View From The Top: General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal

I had an amazing evening last night I came out and we got together with family that I had never met and in fact I found out from my late father's he had written his memoirs and I just got a chance to read those recently that in fact his father's brother had a big house in Palo Alto and so I found out that the family some of whom were here many of them are Stanford graduates or current Stanford students that was interesting what was really good was I found out they owned the house and I also have reason to believe they owned all the land that Stanford is on and still do we're flexible we work out some kind of rental agreement I think but they'll have to be a few changes and I think you'll get used to uniforms in marchin over time we're going to talk about a couple of things today and I thought that one of the things that a good thing to talk about is the meaning of life and the meaning of life of course is explained in this diagram here if I put this up if they taught it at West Point the cadets would be required to measure the length work the angles know exactly what the balls are but they wouldn't give a damn whether they knew the meaning of life but I was counseled here that I'm speaking to a very August crowd and so I should not speak down to Stanford students so any questions this is going to be a lot easier than I thought from 30th September 2004 in the LML neighbourhood of Baghdad in Iraq five seasoned hard looking men moved down the street very difficult time in that part of the city they moved into an abandoned house and inside there was still some furniture broken glass and things like that and they met three other men they began to discuss an operation they were soldiers they began to discuss an operation that would be conducted this was a difficult part of the war those individuals knew war they made plans to conduct an operation would be both dangerous for them and require very very careful planning ultimately because of the nature of the operation they wore local garb and they used local vehicles and they had two vehicles and then they had some people who would move on foot when they were prepared they occupied two of the vehicles and then the people on foot took off and they moved toward their target where their enemy was meeting the enemy was meeting at the opening of a water sewage plant as the individuals came the first vehicle carried the first group of Fighters to moved to the target area it moved right into the crowd and then with a click of a switch the car exploded it created mayhem but the crowd began to gather back in again the crowd had been Iraqi officials American soldiers handing out candy to young children and a disproportionate young number of Iraqi children when the crowd had filled back in again the second car arrived and it too detonated 42 human beings were killed 35 of whom were children 141 people were wounded 72 of which were also children and the sense of a military operation of the kind that we are not normally prepared for had to be gathered because this group of Fighters were al-qaida in Iraq they've become hardened professionals in a sense and they conduct a very well run operation with a new set of rules so today I thought we talked about doing the right thing I'm not going to talk about it from a sense of morality I'm going to talk about a sense of what this means for the future of organizational leadership how things are happening in the real world and how I think that they will happen in the future in 2003 I took command of the Joint Special Operations Command that organization was known by its acronym JSOC I'd served in it for much of my career I'd serve in Afghanistan before this and I took command of its of this unique organization and this organization was formed after the failure of the 1980 attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in the American Embassy in Tehran and it was designed to bring together America's most elite special operating units Delta Force seals Rangers others into this umbrella organization or Task Force that could do all the difficult missions that the nation envisioned we would need in the future the failure of the Iranian rescue mission Operation Eagle Claw gave impetus and fairly quickly the resourcing and talent gave real strength of this command real ability so when I took command in the fall of 2003 in Iraq by 2004 if I were to describe JSOC to you it was a pretty unique entity it was elite every individual in the organization went through a selection and assessment process selection to get it to get selected then a very detailed training process it was well resourced extraordinarily so better than any other part of the US military in fact if you had an idea of a new piece of equipment or a requirement or weapon we had the ability to fund and get that on very very rapid timelines and it was efficient he had developed processes it had developed a culture of doing things very very well so it was this very effective unique entity by the summer of 2004 we were also losing and you say what is losing mean it's not like not making a profit this quarter it doesn't feel like that it feels and looks much different than that it feels like tragedy it feels like loss of life it feels like loss of national and individual futures and dreams and it procore acquires people to come to grips with the fact you can lose and you have to do something about it we knew that something was different in this particular fight we were so good but we knew that the environment was different the 21st century was different than what we had prepared for and what we had experienced earlier in our careers and needed something new but we didn't know what it was we just knew we were doing all the other things we'd been taught to do but they weren't working like they used to work so today what I do is I thought I'd take you through what we think had changed what we needed to do and then ultimately what we did so let's talk about change everybody goes through change in your professional life in your personal life when I was young I hit things pretty good as you can see I saved money on what beer I drank to buy nice trousers but