, not tiers and silos… To defeat a network, we had become a network. We had become a team of teams.”

This was a tremendous biography of a leader who was willing to push aside centuries of military management customs in order to find success against an elusive network of terrorist. I really enjoyed every chapter and found myself consistently considering how to build a similar mentality within my own company.

Inspired by this book, I called a rare meeting of my different location managers together this week. We are always so busy that it is difficult to come together, but we will be more successful if we can learn from this book and function more like a team of teams.

This is a brilliant book, and beautifully written; it gracefully combines the story of Stan McChystal’s personal battlefield experience—and humble transformation as a leader-- with his creation of a “network style organization” for his intelligence mission in 2004 and years following, during the Iraq war. The organizational model he describes—bringing together diverse (and siloed) intelligence and combat units, and creating the tools and culture for large scale learning, collaboration and action as a “team of teams,” is rich with insights about a next generation model of organization that I believe will become more important every year. I found myself scribbling notes in every chapter as I worked through the volume.
Do not mistake this book for yet another war memoir (he’s actually already written his own modestly told version of that--My Share of the Task—a compelling earlier book offering historical perspective on his growth as a leader during military service). Team of Teams focuses instead on the specifics of building an innovative network style organizational model in the face of the significant “performance challenge” of new network-intensive wars—and what kind of more transparent, empowering, and connected leader is required to pull that off. It is a deep case study and blueprint for future organizational design, with potential application to many potential strategic opportunities, across all sectors of the society and economy.
McChrystal’s personal reflections on how and why he did what he did is woven in with operational insights about creating the all-important “shared consciousness” of the “team of teams” and also well integrated, practically explained digressions on the theoretical background of how networks deliver such unusual value today. Another great feature of the book is its use of military historical examples, to explain “disruptive ways of thinking” for leadership and strategy.
The book itself has three other co-authors who have clearly operated as a creative and soulful “team of teams” with the General in telling this story. It’s hard to read the book without coming away with both awe and admiration for what they accomplished. The fact that all this can now be useful to other leaders working in different networked domains today is a pure patriotic bonus.

Superbly organized and well written. I really enjoyed how different areas of history were interwoven with the concepts being conveyed. I look forward to putting the techniques into practice in the complex and ever-changing world of IT.

General Stanley McCrystal takes his war-time experience in Iraq and develops management insights that have application in any organization. Complexity rules in a world that becomes more interdependent every day due to the advancement of technology and its ability to link people together. Complexity works against the traditional management wisdom of top-down management promoting every greater efficiency through reductive efforts to simplify activities within an organization. McCrystal says organizations need to be constructed as agile, resilient, interlinked teams bound together by trust and a common purpose. The leaders in agile, resilient enterprises delegate and empower decisions and actions to subordinates when pursuing common goals. This is a useful and engaging book for anyone who manages, or hopes to manage, other people.

Considering the vast amount of books on leadership, it is hard to come accross one that actually makes you reflect and consider that this one has stuff I can actually put to use almost immediately. "Team of Teams" is such a book! As a history buff I must say I loved the examples from the past,but mostly the stories General McChrystal tells about leading the american efforts in Iraq against AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) in mid-2000's. In the beginning his teams, although possessing way much more resources available, were being defeated by an enemy that seemed to be everywhere and appeared impervious to any strike that could be blown to it, the main reasons for that being:

1. The enemy is local, so it has all the advantages locals have in a guerrilla kind of conflict;
2. (And this is a reason not raised in the book) The enemy is more than willing to die for their cause, since they believe such fate will land them in Heaven forever.
3. The enemy is organized in a way that at first seems chaotic and almost impossible to understand, but that provides him with a lot of resilience.

General McChrystal and his main commanders, by doing research in other fields (specially modern management) and learning from their mistakes end up developing an organizational structure that, although somewhat similar to the enemy's at first, is even more adaptable and efficient, since it takes a lot of advantage of advanced (and also very expensive) communication resources available to all of their teams.

