Title: Team of Teams – New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Author: General Stanley McChrystal
Publisher: Portfolio Publishing
Publication Date: 05/12/2015
ASIN: 1591847486
Read BookBook Description:
Team of Teams, written by retired Army General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. General McChrystal calls on his experience commanding special operations forces in Iraq to challenge the status quo of centralized command and control.
When General McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move fast, strike hard, then vanish into the local population. The allied forces had an advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter.
McChrystal and his team discarded conventional wisdom and remade the Task Force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a synergy that would have been impossible even a decade earlier. The Task Force became a “team of teams”—faster, flatter, more flexible—and beat back Al Qaeda
In this powerful book, McChrystal and shows how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It has the potential to transform organizations large and small.
Book Contents:
PART 1
THE PROTEUS PROBLEM
Chapter 1: Sons of Proteus
Chapter 2: Clockwork
Chapter 3: From Complicated to Complex
Chapter 4: Team of Teams
PART II
FROM MANY, ONE
Chapter 5: From Command to Team
Chapter 6: Team of Teams
PART III
SHARING
Chapter 7: Seeing the System
Chapter 8: Brains Out of the Footlocker
Chapter 9: Beating the Prisoner’s Delemma
PART IV
LETTING GO
Chapter 10: Hands Off
Chapter 11: Leading like a Gardener
PART V
LOOKING AHEAD
Chapter 12: Symmetries