my misspent youth had a in date and that end date came this day when any corcoran then agreed to be my wife and imagine me looking down the aisle see a beautiful girl and then seeing her dad rut row but when you get married a lot of things change in your life but one thing doesn't change at all Annie hasn't changed in 37 years not at all I have to say that that's how you make 37 years but your life changes and pretty soon after that a few years later Annie blessed us with a child a son and so I did what everybody does when you got a son I hang them upside down I flipped him around like this and then he does what every mother does she goes don't do that you give him brain damage I said I'm not gonna give him brain damage this is my son in high school maybe a little bit but he waltz through Florida State for a four-year degree in seven years but just are you think there isn't justice in the world he's in Afghanistan now serving for the government so it does come around but things change things change a lot for each of us and change in the environment we got to recognize admit it and deal with it so what's the new environment look like well we throw all kinds of words about the new environment all the buzzwords I don't even know what recursive means but I it means change I guess but when I look at all of this really two terms came down after we studied this that really meant more than all the others one was tight coupling and what we mean by tight coupling is when things are linked together or networked almost like a power grid or an ecosystem or a set of computers that are linked together when they're coupled so that when something happens in one part of it it may affect all or parts of the rest of it and you think of this in an ecosystem of fish and whatnot and if something happens in one maybe food source or whatever suddenly you can have this cascading effect that you're really not ready for and it's very very complex and tight coupling increases it and then tight coupling is affected by speed and we say okay we know things are faster but we don't really know how much faster it is think about how things used to arrive to you maybe the oldest people here today remember this kind of delivery but probably most of us will see this kind of delivery things will happen at a speed we're not prepared and when you put the two things together the effects of tight coupling and speed you get some interesting effects but what do you effected you're affecting what we called the elegant solution this is what was taught in business schools for many many years yell against solution was great I mean just look at it it looks good put that on the wall here off this looks like you know what's going on information goes down goes through set paths after a certain period of time at the end of the day into the weekend of the month whatever you specify the information comes back up there are right angles there are blocks that fit neatly in different parts of the organization if they need to communicate there's a process to do that it's going to go this way you're going to talk to this and it's going to happen just like this you know it was designed the elegant solution was designed to create order to solve a problem to create efficiency and people are always doing that at the end of the first world war the great takeaway was that defensive arms were stronger than offensive arms and trenches worked very well to stop enemy attacks so in the interwar years specifically the 1930s the French looked at a growing strength in Nazi Germany and they decided we need to do something to protect ourselves so they created something which has become almost a byword for stupidity they created something called the Maginot Line and the Maginot Line was designed to defend the border between France and Germany from German invasion and if you look at the Maginot Line it was actually pretty amazing thing at the top it had these steel cupola and partially buried cement and concrete facilities very difficult to target very difficult to get at but easy to man with a small number of forces vertically it went down on the ground and it had elevators that went down through multiple levels and at the multiple levels like at one level you have ammunition another level you'll actually have railroads that connect the different parts of the line for very efficient the idea was with a very small number of forces you could defend against a huge potential German attack and together it was a pretty amazing engineering feat everybody says well this is just a monument I think Patton said a monument to the stupidity of man the thing about the Maginot Line is it worked it did exactly what it was designed to do the Germans did not breach the Maginot Line in 1940 when they bet when they invaded France the French had solved that problem but they had not solved the real problem the big problem the Germans went around it they went to the north and they came through so in effect the solution worked but didn't solve the problem so the answer was to an incorrect question shall we go back to the elegant solution and we start to say well it's so neat it's so clean it's so comfortable what could be bad about this or what could be the weakness because it was vertically stratified into horizontal tears tears of rank or authority it was horizontally stratified into vertical silos typically around a functional area part of an organization and if you think of the horizontal tearing information would go down and it would go up but it assumed that the organization had adequate time for information that flow through those pathways but speed as things sped up actions around them suddenly that was tested that has been tested and with within the vertical silos the functional silos there was an assumption that as you broke these silos down you assumed an exclusive relationship ie the vast majority of the interaction is inside those silos and it fits comfortably there and if somebody needs to do business most of what they do can be done right inside that silo but as tight coupling kicks in and increases in its reality suddenly if you've got to do business in one part of the organization but it doesn't reside only in your silo if it affects many other