General Stanley McChrystal on Leadership

thank you all very much for coming it's great to see so many of you I'm Hannah McGuinness I'm thrilled to welcome you here on behalf of the how-to Academy you might notice there are quite a few of you it's been so popular this event they had to have another additional event just to avoid disappointment and it's hardly surprising given of course the compelling subject matter of leadership and also our guest this evening one of the most most expert men in the field of leadership it really is such an honor to have him here with us General Stanley McChrystal a man who Robert Gates the defense secretary for Barack Obama and for George Bush called one of the most incredible warriors and leaders of men that I've ever met and he served in the US Army for 34 years retiring in 2010 as a four-star Army general perhaps best known for commanding JSOC the American joint special operation command and forces NATO forces in Afghanistan and now he's a fellow at Yale University where he teaches international relations and the head of from a crystal group which is consulting businesses and this is I think a third book or his other books have been New York Times bestsellers and this latest book leaders myth and reality that we will base our discussion on this evening really is a compelling and illuminating piece of work if you haven't read it I highly suggest you do and I'm sure you have your copies which general McChrystal will be signing afterwards this evening but don't expect to read it will to go away with a sort of precise 10-point plan and an idea of how to make a perfect leader it's about exploring leadership in all its complexities and it says in big bold letters on the back leadership is not what you think it is and it never was and of course every day would probably be a very opportune moment or leadership as a hot topic on any given evening but particularly this evening a day when America has woken up to the results of its midterm elections which will determine how power is balanced in the country for the next few years and of course an election that was focused around their somewhat controversial leader who I think it's halfway through a press conference which seems to be quite quite an eventful press conference in which some of the CNN reporters were refusing to sit down when I when we last came in so hopefully we'll be able to talk a little bit about that as well and about the generals experiences as the leader himself this evening I will be talking to him for around 45 minutes a little bit longer and then there'll be a chance for you all to ask questions so please raise your hands high they'll be roving mics don't go away wishing you'd ask something in this rather special opportunity to do so so if you'll all join me again and giving a warm nth welcome General Stanley McChrystal thank you a very warm welcome and could you just start off by telling us what your aim was in writing this book what you wanted your reader to take away from it absolutely my first bite thank you for having me Hannah and thank you everybody for coming here tonight when I look at the crowd I'm guessing that there may be a few people I got to serve with in Afghanistan Iraq and I particularly thank you guys for what you did and for being here tonight this book was not the end but it was a part of a journey of me trying to figure out leadership what had happened is I had spent a lifetime trying to be a leader I'd been taught leadership I'd learned some I practice some I've made some mistakes I've had some successes then when I left the military I wrote my memoirs and when I wrote my memoirs I thought I'd sort of figured out leadership and I would just write this triumphal book about how great it was and I had this really interesting experience and that as I started to write the memoirs I wanted to get the full story so I a young person working with me and we did a whole bunch of interviews of people who've been there and so I had made a decision and then there'd been an outcome good or bad which I'd gotten credit or blame but as we did the interviews what we found was my memory was not wrong but in almost every case that was stunningly incomplete what it meant was I'd have given an order and I thought something that happened actually a whole bunch of other people did a whole bunch of other things that I never knew about and there were other factors playing on then stuff what happened and what it did is it put my role in context where I mattered but I wasn't the star of the show and I wasn't as important as I thought I was and that sort of calibrated me on wait a minute if I wasn't the fulcrum of history in that case maybe I don't actually understand leadership as much as I think I do then we went on and wrote another book team of teams about how teams work together and the same thing we we took an experience we'd had particularly in Iraq and in transforming Joint Special Operations Command and how people operate and we'd studied other businesses to see whether our experience had been unique to or the special operations we found that no it hadn't it was exactly what was hitting everybody it's a context change of the environment now faster more more complex that they have to navigate and so as we went to write the next book we really thought that on there and said well we we actually don't understand leadership now at age 64 when I've been a leader and I've been teaching leadership now for nine years at Yale it's kind of embarrassing to admit I don't understand leadership I don't even know what it is and there's a standard definition of leadership which is sort of accepted it's the ability to influence people to do things but we didn't think that was right so we went back to Plutarch first century historian and we started studied in leadership but we came exactly to the conclusion Hana mentioned we don't understand leadership because it's not what we think it is and it never has been so we've been essentially confused about it not just me but most of us for our whole lives with some pretty big implications to that so we decided to write a book not that we would be able to absolutely put a nail in what leadership is but we would extend the conversation the exploration to identify the challenge and start people moving in the direction of that and frankly with what's going on in my country right now the other goal which really came up part way through the book was to start a national conversation on leadership start a conversation not down in the tactics or politics but at a higher level the sort of what do we want to be as a society what's our role as followers and what do we want for our leaders and if we can get that conversation started we think the book will be a success I want to come on to that a little bit later perhaps and your country but let's look a little bit more at how you the layout of the book and the structure so you've chosen 13 extraordinary characters some who we know lots about others I'm ashamed to say that I didn't and how did you come about choosing them and why did you decide on on this structure absolutely because Plutarch had it and so what I'd never read Plutarch I knew who he was by name is a first century historian and he kind of invented biography and he wrote live sir parallel lives of the Greeks and Romans is sometimes known 48th leaders with a Greek enrollment in each case or in most cases compared to each other at the end and he was really searching for virtue he was trying to give us people we could emulate or have cautionary tale stuff so if it was good enough for Plutarch it's good enough for us so we decided to do we couldn't have 48 so we decided to do six pairs of leaders or twelve leaders and we wanted diversity so we we wanted gender diversity race diversity nationality field of endeavor diversity good and bad diversity so we went out and we we started picking them we ended up with geniuses Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein founders Walt Disney and Coco Chanel and I'll tell you right now I didn't know she was a person until we started this bus I thought it was just a sign in the mall when you see Chanel we had heroes Harriet Tubman the slave and Jean hi 14th century Chinese Admiral we had zealots maximilien robespierre the French Revolution in Abu Musab al-zarqawi Oh more recent times we had reformers Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther King jr. of the American Civil Rights