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

by Stanley McChrystal

Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.

you can only optimize for efficiency if you can identify x and y sufficiently far in advance to build a dependable system for converting one into the other; the pursuit of efficiency is grounded in prediction.

Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.” If

Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.

“Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working . . . than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each . . . adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

we needed the SEALs to trust Army Special Forces, and for them to trust the CIA, and for them all to be bound by a sense of common purpose: winning the war, rather than outperforming the other unit.