parts of the organization suddenly you got problems because across the organization the pathways to connect these parts and deal with the tight coupling are ponderous so speed and tight coupling suddenly challenged the functionality of the elegant solution so what did we need that was really what we faced what did we need in Iraq first off as I talked about JSOC was tasked with defeating al Qaeda in Iraq which we called a Qi and go back and look at what was the force I had it was an extraordinary two elite effective force conventionally organized it had some really important traits had very clear and effective structure it had very understood and rehearsed processes it could measure what it did and it could optimize or get the most efficiency out of the organization possible hit the most number of targets do it with the right kinds of people and so efficiency the most effective executors should have been dominant and in fact we didn't know it at the time we were actually disciples of a guy named Frederick Winslow Taylor born in the middle of the 19th century near Philadelphia son of a very successful lawyer Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1874 applied to college there was no Stanford so he applied to Harvard he got accepted to Harvard but he wisely chose instead to go work on a factory floor just take a basic job on a factory floor and there he became fanatical in his desire to understand the concept of best practices what works best how do you get the most efficiency out of an organization and he eventually produced a book which are undoubtedly familiar with scientific management and became a Bible really for the 20th century and how we do things break everything into its tasks something we could call reductionism and then pull those tasks together and if they're all efficiency done efficiently done you got a great process I think it's really represented well by a really good assembly line if you get that right it's going to be hard for any other approach to be more effective against this we have al-qaeda in Iraq they were not organized like we were they were organized like this loose network of associations we kept trying to put them on whiteboards and we map out their structure top and tiers down but they never got that memo and they were instead organized by friendships and family associations in who'd served together in Afghanistan who had other relationship who was married to whose sister I don't think this was carefully thought out and planned but it became the organic way in which they were structured and what it gave them was extraordinary adaptability because they didn't have a manual that they were violating their manual was survive and win and so suddenly this extraordinary the apogee of efficiency is up against this child of adaptability and we were having big problems so we felt a lot about this and you say what is efficiency efficiency if you get it down here it's getting the most why what you want with the least X it's making the most cars with the least steel it's doing the most raids with the fewest forces it's making the most money with the least investment and it's pretty straightforward all you got to do is clarify what Y is and then focus until you figure out the most efficient X but it assumes you know y it assumes you know what you have to do the the output or requirement but speed and tight coupling and produce something we call emergent properties and emergent properties are when you put together phenomenon like those you get unexpected outcomes you get a different environment that those qualities have changed and so suddenly why is not so easy to solve for think of it this way we're going to talk about Springs as we get more data now we can collect more information now very very quickly and we can predict whether or better than ever before now forget things like global warming but just typical weather patterns as we get more and more information our ability to predict weather has gotten increasingly effective so it ought to apply to everything but think of the Arab Spring we have more and more ability to watch what happening talk to people deal more and more data but in reality the Arab Spring is a complex event that is affected itself by more data as more information passes more communication more complexity so we are trying to gather more data but exponentially that which we are trying to measure and predict is more complex so more data does not equal more predictability and that can produce something we call predictive hubris in 1973 they did a study and the study gave people who were well experienced in horse racing information first they gave them ten pieces of information about all the horses and they asked them to predict the outcome and they measured their confidence in how accurate they thought their prediction would be then they gave them 20 variables and asked the same thing interestingly enough with 10 variables their accuracy was X with 20 variables with 20 pieces of information their accuracy didn't go up at all but their confidence that they had it right went up significantly so they were more confident probably with the second than they should have been because they had more data but they didn't really have more reason to be accurate so you can have a phenomenon which predictive hubris and think of the times in life where we assume something is going to happen because it has happened before because data says it is and then we are completely surprised so now we say if we're going to go back to our equation of getting the most with the least well X what if you don't know why and it's pretty hard to figure out the other variables suddenly you're dealing with constantly changing requirement you don't even know what the problem you're going to have to solve tomorrow is so getting a perfectly efficient solution to that is elusive so adaptability becomes the holy grail and the way I put that is adaptability is a difference between doing things right doing things by established processes habits training and doing the right thing doing what works becomes your attention and if you go back to Iraq the difference between my force and al-qaeda in Iraq as much as we tried we carried the baggage of doing things right