In order to implement the needed changes leadership had to dig deep in some psychological issues, since military teams are usually taught to trust command and their colleagues but suspect everyone else (this is usually called "silo mentality"). Different teams compete among each other and do their best not to share relevant information, since that gives them an edge on other teams. Such mentality is very hard to break, since it is very efficient in many different environments that have in common a controllable level of complication. The problem is when things go from complicated to complex, in a way that processes and rules alone cannot guide different teams working in a same mission/project to success (teams of teams). How General McChrystal and his leadership team broke that mentality? Well, read the book, it is worth it :)

The main takeaway of the book is described in its final recap:

"At the core of the Task Force's journey to adaptability lay a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums of communication and extreme transparency, and empowered execution, which involved decentralization of managerial authority. Together, these powered our Task Force; neither would suffice alone."

That is a summarized way of implementing the concept of "collective intelligence", an antipode to Groupthink that all teams should pursue, military or not.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I learnt so much from the General's experience transforming his task force into a more adaptive organization that operates as a network of independant teams. I also appreciated the specific details that the General implemented that led to people feeling more empowered to make the right decisions.
The only reason I didn't give a five star is due to the verbosity of the book on anecdotes that could've been avoided. The book could've been much shorter if it weren't for those distracting anecdotes.

It's been said that ideas are the currency of this century ... and "Team of Teams" offers tremendous ideas on business design, management and leadership for this century's complex world ... with proof they work.

I am an active duty military officer who served in southwest Asia at the same time as the authors were with the Joint Special Operations Command; I've experienced the complicated/complex challenges they describe, as well as organizational solutions they implemented which resulted in achievement of national security objectives while forging high performing 'teams of teams' in the process. From the 'Forward' by esteemed thinker and author Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of "The Innovators," I knew this would be much more than a 'military' book. The authors draw upon their expertise as former Special Forces officers in peace, crisis and combat. But more so, they apply best practices of what made their small and large teams successful; actions that inspired trust, built common purpose, created shared awareness, empowered of individuals to act, and physically changed traditional workspaces and communications practices. The text is rich with references to classic business management theorists and practices, historic military references (particular attention paid to British Admiral Horatio Nelson and his fleet of skilled and audacious captains considered 'entrepreneurs of battle"), and current military and business case studies s which highlight the imperative to adapt in order to succeed in today's dynamic business world.

Three book citations merit attention. 1) "The [Special Operations] Task Force's [organizational] shift was akin to the that team moving from playing football to basketball." An excellent analogy. As a fan of both sports, I quickly envisioned basketball players having to instantaneously be able to switch from offense to defense (or vice versa). A basketball team needs to be built and trained to dynamically change between the two postures. Contrast this with football teams which have larger units, greater specialization and a deliberate pace of play. The Implication: Is your business organizational model a 'football team' in a 'basketball team' sport? 2) "The common denominator of the professionals with whom I served was an almost mythical devotion to mission accomplishment." I couldn't agree more, and the authors subsequently reference that no matter the organizational principles discussed in any business setting, the 'organization' is not the end state, the 'mission' is the end state. Implication: Is your business organization optimized for process - or - product? And 3) "Big data will offer no respite from the unrelenting demand for continual adaptability." I'm in full accord. An organization's future success depends on it's a) adaptability to make sense of the data, b) turn the data into useable information, and 3) apply it knowledgeably in ways to improve performance or profit. Implication: Beware the data glut ... which if not utilized well, often results in an information and knowledge deficit.

Regarding the book's format, I commend its excellent use of diagrams to emphasize key learning points and its inclusion of recap boxes at the end of every chapter to underscore strategic concepts. After reading "Team of Teams" I am convinced you can't just take a good leader and throw them into a dysfunctional organization and expect success. Failure to change the model of organization itself which is ill-adapted for a complex working environment is a recipe for failure. "Team of Teams" offers an organizational template that succeeded in in the most dynamic environment imaginable, and an organizational model that can be adapted for the complicated and complex environment of the 2st century business world as well. I've commended "Team of Teams" to my service for inclusion in our professional reading list and hope every Commanding Officer will consider how its proven organizational concepts can improve their team's performance and results.