Movement and then finally we had power brokers we started with politicians but we really thought it was better that power brokers and we had boss tweed a corrupt New York politician of the 19th century and paired him against Margaret Thatcher the famous Prime Minister of Great Britain and so the idea was to give a wide range not identifying what's alike in them but really addressing the question why did they emerge as leaders and then what was the impact of that the first leader that you talked about robert e lee and he isn't paired up with anyone no and there seems to be a lot of significance in character fee you someone you thought was a great leader at the start of your career and a man whose reputation has been questioned a lot in recent years and tell us a little about his his position in the book and in your life sure we we couldn't write a book about leaders in leadership that I put my name on that didn't include Robert Ely and the reason is not because I think he's a greatest leader but for my life he was the biggest example of positive leadership that I tried to emulate and to sort of put it in context he grew up not far from where I did he grew up in Alexandria Virginia he was at the famously family of Virginia he was it descended not by blood of George Washington who lived only ten miles away he had gone through a life that turned out to be quite similar to mine he went went to West Point as a young man then went to 32 years in the United States Army I had grown up in the same area I had gone to Washington Lee high school although a century later I followed him to West Point when I got there he was a figure to emulate there were other generals with statues and whatnot but I lived in Lee barracks there were paintings of robert e lee and other people were people you could try to be like lee you couldn't because it was too good but you could try to use him as a beacon to move in that direction he went through West Point with 0 demerits I did not do that but but for a lifetime I had thought about him as the penultimate description of leadership when I was a second lieutenant I got married to a young army brat I'm now been married to her for 41 years yeah she gave me a painting of robert e lee and it wasn't a real painting she paid 25 bucks for it it was a a cheap print and somebody had painted over it with clear acrylic to give it brushstrokes so it looked like a painting framed it was $25 but on second lieutenant pay that was a lot of money then and so I had it with with great pride for 40 years and I hung it in every set of quarters where we lived and it was for me two things one I'd look at it and I think well that's who I want to be like and when people came to my house I was proud they'd look at it and they go that's who he wants to be like then in the spring of 2017 we had the activities at Charlottesville and were in which white supremacists arguing over the removal of a statue of General Robert Ely incited violence and a person in fact was killed and it really got a lot of focus in the US and my wife Anna came to me and she says I think you ought to take down the picture and I said wait a minute I can't you gave it to me anything you give me a sacred she goes yeah I got it take down the picture and I said no he's just a generally not a political person he just did what he thought was right he fought and I want to be like him and she said well when people come into our house I think it may communicate something to them unintentionally they may think you are trying to communicate that you agree with white supremacists and I said you know I don't she says I do they don't I think you had to get rid of the picture so I took about a month arguing with her holding my ground for a while and then finally I realized she was right and on a Sunday morning in early summer of 2017 I took it down took it out to the garbage and threw it away got picked up the next day by the garbage truck with the landfill and it was an emotional thing for me because my connection to him had been emotional this and I started studying him more because we were just starting this book and I said well you know I can't be honest about studying leaders unless I include Robert Ely but we've got to include him in a way that is thoughtful because it was very controversial in the u.s. big argument about all the statues around the country that existed about him so he started researching I'd read a lot about him I live sort of in his shadow but as we read more and we thought more deeply and we had hours of conversation included J Mango news one of my co-authors he's out in the audience here what we really came to is here's a guy who had all the leadership traits and behaviors that we would admire he was a courtly gentleman he was a decisive soldier he was handsome he was well read he was just all of these things he wrote about duty he wrote about honesty but in the spring of 1861 after 32 years in the United States Army he makes the decision after being offered command of northern or United States Army troops he makes a decision instead to ally with his state Virginia and when Virginia secedes from the Union and joins the Confederacy he goes with him on the surface that looks like loyalty to your state but what he did was he violated his oath the same oath I take it to the United States and he fought for the next four years to destroy the United States that his role model George Washington had done much to create and he did it to protect slavery that's what the Civil War was about the greatest evil in American history now so what's my conclusion do I come out that robert e lee's evil and that i should never speak his name again no i don't come out that way what i come out is robert e lee was a good man but he was a man he was a human he wasn't a two-dimensional picture or a statue or a myth he was a person that made mistakes in fact he made what we call at his Praetorian moment he made an incredibly big mistake he forgot who he was and he's fine just like I am and so it seemed appropriate to not pair him with anyone because his story was to me unique and very important but also a great stepping stone to just how complex leadership actually is tell us about that I mean obviously it's a lot to talk to fit in but your three myths the things that we think we know about leadership but really we don't perhaps you could tell us about those three sure as we started looking at leadership we said well why don't we understand it and then we came to the reality that we look at it through mythological eyes when I was a child my what my mother was she loved mythology in Greek and Roman heroes so she had books around and she given to me to mean there was a child's book there was my favorite was an orange book printed in 1929 in Chattanooga Tennessee my mother had read it when she was a child when I was a child she read it to me and one of the ones that there was Theseus and Perseus and all but one of the ones I remember very well was Atlas and they'd have a very short narrative about the person then they'd have a hand-drawn picture and the picture of Atlas is a pretty muscular guy and sort of a g-string standing on top of a mountain holding the sky on his shoulders and you look at that thing and you go that's ridiculous but then you realize for many centuries people used mythology to explain the unexplainable people didn't know why this guy stayed where it was why didn't it fall there had to be a reason and so they came up with the idea that if it didn't fall somebody must be holding it up and it's atlas and there is and people accepted it and so when we start to talk about mists it's amazing how we accept myths and we just kind of live with them and so the three myths that we boiled it down to for the book the first was the formulaic myth about leadership and that is if you have the right traits or you exhibit the right behaviors if you read the seven Habits of Highly Effective People and you follow all of those you're going to be a successful leader now you'll learn some good things but the reality is that doesn't correlate to the factual outcome when you actually study the performance of leaders you find many many leaders who have all of these traits in spades and they fail completely robert e lee not only made a bad mistake in the civil war he also lost he lost at the end of the day to Ulysses s Grant who had very few of those traits but he won and we see that business another so the reality is