if you don't violate your processes the principles you've been taught people won't criticize you even if you fail but I did all the right things now if you lost you obviously didn't against an enemy whose only metric was survival and success so efficiency comes up against adaptability an efficiency comes up the loser so what we did was we melded the two we tried to take the best of what we do put it together with extreme adaptability and change the way we thought and operated to make it work so how did we do that what did it look and feel like we all know small teams everybody's been on a basketball team or small class or something where it just feels easy you can finish each other's sentences you can predict what people are going to do what's the nature of those that allows that to happen most of us remember the first of May 2011 and the raid that ultimately killed Osama bin Laden had we been watching in real time as some people were in the White House and other locations as the two special helicopters came to land in the compound one of the helicopters crash-landed now that's 50% of your assault force crash lands before you get anywhere eyeball-to-eyeball with the enemy and you go we're screwed but if you understand these operations and while I was in command we probably did several thousand of equal complexity something always went wrong that was well within the span of what we typically expected an experience so when an aircraft goes down it's not like I we got to go back and try again another day nope we deal with it and so that had been built into the DNA of the force that had been built into the people so what does make a team great we always say well go get the best people you can some of its parts get together talent and you're going to win I call out the dream team fallacy for those of you remember the American the u.s. men's basketball team in 2004 brought together the best professional basketball players in the world walked away with a bronze medal while Argentina got the gold so strictly speaking just talent doesn't do it a team is not the sum of its parts there's something else Navy SEALs this calendar came out in 1992 we gave him amazing amount of over this as you can imagine but if you think of Navy SEALs you say why are seals so effective it's because they are all genetically superior brilliant motivated etc but in reality to be a seal it's difficult but there are many people who can do it thus the physical standard for swimming is to do two miles in 75 minutes with fins now not everybody here can do two miles in 75 minutes but this 64 year-old Lady Diana Nyad did two miles in less than 75 minutes and then she swam a hundred and eight more miles staying under that same pace the whole time so it's not a case of Superman it's not a case of people who just are identified for their exquisite abilities it's something else and I think part of that is trust and purpose now what is trust trust is we use the term a lot but I'm not sure we really know what it is it's faith in your colleagues but it's also familiarity with them it's that special relationship that comes between people in organizations where you absolutely know and can rely on what they're going to do and why and it builds that special bond in Navy SEAL training called basic underwater demolition school buds everything is designed to build trust between people they have to go somewhere with another swim buddy all the time all of the drills that are done are done with either a group or at least one other person it's designed to build that special linkage of trust and purpose one of the things that we do in elite units is we make the training regimen to get in the selection process so hellacious that it takes this huge commitment it involves physical pain sometimes fear often a lot of sacrifice of time other things to get in that organization and to be a part of that you have made a big commitment to be a part of that one of the things it does is it helps identify those people who are aligned and it also increases the alignment because that's what you invested in you tend to feel committed to and so really trust and purpose changes the basic calculus between individuals so trust in purpose is an emotional linkage then you give them a contextual linkage ie they have shared information they all can get access to shared information suddenly you get something that we call shared consciousness now that shared consciousness is almost a magical property because people who have trust and purpose and then they understand and see similarly not agree with everything that's not the point but it produces this emergent intelligence and awareness that is shared between them so think about it ants the average ant is said to have seven neurons of brain power I served with guys with about that level but hundreds of thousands of ants can come together and without a spoken language without a written language without any handbook without any formal education they can create these extraordinarily fun functional colonies and do these amazing things like this anthill seven neurons of brains so now let me for just a second here because I've got a classmate of mine from West Point here a guy named ed Evans and he and I were right at the bottom of the class in math and I just want to celebrate the moment with you ed that I am a Stanford's business school teaching a math equation our instructors would roll over in their graves so what am I saying here I'm saying efficiency or effectiveness of the team the excellence is a function of the individual excellence the talent the commitment of individuals and a and shared consciousness sort of makes sense and that individual excellence is what we bring to the table or or was built inside us and then that connection between us is that almost that magic elixir the changes that relationship and you can apply this at various levels excellence at different levels you can look at it that way we're familiar with small teams because that's sort of natural but think of it at any given level it's a function of excellence one level down the component pieces times the level of shared consciousness one level down so if your pieces work together and we would think about it this way a SEAL