The Art of Manliness - #313： How Leaders Build Great Teams

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a

00:00:18.940 complex, ever-changing world. Thanks to our network, Global Society, small players can

00:00:23.640 have a huge impact in geopolitics and world business. Unfortunately, most organizations

00:00:28.740 aren't structured in a way to thrive or even survive in this new fluid environment. My guest

00:00:32.520 today experienced this firsthand as he worked with General Stanley McChrystal in Iraq during the

00:00:36.100 war against Al-Qaeda. His name is Chris Fussell and his latest book, One Mission, How Leaders Build

00:00:40.660 a Team of Teams, Chris shares the tactics and tools that the military used in Iraq to transform

00:00:45.140 themselves into a more agile organization. Today on the show, Chris and I discuss why traditional

00:00:49.360 top-down leadership organizations aren't effective today, either in the world of military or business,

00:00:54.100 and how civilian organizations can apply the lessons he learned during combat. We discuss

00:00:58.480 the legacy of John Boyd's OODA Loop philosophy and how McChrystal took that idea and scaled it to the

00:01:02.520 large and often bureaucratic armed forces. And then Chris delves into how to develop a sense of

00:01:06.800 shared consciousness in your organization and how to empower subordinates to make decisions to move a

00:01:11.020 goal forward without having to ask for permission from a superior. We then discuss why complete

00:01:15.640 decentralization isn't a cure-all and why it's important to have the structure of a top-down

00:01:19.880 leadership hierarchy. Whether you're a corporate manager, business owner, or a leader in a nonprofit,

00:01:24.040 you're going to walk away with some actionable advice to make your organization better.

00:01:27.640 After the show is over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash Fussell. That's F-U-S-S-E-L-L.

00:01:37.740 Chris Fussell, welcome to the show.

00:01:40.040 Hey, thanks. Appreciate you having me on. Looking forward to the discussion here.

00:01:43.260 We got a new book out, One Mission, How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. The follow-up to your book

00:01:48.360 that you wrote with General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams. Before we get into the idea of Team of

00:01:54.860 Teams and One Mission, I think a little bit about your background would be helpful because it'll

00:01:59.980 explain a lot of what's going on here. Can you walk us through your background and what got you

00:02:04.100 to the point where you're writing a book called One Mission and Team of Teams?

00:02:07.380 Sure. I'll try to start where it gets relevant. In the late 90s, I graduated college in 1996 and

00:02:13.360 went into the Navy after that and directly into the SEAL pipeline. I started SEAL basic training,

00:02:20.720 the BUDS program in 97. And then in 98, I joined the SEAL teams on the East Coast, the U.S. and

00:02:29.000 Virginia. Spent the next 15 years in that community inside the special operations world, specifically

00:02:35.180 in the SEAL teams that entire time, but working with a broad swath of other services and then

00:02:41.940 sort of interagency partners until 2012 when I left active duty. Obviously, in the years after

00:02:47.600 2001, the world has changed dramatically and the military had to adjust the way it did operations

00:02:55.460 overseas as a result of this new type of conflict that we find ourselves in battle inside of. And

00:03:00.920 the special operations community was in a very interesting and complex part of this global fight.

00:03:07.160 So I'm sure your listeners are all well aware of how dramatically those communities have changed in

00:03:13.940 the last 15 years or so. And so I had the unique optic to be involved, you know, at multiple levels in

00:03:22.420 that change process. First, as a sort of a junior officer inside those communities in the years after

00:03:28.280 2001, and then sort of rising up to mid-management sort of positions at the operational level.

00:03:35.040 And then one year in my career, I spent as then three-star Lieutenant General McChrystal's aide to

00:03:44.560 camp his last year of five years that he commanded a global task force specifically focused on

00:03:51.160 counterterrorism. So in that year, we were basically forward deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for about

00:03:56.860 a year straight. And I was able to sort of sit right next to General McChrystal and other senior

00:04:02.080 leaders in that community. And having experienced the change from the ground level, I was then able

00:04:08.720 to sort of witness the organizational processes as a, you know, an observer to that staff, which was

00:04:15.160 just a fascinating process for me to sort of see behind the curtain and say, oh, this is how we've

00:04:21.160 gotten so much better. Not at battlefield operations that we had amazing units on the ground that were just

00:04:26.740 improving exponentially, but at the synchronization of this global enterprise. There was an amazing

00:04:31.680 process behind that. So when I left service in 2012, I partnered with General McChrystal, who had

00:04:39.160 created what we call the McChrystal Group. And we had started doing work with industry, helping them

00:04:44.580 consider similar changes in their sort of global operating model. And about four or five years ago,

00:04:52.240 we started having this conversation. Let's work on a book that tries to capture these lessons. So that was

00:04:57.020 the origins of Team of Teams. And what we found was that as we started to dig into that subject,

00:05:02.120 we realized there's a lot here. So the first book, Team of Teams, is very focused on sort of the macro

00:05:10.580 theory of the case, what has changed in the world. And our thinking led us to some deep discussion in Team

00:05:17.380 of Teams around the information age, the speed with which individuals can connect, share ideas,

00:05:24.980 create actions. That's increased the complexity in the world on orders of magnitude just in the last

00:05:31.660 10 years or so. And the argument we made in that initial book was that traditional systems aren't

00:05:38.160 capable to restrict bureaucracy of dealing with that level of speed and interconnectedness that now

00:05:44.540 sort of swarms us everywhere we look. So that was the idea of the first book. And then when we

00:05:48.740 finished that, we realized there's there's more to be said here. What are the processes that actually

00:05:54.560 allowed the enterprise that McChrystal oversaw and other organizations that are going through this

00:05:59.220 to change the way they operate to react to this, this big change that we're all dealing with.

00:06:04.520 And so that's what we focus on inside of one mission. And as we finished up Team of Teams,

00:06:10.020 had a long conversation with McChrystal, and he encouraged me, hey, you sat on the staff and observed

00:06:16.540 this, you should write the next book from that optic as a person who was sort of not in the senior

00:06:24.220 leadership team, but watching how they did business. And then I went on, after that, I had gone on to

00:06:28.340 grad school and done some thesis work on how those systems were working. And so that was the origins of

00:06:33.460 of one mission. And so we're pretty excited now that the two go in in great compliment to each

00:06:39.060 other, the theory of the case, the change we're all dealing with. And here's a practicum on how

00:06:43.720 you can actually implement this sort of change model inside your organization.

00:06:48.200 That's awesome. For our listeners who aren't familiar with the changes that the military went

00:06:52.780 through, particularly the special operations part of the military, what how was how did the military

00:06:58.180 organize itself before these changes? And how was the way they operated? Why did it like not work?

00:07:07.100 Well, the military is in simple terms, very much like any other big enterprise, it's it's structured

00:07:13.160 in a top down sort of fashion. And this is not to attack traditional hierarchical approach there.