"Team of Teams" is a powerful book that goes beyond the battlefield. It shows us systems that today's business and organizational leaders can use to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. Because the old rules no longer apply, today's leaders need a new roadmap - and this fascinating book provides it. If you run a corporation, a nonprofit, or any other type of organization, the wisdom of General McChrystal and his colleagues is invaluable. This book has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

How many people can you have on a conference call before it becomes completely useless? Six? Eight? A dozen?
How about thousands – on a call that apparently helped to change the shape of modern warfare?

In his new book Team Of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal explains how a giant-sized daily videoconference became a crucial weapon for his US Task Force in Iraq.

“Our standing guidance was ‘Share information until you are afraid it’s illegal’,” he says. “When people think of cutting-edge military hardware, they usually picture weaponry, not a bulked-up version of Skype, but that was our main technological hurdle and point of investment for several months…

“Technically it was complex, financially it was expensive, but we were trying to build a culture of sharing: any member of the Task Force, and any of the partners we invited, could eventually dial in securely from their laptops and listen through their headphones…

“Attendance grew as the quality of the information and interaction grew. Eventually we had seven thousand people attending almost nightly for up to two hours. To some management theorists, that sounds like a nightmare of inefficiency, but the information that was shared was so rich, so timely, and so pertinent to the fight, no one wanted to miss it.”

I’m not going to start recommending massive conference calls to my clients – to be honest this sounds like more of a broadcast than a conference – but there are some exciting and interesting lessons in this book about what could be possible. For the boss of any large organisation which fears being Uberized, this book is a must-read.

Because that giant conference call was part of a much bigger strategy. McChrystal and his Task Force were learning to engage in a new kind of war, fighting a networked enemy. There were no tidy battle lines in Iraq: old-fashioned command-and-control was no longer fit for purpose.

He argues that the situation had crossed from complicated to complex, requiring a new kind of organisation to respond.

Complicated vs complex? In a complicated system, prediction may be difficult, but it is possible (maybe with the aid of “big data”). In a complex situation, by contrast, there are simply too many moving parts: effects are non-linear and unpredictable.

The Task Force was caught up in an “emergent, wayward swirl” which was not just marginally different from previous conflicts, but “vastly faster and more interdependent”.

So McChrystal and his officers set about creating their “Team Of Teams” – and that massive conference call because a crucial piece of the jigsaw. It was essential because relevant, up-to-date information from that daily call empowered the soldiers on the ground.

Armed with real knowledge, they could confidently make decisions that had previously been reserved to the top brass – quickly enough to stay ahead of the enemy.

And of course, that changed McChrystal’s role as leader – which he argues is part of a wider shift in leadership. He urges a move from “chess master” to “gardener”.

He says: “Creating and leading a truly adaptive organization requires building, leading and maintaining a culture that is flexible but also durable… this is a culture that can be planted and, if maintained, can flourish. It just requires a gardener: a human, and sometimes all-too-human, leader displaying the willingness to accept great responsibility remains central to making an ecosystem viable.”

Lots to think about, lots to apply – and, as more and more organisations find themselves whirling in complexity, lots thats relevant way beyond any military context.

If you’ve been worrying about whether your lumbering old organisation could ever change – well, here’s a real-life story of one that did, under as much pressure as could be imagined.

And if you’re in a smaller group trying to persuade colleagues to go for a distributed decision-making model, the ripping yarns here make a compelling, hard-shelled case.

I can hear myself telling these stories in organisational change projects for years to come!

I want to preface this review by saying I don't read much military history. I'm sadly lacking in the knowledge gleaned from the battlefield. That being said, I do devour writings on business efficiency and strategy. Although basing the structure on military methods which McChrystal employed successfully in his respective theater, as a non-military-minded individual, I easily understood the translatable methods in which to improve communication and results-driven performance. In my own organization, we've always had an issue with a lack of communication across teams - the phrase "tearing down silos" is what I'm constantly repeating - this concept is reinforced throughout the book, and it's obviously a topic that's been covered before - however, not with the fresh approach, explained with simple terms and invigorating examples. I invite anyone who's looking for ways to make a more effective organization to check out this easy-to-understand, thorough book.