team an aggregate unit of seals is the function of individual seals times that shared consciousness shared between them now in JSOC we we understood this intuitively it was in our culture it was in our DNA it was how we operated it was how we thought it was everything about who we were but yet at the next level we got it completely wrong because at the JSOC level where we were a larger unit that was made up of larger components suddenly at the team level we had really good teams but when we did things to operate together we kidded ourselves this would be the setup for what we called ellipse exercises every quarter four times a year we did these complex special operations exercises to build the team into this effective team and we would typically bring task forces blue as a seal green as Delta red as the Rangers we bring all this complex entity together we're going to do a complex operation to show how closely our teamwork works but most of the operations looked a lot like this there would be three objectives the seals would hit one objective Delta would hit one objective and the Rangers would have one objective geographically dispersed so we didn't run into each other you take those objectives down then you return back to the base and then you'd have this combined what we call a hot washer actor action view see how it went we didn't really do a complex operation we really did three separate operations in many cases the forces on those didn't really work together they weren't really in this training environment tightly coupled so we didn't produce what we thought we were producing we didn't produce inside the organization that shared consciousness between the larger teams so where we got it right at the low level automatically when we took it up a level we got it wrong but didn't think we have it wrong so how do you scale this how do you get it up and make it work at larger levels because this is where it gets hard anybody can make a basketball team work together almost anybody you start with one team small team you got emotional and intellectual connections that have to be built at the emotional level you know everybody at the intellectual level you all have total awareness and that's pretty easy to do when you start to go at a higher level bigger suddenly you have to take a team of team approach because there's just things you can't do to make an individual team cannot be too large so the approach has to be somebody has to know somebody else or someone else in another organization so there have got to be connections not between every individual but between every organization at some human level and you have to have practical contextual awareness not everybody can do everything but you've got to have enough linkage so that it pulls you into a similar relationship that the small team enjoys think about the old system as you try to build this intellectual synchronizations you try to get everybody on the same sheet of music inside our vertical silo and our old elegant solution we typically had things which made that work you had environmental context everybody shared they saw what was happening in their part of the factory their part of the business they got that they had organizational context they knew people they knew how it was structured it was pretty comfortable and technologically they were constrained it was hard to reach out and talk to people in the other part of the organization because you had to go to another building another state we didn't have email phones quite as easily as we do now so maintaining connections was automatically constrained so it wasn't assumed but all that's changed obviously when you think of effective intellectual synchronization we think of NASA and so what do you think you think of the movie Apollo 13 and think of the control room and you think of failures not an option everybody go in check check check check check the real miracle of NASA didn't occur in the Apollo 13 control room it occurred in the development of the Apollo program which was amazing what they were doing in less than a decade was creating technology all of which was changing as they did it pulling pieces of all this technology together to create something that was extraordinarily different from anything that had been done and they pulled this engineering effort together at disparate locations in real time in less than a decade it's probably one of the best case studies of an organization being able to share information remember this is before they were empowered it with as many information sharing tools as we have now in Joint Special Operations Command when I took over we had a very small update every day for leaders in the organization so we kind of get in a huddle and past information synchronize we started with about 50 people in it by the time up I gave up command it was more than seven we did it every day 90 minutes long every day essentially the whole command so everybody shared information knew where we were going what we're doing and what updates and changes had occurred so you need some kind of robust communication form doesn't all look the same but there's got to be a way where everybody develops that shared consciousness and you got to be emotionally tied because people act on emotion we started with frequent casual exposure you know you run into people think about it if you don't see somebody in a long time it's hard to have conversations but if you see them constantly in your dorm in your office wherever you start to talk we were running operations that dependent upon aircraft who did surveillance did full motion video and we had fighters shooters up our operators who were going to go on the targets as much as possible I brought all of those to single base locations because what I wanted is I wanted the pilot who is going to fly that very sensitive reconnaissance mission during the attack when they came back and they went to the mess hall I wanted them to run into the operators who'd been on the mission and I wanted them to feel shared and if one of them screwed it up I wanted them to see each other eyeball to eyeball because it's a lot easier to screw somebody that you don't have to see the next day but we had to go even deeper we had to also do