00:07:19.000 There's a lot of strength inside of that system. And, you know, over the past 100 years or so,

00:07:24.900 say in the industrial age, collectively, you know, many folks around the world have learned those

00:07:32.880 systems and refined them to a near as near perfect state as one could hope. You know, we've seen that

00:07:37.940 in industry, we've seen that in governments, we've seen that in the military. And that is all premised on

00:07:43.360 the idea that I have enough subject matter experts that can read the environment, predict what is likely

00:07:50.000 to happen. And that could be predicting what products people will want, what the next election

00:07:55.300 cycle will look like, what our enemy on the battlefield is most likely to do based on their

00:08:00.540 supply chain, their leadership model, the terrain, etc. All the underlying foundation of those systems

00:08:07.640 is very similar. And so that's the type of system that I came into, even inside the special operations,

00:08:13.900 the operations that had gone on for years in that world were premised on the predictability of the

00:08:20.480 environment. And so you could then say, okay, here's what's likely to happen or here's what's

00:08:25.360 just happened and what will occur next. Therefore, here's the unit we're going to use to address that

00:08:30.540 issue. They will go out, they will execute an operation, they will come back with new intelligence,

00:08:34.520 and then we will decide what we do next. What we found in the early years of the conflict in Iraq

00:08:41.200 was that the technology age, you know, which was creating an entirely different space than what

00:08:47.460 we found on the battlefield, but the threats that we were facing there were leveraging what we now

00:08:52.480 consider just sort of commonplace realities of the information age, you know, you can connect with

00:08:58.580 people very quickly over email and cell phones. And now you can create massive amounts of followers

00:09:03.680 on Twitter. And there's just countless things that you can do in the information age to connect

00:09:08.140 individuals around ideas that simply didn't exist when the models that we had come to be so

00:09:14.880 comfortable with were developed. So this 20th century sort of traditional top-down model versus

00:09:21.200 a massively distributed problem set, the two don't marry up very well. And I would argue what most

00:09:29.260 organizations and what we were feeling in the military was the distributed model, think of it as a

00:09:35.140 just a mass flash mob. It's not going to necessarily beat or destroy this big traditional system,

00:09:43.340 but it will bite away at it in so many different parts all at once, that eventually the big system

00:09:49.440 just sort of can collapse under its own weight. And what we found on the battlefield was, you know,

00:09:56.420 Al Qaeda being our first sort of understanding of these distributed networks, they didn't have some

00:10:01.160 massive, you know, great plan that they were going to put in place. It was going to, they were going

00:10:05.400 to replace system with sheer chaos and introduce, you know, some very deliberate ideology into that

00:10:12.860 vacuum. But that's not what they were worried about. They weren't trying to create, you know,

00:10:16.520 a nation state to replace the old system. They are intent on creating chaos into which you can then 0.53

00:10:23.380 inject whatever idea set you want to. So that was sort of the tension in the fight that we found

00:10:29.600 at a systems level. We have, we have a model built on premises that no longer exist, facing

00:10:36.880 a network threat that has no rules. It just, it exists on a narrative that's strong enough to pull

00:10:45.840 in followers and it can grow exponentially in a very short order. And I guess we're seeing that

00:10:51.140 in full force recently in Europe with all these sort of terrorist attacks that just come out of

00:10:54.980 nowhere. There's no hierarchy. It's just network people who are keyed into that narrative and they

00:11:00.280 decide to do something about that with that narrative. That's right. And that's, there's a

00:11:05.460 really interesting part to all of this, which is, you know, what is it that makes networks in any space

00:11:11.600 in, you know, in, in, in the way a nation runs itself, in the way a military functions, in the way a group

00:11:16.900 like this is put together, the networks that have this sort of really powerful narrative that is

00:11:23.440 very attractive to people. And that's not a judgment on whether it's good or bad. You might

00:11:27.240 think it's a, it's an evil narrative, but it doesn't really matter what you think. It matters

00:11:31.040 what people are willing to become part of that thing. And if you connect with enough of a followership,

00:11:35.720 like we're seeing in Europe and other parts of the world, you know, folks will flood from pockets 0.96

00:11:40.260 all around the globe now to be part of something that they think has great meaning. And so that's why,

00:11:45.800 you know, the idea of fighting an information age war, the information campaign, it's not new,

00:11:51.240 but we're seeing it. It's just a very, very intense part of the struggle right now is look

00:11:56.480 that until the story catches up with the realities on the ground, we're always going to be one step

00:12:02.760 behind these things because they do tell a very powerful narrative to those that would wish to be

00:12:08.200 part of them. We saw the first stages of that in Iraq in the early days, and now it's just

00:12:13.200 continued to grow over the last 10 or 12 years. Yeah. As I was reading your book and the ideas,

00:12:18.540 it made me think about John Boyd's OODA loop and how, what he was writing 50 years ago,

00:12:24.720 like we're starting to see manifest itself today with these sort of network terror cells and like

00:12:29.220 how, and he said like, this is how we need to respond. Like he was probably talking about,

00:12:32.920 he was talking about guerrilla fighters in Vietnam who acted very similar. And he said,

00:12:37.200 in order to combat them, you needed to, we needed to change the way we operated on a,

00:12:42.240 on the, on the military level. So you kind of implemented this idea of the OODA loop often

00:12:45.720 gets simplified, but it's very complex where it's all about just constantly taking information and

00:12:52.540 making decisions rapidly on that information so you can combat the enemy.

00:12:58.120 Yeah. And you know, Boyd's got an interesting history inside the air force and it was never

00:13:02.200 promoted up to a very senior level because his ideas were probably contradictory to a lot of big

00:13:07.200 systems thinkers. And this, this is how you structure a big enterprise. And I think they,

00:13:12.460 they were probably folks that saw Boyd as too much of an outlier or sort of a threat to

00:13:16.020 traditional thinking, but he's a fighter pilot. So he started at the small level, which to your

00:13:20.860 point, it often gets simplified down to that, but he was actually a big systems thinker.

