MAY 13, 2015 - 10:49 AM
Just when you think that you’ve heard it all: I learned from General McChrystal’s new book that in early 2003, when McChrystal was on the Joint Staff, that Central Command, then led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, “initially prohibited the Pentagon staffs from viewing their internal Web site out of a (common) fear of giving ‘higher headquarters visibility into unfinalized planning products.”
McChrystal comments that, “Such absurdities reflect that most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”
A book release with a more promising premise is hard to imagine: the inside story on the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Task Force adaptation in the War on Terror, reversing the outcome from failure to success. Moreover, the lessons learned from that experience can be applied to the leadership and management of any organization struggling to address the dynamic, complex environments of our globalized lives.
Up front, Stan McChrystal offers a vital caveat that all readers ignore at their peril: Team of Teams is not a war story. This is a leadership story and a management story, masterfully crafted and compellingly delivered by McChrystal with the assistance of two former Navy SEALs — David Silverman and Chris Fussell — and Tantum Collins, a Yale graduate currently studying at Cambridge.
The text is a tour de force of management theory over the past century. Beginning with Taylor’s work on efficiency and the foundation of scientific management, the authors establish the underpinnings of most legacy military and business organizations. Next there is a thorough treatment of complexity, carefully distinguishing it from mere complication, and how this phenomenon defeats most adherents to scientific management. The next transition is to resilience thinking, adaptability, and the important distinctions between team thinking and command thinking. Finally, there are key observations on how modern technology enables shared consciousness, greater transparency of decision-making and devolution of decision-making authority to lower levels. Anecdotes and vignettes mined from the authors’ military experiences and management studies weave through and connect the argument.
Team of Teams offers explicit and substantive prescriptions for what ails modern organizations. The argument is that the benefits of small, effective teams can be scaled up significantly through a network approach built on transparent decision-making and an “eyes-on / hands-off” devolution of decision authority to the lowest practical levels. The recommendations include the physical co-location of key stakeholder representatives and robust attention to liaison representation where that is not possible. Technology can be leveraged for large scale communication of context and intent to the “team of teams.” Most importantly, there is a unifying emphasis throughout on the human dimension of organizational behavior and culture.
GEN McChrystal argues compellingly that this is no “zero-defects” approach, and that leaders in a complex environment must be content with a 70% solution. I suspect Stan was significantly “hands-off” in his authorship role here, because 70% is how I would score the military perspective of Team of Teams. Granted — it is not a war story — but most military officers picking up this text will utter a short prayer: “Please God, don’t let this be about how SOF won the war. And if SOF has to win the war, please don’t let it be about how only the SEALs did it.”
Alas, such prayers go largely unanswered. There is no mention of the 160,000 non-SOF military members that shared the Iraqi battle space with JSOTF, or their complementary role as the admittedly non-cool, non-special team in the team of teams. Although there is grudging acknowledgement that there are non-Navy SOF elements, the SEALs overwhelm the narrative with extensive accounts of BUDS training, etc. In a world where the SEALs are painfully over-exposed, this will generate some anti-bodies in more experienced military readers. Such readers will also not find co-location of the joint and inter-governmental battle-staff, attention to LNO assignments, or extensive televideo conferencing of daily O&I meetings as ground-breaking innovations, as these have been standard practice in the conventional forces at least back to Army operations in Bosnia in the mid-90s.
In spite of the scope of this text as a management treatise, intriguing questions go unanswered. The enemy is portrayed as being superiorly adaptive and resilient, with scant explanation of how they achieved that. The role of their ideology as a substitute for directive command and control is unexplored. Although decision authority can be decentralized in an “eyes on / hands off” environment, accountability can not be decentralized — is this risk always acceptable? How does one navigate the treacherous tensions between authority and accountability?
Finally, the elephant in the room is that for all this adaptation and innovation the enemy they defeated has forced the evacuation of the old JSOTF base of operations at Balad, Iraq. Strategy still eats organization and process for breakfast. This omission of context particularly frustrates me because I witnessed GEN McChrystal’s personal and vital role in recognizing the Sunni revolt in Anbar Province and setting the strategic conditions in place that enabled a temporary window of stability in Iraq. The book would be improved if this exemplary, self-effacing leader was more hands-on in explaining the role of effective strategy — in the absence of which even teams of teams will flounder.
Notwithstanding these quibbles, Team of Teams slashes useful trails through the jungle of complexity that bewilders most modern organizations. It is a story worthy of a careful read and even more careful reflection.
