If you’ve triumphed by building a revolutionary networked organization in the theater of war, can you help leaders do the same in the corporate arena? Can “business commanders” take advantage of organizational lessons of fighting terrorists-- to build more agile, networked enterprises too?
General (retired) Stanley McChrystal (photo by permission McChrystal Group)
Stan McChrystal thinks yes. For the past five years the retired general has been pursuing questions of how. McChrystal Group, his business consultancy of researchers, practitioners and former military officers, helps companies today become smarter, faster and flexible, akin to how the general’s networked coalition of Allied forces thwarted nimble Islamic jihadists in the post 9/11 Middle East wars.
Translating Warrior Networks For Business
I caught up with Stan and few of his colleagues to discuss how they’re translating warrior network techniques to the profit-making world.
McChrystal retired from the military in 2010, after his pioneering counter-terrorism effort helped turn the tide against Al Qaeda. McChrystal’s command, chronicled in his engaging memoir-cum-handbook Team of Teams—dramatically reduced Allied losses and killed the jihadist mastermind, al Zarqawi.
As I earlier wrote, this general’s battlefield achievements were less about traditional leadership prowess than “unlearning command and control”—letting go of authority as he developed a largely self-governing, cross-organizational warrior and intelligence network that functioned rapidly, flexibly and with deadly entrepreneurialism against the terrorists. McChrystal’s “team of teams” innovation was twofold: building a community of “shared consciousness” and mission among formerly disparate military and civilian units; and redefining leadership and culture to enable quick action at the front line, with little or no oversight.
“So how do you adapt,” I asked the former general, “the military ‘team of teams’ to a business?”
A Model--But Not A Template--For Network Organizations
“Coming out of JSOC [The Joint Special Operations Command which McChrystal led in Iraq], we had a model potentially applicable to corporate clients. But it wasn’t a one-size template: the approach would have to be tailored in different commercial settings, and suited to their immediate problems.”
For context, I asked the general and his colleagues to first explain relevant similarities and differences between military and business organizations today.
McChrystal began with an overarching commonality: “In Iraq and Afghanistan we adopted a network approach to fight the network that Al Qaeda was beating us with. Businesses today are also fighting networks—customers and competitors are more and more interconnected—constantly shifting relationships, product preferences, strategies. At war we had to build a more agile and intelligent organization to keep ahead of a fluidly networked enemy. Companies now have to do that too. And building networks that operate like an extended team requires a completely different kind of leadership, whatever the setting.”
But as his colleagues chimed in, they called out some important differences.
What’s Not The Same
Several McChrystal Group consultants stressed how business clients lag behind the military’s practiced collection and analysis of intelligence. The JSOC “team of teams” depended on everyone taking advantage of what the network was constantly gathering and learning—the shared consciousness of situation and opportunity for performance. As Tom Maffey, a former Army Ranger and Brigadier General—and now McChrystal Group COO—reflected, “Most companies don’t have a significant intelligence gathering capability. In fact, JSOC showed you don’t actually have to build up a huge staff—the innovation is turning the entire organization into the capability. We help our clients do the same.”
A related difference is many corporate leaders’ lesser ability to shape the information gathering they need, based on the requirements of strategy. “In the military," commented McChrystal Group Chief Growth Officer David Gillian—a former Brigadier in the Australian Army and experienced intelligence officer—we have the concept of ‘commander’s intent’: directional guidance that helps everyone understand what leadership is trying to achieve, at a level above situational operations. That then guides the information and learning needed. We find that many people working in corporations lack any clear idea of a ‘commander’s intent’—and then have their strategy distracted by the daily flow of information. They lose track of the big picture, and the critical questions they really need to seek answers to.”
Eyes On, Hands Off
Stan McChrystal offered an interesting counter-point. “Ironically today’s technology can undermine the historical value of ‘commander’s intent.’ The concept was devised to guide soldiers’ local decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, beyond an officer’s reach. Because any leader today can follow a network’s minute by minute activity, he or she will be tempted to micro-manage. The real agility of team of teams stems from leaders able to monitor rapidly changing situations but ultimately trusting others to decide about front-line action. The slogan is ‘eyes on, hands off.’”
But for a leader to be “hands off”, members of a network must be skilled, problem-solving, collaborative people. Unfortunately, talent development towards such goals in many corporate organizations lags best-of-class military capability. McChrystal Group Managing Partner Rachel Mendelowitz commented “a very large part of what the military does is training and developing leaders. You can’t build an agile fighting force without an intense focus on people.” Mendelowitz also noted corporate organizations struggle with how to reward people in a new era when both goals and the strategies needed to reach them are constantly shifting. “Promotion and career paths for soldiers are less dependent on static milestones.”
Pressure, Tempo, Commitment
As discussion continued, the consultants also pushed back about two “war versus business” differences I had assumed.
“Isn’t it much harder to rally a civilian organization to work together flexibly, when the stakes aren’t as high as, say, a do-or-die fight against terrorists?” I asked. Gillian replied quickly. “I don’t want to downplay the pressure of war to create teamwork. But any leader, to be successful, has to commit to help their organization perform collectively at the highest possible level, whatever the challenge.”