you can't simplify leadership down to a checklist there's not a formula for it the second we call the attribution myth and that is the idea that the leader is the person that decides the outcome for the organization if the organization fails or succeeds the leader is the reason and therefore deserves credit or blame in the military we used to say a unit commanders responsible for all the unit does or fails to do that's true responsible in the command sense not responsible and that they are the fulcrum of what happens as you heard about my memoirs when we when I studied my own life I found I wasn't even the fulcrum in the actions there and we look time where we look at those and we want to believe we want to simplify it down to that outcome and then the last myth is we call the results myth and that's the idea that we are demanding results-oriented followers we make our leaders produce we want the CEO to make money we want the president to win elections we want the general to win battles but in reality that's not borne by experience either we actually follow leaders that are serial failures often we have emotional attachment to leaders more than we do on their actual outcome and so we often follow people who take us to very negative places but we elect select follow support whatever is appropriate in that thing time and again because leadership is not a thing the leader does leadership is an interaction between followers leaders and these other contextual factors it's like an emergent property from a chemical reaction almost and so what it is is this thing that occurs and but we look at it almost two dimensionally in your selection you have as you've mentioned three women and but you've written gender imbalance in leadership is both disturbing and unhealthy what do you mean by that and how can we overcome that we wanted to write about as many women in the book as was appropriate and yet when we look to find leaders in history because all of the people we profiled we decided would be dead there were fewer opportunities for females to lead and so there there's less track record there are people we looked at Joan of Arc we looked at Katharine Graham of the Washington Post we looked at a number we settled on Margaret Thatcher Coco Chanel and Harriet Tubman each of their stories if we look at it he's sort of an improbable rise to the success they did Coco Chanel was an orphan she learned to sew she became a nightclub singer she became a courtesan for some wealthy cavalry officer then she but she was very talented she became an opportunist a businessperson she saw that there was an intersection of factors right about the time of the First World War heavy women's fashions that were expensive and very painful to wear and she said women are entering the workforce materials are more expensive we want more freedom let's change that and so she changed women's fashions and things lighter more form-fitted and then she lived the brand she became the brand by dressing and acting and she allergic you want to be like Coco Chanel I have a great life here's the clothes to wear here's the perfume to use and then she created an empire and she worked hard until the day of her death and she was hard to work for but extraordinary rise Harriet Tubman was a five foot tall slave who escapes and then she goes back in the slave control territory thirteen times before the Civil War to lead to safety other slaves on any single occasion that she'd been captured she would probably been killed or at least put back into slavery sold to the deep south she had no formal education no position no election appointment and yet she becomes this spiritual symbol for females for slaves for abolitionists for people trying to give a better life and she becomes a leader unintentionally but a powerful leader through her example and her courage and then there's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher you know the grossest daughter she grows up in a time in politics when it's not simple for a female to move to the top in politics in fact she got heckled in her early days in Parliament made fun of for the female traits of her she took voice lessons from Laurence Olivier to lower her voice to sound more like a political leader and yet she became a woman of conviction she took away she worked her way to the top there were no free breaks and then she became of course one of the most famous prime ministers in British history all of those characters have faults but in reality there are amazing success stories probably harder Road than any man did it still hasn't gotten that much better one of the things we we found as we did research that you probably won't be surprised that there are more male CEOs now in the United States than there are female CEOs what is disturbing is there are more male CEOs named John than they're all all female CEOs you get the perspective and you go something's wrong and there are lots of things wrong but as we look at leadership in that interaction between followers and factors we've also got to look at things like opportunity but the important thing is as you mention in the book when you do mention that statistic about more Jon's which obviously I found relatively annoying that you mentioned that it's not it's not about quotas the reason we want to have more women leaders it's because generally it's better for business which I think you talk about a train businesses form perform better when they have greater diversity I mean it's just app saluté fact if you go beyond and look at the data if they've got more diversity they make more money if they have better diversity in the Board of Directors they make more money you can't I mean you don't argue I don't argue with data let's talk a little bit about personality how important is it and what did you find with your 13 that leaders have a compelling or a charism a charisma because most of yours seem to and how important is that that there's someone that not only you want to emulate but that they have a liveliness about them I think that's an interesting point they were not all charismatic in the same way if you take maximilien robespierre who of course led the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution he was not charismatic in the way we might consider it he was actually a bit of an introvert that wasn't very much of an introvert he spent most of his time in his apartments in Paris he wrote speeches and he wrote letters and he sent them out and most of them were delivered to people as opposed to speak in fact he wasn't the gifted speaker so if he had a speech and he gave it it wasn't something that would impress him but there was a kind of charisma that was came from his zealotry he had become infused with enthusiasm for Russo's writing in the virtuous Society and he believed that that's where France had to go and when the French Revolution in 1790 89 began the process and then later actually executed the monarchy there were people who had great second doubts there were people who said wow we shouldn't do that we should go back to a constitutional monarchy we we should hit some middle ground and Robespierre was the guy who said no this is the direction we're going he was unwavering he was so firm in his conviction he burned white-hot like a flame and what that did was it gave people the chance to look at him and go wait a minute if he's got no doubts there must be something to that and he never wavered in his zealots we just pulled people toward him so it wasn't charisma in the traditional sense it was charisma through this absolute conviction Abu Musab al-zarqawi de the terrorist leader of al-qaeda in Iraq who I ended up spending two and a half years fighting against he had his strange core to sort of correct charisma it wasn't well educated got thrown in prison in Jordan for five years tried to cut off a tattoo to show everybody he was a pious Muslim when he got out and he started to to lead our Qaeda in Iraq he personally beheaded a young American named ik Berg on video some of you would have seen it it's the spring of 2004 it's pretty emotional for all of us at the time and I vowed we'd kill him but the reality is if he sat in here to some of us he would look like a thug to other people he wore all black he had the classic terrorist leader look he wore all black but in reality he was so focused on the mission so unwilling to compromise so convinced that he and the movement was right that he would go out and