I just finished the Team of Teams. I think the General did a good job of interlacing some tried and true management techniques into the military strategies he has experience in. It got a little slow in the civilian area but made up for it in the military side. As a former soldier the concept of inclusion and team work are something I miss in the civilian world. I agree the more you can move decision making closer to the people that have to act the better.
I wonder what the Generals strategy is for fighting an enemy that doesn't have the same ethics or morals as the allies do?

This book was great for any mid level executive that can actually drive change. I work in a company that does cross functional teams pretty well but it is still great for empowered delegation to those under you. Something my company does very very very poorly. It is an interesting book about trust in leadership, team building, and just well written. Want to make a better team? Read and implement some of this.

It is not often I publicly recommend a business book since most of the better ones have just as much good advice as unsubstantiated. But...I’m an advocate of small, cross functional, cohesive, and focused teams operating under a shared purpose. This newly released book is an excellent read that captures this philosophy perfectly. The takeaway: if the contemporary US military, with a long history of top down command and control and a perceived need for silos and segregation of responsibility and sensitive information, can reorganize into autonomous cross functioning teams guided by a greater shared purpose, any corporation in the world can. Through interesting examples of modern military operations under his command, General McChrystal builds the case for this business shift to stay agile, innovative, and competitive in today's complex and rapidly changing and highly networked world. Spot on, backed by empirical evidence, and engaging (especially if you want to appreciate the complexity of our modern military campaigns)…please consider giving it a go...

Enjoyed the book, and having experienced similar organizational challenges in different endeavors, can relate to the stories. The knowledge they "discovered" is exactly right, but has also existed elsewhere. I would recommend this book accompany "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay for a more detailed description of applications to benefit your own organization. Put together, they combine to create a powerful combination.

Coincidentally timed just before the U.S. Army published their newest revision of The Army Vision. This tome offers application to theory at every turn. You can see that GEN McChrystal still embodies the Army Values as he interweaves shared consciousness and trust (much like how the Army uses the terms shared understanding and trust) as key characteristics of a successful organization. I was implementing a lot of what GEN McChrystal spoke about, reinforcing my initiative in my organization. This book is simple brilliance that anyone can follow, as long as they care for their organization, and believe in its mission.

Gen. McChrystal is arguably the finest general that the USA has ever produced. That he was in effect left to option but to honourably resign is a blot on those who should know better. He puts brains before bullets, almost unheard of in any army, I can think only of John Monash and Air Marshall Hugh Dowding in the same category. McChrystal was able to weld together teams from among groups that were suspicious of, and even hated each otaher. The result was an outstanding local victory that unfortunately has been lost by his successors who either did not, or were prevented from following his lead.
The story is told here in his typical crisp, lucid and unpartisan style, he is as good a writer as he was a general.
But his methods were not new, the Israelis have being doing it all for decades. Regardless, as Churchill (himself a brave soldier) said
"The Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all other opportunities". This is a great book by a great American, a must read for anyone who values fact over fiction.

This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in building a successful organization in today's complex and interconnected world. General McChrystal provides a roadmap to success based upon his observations and experiences as one of the most successful military commanders of our time as well during his tenure providing consulting services to corporate America in his private capacity with the McChrystal Group. I found this book to be very easy to read and digest. I'll be recommending Team of Teams to all of my clients.

Read it if you want to understand that in today's world the old ways of organizing ourselves and our work just aren't going to be as effective as in the past. The world has changed and we either change with it (adapt) or risk becoming irrelevant. What General McChrystal's book does so well is to help lay the conceptual foundation for new ways to work together, communicate and organize and direct creativity and collaboration. Whatever your endeavor of study, career, or specialized field (or in the case of health care SUPER-specialized) I'm confident that this book has examples and lessons that would be valuable to learn. I enjoyed it and General, thanks for your service to our nation and for writing this book!

"To defeat a network, we had become a network. We had become a team of teams." The final two lines of "Team of Teams" summarizes its contents better than any review from me. In a permissive environment or ecosystem, getting inside an opponents decision cycle creates opportunity. Proper context and understanding of competitive ecosystems create intelligence: 'the ability to detect a trend or pattern with least amount of data' (hat tip to Herb Meyer). Two heads are better than one-an entire network of talented & motivated warriors is better.