I replied asking about another assumption I had made. “But doesn’t the ongoing threat of action in war also impose a faster tempo than corporate business?” Mendelowitz countered again. “In the military, the fighting is intense, but it tends to be separated by long pauses of reflecting and preparing for the next battle. Many of our corporate clients are plagued by ongoing, low-level distraction and day-to-day firefighting. So they don’t take time to think and plan long term. They sometimes have trouble focusing on key moments of performance because of that.”
Team Of Teams Lessons
So what overall has McChrystal Group learned about building a networked “team of teams” for corporate clients? Seven further themes emerged.
1.Get clear upfront on the performance challenge. Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal and now Managing Partner underscored one big lesson that McChrystal Group had to learn the hard way: “We developed some great partnerships with clients in the early days, but it took some back and forth before we really understood the challenges the clients needed help with. Our approach critically depends on that shared understanding, and we focus on it much more quickly now.”
2. Beware the leader without real commitment to change. McChrystal offered another insight forged by some earlier bitter experience: “Before we take on work now, we are much more intentional about assessing leaders’ willingness to change their organization—and also themselves. Many don’t realize how much personal change building a team of teams will mean for their jobs and identities; or they’re not really willing to commit to the necessary transparency, trust and giving up power. Unless we believe they’re ready for those things, we are reluctant to help.”
3. To build a better network culture, start with the networks and culture you have. McChrystal Group now structures most engagements around the findings of a tailored diagnostic—survey, social network analysis, and contextualized interviews—to understand barriers and opportunities for moving towards “shared consciousness” and a more agile culture.
As Managing Partner and former U.S. intelligence professional Jess Webb explained, “Our Organizational Performance Analysis has helped us better articulate the different elements of team of teams for ourselves—for example distinguishing among different kinds of trust in relationships—but it’s also a tool to raise awareness among our client leaders of the real underlying barriers to their strategy implementation. We use it to build a road map with clients, to leverage or unblock the information sharing and energy in place that’s fundamental to shared consciousness.”
4. Build trust with leader behavior and transparent processes. McChrystal reflected on the transformational coaching he offers leaders, for example his recent work with a financial services CEO. “I’ve been helping him see that team of teams requires a much higher level of trust across the organization. When his organization was small, he could do that through personal relationships. As it grew, he had to shift his role, to help people start trusting ‘things’—ensuring processes of decision-making, compensation, and the like are fair, transparent, open. As organizations get bigger, leaders have to embed trust in actual operations.
5. Break silos with cross-boundary engagement and value. Silos are the enemy of shared consciousness and empowered decision-making. McChrystal Group helps clients integrate both horizontally and vertically, by developing “keystone forums” which institutionalize cross-functional meetings and problem-solving as part of regular work.
Keystone forums regularly convene members from across business units—to assess situations, share insights, and innovate together—all in search of higher performance. The idea is modeled on what McChrystal developed with JSOC, in the form of daily, large-scale virtual communication and conversation involving thousands different soldiers and intelligence contributors from across the Middle East and Washington DC. As these “Operations & Intelligence” briefings matured, shared consciousness about the why and wherefore of learning and helping one another at war grew stronger.
Such forums can become culture-building successes for a business if they similarly help surface opportunities to create new value across silo boundaries. Partner Howie Cohen created an “ah-ha” collaborative breakthrough at one client when he helped competing directors see the savings when everyone agreed to start using the same supplier for a critical operational need. Over time, as the company found further synergies among its different units, a more uniform strategy for the enterprise began to emerge. “The CEO was able to literally increase the stock price for the company because he could now explain to investors more clearly how all units of the company working together would increase end-to-end customer value.”
6. Appreciate the multiple strata of cultural change. Shared consciousness requires every member of a network to better understand—and accept—cultural differences across its community.
McChrystal explained further: “The dimensions of cultural integration can be very subtle. In some of our global clients, we’re helping members bridge differences among functional cultures—say engineers, sales, marketing, each with their own jargon and assumptions—but also across geography and nationality, for example customs and language differences among Chinese versus Latin American units. Shared consciousness requires leaders to work on all aspects, and be sensitive to multiple layers of integration.”
7. Embrace incrementalism as required. I challenged the group whether team of teams was necessarily all or nothing for an organization. Gillian offered a practical reply. “You have to make progress where and how you can. We sometimes have clients that aren’t ready for full enterprise transformation—but one unit may want to become more agile and better networked to increase its effectiveness. We might help them with more localized keystone forums or similar, and look for opportunities to bring other parts of the enterprise in later.”
Looking Ahead
Stan McChrystal added a concluding reflection. “We continue to learn and adapt the model—and there’s a lot we still don’t know. We’re also seeing lots of organizational innovations that are pushing our thinking—for example hybrid models combining hierarchy and networks, and governance mechanisms that are almost leaderless.”
“But leaders are not going to disappear. They just have to change how they lead, in step with all the changes of how networks themselves are evolving.”
