Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Stanley McChrystal, and the panelists on the Nightly Show are Christiane Amanpour, Christian Finnegan, and Jordan Carlos.
Stanley McChrystal is a retired United States Army general who was Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A). He previously served as Director, Joint Staff from August 2008 to June 2009 and as Commander, Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and is currently a Yale University faculty member, teaching courses in International Relations as well as writing a number of books. His latest book is
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
THE OLD RULES NO LONGER APPLY . . .
When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter.
TEACHING A LEVIATHAN TO IMPROVISE
It’s no secret that in any field, small teams have many advantages—they can respond quickly, communicate freely, and make decisions without layers of bureaucracy. But organizations taking on really big challenges can’t fit in a garage. They need management practices that can scale to thousands of people.
General McChrystal led a hierarchical, highly disciplined machine of thousands of men and women. But to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, his Task Force would have to acquire the enemy’s speed and flexibility. Was there a way to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network? If so, could the same principles apply in civilian organizations?
A NEW APPROACH FOR A NEW WORLD
McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade the Task Force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a oneness that would have been impossible even a decade earlier. The Task Force became a “team of teams”—faster, flatter, more flexible—and beat back Al Qaeda.
BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD
In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It has the potential to transform organizations large and small.
That was a whole bunch of words wasn't it? So what is really in the book?
Stanley McChrystal’s Accidental Exposé About the Military
The combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and his team of co-authors intended to author a guide on how to use small teams to infuse organizations with dynamic and adaptive leadership. Instead they deliver an accidental exposé of what is wrong with the modern major general.
While the Rolling Stone dust-up doesn’t make it into the pages of this leadership guide, plenty of McChrystal’s combat experiences do. The general’s war tribulations and his appreciation of military history are the touchstones that frame the book’s approach to leading in the modern world.
McChrystal chronicles the difficulty of adapting the thinking and activities employed in conventional military operations to the chaotic challenges facing civilian organizations. Traditional organizations, he concludes, are ill-suited to solve today’s wicked problems.
“Team of Teams” is essentially a journey of self-discovery. McChrystal finds he must learn to distinguish between “linear” problems (that are decipherable and predictable) and “non-linear” challenges (complex systems where the causes and effects that drive behaviors and outcomes are far more difficult to understand).
What is interesting about “Team of Teams” is not that McChrystal and other Army leaders figured out the difference between mastering linear and nonlinear environments—but that it took them so damn long to do it. Rather than inform, the book prompts the question: What is wrong with the modern major general?
In framing the challenge, McChrystal reflects on the fundamental and original contributions of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the well-acknowledged father of “scientific management” and framer of how to build linear systems to solve linear problems.
The fact that other soldiers at other times have done what McChrystal did suggests the general has not discovered new management principles for new problems. Rather, he has rediscovered a long-standing truism about leading in war and peace. Some problems are linear. Some are not. Some are a mix of both. The most successful leaders adapt to the kinds of problems they face, rather than insist problems conform to how leaders like to do business.
I really don't understand the appeal of these sort of books. The world is complex and complex problems require complex solutions. It is not revolutionary. It seems like business and governmental leaders like to reinvent the wheel and act like they are the first to create it.
Christiane Amanpour
is a British-Iranian journalist and television host. Amanpour is the Chief International Correspondent for CNN and host of CNN International's nightly interview program Amanpour. Amanpour is also a Global Affairs Anchor of ABC News. As of 2014, she has been recognized as one of the journalists most world leaders follow on Twitter according to a report by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller.
Christian Finnegan
is an American stand-up comedian, writer and actor based in New York City.
Jordan Carlos
is an American stand-up comedian who played a recurring character on The Colbert Report and is a co-host on the Nickelodeon kids' show "Me TV." He currently appears as a panelist and reporter on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 6/2: Mayor Bill de Blasio
We 6/3: Melissa McCarthy
Th 6/4: Steve Buscemi