Early in the book, Gen McChrystal makes the statement "Big Data will not save us," which I found very timely. My organization is putting a lot of energy behind big data, and the general's perspective on this topic was spot on and can help us avoid serious pitfalls. Same goes for the other lessons on adapting leadership and teaming styles under complex, fluid conditions.

This is arguably the best book on modern management I have read since Drucker. General McCrhrystal does a fantastic job synthesizing learnings from Sandy Pentland's Honest Signals, Kahneman's Think Fast, Think Slow, and Nassim Taleb's Anti-fragile, and applying them to management and leadership. It was a timely book for me as I was working on applying what i learned from those books to my daily life. the author beat me to the punch.

Clearly the Authors are very smart. Clearly the Authors have a wealth of knowledge. Clearly the Authors have unique experiences to share. We get it. The message and theory of this book should have been conveyed in a quarter of the pages. Multiple times at the conclusion of a chapter I found that the Author did not advance his theory any further; I had remained at the same stage of his theory after completing multiple consecutive chapters. It was a struggle completing the book.

Outstanding piece of work. Love his gardener metaphor! The worlds has way too many “chess masters.” It unleashes the power of the entire organization, not limiting it to the top few. Powerful message for corporate America.

The way that he balanced military examples with other vignettes was very powerful. It made me think about leadership in new ways that I can apply in my role. While some of the challenges that he presented are daunting because our environment is changing so fast, the solutions that he provides are motivating and empowering. Important read for all leaders today.

Very insightful assessment of the limitations of modern hierarchical, matrices organizations. Very practical discussion of how to evolve, challenges and risks. Nails the fact hat trust is the core currency to create a working team of teams. See also Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Excellent read! McChrystal presents impressive, tried and true concepts that are relevant to all businesses today. The world needs this! Perfect timing on a perfect read to help me in the right direction of starting my new business.

We’re taken out of the box and asked to rethink everything we know about the macro structure of how leadership is done in a complex organization. The real life war examples create an entertaining and engaging backdrop for a great lesson in leadership. Highly recommend the read.

Team of Teams is a great book for Leaders in any organization who never want to stop learning. Few have the experience of authors like Stan McChrystal who led transformational changes in the most complex situations resulting in synergistic effects that didn't impose our will but embraced the will of everyone involved by truly leveraging the power of building a teams of teams. Powerful message with implications for every organization from the battlefield to the boardroom.

I like how McChrystal challenges what has, unfortunately, become commonplace in that individuals at all levels hoard information to create a sense of power. As the book describes, knowledge is still power, but it's the organization's power and how that knowledge flows that breeds success. The authors not only share ways to build this in your own company, but also to create a sense of trust.

Excellent read! McChrystal presents impressive, tried and true concepts that are relevant to all businesses today. The world needs this! Perfect timing on a perfect read to help me in the right direction of starting my new business.

We’re taken out of the box and asked to rethink everything we know about the macro structure of how leadership is done in a complex organization. The real life war examples create an entertaining and engaging backdrop for a great lesson in leadership. Highly recommend the read.

Team of Teams is a great book for Leaders in any organization who never want to stop learning. Few have the experience of authors like Stan McChrystal who led transformational changes in the most complex situations resulting in synergistic effects that didn't impose our will but embraced the will of everyone involved by truly leveraging the power of building a teams of teams. Powerful message with implications for every organization from the battlefield to the boardroom.

I like how McChrystal challenges what has, unfortunately, become commonplace in that individuals at all levels hoard information to create a sense of power. As the book describes, knowledge is still power, but it's the organization's power and how that knowledge flows that breeds success. The authors not only share ways to build this in your own company, but also to create a sense of trust.

This book is absolutely fantastic. It doesn't matter if you work on Wall Street, are an entrepreneur, serve in the military, own a gym, work in a research laboratory, or are an architect... this book will help you do what you're doing better. The concepts are well-explained and corroborated by real-world experience and historical examples. Reading this book to understand the method to the madness of the 21st century.