David Fastabend is a retired Army officer who served as Multinational Forces Iraq C3 in 2006-2007 and Director of Strategy, Plans and Policy for the Army Staff 2007-2009.
MAY 12, 2015 - 10:39 AM
Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, is essentially two books.
One is a Gladwell-esque attempt to relate a variety of stories, most familiar but some new, that are meant to illuminate different aspects of both the history of management thought and of the authors’ solution to the problem of how to make large bureaucratic organizations flexible and adaptive enough to succeed in the modern world.
The other is a description of how McChrystal and his team radically improved the performance of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq by transforming it from a rigid hierarchic structure to, in their term, a “team of teams.” JSOC’s new structure and method of operating allowed it to integrate intelligence more effectively and plan and launch operations much more quickly than it ever could have before, resulting in a series of (temporary) triumphs, culminating in the killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Team of Teams has some significant weaknesses, but its description of how a remarkably gifted leader transformed an organization in the most challenging of circumstances both adds to our understanding of the Iraq War and is likely to be helpful and occasionally inspiring for executives. It may be particularly useful for business leaders who are unlikely to read the academic research that has come to very similar conclusions, but who might instead be drawn to a story of organizational transformation under literal, not metaphoric, fire.
Many large organizations today struggle with exactly the problem McChrystal and his co-authors identify: the need to be far more agile, adaptable, responsive to information from the environment, and able to learn and innovate quickly in response to new, unanticipated, and rapidly-evolving threats than they would have had to be a generation ago. The solutions they identify, of breaking down organizational silos, building personal ties between members of different units within the organization to enable information flow and cooperation, and minimizing or eliminating leaders’ tendency to micromanage subordinates in favor of empowering people to make their own decisions whenever possible, are familiar, but also useful, powerful, and likely to be implementable by business leaders.
Team of Teams’ strongest effect is that it leaves me enormously impressed by McChrystal’s abilities. Few leaders could have stepped back from the war effort in Iraq and rethought some of the most basic assumptions about how the military should operate. Even fewer could have countered the tendency to throw more resources at the problem or optimize current processes instead of reinventing the organization wholesale. Even more impressive, of course, is that after McChrystal and his team diagnosed the problem they faced, they were able to successfully implement this radically new approach in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Teams of Teams’ most useful aspects for executives are likely its concrete examples of how McChrystal and his team reformed JSOC, with analogues of many of those approaches available to business leaders. Their solutions may not be new, but few people can claim to have implemented such ideas so successfully or in such adverse conditions.Team of Teams’ suggestions are far from complete but they are, without question, useful, interesting, and often thought-provoking.
Team of Teams is far from flawless. It does not explain, for example, which circumstances that make its preferred organizational form preferable to traditional ones, or describe the advantages of the old form over the new one. It could have been strengthened by engaging more deeply with the management literature on the organizational forms it describes, particularly the work of Michael Tushman on ambidextrous organizations and Ranjay Gulati on disrupting organizational silos. It does not engage with the differences between militaries and businesses, nor does it offer advice to leaders with authority less absolute than McChrystal’s was on how to win over opponents.
The book also stumbles when its attention shifts from the military in general and Iraq in particular. Its stories of Frederick Taylor pioneering scientific management, for example, may be interesting to readers unfamiliar with them, but they are likely to be old for many, and they tend to distract from the book’s primary goal of explaining a different model of management. In some cases the authors’ relative unfamiliarity with business shows — their attribution of the financial crisis to a lack of supervision of junior employees in Wall Street firms by senior managers, for example, shallowly (and arguably mistakenly) analyzes a complex event of surpassing importance.
It also has a small number of factual and editorial errors. But these should not impede anyone from reading Team of Teams or taking its ideas about management seriously.
Despite its weaknesses, Team of Teams is valuable. Its most important advice for leaders, however, is likely to be the hardest for them to take. Information technology enables leaders to monitor their organization with unprecedented immediacy and fidelity. McChrystal and his co-authors acutely observe that this is a double-edged sword. Such transparency can be a huge asset when it allows leaders to learn about what their followers are doing, and when it allows followers to observe leaders and get general guidance from them. When it is used to enable leaders to micro-manage their followers instead, this transparency is an organizational bane. McChrystal’s description of his personal struggle with his controlling instincts (instincts shared by most leaders) is therefore likely to be particularly valuable to other leaders struggling to make the same organizational transformation.
Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. He has published on leadership, military innovation, and the security and economic implications of advances in synthetic biology.
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