Team of teams
Ratings16
Average rating4.7
15
Ratings16
Average rating4.7
As commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), General Stanley McChrystal played a crucial role in the War on Terror. But when he took the helm in 2004, America was losing that war badly: despite vastly inferior resources and technology, Al Qaeda was outmaneuvering America's most elite warriors. McChrystal came to realize that today's faster, more interdependent world had overwhelmed the conventional, top-down hierarchy of the U.S. military. Al Qaeda had seen the future: a decentralized network that could move quickly and strike ruthlessly. To defeat such an enemy, JSOC would have to discard a century of management wisdom, and pivot from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. Under McChrystal's leadership, JSOC remade itself, in the midst of a grueling war, into something entirely new: a network that combined robust centralized communication with decentralized managerial authority. As a result, they beat back Al Qaeda. In this book, McChrystal shows not only how the military made that transition, but also how similar shifts are possible in all organizations, from large companies to startups to charities to governments. In a turbulent world, the best organizations think and act like a team of teams, embracing small groups that combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share what they've learned. Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career, the private sector, and sources as diverse as hospital emergency rooms and NASA's space program, McChrystal frames the existential challenge facing today's organizations, and proposes a compelling, effective solution.
Reviews with the most likes.
Big fan of this book.
It's about how to enable huge, complex teams to be adaptable at scale.
It deep dives into 2 main strategies:
1. Creating shared consciousnesses so that folks at the front lines have a very high level of information and context.
2. Delegating decision making so that senior leadership don't bottleneck, increasing speed, adaptability, and empowerment.
Lots of fantastic, well placed anecdotes from: the fight in Iraq, US companies, NASA, historical books, and the author's personal life.
It takes a bit to get going but warms up by chapter 6 on org structures, which is fantastic. Loved chapter 8 on the O&I meeting structure, and chapter 11 on a leader's role on a team of teams.
It's not immediately drag-and-drop applicable to software teams, but that's also what's so good about this book, as the tactics from a different context (the war against Al Qaeda) spur thought on what methods you could apply to software teams and how you might adapt them. The strategies are generalized enough to last for decades.
I would give 4.5 stars. Going to round up as this is just so well written, with such interesting, practical examples. The best book on empowerment at scale that I've read yet.
Second read.
The essential conundrum is that the only person who can implement the team of teams notion effectively has to be 1. unequivocally in charge of the entire enterprise, and 2. secure enough to voluntarily cede power down the chain.
Team development
Eventually, we all have to take a leap of faith and dive into the swirl. Our destination is a future whose form we may not find comforting, but which has just as much beauty and potential as the straight lines and right angles of the past century of reductionism: this future will take the form of organic networks, resilience engineering, controlled flooding-a world without stop signs. (249)
A must read for anybody who currently leads a team or who is looking to develop their career to do so in the future.
