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McChrystal was faced with several truths: Part III, Sharing, offers penetrating chapters which challenge how well we share, communicate, and ultimately delegate.
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Richard Hackman and “Brooks Law,” in Leading Teams, arguing that adding staff to speed up a late project has little chance of working (p.
McChrystal’s summary: “We just needed every member of the Task Force to know someone on every team.” Think about that and whether or not it applies within your (often matrix) organization. Or, perhaps worse, the number of deaths due to medical error is now estimated to be between 210,000 to 400,000, which equates to the third leading cause of deaths in (CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) 2011 (page 124). This sets up Part II, contemporary examples of the need for agility, including the sobering comparison of United Flight 173 (airline crews structured as a command) with US Airways Flight 1549 (airline crews functioning as a team). The authors also draw an important explanation and differentiation (on page 57) between complex (sharp increase in interactions) and complicated (many parts, but may be broken down) very instructive for leadership understanding, concluding (on page 59) “small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which one will turn out to be the case.” The authors also mention Steven Johnson’s Emergence, which strips the mythology of the Ant Queen away (pages 103-5), eventually yielding that “order can emerge from the bottom up, as opposed to directives from above.”īy Chapter 4, Doing the Right Thing, we may (as McChrystal’s team did) feel outdated, outflanked and uncompetitive, very similar to our Setting Leadership Priorities workshop focusing on a leader’s need to be effective rather than efficient. With humility, McChrystal’s team (page 52) concluded, “the proliferation of new information-age technologies rendered Taylorist efficiency an outdated managerial paradigm.” A great story on pages 53-54 describes how Hosni Mubarak’s reign in Egypt ended within just three months after Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi’s horrific self-immolation protest. He is so stupid that the word “percentage” has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful (page 43).” “ shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type… the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. Taylor focused on extreme efficiency, which correspondingly discounted people: McChrystal persuasively argues any organizational endeavor would learn well Taylor’s lasting influence about how people and teams do things. It continued to function as persistently and implacably as ever, demonstrating a coherence of purpose and strategy.”Ĭentral to Part I is the story of Quaker Frederick Winslow Taylor (introduced on page 36). McChrystal, a very well trained and competent military officer, wondered why AQI was not collapsing under increased military action. Think of Part I, The Proteus Problem, as a call for self-audit of your organizational structure. General Stanley McChrystal (retired) with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell share the limitations and failures of a traditional command and control centric response to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), their transformative and successful adaptation and response, and the relevant lessons for any contemporary organization.