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

by Stanley McChrystal

the organization we crafted, the processes we refined, and the relationships we forged and nurtured are no more enduring than the physical conditioning that kept our soldiers fit: an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.

But we also had to ask a deeper, more troubling question: If we were the best of the best, why were such attacks not disappearing, but in fact increasing? Why were we unable to defeat an underresourced insurgency? Why were we losing?

The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.

At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.

At the heart of his success was patient, yet relentless, nurturing of competence and adaptability within his crews. Here, for organizations, lies the critical nexus between theorized strategy and realized victory—the ground where doctrinaire theorists and armchair admirals fall short is the decisive terrain from which true leaders emerge. Nelson’s real genius lay not in the clever maneuver for which he is remembered, but in the years of innovative management and leadership that preceded it.