Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq moved quickly, striking ruthlessly, then seemingly vanishing into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training--but none of that seemed to matter. To defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, the 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? Discarding conventional wisdom, McChrystal and his colleagues remade the Task Force intosomething new: a network that combined extremely 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. The Task Force became a "team of teams"--faster, flatter, more flexible--and beat back Al Qaeda.

STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL’s last Army assignment was commanding all U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He had previously served as director of the Joint Staff and as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. The author of My Share of the Task, he is currently a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and cofounder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm. Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell are his colleagues at the McChrystal Group.