00:13:24.300 But the OODA loop observe, orient, decide, and act his, was his foundational argument that said,

00:13:28.960 look, if you can get an individual in a, in a fighter jet to do those things in sequence faster than

00:13:34.640 the person in the enemy fighter jet, they will win in the dogfight. They can observe the situation,

00:13:39.900 orient themselves, their thinking and their aircraft to it, make a decision about what

00:13:43.380 they're going to do next and take action. The tighter you can make that loop, which is dependent

00:13:47.540 on all sorts of outside variables and their, their ability to triage very quickly, then they will

00:13:52.140 shoot down the other fighter, which, you know, makes total sense. If you think of the sort of top

00:13:55.780 gun scenario, two, two airplanes, dogfighting, which doesn't really happen in today's air to air

00:14:00.420 conflict anymore, just based on weapon systems, but it's a, it's a logical sort of easy to

00:14:04.740 understand concept. Scaling that up to the enterprise is where it gets really, really

00:14:08.740 challenging. And, you know, it's funny you mentioned, boy, because on the, as we started

00:14:14.460 to feel these changes inside of the counterterrorism task force that, that McChrystal oversaw, people

00:14:20.100 started to throw that language around to say, wow, we, we, we were speeding up the OODA loop

00:14:24.800 of this global enterprise. I mean, there's thousands of people spread around the world and,

00:14:28.320 you know, multiple countries in every time zone, but acting as a unified whole to be able

00:14:34.440 to reorient all the strength of that system against a very specific problem and make a

00:14:39.720 decision, take an action within a matter of minutes sometime. So the ability to do that

00:14:44.040 was a whole new way of, of thinking. So sometimes if it's, as we're talking with industry leaders,

00:14:49.940 I'll often start there. If they have some sort of background understanding of, of Boyd's theories

00:14:54.340 to say, look, you can now scale this up to the enterprise level and, and really,

00:14:58.140 really orient yourselves globally very quickly.

00:15:00.740 And what was the transition like from this top down? I mean, I think you call it dotted line,

00:15:05.840 hierarchy structure, right? Where there's a chain of command where you wait, you get your orders

00:15:10.260 from someone else and they get the orders from someone else. And then to more of this distributed

00:15:13.800 model, talk a little more, it's more of a hybrid model. We'll talk about what, you mean,

00:15:16.960 what that means, but what was the transition like? Did it, were there a lot of people who were,

00:15:22.260 you know, dug their heels in and like, no, I'm, this is, I'm not comfortable with that.

00:15:26.360 We had to do it the way we've always done it. Or were people pretty open to that?

00:15:30.020 Yeah. In one mission, we talk about sort of the solid line, traditional hierarchy,

00:15:33.880 coupled with dotted lines, sort of distributed networks. So if you, anybody that's worked in

00:15:39.300 a big enterprise has stories or can talk directly to, yeah, we were structured this way, but to

00:15:44.820 actually get business done with this division of this department, you had to go to this person

00:15:48.480 and that person. So what they're doing is they're describing these sort of darker networks

00:15:52.080 that exist inside of any enterprise. So that's always existed. I think what McChrystal and the

00:15:56.740 senior leadership started to realize was how can we put a place, a structure in place that identifies

00:16:02.560 and leverages those networks? Because that's where things happen really fast in a big enterprise.

00:16:08.240 That's where key relationships sit. That's where interesting, unknown decision makers lie within

00:16:15.540 the organization. So how can we couple those with the strength of the traditional solid line system?

00:16:20.660 If we can bring those two things together, then we can have the stability, power, et cetera,

00:16:26.280 of the traditional system, which we don't want to lose, and move with the speed and distributed

00:16:31.020 nature of these networks that we're fighting. Now, all that sounds great in hindsight. I think to

00:16:36.240 your other question, what did that change process feel like? It was very organic, very sort of,

00:16:43.040 let's pursue what works and cast off what doesn't work. There was not a master plan that was put down

00:16:50.300 on paper and said, here's where we are, here's how we're structured, here's what the new threat

00:16:55.220 looks like. Therefore, here's a 24-month change cycle that we're going to go through, you know, a very

00:17:00.700 traditional approach. Because the problem was so new. And the senior leadership that started to have

00:17:05.780 this conversation, they just said, okay, what we're doing now isn't working. We're pushing the

00:17:10.900 traditional system as hard as it can possibly move, and we're still watching the threats grow.

00:17:15.220 So we have to look for a new solution. And very organically, through broader and more inclusive

00:17:20.800 communication processes, through a very conscious effort to decentralize decision-making further and

00:17:27.440 further down into the field, through a whole series of steps like that, where we ended up was,

00:17:33.580 wow, we've created this sort of dual-axis system where we have traditional top-down structure as a

00:17:40.360 baseline and stability, and we have the ability to move very quickly as a network sort of model.

00:17:46.440 So those two things coupled together as this sort of hybrid structure. Now, had there been a master

00:17:51.240 plan out of the gates, because the thinking was so new, it probably would have gotten more pushback

00:17:56.320 than just organically navigating toward things that were working and throwing away those that weren't.

00:18:02.140 I don't know, it's a hypothetical, so it's hard to judge. But I think there was a certain advantage to

00:18:05.920 saying, hey, we're all in this together. Let's figure out what it looks like. And what we ended up,

00:18:10.360 was a very deliberate model that we found is repeatable in other spaces.

00:18:15.240 That's awesome. Well, let's talk about, I can understand how this hybrid approach,

00:18:19.260 where you have a structure, solid line hierarchy with this more distributed network model as well,

00:18:24.760 how that would be great for the military in fighting the war on terror when you're also fighting

00:18:28.260 a networked enemy. Take this to the business. How does this apply to the business? Why should a business

00:18:33.760 start looking to maybe going transition to a hybrid model where it's not just solid line hierarchy,

00:18:39.920 but also a more networked organization?

00:18:43.920 Yeah, no, it's a great question. And it's interesting when I left the service in 2012,

00:18:48.160 started having deeper conversations with folks in industry. That wasn't that long ago,

00:18:52.560 but this sort of thinking, I think, was still new to a lot of folks in industry, in big government

00:19:00.540 outside of the military, in big systems like healthcare, et cetera. But now, I think we're seeing,

00:19:06.480 you know, just click on the news any day. We're seeing such rapid change and traditional systems

00:19:13.780 getting attacked by, you know, new players in almost every way that people start to realize,

00:19:18.940 okay, there's something going on that's different than it was 20 years ago. This is not a battlefield

00:19:23.740 or terrorism-based problem. So, the solution set, I think, speaks to the idea that, look,

00:19:30.880 your traditional system, you know, if you run a company that's been around for 80 years and you're

00:19:36.340 doing really well, you've built a model that's based on facing similar sort of competitors.

00:19:43.440 So, if I want to compete in your space, I'm going to read your playbook. I'm going to look at your

00:19:47.220 history. I'm going to try to build out a similar system, but with a more efficient model. I want

00:19:53.520 better talent. I want to build a better widget, whatever we're competing over. And then, I'm going

00:19:58.840 to start to slowly eat up your market share. I can come up with a very deliberate way to attack you

00:20:04.640 and also become a big player. And maybe one day, I'll completely usurp you and I'll buy you and now

00:20:09.700 I'm the dominant player, right? So, we've all seen that work. So, the focus is, you know,

00:20:13.380 how do I become more efficient? How do I optimize my system? How do I get the better talent?