embedded exposure what we did was in fact the seals in Delta didn't have diplomatic relations when I took over it was sort of like Iraq and Iran which was amazing because they're very similar in culture and background but maybe too similar so I said okay we're gonna have an exchange program you're going to take people from the organization's exchange and put them in the organization's of the other assault teams and the first thing I was told can't do it cannot be done because we grow up together we have our culture we've got to rely on the guide or right and left and so it's unfair to put this external person in there and I understood that and I recognized I said but that's alright we're going do it anyway because it's hard to hate somebody you know with a few exceptions but some months after we started doing this we had a firefight in Iraq and one of our operators was shot and he lost his leg and the investigation turned out he'd been shot by friendly fire he'd been shot by one of our own operators and then we found out he'd not only been shot by one of his own operators he'd been shot by one of the exchange guys from the outside and I said that's it everybody's going to bring out every antibody to this and they're going to throw this on the table and they're going to tell me see you're responsible you got it wrong that's not what happened they said no that stuff happens he was doing the right thing he's one of us let's move on to include the guy who lost his leg we had been just long enough where they had gotten over that and now it became an empowering thing the guy who lost his leg interestingly enough courageous guy 18 months later was back in the fight on a prosthetic leg still is so shared consciousness really with our meaning of life ball here is a combination of the intellectual and emotional components of this but back to speed it's one thing to get it right as long as you get it right fast enough as fast as you have to have it this was a real problem for us because if you think back to the original hierarchical model we always draw a triangle for this at the top of that model what do you got you got information going up where people think that's where the thinkers are people that have assigned parking spaces and at the bottom they give commands down you got people who are doing it people are actually doing to work so you got the people up here thinking and the people down here doing and yet it can be a problem there's a lot of history for it if you think of army units traditionally they're very much direct armies would get in formation they would march in formation the whole purpose was to get everybody at the same place at the same time so you could focus either in combat or otherwise without losing people and being disorganized the Navy had a different approach inside a ship there was tremendous discipline and focus but once a ship was sent you couldn't talk to it when Admiral Perry went to open Japan they kind of patted him on the head and say going over there and do an incredibly important thing for American foreign policy let us know how it goes they couldn't guide him so they didn't try to they said go out and do what makes sense pretty interesting difference an adaptive adapting to situation but nowadays there's this danger there's this seduction of situational awareness you can get on the internet you can read every paper you can talk to people you can call anybody you want you can do it real time by 2005 and late on to the rest of my tour I could sit in my command center and in the command center there were about 8 or 12 of these flat-panel screens and what they would have is full motion video downlink from predators and other air things they're giving me real-time TV coverage of every operation we're doing and I could sit there and I could watch everything that's happened I could watch what's going on on the target I could watch the raid force I could arrive I could watch the the firefight and because we took the radio signals and pumped him into our internet I could listen to every radio call I could listen down at the lowest level I could just an operator one talking operator two and guess what if I wanted to I could push a button I could talk to him but I never did because I realized that that was the seduction of situation awareness I didn't really know what was going on I was watching it on TV but I wasn't down or I wasn't here in the crack of bullets I wasn't cold I wasn't scared I didn't have a feel for what was actually happening but the danger is because we get all this data now we watch what's happening to here square in real-time we say what we think we know what's happening in Egypt of course we don't we may have more data but it's even more complex than that and so one of the dangers is not falling prey to this so which we really had to do to make this work fast enough with to change the thinker's into doers the doers into thinkers that everybody became both and it changed not just how we operated and change the culture of who we were and how we thought of what we did we inverted the model we decoupled the relationship between information and control I fi of the information I have control because now we could get the information to everybody and more people control what they did which allowed us to do what we call empowered execution we say decentralized operations you know if you take decentralized operations too simplistically you're just pushing your problem down to other people and say do it if you don't also give them the authorities and the information they're operating blind and it's unfair and ineffective but if you empower them with those things suddenly empowered execution lets people operate at the right level decisions be made at the right level effectively and they also feel differently about it they say how much should you D centralized decentralized until you're uncomfortable and then decentralized one more what did it do for us how does it play back to me in the summer of 2008 August 2008 my force in Iraq did 18 raids that's about one every other night now I thought we were at a breakneck pace I thought we were just pedal-to-the-metal how could you do more operations than one every other night because they were