lead patiently lead bravely that in fact he became the kind of leader that even Iraqis and other people who came to the fight they didn't share the fervency of his belief but they were willing to follow him because here's a guy who is just so incredibly committed so the answer is some of our leaders had just extraordinary charisma like Leonor Bernstein you just wanted to be around than her Bernstein but others you didn't want to be around but you're captivated by and so there is something to it and talking about being captivated by him one of the things we often think of as a good leader needs to be a very good communicator to be able to speak to an audience again that seems to be a little bit of a myth and what Martin Luther King's Speech for example isn't exactly what we thought it was tell us about how the importance of good communication you know communication in some way dr. Martin Luther King in August of 1963 gave a speech that most of you probably heard about her seeing clips of it's the I have a dream speech that he gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and it was given to 250,000 and people who'd March for the March for jobs in progress in DC he was the headline speaker I think it was the 16th Speaker of the afternoon so you'd had this just array of speakers before him people waiting around shifting weight from one leg to other but they wanted to hear dr. King because he was the guy who was most well known he was the of the civil rights movement he writes a speech until 4:00 in the morning and this is a guy who writes incredible letters from a Birmingham jail he writes speeches and and sermons but he writes till 4:00 in the morning on this speech and then he gets up to give it in the first 11 minutes he's not connecting with the audience they're polite and they listen but they're just not connecting and then Mahalia Jackson a noted gospel singer who knew dr. King well was near and she goes Martin tell him about the dream and he shifts from his prepared speech and he goes into a familiar riff I've been to the mountaintop I have a dream and it captivates the audience and it captivates the nation it captivates history and so we tend to think of dr. King in this moment where he gives us amazing speech and we say wow what a great guy what a great speaker but in reality in 1963 he had already been in the movement for eight years he began in 1955 December 1955 as a 26 year old pastor who had just arrived to Montgomery Alabama and they were trying to to do a an effort a movement to desegregate public transportation buses and so as the African American population got together and said how are we going to do this they elected Martin Luther King was 26 year old newcomer to be the leader of what they call the Montgomery Improvement Association and for the next more than a year he orchestrates this movement that includes African Americans walking to work carpooling to work doing anything they can to avoid using public transportation and after 382 days they win they desegregate public transportation but that's not the end Martin Luther King then becomes a leader that moves around the south essentially leading a movement but he's never elected he's never appointed he's not in charge in fact what he has to do is constantly pull together a constellation of different groups all interested in civil rights but different in their nature and many with very strong will leaders who've been in civil rights longer than dr. King and it's a masterful leadership job that's management leadership constantly adapting to changing conditions the speech in 63 precedes his murder five years later in 1968 and the amazing thing is after 13 years of leading this movement managing it leading it rhetorically representing it and he's killed suddenly at the roller Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee you'd think that someone this central it would cause the movement to collapse or stop and it doesn't it keeps moving on which may be the biggest tribute to what he actually created and that was a movement that had its own momentum and its own belief in itself that's is perhaps the unifying factor but what draws all 13 together because obviously they're very very complex but what did you find and I think you just alluded to it the one thing that unified all those leaders yeah there's really not accept that they emerged as leaders you know we looked as he was they're going to be a trait was there going to be some kind of burning intent on their part this ambition or something and you can't find it that's one of the the fascinating part of the study what we found is some of them emerged as leaders unintentionally Albert Einstein's a physicist he's a brilliant guy we can't understand what he did we can say e equals MC squared but we don't know what it means I'm right I mean yeah and and yet he becomes a leader because in 1923 he's the most famous man in the world and he's just a young physicist he was a patent clerk in 1905 when he wrote the amazing papers that revolutionized physics - including the special theory of relativity he's not very old when he comes out with the general theory of relativity and really that's about the last big thing he ever does in physics but what he does do is he communicates constantly through the community of people in physics scientists people who support it he becomes a symbol he writes 30,000 letters during his lifetime connecting people propagating helping other younger physicists he's offered the presidency of Israel and he turns it down he says I'm not qualified for that but he but that time he'd become a symbol for people he looked like everybody's uncle you know rumpled clothes hair big moustache but reality he'd become more of a symbol than he was any kind of practical leader so he emerged as a leader without ever appearing to have sought it but he did understand it do you think anyone is born a leader a natural-born leader yeah that's a question we ask ourselves a lot I think many people are born with traits that help them be leaders they might be very intelligent they might be naturally charismatic they might be strong or whatever it is for the society they're in which I think are tools which help I think leadership I personally believe leadership is learned I think it starts very early with the examples you're around usually your parents may be teachers and then it goes up from there and most leaders develop some sense of responsibility that something has to happen many of you who've been in combat know that informal leaders arise when somebody's in a situation and something has to happen and it's not happening and then suddenly corporal so-and-so or private so-and-so suddenly shows this amazing amount of leadership and you go wow where did that come from and it came from somewhere in his life he's seen that he's known that I don't think it's it's inside you doorman I think it's a learned thing mostly to experience let's talk a little bit about the leader of the United States and what kind of a leader is Donald Trump I mean he is he is but he has been a successful in his own way leader and also part of a movement that we're seeing across the world you know somebody tells me that President Trump is a bad leader I would I would contest that if they told me he was in effect leader ineffective leader I'd contest that as well he's clearly been remarkably effective here's a business guy who got elected president and with the midterm elections he didn't lose as badly as most parties do in the midterm elections when they're in power so in reality he's been very effective now I separate good and bad from effective or not because good and bad sort of got a value judgment to it but he's been very effective and he's been largely successful in many things he wanted to do or wants to do now I would argue I don't think he's a good leader for America I think that what he has done is he's pulled at emotions that are inside each of us he stimulated things that aren't the best of us he has caused us there's more division than before but also he's caused emotions and things like against immigrants and whatnot that I think are ultimately counter to what I believe the American character is I think his inability to stick to the truth is different from what we would demand from our children I think some of his other conduct is not the kind of example of representation that we want for the people we work with or the people that represent us so I