00:20:19.160 We're competing directly with each other. Now, those systems are still very important because

00:20:23.320 there are big competitors, but there's also a totally different type of competition that doesn't

00:20:27.680 play by any of those rules. The interconnected sort of external actors, startups that can scale

00:20:34.580 overnight or don't need to scale. They can just release a new technology that just disrupts

00:20:39.760 the market that you're in or a consumer base that can interconnect in a way and, you know,

00:20:46.920 debunk a new product that you release before it even hits the market. A consumer experience

00:20:52.480 where someone enters one of your stores or, you know, the recent United example is just perfectly

00:20:59.480 illustrates this where you have, you know, a problem on an aircraft and a system that isn't

00:21:05.020 quite comfortable yet decentralizing all the way down to truly empowered folks at a gate

00:21:09.700 that say, this is escalating. We're going to put in a lot of, you know, more time or money

00:21:14.120 right now here in the moment than we would have traditionally, but we're going to solve this

00:21:17.800 problem. Instead, when you have to rely on sort of a traditional approach, it can cost, you know,

00:21:23.960 millions of dollars in shareholding over, you know, in a very, very brief period of time

00:21:30.700 if you're not comfortable creating that decentralized model down to those that are closest to the problem.

00:21:36.060 The problems aren't new. They've always existed. The issue is these problems can now interconnect,

00:21:42.100 be shared and drive thinking about your organization at a speed and at a scale that

00:21:48.720 traditionally they simply couldn't. So I would argue that the traditional systems really don't

00:21:54.440 have a choice. Organizations will not be run the same way they are now in 20, 25 years. So we are in

00:22:00.140 this transition point. I would argue that this hybrid sort of structure is one way to bridge

00:22:05.180 through this transition, but those that are convinced that the 20th century model will

00:22:09.860 continue to be the right solution as the information age gets more and more complex. I think it's a

00:22:16.320 pretty rough road to be on right now.

00:22:18.980 So the planning cycle is getting shorter and shorter. I mean, it used to be where you could plan

00:22:22.720 for a year, then maybe a quarter. Now you have to like, maybe it's just day to day or maybe hour to

00:22:28.140 hour. You have to be able to make decisions that fast.

00:22:31.680 Yeah, I think so. But I think you have to be able to do both. I mean, there is long-term planning

00:22:35.840 where you, you know, you want to know where you recruit from and you, you want to have a relationship

00:22:41.980 with that graduate school or whatever the case may be. You want to have a good intern program that

00:22:46.400 you get to look at people over multiple years. So those aren't minute to minute decisions. Those are

00:22:50.600 deliberate relationships that are built over time. In the military, you're not, you know, minute to minute

00:22:55.180 deciding what the next aircraft carrier is going to look like. Those are, you know, long time horizon

00:23:00.180 programs. And so you don't need some sort of distributed system that's capable of dealing

00:23:06.180 with sheer chaos in a system like that, that you can control. I'm not saying it's easy. Those are,

00:23:12.100 you need a lot of smart people that know how to manage things very well from people to money to

00:23:17.480 communication plans, et cetera. But whether you like it or not, there are also spaces that,

00:23:22.460 that move in that minute to minute fashion. And so back to our experiences in the counterterrorism

00:23:29.100 world, you couldn't say, well, let's just completely focus on empowering the teams on the ground so

00:23:34.620 they can move minute to minute when they're, when they're in, you know, literally in the,

00:23:38.520 in the target environment and cast away the fact that we still have to come up with a training plan

00:23:43.140 for next year, or we still have to recruit people over a multi-year time horizon. So those two things

00:23:48.600 need to live in, in congruence with each other. The hard part though, is that the fact that there

00:23:53.860 are minute to minute things that can disrupt you. That's just the reality. Now organizations need to

00:23:58.720 have a system in place that's, that's capable of dealing with that, which is why you have to get

00:24:03.580 comfortable living on these two axes at the same time. So let's, let's dig into a little bit of how

00:24:07.420 you develop sort of the how to the nuts and bolts of this team of teams approach. And one mission you

00:24:13.080 talk about the first step is developing or having a mission focus. Is that something like a corporate

00:24:19.360 mission statement that people roll their eyes out or is it something else? You know, it's

00:24:24.440 interesting. So we talk a lot about this idea of creating the right type of aligning narrative in

00:24:29.000 one mission. And yeah, everybody's got the poster on the wall. It says, you know, be the best or

00:24:33.200 whatever the case may be. And those are there for good reason. Those can become eye rollers. And I'm sure

00:24:37.840 the task force that I was part of under, under McChrystal had some version of that, that I was never

00:24:42.780 aware of, or maybe I was, I just can't recall at that point. The problem is they don't, they don't

00:24:47.020 really have enough meaning when it comes to connecting different parts of the organization.

00:24:50.820 And so we lay out in one mission is our leadership started to change that from whatever sort of

00:24:56.100 bumper sticker narrative it might've been to a story that really forced us at the, at the low level to

00:25:02.100 make a choice. And what we had inside of this, our, our global task force was a culture that's not

00:25:10.140 unlike you'll see in big, big enterprise where we had these incredibly capable, proud, very tribal 0.66

00:25:16.540 verticals. So I was part of the SEAL teams, army units had their versions of that. We had air force

00:25:22.720 folks, we had interagency like intelligence teams that became part of our task force. And when you

00:25:28.140 went far enough down onto the ground, each of those groups had a really strong, powerful grip on their

00:25:33.960 members, which served us really well for, for a long time. And it, it, it means a lot to be part of the

00:25:39.220 SEAL teams. Obviously you go through, you know, many, many years of wickets to, to reach that level

00:25:44.580 and you, the, the, the tribe speaks a certain language. It carries itself a certain way.

00:25:50.460 It wears its hair a certain way. All those little nuances mean a lot when you're in the, in the system.

00:25:56.120 And when you look at another tribe that is on the same big org chart on the wall, they're, the way they

00:26:02.120 carry themselves is a little different. They wear their uniforms a little different. The language they use

00:26:05.600 is slightly different. So there's an immediate uncertainty about, are they really part of the

00:26:09.520 same organization? And all of us, we're all human. So you'll default back to your, your tribe and say,

00:26:14.580 this is where I'm comfortable. Now, the problem we found that, that led to in a very interconnected

00:26:19.200 fight where the threats have one common story that they're just bolting people onto to create action.

00:26:25.060 And we find that we have little different nuances between our, our organizations that can lead to

00:26:31.520 massive separation when it actually comes to trying to fight this interconnected network.

