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

by Stanley McChrystal

New technologies enabled the construction of larger, taller buildings to house the increasingly complicated strata of the workplace. The “office building” took shape under the hand of architects such as Louis Sullivan, who envisioned structures composed of independent, standardized cells, which he likened to the hexagonal building blocks of beehives: discrete, MECE units, not to be merged.* Dictaphones and pneumatic tubes enabled discrete, directed communications at a distance without the messy inefficiencies of the countinghouse. Executives moved to separate rooms, then to plush suites, and finally to different floors to separate them from the “pools” of stenographers toiling away at desks arranged in grids, silent but for the clacking of typewriter keys. The “corner office” where a manager could separate himself from the rest of the workforce became a status symbol. (During the 2008 financial crisis it emerged that many executives commute to their offices in private elevators, further minimizing any potential interaction with employees.) It was in the early 1900s that the term “ladder” became common parlance for the corporate hierarchy.