planned and they were rehearsed and they were reported up to me and then I proved them and then they do them just couldn't do it but we were still losing and not only we were losing we were starting to lose even more so we changed how we operated and two years later we were in the fight the whole time there two years later same month same force same everything else we did 300 raids that month 10 night we kept that pace up for two and a half years you couldn't have done that in a traditional hierarchical model so when you think about inverting the model really the two things that became critical first were shared consciousness we've talked about letting people have a clear shared understanding and then the idea that you're going to empower execution and the to support each other they're mutually reinforcing and that's what we now call cross lead for those of you who are in love with the elegant model this is just to make you feel good because your worship at the mantra of efficiency and you have your profits we all had our profits and they weren't wrong we got a century of extraordinary value out of being efficiency minded but we're not playing that sport anymore the game has changed the battlefield the environment whatever you want to call it has changed and now I believe the secret is adaptability and it's being able to increase our adaptability constantly not just our personal adaptability but at every level thank you and I'll be happy to answer any questions the question was what's a single most unexpected thing that I learned it was probably wrapped up into this I expected that if we got better and better at what we did if we honed our skills shoot straighter fly faster do all of those things that if we got good that our technological and quality mismatch would allow us to win that was true at the tactical level we won every firefight we had night vision goggles we had Global Positioning System we had incredible people you know with tremendous skills and courage so we won every firefight the problem is that doesn't equate to winning the war and for about two years I pressed this organization to get better at what we do better what we do better what we do and we're winning all the firefights and I'm telling myself therefore we'll just do this long enough we'll win the war that wasn't right it was like a thousand people taking an accent and and chopping on a tree but they're all hit in different spots a lot of barks flying and what an opportune time it wasn't until we figured out to change that model and we had to get more focused into the big outcome that that it worked and it ultimately did we broke out Qaeda in Iraq now they're coming back but it's for reasons of internal to Iraq sir general McChrystal good afternoon my name is Phil misere I'm an MBA one and a former Navy pilot you spoke a little bit about how the drones had kind of affected your situational awareness and I'd like to ask you another question about how drones can perhaps affect the calculus when decision makers are making decisions from a tactical level as a commander it seems like the use of drones makes a lot of sense when you're going after a target if I've got to choose between a manned aircraft and a drone I'm going to pick a drone every day because we don't put a service member at risk but from a strategic perspective when our civilian decision makers are making decisions to use force or not to use force do you think that the use of drones or the capability of drones alters the calculus and makes it easier yeah that's a great question let me let me frame it a little bit first I think drones are here to stay we're going to use them we need to use them and they're important part of what we do I'm actually going to use them even more so I think that's important but they are different they're different because they are perceived differently now if you think about it there are several factors is the first is go back to 1988 anybody remember what happened in 1988 how many of you weren't born in 1988 that's very sad President Clinton ordered Tomahawk missile strikes into Afghanistan and to Sudan in response to pretty clear activities in the part of the Salman bin Laden now if those timeout missiles didn't kill ubl but they killed various people created damage if you Dasia average American the next morning if we were at war what would we have said no we're not at war we fired some Tomahawk missiles if you were near the impact point of a Tomahawk missile and you asked the next morning if they were at war with America what do you think they'd say the answer is probably different so if it lowers the threshold on the use of military force it's dangerous and what I mean if it can be too casual it can seem too easy too inexpensive too risk-free and it increases your likelihood of doing it then I would say everyone who orders one ought to go stand next to where one has gone off and where you see body parts and and things like that it's very different so I'm not saying we don't use I'm saying you got to make sure you understand what you're doing the other part of it is perceptions we've got problems with some Mexican drug lords in the US and whatnot the Mexicans are after them but what if Mexico flew across the border with drones and did a missile strike in Texas how would we respond probably not well and it's the perception of we can step back and hurl fun bolts like Thor without any risk to ourselves that's viewed as arrogance now whether that's right or wrong perceptions matter in the world that's why people go to war because they perceive something so I think we've got to be very very thoughtful about how everything we do is actually perceived by others cannot throw out the capacity entirely but be really thoughtful about it

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 75,037

Rating: 4.8174906 out of 5

Keywords: mcchrystal group, collaboration, communication strategies, employee empowerment, experienced leaders, globalization, growth strategy in the face of change, international, leadership development, leading a team, military

Id: GgrQYS-q5f4

Length: 53min 7sec (3187 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ReclaimerSpirit]

This was most excellent. Thank you very much.