think from that standpoint he's been a very negative leader for the United States but he's where he is now and what will be interesting to see is at what point the people of the United States start to look at the mirror look themselves in the mirror and say what do I believe in what are my values what do I want the values of my nation to be and when they do that and we decide then who do we need for our leaders what kind of Li do we really want to have then I think many of the things that President Trump has done will will prove to be disconnected from the real aspirations of the American people that's what I want to believe and that's what I did how do you think that the results of the midterms will affect the power that he now has for the next few years yeah I don't think the the actual results of the Democrats take in the House and the Senate taken the Senate means much I could make an argument from strict political sense it's good for him to lose the house because now when things don't happen he can blame it on that he can say look I could have done it because a lot of what he does is coulda woulda shoulda and so I actually think for the presidential election it's an advantage for him what we really need to look at though is this midterm election usually Americans don't vote in high numbers in the midterm in 2014 83 million people came out to vote yesterday a hundred and fourteen million people came out to vote that's hugely different and what happened is with that kind of engagement that means America is listening that means America is paying attention and what I think the portends is two years from now I would imagine the number of voters will go up even more that's good because Americans need to be engaged in fact you know if I have a suggestion for the nation it would be mandatory voting you could go in the boat booth and vote for nobody but everybody has to vote and the reason I beat for that is it would do away with all voter suppression it would take away the ability to stop certain people from voting by making it hard and we've got a bad history of that and so I think that's the real story people aren't going to talk about it much in the near term but this increased engagement in politics is going to change all the dynamics the other thing that changed yesterday was the increase in the number of females that were elected that's gonna change things too you know when you have a very small number of any group like females they become maybe a vocal and important minority when they get above a certain number than suddenly the dynamic changes there's a critical mass to it maybe were getting close to that plus we got a lot of new energy and many of the people who are elected so that could help to change the dynamic as well will the change dynamic have any effect on foreign policy or is that the one area that they cannot influence him going forward yeah foreign policy is traditionally in America is supposed to be not much affected by the party in power it's supposed to be more consistent than domestic policy because our allies and our long-term relationships matter so much that's changed in the last few years obviously President Obama actually took it in a pretty different direction President Bush had president Trump has put his own stamp on foreign policy I don't think the Congress will change foreign policy very much they can opine about it but I don't think they've got that the wherewithal to do that but I think the world will help change that the increased number of voter increased voter engagement in the US as people start to speak up and say we're not happy the way we are being portrayed in the world we're not happy perhaps the way we are conducting ourselves in the world there are a lot of things that President Trump has done in foreign policy I don't have any dispute with there are things that had to happen and have happened but the tone is often damaging and so I think it's very important that we we looked at and I'm hopeful that that's going to happen Afghanistan is one of the oversleep you served there and there's been talk of withdrawing forces for many years do you think the time has come now to withdrawal from Afghanistan yeah I'm just amazingly I'm not the right person to ask that question because I'm biased I really like the Afghan people I really care about that country and so I admit to you up front you know any answer I give you is colored by that I can't make one of these dispassionate decisions because people say well they're corrupt they fight the Taliban does this I'd been over there and I've seen the young girls we put in school I've been over there and I've seen soldiers who are once went to the hospital and an Afghan soldier had lost both legs above the knee and one arm and I go in to visit him with President Karzai and the guy goes all I would like to do is continue to serve my country now this is a kid who comes from nothing gets badly wounded and he does not have the same medical care that you're wounded here or I wounded the states get and yet this is what he says was it genuine it seemed genuine to me and so if you step from afar and you sue Afghanistan you see the graveyard of Empires you see the quagmire you see all these things you don't like when you get up close it doesn't look like that looks like people looks like possibilities and so what I'd say is I don't know what we will do I do know that any decision maker is a national leader is a hugely difficult problem because it's easy to sit there and say Afghanistan 17 years it's hard we should get out but if we were to pull out and the Taliban were established a regime over most of Afghanistan again and if they brought al Qaeda back in when the 9/11 attacks were launched from that would be so politically difficult for an American president that it has put most of them in this really difficult conundrum so I don't have a clever answer for Afghanistan I wish I did you talk about your own time there in general what lessons about leadership did you learn from your own experiences as I was there starting in 2002 part of every year up to 2009 cuz Joint Special Operations Command was operating there I spent more time in Iraq much more but I would do a lot of time in Afghanistan as well I actually took over in the summer 2009 and that's different when you take over into their Foton that's a different perspective and so I'll address my answer to that period I took over at a period when the war was eight years old and everybody had lost interest in it all our allies in the coalition wanted out to include the United States our Afghan partners had lost confidence that we were going to be the solution to their problem the Pakistanis thought we were going to leave so they were in that constant thing were their force and against us at the same time but they were already calculating that we were going to leave and we or we were going to fail and so had the Taliban and so the challenge we had to do starting in the summer of 2009 if the mission wasn't going to change that was first question I asked my leadership they said no the missions the same went to Brussels talked to the NATO secretary-general said not the missions changed we're still trying to get stability in Afghanistan so that's what he wants you to work toward then the question came is how do you change that and the first thing you had to do was change the sense of the lack of confidence you had to convince people that we could win this we should win this and we would win this which meant we had to be morally the right force that they believed in we had to be capability wise the force that could do it doing the right things and then we had to show the will that we would win we had to convince people we'd stay and that's really hard did you have to believe in it yourself to convince others that's the fascinating paradox of it because when I was sent over I was asked to an assessment I did then went back and told my leadership if we want to have any chance to win we have to change our strategy we have to start protecting the population and we're gonna need to do a number of things if you're not willing to do that don't do anything else just let's give it up now if you are willing to do that you're willing to put the resources in to do it we have a 50-50 chance at best of succeeding that's it 50/50 at best but if that's what you want to do that's what we'll do and the decision came back yeah it was kind of a tepid support but it was