The key ideas

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Stanley McChrystal, 2015

Why was the best army in the world losing to a poorly armed network? General Stanley McChrystal tells how his task force in Iraq realised it was built for a world that no longer existed, and rebuilt itself into a "team of teams". You'll learn why adaptability matters more than efficiency, how thousands of people come to see the whole picture, and why it's time for a leader to become a gardener rather than a chess master.

Who it is for

For anyone who leads people or works in a large organization and sees that smart people and good departments somehow can't keep up with change. And for anyone curious how a special forces command rebuilt itself in the middle of a war.

There's likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that's your mission.

The best soldiers in the world are losing

Iraq, 2004. General Stanley McChrystal commands a special task force. It is made up of the best special operators in the American military: they have the best training, the best intelligence and the most advanced equipment. Fighting them is Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group with no headquarters, no rulebook and no decent weapons. And it is winning. The attacks don't stop, and each successful special forces raid changes almost nothing.

McChrystal wrote this book together with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell. It's about how the task force understood why it was losing and rebuilt itself from scratch. The reason was unexpected: it wasn't about courage or weapons, but about how the organization itself was built. It had been designed for a world that no longer existed.

The book's main idea: in a fast and tangled world, the winner isn't the most efficient organization but the one that can adapt quickly. To do that, it has to become a "team of teams": a large structure where thousands of people work as smoothly and flexibly as a small unit.

It's worth remembering what kind of book this is. It's the experience of one military command and the conclusions of its leaders, not a scientific study. The army is a special environment, and not everything carries over to an office directly. But the questions McChrystal asks apply to any company, hospital or startup: why do smart people in a good organization suddenly fail to keep up with the world?

An enemy with no one in charge

At first the task force fought the way it had been trained to. Intelligence gathers information, headquarters plans, the units carry out the plan, the analysts go through what was captured. Every stage was polished to perfection. The trouble was that by the time the information had passed along this chain, the enemy had already moved, swapped people and struck somewhere else.

McChrystal describes Al-Qaeda in Iraq as a network. It had no vertical chain where orders come down from the top. Small groups acted on their own, regrouped quickly and swapped news all the time. McChrystal recalls a Greek myth. Proteus, a sea god, changed his shape so he couldn't be caught. This network was the same: hit one cell and it had already taken another form.

Hence the main conclusion of the first part of the book. The task force didn't have an efficiency problem, it had an adaptability problem. It was superb at doing things that had already become useless. McChrystal put it briefly: it takes a network to defeat a network.

The mistake many organizations make is that, in response to failure, they start working even harder along the old lines. More control, more reports, more plans. McChrystal admits that at first his task force did the same.

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About the author

Stanley McChrystal is a retired American general who commanded the US Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and then the NATO forces in Afghanistan. He wrote the book with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell.

All books by this author: Stanley McChrystal

Terms from the book

  • Nelson
  • Taylor
  • scientific management
  • Mueller
  • Lorenz
  • Al-Qaeda
  • Butterfly effect
  • Navy SEALs
  • Apollo
  • Collins: Tantum Collins, one of the co-authors of Team of Teams.
  • Silverman: David Silverman, one of the co-authors of Team of Teams.
  • Fussell: Chris Fussell, a co-author of the book and a partner at McChrystal Group, the consulting firm McChrystal founded.
  • Proteus: A sea god from Greek myth who changed his shape so that nobody could get an answer out of him. McChrystal compares the enemy's elusive network to him.
  • Fort Bragg: A large US Army base in North Carolina, home to special operations forces.
  • Walker: Brian Walker, an Australian ecologist who studies the resilience of natural and social systems, co-author of the book Resilience Thinking.
  • Salt: David Salt, a science writer, who co-wrote Resilience Thinking with Brian Walker.
  • Crew resource management: An approach to pilot training introduced after the crashes of the late 1970s: everyone in the cockpit must speak up about a problem, and the captain must listen and use the knowledge of the whole crew.
  • Sullenberger: Chesley Sullenberger, an American pilot. In January 2009 he landed a passenger plane with both engines out on the Hudson River in New York, and everyone on board survived.
  • Ranger: A soldier of the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, an elite light infantry unit for special operations.
  • Pentland: Alex Pentland, an American scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how communication between people affects the work of groups.
  • ELDO: The European Launcher Development Organisation, which existed in the 1960s and 1970s. Its Europa rocket never put a payload into orbit.
  • Shared consciousness: McChrystal's term, not a scientific concept: a state of an organization in which everyone understands not only their own task but the whole picture.
  • Balad: A town and large air base north of Baghdad, where the task force had its headquarters.
  • Liaison officers: Military personnel sent to work in another unit or agency to set up information sharing and joint work.
  • Empowered execution: McChrystal's term: the right to decide is handed to those closest to the problem, on condition that they can see the whole picture.
  • Trafalgar: A cape in southern Spain, off which the British fleet defeated the Franco-Spanish fleet on 21 October 1805.
  • Zarqawi: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006), a Jordanian terrorist and leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was killed in an air strike on 7 June 2006.
  • Abd al-Rahman: Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, Zarqawi's spiritual adviser. Watching him led the task force to Zarqawi's hideout.

All terms

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