00:26:36.240 So what the narrative that our senior leadership started to talk to us about was at a very high

00:26:43.340 cultural level saying, look, we, we are not coming together as a holistic organization. We do not trust

00:26:51.020 each other between tribes. We do not have genuine cross boundary relationships that allow one unit to

00:26:57.820 pick up a phone to another unit and say, here's what I think is going on. And you listen to them

00:27:03.620 as if they were part of your own team that you trust and, and believe their, their optic on the

00:27:08.500 fight as much as you would believe somebody in your own tribe. Until we get to that level as an

00:27:12.520 organization, we will not be as interconnected as the threat we were facing. And even though we're

00:27:17.360 stronger and faster and better trained and better equipped, all these things, they will still stay one

00:27:21.600 step ahead of us. And so if that level of powerful narrative, that's not a bumper sticker on the

00:27:26.760 wall, that's a call to action that says you can stay comfortable inside of your tribe, or you can

00:27:32.480 become part of this larger story that's going to truly pull us together as a, as a, you know, one

00:27:37.860 mission focus type organization, then we win. So the choice is up to you every single day, you're going

00:27:43.000 to have to decide, do I want to stay comfortable in my tribe or to want to be part of a culture that has

00:27:47.940 the potential to win in this environment. And so that was a, you know, that didn't happen overnight.

00:27:52.940 That was a consistent conversation that went on for weeks, months, and then just became the DNA of

00:27:58.240 the, of the organization. But for me personally, coming up through that system, that was the most

00:28:03.400 powerful part of what our leaders did for us was forcing us to truly think about which, which hand

00:28:09.240 we wanted to play. Do I want to be comfortable in my tribe or do I want to get uncomfortable and try

00:28:13.820 to be part of this bigger, bigger thing?

00:28:15.380 So the part of developing that one mission team of teams approach is this idea of shared

00:28:21.340 consciousness where everyone's on the same page. So the idea of shared consciousness is basically

00:28:25.280 everyone has that one mission focus, no matter what team they're on, what tribe they're part of,

00:28:29.480 but also there's a shared consciousness of the information that's available there and how it

00:28:33.920 affects all the other organizations, right? So maybe the SEAL, maybe the SEALs have some bit of

00:28:38.860 information that might be useful to another organization. I think people understand on the macro

00:28:43.760 level, but how do you do that? How do you get that shared consciousness going across organizations

00:28:49.260 so that people are all on the same page?

00:28:51.740 Shared consciousness is one of the things that most people have experienced. If you've been in a

00:28:55.060 startup, if you've been on a high performance sports team, anytime you've been in an environment

00:28:59.920 where there's six of us or 12 of us or 20 of us, and we all connect emotionally and we all are close

00:29:06.720 enough in physical proximity or we resynchronize ourselves at a fast enough pace that I can

00:29:15.380 understand what you're thinking, you can understand what I think. That's shared consciousness. Most

00:29:19.580 people have felt that at some point, but they'll describe a, I would describe a SEAL platoon. You

00:29:23.940 might describe a startup that you were part of or a sports team you're on. So how do you scale that up

00:29:30.580 to the enterprise level became the big debate. And I remember our senior leadership when we were going

00:29:35.480 through this transition saying, we are, you know, our core strength is our small teams, our ranger

00:29:41.140 platoons on the ground that just move with complete fluidity. Is it possible to scale that up to this

00:29:47.300 global enterprise level? Because if we can do that, no one can keep up with us. But it seems sort of like

00:29:52.480 a pretty big challenge, right? So very organically, what became the backbone of creating that sort of

00:29:59.780 structure was increased periodicity. So the speed with which we resynchronized ourselves went up

00:30:07.180 exponentially. And then the amounts of personnel involved in those resynchronizing communication

00:30:14.240 structures also went up. So we started to ask the question, how fast is the threat externally

00:30:20.300 changing? And can we realign ourselves to marry up with that pace? Now there's a whole history to how we

00:30:25.660 got there. But essentially the takeaway was these networks, Al Qaeda and networks like this, there's

00:30:30.500 something different every morning. When they wake up, they look around and they say, what are we going

00:30:34.440 to do today? And they redesign who's talking to who and what they're going to execute in that next 24

00:30:40.000 hours. So that's the cycle that we needed to keep up with. Now this was happening multiple layers above

00:30:45.200 where I was in the organization at that point. But that's the conversations that they started to drive.

00:30:50.760 Then they backed that up and said, okay, if that's 24 hours, how do we resynchronize ourselves every 24

00:30:55.360 hours in order to be able to keep up with that pace? So we, over time, started to look at the

00:31:01.140 battlefield in these 24-hour cycles. The first 90 minutes of that cycle would start with a global

00:31:06.640 video teleconference. And in time, that grew to thousands of people around the world sitting in

00:31:12.440 this one common forum every 24 hours, seven days a week for years on end, developing this sense of

00:31:18.000 shared consciousness. And it wasn't a top-down, here's what you're going to do today. It wasn't a

00:31:23.640 mid-management, let me update everybody on what's going on. It was a 90-minute discussion about how

00:31:29.200 people were seeing the problem. What was the new data? What teams had gone out into the fight and

00:31:34.600 learned something new? Very raw and honest discussions about what was actually happening

00:31:39.520 inside the problem. Then you could go into these windows of decentralization. So you'd have thousands

00:31:44.760 of people that would walk out with that same sense that you and I might have if it's a three or

00:31:48.920 four-person startup after our morning cup of coffee. And we'd say, okay, let's go get them.

00:31:53.300 Same thing was happening, but with thousands of people around the globe. So then we would go into

00:31:57.140 22 hours of truly decentralized operations where you could push responsibility deep down into the

00:32:02.780 units that were on the ground. And then 22 and a half hours later, they resynchronize and we have

00:32:07.240 the same conversation. Is it, you know, no single day was ever perfect, but over time, you marry all these

00:32:13.320 things up and you truly created this global enterprise with a sense of shared consciousness that you would

00:32:18.340 find inside a 12-person platoon, for example.

00:32:22.300 Okay. So the regular 90-minute meeting, right? And I think people hear that. And I think you sort of

00:32:26.840 mentioned, it's not like a management update meeting, right? It's like, here's what's going on. It's

00:32:30.360 something different. So like, say someone wanted, they have a business, they want to incorporate this

00:32:34.360 sort of cross-communications amongst different organizations within the company or their own

00:32:38.460 business if they have one. What's like the agenda? Like, how do you start that meeting? Is it just

00:32:42.660 like, you have a topic? I mean, what are the mechanics of that?

00:32:46.940 Yeah. No, it's a great question. The temptation is to say, okay, got it. Let's do that on Monday and

00:32:53.820 we'll get, you know, we'll get 500 regional managers onto a call and we'll just start talking

00:32:57.880 about stuff. Well, that's, of course, we know where that's going to go. It's just going to turn

00:33:00.600 into total chaos, right? So when we're doing work with organizations, we will start with what we did

00:33:07.040 very organically inside the task force underneath McChrystal, which was starting with a conversation of,

00:33:12.740 okay, what are we trying to accomplish? What's our strategic intent as an organization?

