Team of Teams Quotes

“If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win—what would you do differently?”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“years ago, a Fortune 500 firm was expected to last around seventy-five years. Today this life expectancy is less than fifteen years and is constantly declining. The Fortune 500 list of 2011 featured only sixty-seven companies that appeared on the list of 1955, meaning that just 13.4 percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 were still on the list fifty-six years later. Eighty-seven percent of the companies simply couldn’t keep up; they had either gone bankrupt, merged with other companies, been forced to go private, or fallen off the list completely.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In place of maps, whiteboards began to appear in our headquarters. Soon they were everywhere. Standing around them, markers in hand, we thought out loud, diagramming what we knew, what we suspected, and what we did not know. We covered the bright white surfaces with multicolored words and drawings, erased, and then covered again. We did not draw static geographic features; we drew mutable relationships—the connections between things rather than the things themselves.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win—what would you do differently?” At first they would chuckle, assuming I was joking, but soon realized I wasn’t. At that point most became very thoughtful. If they were forced to operate on a metric of task completion, rather than watching the clock until they went home, the implications would be significant.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“adopted a practice I called “thinking out loud,” in which I would summarize what I’d heard, describe how I processed the information, and outline my first thoughts on what we should consider doing about it. It allowed the entire command to follow (and correct where appropriate) my logic trail, and to understand how I was thinking.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Our teams were crafted to be chess pieces with well-honed, predictable capabilities. Our leaders, including me, had been trained as chess masters, and we hoped to display the talent and skill of masters. We felt responsible, and harbored a corresponding need to be in control, but as we were learning, we actually needed to let go.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“But the leader’s access to information is not the problem. We can work harder, but how much can we actually take in? Attention studies have shown that most people can thoughtfully consider only one thing at a time, and that multitasking dramatically degrades our ability to accomplish tasks requiring cognitive concentration. Given these limitations, the idea that a “heroic leader” enabled with an über-network of connectivity can simultaneously control a thousand marionettes on as many stages is unrealistic.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“When he shifted the coffee break system from being individual to being team based, interaction rose and AHT dropped, demonstrating a strong link between interaction and productivity. As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Testing for a sense of purpose at its broadest and most visceral is simple: make the experience unpleasant enough and only the truly committed will persevere. The physical hardship of BUD/S is a test, not of strength, but of commitment. “We could tell from interviews who would drop,” Ruiz says. “It was the ones who were in it for themselves: ‘I want to try BUD/S,’ ‘I think I’ll enjoy the challenge.’ Nobody enjoys BUD/S—it’s hell.” The successful ones, he explained, “were the guys who said, ‘I wanna be on the SEAL teams. I wanna fight overseas.’ It seems like a small difference, but it means everything.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Doing this requires increasing transparency to ensure common understanding and awareness. It also often involves changing the physical space and personal behaviors to establish trust and foster collaboration. This can develop the ability to share context so that the teams can decentralize and empower individuals to act. Decisions are pushed downward, allowing the members to act quickly. This new approach also requires changing the traditional conception of the leader. The role of the leader becomes creating the broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“After identifying the adaptable and networked nature of Al Qaeda, the general and his team explored why traditional organizations aren’t adaptable. One conclusion they reached was that agility and adaptability are normally limited to small teams. They explored the traits that make small teams adaptable, such as trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individual members to act.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Management models based on planning and predicting instead of resilient adaptation to changing circumstances are no longer suited to today’s challenges. Organizations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Groups like SEAL teams and flight crews operate in truly complex environments, where adaptive precision is key. Such situations outpace a single leader’s ability to predict, monitor, and control. As a result, team members cannot simply depend on orders; teamwork is a process of reevaluation, negotiation, and adjustment; players are constantly sending messages to, and taking cues from, their teammates, and those players must be able to read one another’s every move and intent. When a SEAL in a target house decides to enter a storeroom that was not on the floor plan they had studied, he has to know exactly how his teammates will respond if his action triggers a firefight, just as a soccer forward must be able to move to where his teammate will pass the ball. Harvard Business School teams expert Amy Edmondson explains, “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” Without this trust, SEAL teams would just be a collection of fit soldiers”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Henry Mintzberg, author of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: “Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Within our Task Force, as in a garden, the outcome was less dependent on the initial planting than on consistent maintenance. Watering, weeding, and protecting plants from rabbits and disease are essential for success. The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“All the efficiency in the world has no value if it remains static in a volatile world”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“unpredictability is the hallmark of complexity”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Experience had taught me that nothing was heard until it had been said several times.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we needed to promote at the organizational level the kind of knowledge pool that arises within small teams.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In the military, where we love abbreviations, we have a term for the one element in a situation that holds you back—a limfac (limiting factor).”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we now live in a world where risk exists everywhere, but we have never been safer.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents, like our Task Force. But this is easier said than done.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World