Summary: General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

De: Ant Hive Media

Narrado por: Pete Ferrand

Duración: 26 m

Resumen del Editor

This is a summary of General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization?

The old rules no longer apply

When General Stanley 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 quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training - but none of that seemed to matter.

Teaching a leviathan to improvise

It's no secret that in any field, small teams have many advantages - they can respond quickly, communicate freely, and make decisions without layers of bureaucracy. But organizations taking on really big challenges can't fit in a garage. They need management practices that can scale to thousands of people. General McChrystal led a hierarchical, highly disciplined machine of thousands of men and women. But to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, his Task Force would have to acquire the enemy's speed and flexibility. Was there a way to combine the power of the world's mightiest military with the agility of the world's most fearsome terrorist network? If so, could the same principles apply in civilian organizations?

A new approach for a new world

McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade the Task Force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents.

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Great Summary

This summary does a solid job of touching on the key concepts and applications of the book through select vignettes from Team of Teams. Tells a 13 hour book in 25 minutes. I strongly recommend the full book to elaborate in more depth if you like this summary.

Team of teams summary weak

While Stanley McChrystal‘s book “Team of teams” is an excellent story, this summary is not. The audio portion of this summary is plagued by poor diction and uninspired writing. You may get a good idea of what Mr. McCrystal core points were, but this summary does not do it justice.