00:33:17.120 That quickly led to us. And what you'll see in large organizations is there's actually multiple

00:33:21.780 different fights going on here. So we're not on the same page about what our strategic intent is

00:33:26.440 and how we're going to get there. So that's this place I would say for any organization to start,

00:33:31.060 get the leadership together, really determine what's our strategy, what are we trying to accomplish,

00:33:35.420 cascade that down into your verticals, your regions, however you're structured. And that, you know,

00:33:39.680 that will change over time, but you have to get some sort of common baseline. Then from that,

00:33:44.340 you can start to look at the speed with which the problems are moving. You know,

00:33:49.040 so you probably have a traditional system that's capable of moving in that linear fashion versus

00:33:53.000 big traditional competition. What are the other problems and how fast are they changing? To deal

00:33:58.060 with those in a decentralized fashion, how often do you have to resynchronize? So you start with those

00:34:02.640 two ideas. What are we trying to accomplish? How often do we have to realign to be able to do it in a

00:34:07.280 decentralized manner? Then you can get into the creation of this sort of communication model

00:34:12.420 based on those former two. And the agenda itself will be informed by the first work you do, which

00:34:18.020 is what are we trying to accomplish? And then you can grow these things steadily over time. If the goal

00:34:22.680 is to have 500 regional managers involved in something like this, start with 10, then make it 30,

00:34:27.780 then grow in time over to that large number. And because you want people to show up and every time

00:34:34.040 they come into a forum like this, say, I'm a busy person, but that's the best hour I spend this during

00:34:39.620 the week, or that's the best two hours I spend every other week, because I walk away with a real

00:34:44.120 understanding of how the leaders throughout the organization are looking at the problem. And I'm

00:34:49.640 very comfortable now operating in a decentralized fashion until we resynchronize. So it's a driver of

00:34:55.700 human behavior as much as anything. Now, for us, the structure of it was important.

00:35:01.900 There had to be a solid background. We had a very consistent agenda that was consistent as much

00:35:10.880 that we always had one. It was very structured, 90 minutes. We knew ahead of time who was going to

00:35:15.960 talk about what for how much time, et cetera. If you went to our portal system, that was the first

00:35:22.100 thing you'd see on the homepage was the agenda for the next cycle. So very transparent there. What was

00:35:26.940 being talked about would change over time based on what was going on in the fight. But people

00:35:31.780 needed that baseline to say, okay, here's what we're going to talk about. I understand how the

00:35:36.680 senior leaders are seeing the fight based on the type of agenda they're structuring. Then we would

00:35:40.760 use a controller. And we highly recommend this to any organization. Train and develop an individual

00:35:46.480 or team, depending on the size of the enterprise, that is responsible for making sure that a forum like

00:35:53.000 this runs smoothly. Working with the IT backbone, making sure that briefers are prepared,

00:35:58.780 coaching them along to like, here's the type of conversations we try to have, keeping the schedule

00:36:03.460 running on time, taking taskers and follow-ups that you can push, you know, things that need to

00:36:08.380 go into a sidebar discussion, you can follow up on those. There's a whole bunch of tricks that you

00:36:12.500 want to do in that space to keep it nicely controlled and functioning. And then we would use

00:36:16.740 a sort of a technology backdrop as well. I mean, our technology then was pretty rudimentary compared to

00:36:22.500 what is available now. But of those, if we had thousands of people on the net, a good majority of them

00:36:27.500 would have a device open, like you'd be on your classified laptop, and you'd have a series of

00:36:32.480 chat rooms going during this forum. So that in the conversation itself, there's, you know, these

00:36:38.200 point to point conversations going on with other people contributing sort of additional information

00:36:43.900 based on the conversation that you didn't want that to turn into total chaos. In the backdrop,

00:36:48.580 you would have 10, 12, you know, maybe more individual or big party chat rooms going on your

00:36:55.180 laptop. So as you're briefing some new insight that you've discovered in one corner of the world,

00:37:00.500 I can reach out to dozens of contacts and say, hey, that's really interesting what they're talking

00:37:05.360 about right now. Have you seen that report? What do you know about that new piece of equipment

00:37:08.920 they're describing, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not a constant interruption and chaos. The chaos can

00:37:12.960 happen in the backdrop. So those were, that gave us the opportunity to create those, those new dotted

00:37:18.160 line networks. Every single time we resynchronize these, you created the best possible opportunity for the

00:37:24.220 right people to connect and say, oh, wow, I didn't know that. We can create a sub network very quickly

00:37:29.220 that's going to solve for that issue, or I'm going to do something differently in the next 22 hours based

00:37:33.760 on what that person just said. So that, and that's why so many people were drawn to be part of something

00:37:39.460 like that. So if we had thousands of people on the net, most of that was organic growth. Most of that

00:37:43.740 was people deciding I want to be in this forum because it gives me the opportunity to create my own

00:37:48.800 sub networks every 24 hours and tackle the issues we're facing in, in, in a new way.

00:37:54.680 Yeah. As I was reading the, sort of the mechanics of it, if I was thinking like Slack could be a tool

00:37:59.980 for a small company who doesn't have the infrastructure, the IT infrastructure to build

00:38:03.480 their own platform. But I think it's the same sort of thing. You have sort of a main channel where

00:38:07.440 you're, everyone's getting the same updates, but then you can go off into little channels

00:38:10.620 on your own and discuss things about the main channel.

00:38:13.760 Exactly right. We use a combination. I mean, and this technology is, you know, there's no

00:38:18.800 barrier of entry for anyone. You can get freeware as a startup between Slack and other systems that

00:38:23.800 are out there and quickly create this, this sort of structure. But yeah, we, we use Slack in our

00:38:28.520 own organization and it, it's a much prettier version of what we were using at the time, which

00:38:33.520 looked basically like sort of MS-DOS chat rooms. But, but yeah, that coupling those two things

00:38:39.440 together, I think today is, is critical.