This is a very interesting book. I always coached my children and my students that the real definition of a team's success lies in making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We often tied that to sports teams and small groups, but the way General McChrystal connects and scales it to large organizations is remarkable and should be the barometer of success for corporations today.

This is so fitting for today’s world and into the future. The only constant is change. Yet, we spend so much time building annual plans, but they’re out of date within days or weeks. This model and way of approaching problems from a collective will help those plans stay relevant and “adapt” over the course of the year. Prepare for unpredictability!

TEAM OF TEAMS uses the dramatic backdrop of war against Al Qaeda to effectively illustrate the effects that speed and interdependent nature of 21st century life have on traditional organizations.

At the same time, the authors take readers through the transformation of that most slow and ossified organizations, the U.S. military, into an agile and effective group.

A critical read for anyone serious about leadership. GEN McChrystal and Co. offer tremendous and fresh insights into organizational leadership in the 21st century. Although inspired by Special Operations, the narrative stretches well beyond the battlefield, ranging from immunology, Greek mythology, and 20th century production lines. There is no better read for those organizations that aspire to adapt and win in the new globalized environment.

I am an author and leadership instructor who conducts seminars across the country. General McChrystal's book has provided very specific and important information that must be shared with every leadership instructor and student in our nation. The meaningful way it is written, combined with the timely issues it describes makes it an asset to any leaders resource library.

This is perhaps the very best book I've ever read on organizational change.

Easy to read and full with insightful experiences.

A must-read not only to military strategists but for CEOs as well.

Organizations struggling to cope with the rising complexity and rapid changes in the world around them need to learn the lessons the US defense forces learned in the new battle fields: become fluid, decentralized, and non-hierarchical to survive. Well-written and compelling read.

Good read....General McChrystal and his team do a great job using examples/events to support this clear narrative. In this complex world he was an agent of change and saved lives. Corporate America should reference this book and his works to stay competitive. THANK YOU for your service and sharing!!!

Gen. McChrystal's TED videos are outstanding because he truly lived what he teaches. Organizational change is hard because we have been entrenched in old models and theories for a long time. As he says, we are playing a different game now and adaptability is the new efficiency. Excellent book!

The General adds his perspective and vantage point to the future of management, based on what he worked tirelessly toward, first to understand, and then to master. Worthwhile companion to his previous volume, which I also highly recommend. Thanks General Mac!

General McChrystal was way ahead of everyone else in strategic references. He understands the dynamic of the enemy we face, but was handcuffed by politicos who abide a PC culture. He also had the disadvantage of being on active duty where civilians call the shots, but seldom approve of the way their orders are carried out. It was double-whammy, when an intrusive media is thrown into the mix.

Yet another business-as-warfare book. Good fantasy stuff for business leaders, I suppose. One could take it apart on a hundred different points, but I'll stick with just one:

What about ISIS?

If our forces were doing such a fantastic job, coordinating intelligence and action, all teamy-on-teamy and such, how the hell did ISIS suddenly arise from the ashes of AQI? Sounds like the model that McChrystal put in place failed utterly on that score. Which means, it failed utterly.

This book, like the man is a thin veneer...Gen McChrystal was not victim of a one-off rogue staff officer. The arrogance of the General, the tolerance of disrespect of civilian oversight and control, reflected a long-standing repugnant culture that was as a minimum tolerated but I submit the General cultivated. It is shameful universities and "rubber chicken dinner circuit" have further emboldened General McChrystal and his understudies. The true leadership lesson from the McChrystal is yet to be written--failure of character and total lack of humility can substitute for solid leadership if you you play your cards right after being caught.

I can't recommend enough this book. Beyond dealing with complexity, that is quite a common theme in the way to manage large projects for example, it deals with the more difficult task of scaling this capability. It is the first book I encounter that deals with this problem in such a clear manner, and with an approach that has been tested in the field of war, one of the most complex situations organizations can face.
Can't recommend enough this book for those that are passionate about how to deal with the ever increasingly complex world that surrounds us.