yeah we put in additional forces change the strategy and we would do that so as you do that then the leader in charge in the United States when you are confirmed for three or four star general you have to sign a piece of paper from the Senate that says if I'm asked opinion I will give my real opinion I won't just say what it is the administration tells me to say that's a tough one because you're told what you're told what the decision is in any case what the the administration course of action is and then you're called in to testify to the Senate and Congress and you're asked questions so what do you think and that's the paradox you're in this tough situation people see a general and they say okay did I believe in Afghanistan or any general in a case like this if I go in front of the Senate or in front of press and they say Afghanistan is really hard you're the tenth commander NIF in eight years we are we are not making progress do you think we can win and I go they'd say well the people who agreed they go that's honest but I had a hundred and fifty thousand troops in Afghanistan who would have gone WTF we're out here being told to risk our life in your tell us so you can't when henry v at Agincourt in shakespeare's telling gives the amazing speech do you think he was sure they could beat the french the answer was I'm sure he wasn't but I think he knew that if they didn't show confidence if he didn't show enthusiasm if he didn't show conviction it was sure that they couldn't and they wouldn't and so the general is in a position or any military leader you have got to have less confidence or you guarantee failure and it borders on sometimes you show confidence when you're not confident you tended your resignation and in 2010 would you do anything differently and if you could go back why did you decide to do that well what do you think Anna I don't know you say it's important to speak your minds yeah I mean here I get burned touching the hot stove yeah I would do a lot different there were number of things I do different in command not an intent whatever but there were mistakes I made and things I didn't do in dealing with political leadership that I could have done a lot better and I'm perfectly willing to say that when the Rolling Stone article what you're really getting at the thing that caused me to submit my resignation it was a freelance guy writing for the Rolling Stone that came and embedded with us just for short periods not for a long period and he wrote this article and it was supposed to be a puff piece about the command team saying yeah just great guys they've been at war together for a long time and then it came out about 2:00 in the morning and it's titled runaway general I'm going this can't be good and what he does is he portrays this kind of this locker room group of people who out of control and whatnot and I don't think it was fair you know and I'm but but I'm probably gonna think that right but I don't think it was fair but it didn't matter because now we have this contentious article that gets put on the desk of the president United States she's my boss and my job is not to put contentious things on his desk and I responsible whether it's right or not I'm responsible and so I'm asked to fly back to the Washington that next day I do that I go into the president offer my resignation and I said he asked me what happened what's the background I said I don't know it's only been 24 hours I don't know what happened and didn't I know that doesn't represent the team I know but it doesn't matter they're my team and I'm responsible if they did or didn't do it I'm responsible for the story so here's my resignation if you want to accept that I've got no problem with that if you want to tell me to go back to Afghanistan and keep coloring I'm fine with that too and he accepted my resignation and and we had a cordial meeting and I still have good relations with him now do I regret the incident more than anything else in my life do I regret that it happens sure I do that moment I lost a career that I'd been at for 38 years in an instant everything I thought I was is gone now I can't even when people ask me I was from age 17 I like Sam a soldier in an instant when they asked me that question I won't say I'm suddenly notorious I'm on the newspaper and TV and the ticker at the bottom every two or three minutes disgraced general fire general some people I knew went on TV and opine now I needed to be fired and they didn't know anything about what had happened or not happen but you watched some of that you go but the point is I'm responsible can't cry over it I signed up for it when things happened well I took credit for them didn't complain about that so when things don't go well I'm responsible and then the other thing that that helped most is when you're at a moment like that and I predict everyone of this room will fail at some time in your life you may not fail on the front page of the paper like I did you may not fail publicly at all but you'll have something that you think you didn't get right and it didn't come out as you wanted it to and you really got two choices one choice is to spend the rest of your life Rhee litigating it there is a duty description for retired general officers called you know disgraced angry retired general and I said that you can actually spend the rest of your type-b in that and I just said I'm not not interested I'm gonna live life forward I can't change anything in the past so I worry about it I'm gonna just do things forward and every day after that what I've tried to do is live my life in a way that sort of disproves what anybody read they meet me they hang out with me or whatever they go boy that doesn't seem like the same thing betrayed there that's the best I can do and if people don't reach that conclusion I can never that but but I have to do that because a lot of people who believed in me before that it placed their faith many had come to war with me and for me because I asked him to I had to keep that face with him and it turned out to be really good for me because life goes forward I've been incredibly fortunate ever since I left the service so except for like one bad day my life spent it's a really bad day life's been just extraordinary it's it's our fortune of course in a way it was written this book and you able to come and talk to us this evening I want to hands over to you in one moment but I said at the beginning that you couldn't take a 10-point plan from your book about about what to be elite what it is to be a leader or what we should take away but you do offer at the end some sort of practical implications for people I'm sure there are people in the audience who think themselves that who are leaders in work what would you say that the lessons or your advice to them is in a nutshell yeah in a nutshell is you are gonna go forward and try to lead and I used the example of Ted Williams an American baseball player in 1941 he batted 406 highest average at that point anyone had ever gotten it was extraordinary 406 as a percentage point 406 it meant he got out he didn't get a hit 60% of the time he failed 60% of the time he went to bat and that's the way it works in leadership you are gonna fail as much as you succeed and the reality is you can't control that there are a lot of things that happen that are beyond you can do everything right and still fail but the thing you can focus on is what you are trying to do what you are genuinely trying to do and if that's the way you're judged I'm good with that the last thing is you talk about the idea that we might be or people talk about the idea we might be in a post leadership age or the age of the follower do we need leaders I we do I I think we are not in a follower age I think we're in a team age I think we're in an age where the idea of the single leader directs people to do things who's on the pedestal and what not isn't practical anymore things are too fast things are too complex we may still still need inspiration from Justin Bieber and people like that they'll be important but really when we're doing complex tasks we're gonna do them with teams and we're gonna therefore decentralize the leadership around what the military would call mission command and that's gonna be really important so leadership will be more diffuse and it won't be embodied in a single person nearly as much as it has been in the past and I will now hand over to you and can you bet this roving