00:38:41.080 All right. So let's talk the hybrid approach. The benefit of it is it gives, you have that

00:38:45.600 solid line hierarchy where you can do some long-term planning and make sure, you know,

00:38:50.260 the things that require long-term planning and logistics get done, but you also have this

00:38:55.360 networked approach and this, but this networked approach gives on the ground subordinates a lot

00:39:01.580 of autonomy to make quick decisions for themselves based on information they've gotten from this

00:39:06.660 shared consciousness that they've received from these updates or whatever else, or whatever

00:39:12.400 this communication that they're using. How do you ensure that these autonomous individuals don't

00:39:19.980 deviate too far from the, the mission focus with their decisions? Cause it's one thing like,

00:39:24.980 Hey, get out there and just do it. But then they might do something really stupid that hurts. 1.00

00:39:29.120 Yeah. Yes, they might. And you know, what's interesting is I remember as a, as a junior 1.00

00:39:35.880 officer in these communities, when my own sort of naive view on things at the time was, Oh,

00:39:41.460 they're going to decentralize and empower, and we're going to be flat. And basically what you just

00:39:46.380 described, like, this'll be kind of up to me and our team and we'll just go for it. And then we come

00:39:51.660 back every often, every so often and tell them what, what we're doing. Well, that's, that's not how it

00:39:55.980 works. And that, you know, in our environment and, and any high risk or, you know, big enterprise

00:40:01.660 system that can create way more risk than it, than it's worth. If you just say, okay, everybody

00:40:07.020 go for it. And then we'll resynchronize because you, you might be a very seasoned actor and I'm

00:40:11.000 brand new. There's no way I should be empowered or held to the same level of accountability that,

00:40:15.700 that you should be. So what I'll describe here again, happens sort of through organic conversations

00:40:21.940 over time inside of our initial environment. But there's a very deliberate approach that

00:40:27.020 organizations can take to create this model. If they start with that original discussion around

00:40:32.220 strategy and cascading that down into sort of measurable metrics within teams, which is an old

00:40:37.300 sort of management model, but very critical baseline that it can provide. So if you have that in place,

00:40:42.580 you can then come down to, you know, me, you, and one other person as let's say,

00:40:46.980 back to the regional sales manager model. If you're, you know, six years in that position,

00:40:54.060 the, the higher level leadership can say, okay, here are the 20 things we're going to empower you

00:40:59.780 to do with at your level. So you don't come back in and check for permission. When we're in these

00:41:05.680 windows of sort of decentralized action, you own all of that. Here are two or three things that I'm

00:41:10.620 going to, going to constraints that I'm going to put on top of you because we're in a volatile market

00:41:15.660 when it comes to joint ventures. If you're talking to any of these three competitors,

00:41:19.140 check in with headquarters because, you know, there's new sort of legal constraints. If you're,

00:41:23.920 if you're encroaching into this sort of environment, check in with leadership, everything else up to you.

00:41:28.760 So that makes a lot of sense to you. You're probably, okay, I'm a seasoned experienced leader.

00:41:33.020 I, I understand why I'm constrained, but I'm also, I know where I'm expected to act with speed and

00:41:38.980 independence. If I've just been promoted up to regional sales manager, I might have three things that I can

00:41:44.740 do at my level and 20 things that I'm constrained by. And that list can get very, very detailed,

00:41:49.940 which things like this happen in a lot of organizations. You know, you have different

00:41:53.720 sorts of actors, but when you took that sort of measured approach and you can do this in great

00:41:59.280 detail inside an organization, if you, if you want to roll your sleeves up, you can literally map this

00:42:03.940 out. Coupled with the inclusion and transparent nature of the communication forums that were put into

00:42:10.100 place. You could literally see every single day as a new actor in the system. I understand my

00:42:16.060 constraints. I understand my authorities, but every 24 hours, I'm getting a new opportunity to see

00:42:21.260 somebody like you, a seasoned member of the organization, talk and operate at a much higher

00:42:27.240 level. We might be peers on an org chart, but you have all these other authorities and I can see you

00:42:32.420 leverage them. I can see the actions you take. And more importantly, I can see how you tie your actions

00:42:38.420 and new information that you might be finding back up into the strategic conversation. So as a new

00:42:43.840 actor in that, in that model, you're probably, even if we're on paper peers, you're thinking

00:42:49.220 multiple levels above me. And every day you're unintentionally, you're coaching me to become

00:42:55.040 an actor like you. And so I see what right looks like most traditional bureaucracies. When that happens,

00:43:01.320 it happens behind closed doors. So I see you as a competitor. I don't understand. I think the boss is

00:43:06.680 just like you more. And I don't have time to sit down and you don't have time to sit down and coach

00:43:10.620 me along. And you might be incentivized not to do that based on myriad of things inside of an

00:43:15.320 enterprise. But in a transparent system like this, I can just see it happening. And when the reverse was

00:43:21.400 also true for us, when a seasoned player could look across and see me as a new member of the

00:43:27.420 organization who is highly constrained, you were also incentivized to reach across and coach me,

00:43:32.520 literally picking up the phone and saying, here's where you can improve. Here's how you should be

00:43:36.200 thinking about the following. If you want these sorts of authorities, here's what our leadership

00:43:39.800 needs to see from you. That was not necessarily because you thought I was a great guy. But every

00:43:44.840 time I pick up the phone to ask permission around one of those constraints that are layered on me,

00:43:49.280 I'm preventing our senior leadership just because I'm eating up their time from doing the up and out

00:43:54.660 thinking that you want them to do. You don't need permissions. You need new relationships with other

00:43:59.560 organizations. You need new funding for a massive strategic project you're focused on. I need

00:44:05.140 permission to go from A to B. So you want me to either figure out how to get from A to B on my

00:44:09.780 own or just get out of the way, right? So you're incentivized to come over and help coach me along

00:44:14.980 to get there. So it also starts to act as a tool for breaking down those tribal barriers between

00:44:19.880 different verticals, different regions, where normally there's a sense of competition. Now people

00:44:24.320 can see, wow, if I make that team better, it's going to greatly benefit my team as well.

00:44:29.560 Yeah. You gave a good example of this on-the-ground coaching where you get a call from some other

00:44:34.360 guy in another organization kind of chewing you out, but he did a coaching experience. So yeah,

00:44:40.280 again, it takes a lot of conscious, intentional, deliberate work to make this approach work in an

00:44:48.400 organization.

00:44:49.940 No, that's right. And what's described in one mission, I would say there's a whole series of

00:44:58.120 basics in there, but coupling them together at a pace that keeps up with today's environment.

00:45:04.040 That's the challenge because it's not good enough anymore to come out and be really good once a

00:45:09.880 quarter at the town hall or to be really good on your quarterly analyst report. You've got to be as

00:45:17.060 good as you can be every single day if you're going to expect the organization to be able to move fast

00:45:21.640 enough. So you talk about this in the book, the military doesn't just rely on organizations within

00:45:27.620 the military. They also work with outside parties where they don't have control over them, but

00:45:34.260 they're a vital part of the mission. I'm sure there's a lot of businesses too that work with

00:45:38.060 outside entities to further their mission and their business strategic goals, but they don't have

00:45:44.140 control over them. For example, my own business, I use a lot of independent contractors for video

00:45:49.700 editing, whatever. How can you apply this team of teams approach with these outside third parties so

00:45:55.760 you can work with them and maintain that rapid operating tempo that you need to survive and

00:46:01.300 thrive in today's world? Yeah. A few things changed in the way that this task force was run by our senior

00:46:07.940 leadership on that front that I think are applicable over to many other parts of industry. One being people

00:46:14.340 have to feel like they're part of the team, right? So I think especially so in today's world. So even if

00:46:21.600 I'm a contractor doing, you know, editing for you, I want to feel like I'm part of the mission that

00:46:26.500 you're accomplishing because that's the sense that everybody, we're so interconnected now that people are

00:46:31.940 looking for sort of the purpose behind any particular thing they're doing. So we try to leverage that same

00:46:38.400 sort of emotional connection with any outside entity. So people weren't just welcome to work

00:46:43.960 for us or be attached to us. They were pulled in as part of the team. So I'll give you an example from

00:46:50.320 like the SEAL community. Historically, you might deploy to a conflict zone. This is going back,

00:46:55.400 you know, many years and why sort of first came into that environment. And you might have, you know,

00:47:00.400 a young civilian intelligence expert from some, you know, outside entity who based on his or her

00:47:08.180 sort of background or experience, they're going to be part of your team and they're going to advise

00:47:12.140 on X, Y, Z. And so they, because of the tribalism, there was, you know, a bias toward, okay, this is,

00:47:18.420 you know, Karen and Karen, here's your office over here down the hall. And here's the team room. And

00:47:22.200 here's where we eat and work out. And here's where, you know, you can use this gym down the road and

00:47:26.420 that sort of thing. Like, we appreciate what you bring to the table. Here's the meetings that you're

00:47:29.840 invited to, but we're the team and you're an additional capability. It's sort of exaggerating

00:47:34.520 it, but we've all felt that sort of pressure. And we're certainly part of the sort of tribal

00:47:38.660 nature of these teams. And what our leadership forced us to change toward and think through was

00:47:43.640 Karen needs to be part of this team. And that doesn't mean on paper, she's assigned to your

00:47:48.160 unit for X number of months. It means she's in your headquarters. She knows how you think. She sits

00:47:53.300 through all the meetings. She's in your chow hall. She uses your workout facilities. She is 0.95

00:47:58.060 integrated into how you operate as a culture. And then her subject matter expertise will be able

00:48:04.700 to be much more effectively leveraged inside of your thinking. She becomes part of your OODA loop,

00:48:10.340 so to speak, as we were talking about earlier, which if you're trying to take a linear approach

00:48:14.960 where, you know, the tribe will think about it to this level, we hit this brick wall, then we call

00:48:20.180 in Karen and she drops in this one amazing insight. And then we solve the issue. That's just

00:48:24.740 completely unrealistic in today's age. She needs to be part of that from step one, not just in the

00:48:30.380 information sharing, but in the way that that culture interacts with one another in the way

00:48:35.300 it sees the problem. So that was one big part of it internally to teams, like pulling people in and

00:48:39.900 really making them part of your tribe. The other was external. As you talk about external partners,

00:48:46.020 our leadership used the liaison model, which is not new in the military, in a wholly different way.

00:48:50.720 So the idea of exchanging folks between different organizations goes, you know, far back in

00:48:56.140 military history. But part of their function historically was just to make sure that, you

00:48:59.740 know, units didn't run into each other and that next moves were aligned between different parts

00:49:04.520 of the battlefield, those sorts of things. So it's a pretty transactional position and you could,

00:49:08.140 you didn't need to put a super high performer in to be able to do that. It could be a junior person,

00:49:12.140 it could be a B player that kind of didn't have a home in the unit, etc. But in the speed of the

00:49:19.080 battlefield made that old model just, just totally ineffective. So our leadership started grabbing

00:49:24.100 very seasoned folks from the battlefield that were clearly on a track, a high performance track,

00:49:30.580 and we're going to be senior leaders inside the organization in short order, where the units

00:49:35.720 would be tempted, like, this is where I want to grab this person and put them in charge of this

00:49:38.980 unit that's in the toughest part of the fight. They instead would have, you know, they drop their

00:49:43.240 body armor and weapons, put on a suit and tie and go work in a civilian intelligence agency or work

00:49:48.300 at an embassy or work in a non-traditional capacity under the title of liaison. But what they really

00:49:54.200 were was a senior enough and insightful enough individual that they connect directly with senior

00:50:00.080 leadership in those other spaces. And they were tethered directly into our senior leadership.

00:50:04.160 So you had this amazing web of connectivity between our sort of hybrid system and these other

00:50:10.420 actors that they could run their organization however they saw fit. But when what we were doing

00:50:15.780 needed to get to those other enterprises with, with network level speed, you had all these

00:50:21.360 positions embedded inside of them that could quickly walk into the offices of the most senior

00:50:25.880 leaders and say, sir, ma'am, here's exactly what you need to understand right now. Here's what we're

00:50:29.740 doing to, you know, handle the situation. We'd like your guidance input, et cetera. I can get you on a

00:50:34.740 phone call right now with our senior leadership. We're going to have a video teleconference on this

00:50:38.420 in 10 minutes. You're invited to sit through and, and sort of guide it from your direction.

00:50:41.900 And they felt like they were truly part of that, that enterprise based on the connectivity that

00:50:46.380 those liaisons provided. And I think you can do similar sorts of models in, in industry. We've,

00:50:51.640 we've, we've done it inside of global enterprises, establishing these sorts of positions between,

00:50:57.540 you know, global regions, et cetera. Or if you're working with outside actors, like here's a joint

00:51:03.420 venture partner, or, you know, even a frenemy in a space, like we have to start exchanging people.

00:51:07.760 So we really understand how each other is seeing this, the market so that we can best leverage,

00:51:12.800 uh, our collective strengths. It's a, I think it's a very universal system.

00:51:17.140 That's awesome. Well, Chris, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more

00:51:21.160 about your work?

00:51:22.480 Yeah. So, uh, the McChrystal group is just, you know, hop on our website and see some of the work

00:51:27.040 we do. And one mission is out, uh, 13 June. So we're excited about its release and hopefully be

00:51:33.680 hearing, hearing more about that. If they want to sort of understand the depth and background,

00:51:37.180 you can start there and then go back to team of teams or the other way around. But between the,

00:51:40.820 the two of those, there's a, there's a sort of a story about our experiences and how we think it

00:51:45.020 applies to other spaces.

00:51:46.720 That's it. Well, Chris Fussell, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:51:49.920 Thanks. I really appreciate it.

00:51:51.000 My guest today was Chris Fussell. He's the author of the book, One Mission. You can find that on

00:51:55.480 amazon.com. You can also find more information about his work at mccrystalgroup.com. Also check out

00:52:00.360 our show notes at aom.is slash fussell where you can find links to resources where you can delve

00:52:04.460 deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast.

00:52:21.360 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website at

00:52:24.500 artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy this show, have gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate if you

00:52:28.400 give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps that a lot. As always, thank you for your continued

00:52:32.160 support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - June 15, 2017

#313： How Leaders Build Great Teams

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