mics here so try and keep your questions quite brief and questions if possible so that we can get through as many as we can thank you this gentleman here Thank You general I advise young people who run companies and you in imply that leadership is something that can be learned can you suggest what would be a good place to recommend the people I work with to go and learn given that they can't take four years out and go to West Point and the equivalent in the UK yeah talk about a softball my company were insufficient Crystal group Leadership Institute so no all the others are crap ours is good yeah no I think there are two things you can do you can teach people a lot of skills as a leader and you can give them background on values you can do those things they're very helpful but I also think you need to try to create situations and experiences for them and most of this is experiencial where they're in entirely new environments where they've got to learn to sense what the conditions are what the followers or the other participants are and adjust themselves in their leadership style to that one of the problems of military leadership is if if the organization is too disciplined at all you're like pieces that move and bricks that move into expected things and you actually grow less so if I was creating leaders for the future I'd be trying to put them in those different environments with tasks that they're unfamiliar with and they've got to learn to deal different kinds of people and constantly changing requirements I think that builds their confidence and their competence thank you is there anything you do differently now as a result of lessons you learned writing this book I think the the biggest thing is I continue to move on this journey of my my understanding of leadership toward the idea that it is this complex thing you can't master it is the understanding that what I've really got to do is be extraordinary humble about that I've got to approach every task with the idea that on my best day I can't master it but I can share with the people around me and create again the team effect to do that so that's the biggest change for me and that's a lot because at age 64 you stop changing you know you're you're pretty set in your ways thank you good evening sir um I was wondering what deep characteristics do you think a woman would need to have in order to actually be President of the United States yeah that the problem is not with the woman the problem is with the electorate it's in the near term and I'm gonna be completely honest in the near term there's this funny thing people want like Margaret Thatcher ran into people want a female politician to perform like a man in many ways but if she performs too much like a man they say no you're trying to be a man and so it's damned if you do damned if you don't I think it's just going to take in the United States sort of this proven competence over time Secretary Clinton got pretty close she was proven competent as a senator proving competent as a Secretary of State she just had other baggage that was unique to her not as a woman but unique to her as being you know connected to Bill Clinton and her story so we're not far from it I don't think I I think there's a little bit of resistance to it now that will wear down in the next few years but they're just going to have to be competent professional pros and and that's maybe unfair because some men don't have to be that and I'm not sure there was the mic up that brilliant this I am with I'm up there I'm sorry with the I should get up there it's good thanks with sport being such a big part of society did you consider putting any sporting leaders in there and if so who was close to the cut it's funny cuz I'm smiling it my co-author J we did we were very interested in putting sports leaders in there we we thought at one point about using players like we thought about Babe Ruth because they became a hero to to American children and whatnot a big iconic figure we looked at coaches we looked at Bill Belichick but he was alive that was a problem we we could have adjusted that but we looked at we looked at Vince Lombardi and the thing that was interesting about Vince Lombardi and in football coaching is he coached at the high school college and pro level and he changed how he coached at each level he adapted when he had very disciplined cadets at West Point when he was assistant coach there he was one way when he coached the Green Bay Packers and he had Paul Hornung his running back who drank a case of beer at night he led differently and but I think Sports Leaders are great examples of that and we just ran out of space to do it thanks thank you very much general and you mentioned about confidence and leaders almost having to be able to show that confidence who give their followers their sense of yes things are ok but had you ever encountered leaders who had had to move from a place where they really were never as good at showing confidence and if so sort of how did they manage to make that transition yeah you know most of us is you rise in positions one you get more experience so you show more confidence but you actually have less confidence because you are less competent in your job the meeting of general officer which a lot of people don't know it means you no longer are an infantry officer a cavalry officer or something your general meaning you you cover a wide sir you're a mile wide and an inch deep by the time you become a four-star you don't know that much about what's happening down in they force particularly new equipment changes tactics I mean you pretend you do but you don't and so you're confident in one way but you're not confident in the other way cuz you're just not close to it where you know you can take apart that the weapon and do that kind of thing yet we have this need to show confidence so we sometimes that's a big mistake we put this veneer around us that acts like we know all act like were never scared never worried never confused part of that's important I don't want to be in a firefight look over and see my commanders sobbing quietly and it's worrisome but at the same time if my commander doesn't know the answer to the question I want him to say that I don't want him to be s anybody and I think it's senior levels we need and with all leaders we need a little more curiosity and that say asking questions of what our force knows or what our team knows being able to say I don't know being able to admit that and if you've got concerns about something I'm not again I'm not saying don't show a lot of fear of things but be willing to show some reality to you again I'm I waiver on the vulnerability thing you you do want people to show a certain amount of vulnerability but you don't want to we don't want people to lose confidence because you seem like you you're incompetent and no confidence and everything else so there's a balance there but it's honesty that really that works most if you got that question say it should I sign have become leader of Israel I'm sorry should I nine have become leader of Israel now he had no clue and you know what was it admirable that's what he told him he said I am no clue well how would I help and they were terrified at first he might accept it I guess they knew we had no clue hello general so a quick question wherever where does your stance on Don't Ask Don't Tell and should women be allowed to serve in the frontlines yeah I'll talk to the second one first you know we had this big hand wringing in the United States about should women be allowed to serve in combat the problem is we had the argument about ten years after they were already in combat I mean women are shooting and doing all this stuff and getting shot and I remember being over there and most people in the force are going whoa it's it's over because there were no lines in Afghanistan and Iraq and so they were there and so to me the discussion was already had on the ground I do think it was good that we finally formalized it and sort of told the people hadn't gotten a word but the answer is yes now that opens up a lot of things if we ever go back to a draft we need to draft women just like we draft men so where you give opportunity must be matched with responsibilities but I don't think that that will be a big issue Don't Ask Don't Tell if if y'all aren't familiar with it it was a compromise solution to the question of gays in the military that was implemented about 20 years ago and what happened was we had a policy that said that if you were gay and people knew about it you could be chapter forced out of the army pretty disgraceful I was the officer if someone was found to be homosexual they were bounced out and it was embarrassing and it was just really not well done then they came to the realization that one there are a lot of gays serving effectively and loyally in the army and they came up with this compromise thing called Don't Ask Don't Tell and that meant that someone could be gay in the service you couldn't ask them if they were gay but if they told you they were gay without being asked you threw him out of the army because we don't want gays and you go wait a minute that is that's almost hypocritical and it wasn't intentionally if a critical it was a compromise that they tried to do because there were just so many conflicting feelings about it what happened in engaged in the military was very similar to what happened with women in combat sort of time passed there was a grunts of people that said no no no no we just can't do that the morale of the force will go down but then almost everybody knew someone in the military was gay and was serving very well and they say we don't want gays in the military but Bob's really good and I need it and and so I think it you know once you're in that situation you what are we talking about let's decide if somebody who's an effective soldier not let's not care about that but we had that awkward policy and the sad part of it it put a lot of people in the position of having to be dishonest having essentially to deny something and commanders to know something and not it it was just weird and so it was a mistake I'm glad been corrected thank you you talked about the future of leadership being decentralized I'm just wondering is anyone in your book because have a shown behaviors good behaviors towards decentralized leadership or have you thought about how leaders need to change the way they behave in order to achieve that yeah that's great we never thought about that as one of the themes to look at in our leaders in my my head is going really fast to see if I can think of one that was particularly like that I I don't none of them jump out at me what I would say is as we do it in the future what leaders are gonna have to do is understand that things at the edge of the organization happened too fast to centrally control them if you think of the industrial model really came into play in the 19th century where you're doing big complicated things together moving an army building big projects or complicated machinery with assembly lines we had centralized control a few smart people figured out this extraordinary system and then they broke down the tasks into discrete tasks they linked them all together and really the only people who understood that were a few people have managed it that worked fine when you're trying to get efficiency on something over time but it doesn't change often the problem is when things change quickly like a military plan from the first world war they put together these plans and they weren't stupid they actually were very complicated plans well thought through but as soon as they get into contact and reality changes the conditions then everything's got to change and yet if you've got this big centralized thing that says the artillery's gonna fire at this amount of time and that's not ground truth anymore things go badly so what we've got to do now is because that's truth now that's just reality and everything all the time now we've got to have a situation where information doesn't go to the top four people at the senior point to make the decision and give direction it's got to go to everybody and it's got to go to everybody along with intent or mission command that then people make decisions within that now fortunately as things got complex they they got faster information technology came it's part of the problem but it's part of the solution as well you can now pass that information down to people so that they can make those decisions that the contradiction or challenge there is really good information technology temps you into micromanagement because you suddenly can see everything you can talk to everybody so we'll share what I shouldn't I manage it you shouldn't because you can't I mean it's just too fast too complex instead you've got to leverage the information technology actually to decentralize it's better be great if you're the last guy yeah can I pick up that last point you're making because when Plutarch was writing his stuff but bottled the pressure of emails how did you separate yourself from this tide of information and what were the disciplines that you imposed upon yourself to stand back and and actually to sort of lead rather than to manage yeah that's a really good question because I don't think I ever did master it you know in the in the period that the most intense period when I was enjoying Special Operations Command I was there for five years and I stayed there the whole time and that was the period when I slept four hours of ninety eight one meal a day and so what I did was create more time to help a little bit that's not the right answer because most do it you can't do it forever we did a few things one at first we had suggestions that we would limit emails only send certain emails to certain people we decided who knows who needs to know something so instead what we do is we share everything we let people self curate their own stuff and decide what they do that worked better on our website we used to share porn portal site we put things in four levels and the first level level one was push information everyone in the command needed to know it the analogy we use front page above the fold like if you walked by a newspaper at a newsstand and you look at the front page you see everything that's happening and you know if you need to buy a paper open it up and and get more detail on something if you don't all right we did that we push that to the whole command you couldn't dodge it then there were three levels below that all were pull where you depending upon what you needed and where you went that's the best we came to we never were able to master exactly how to control email how to control calls and things like that we did find that we stopped having one-on-one meetings unless it was a personal issue we brought bigger groups in because what you didn't want to have is a one-on-one meeting with this person has to go tell her subordinates who's got it we just started telling everybody all at the same time it was a pretty big culture shift that people had to get used to but it was so much more efficient that I think those are the things we move towards thank you yeah it's funny we had a really contentious video teleconference with the White House one night and our mission statement was to try to protect the stability of Afghanistan the existence the sovereignty and stability of the Afghan state in order to prevent it from becoming a terrorist safe haven again for al-qaeda now implied in that if you're gonna create the sovereignty or protect the sovereignty and stability of the country you're also going to leave it a functioning country but the the the in order to was to prevent al-qaeda from reoccupying and having a base key that they can work from I don't think people understood it very well I I don't think everybody did and I don't think I don't think we had enough really hard discussions about it because it implies a certain level of action as resides a certain level of resources and sometimes the imprecision of language or the unwillingness for people to jump in and put their arms around it was was less than it needed to be I'm very sorry and if we haven't managed to get to your question but thank you all very much for coming and thank you again general McChrystal it's been

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Keywords: Stanley McChrystal, McChrystal, leadership, international forces, Afghanistan, Walt Disney, Margaret Thatcher, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Martin Luther King, myth and reality, Jeff Eggers, Jason Mangone, Hannah MacInnes, H​ow To Academy​, H​ow To: Academy​, Driftwood Pictures, Conway Hall, London, Leadership Masterclass, Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal Group, Team of Teams

Id: vTruun2YhlA

Length: 74min 43sec (4483 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018