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I also like to see people who are on a team and got selected to be a leader on the team like the captain or a leader on debate or whatever, because it shows that they were committed to something and people were respecting them during that.
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Welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with General Stanley McChrystal.
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His new book, Team of Teams, an excellent read.
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I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
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We re gonna talk about leadership from a special forces perspective, why flexibility and adaptability are the cure for an unpredictable landscape, and some techniques for building that flexibility in ourselves, and why relationships are the key to success of any organization, military or otherwise,
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and how we can develop those relationships and networks to improve our own organizations.
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Really glad to have you with us here today at AOC.
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So enjoy this episode with General Stanley McChrystal.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox.
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That s where we discuss concepts like reading body language, nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking, mentorship, influence, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, you can text charmed to 33444.
0
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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Everywhere else, just go to theartofcharm.com and also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, let s talk to General Stanley McChrystal.
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I toured and spoke to the 2nd Battalion, Ranger Battalion.
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We did a little training up at Fort Lewis.
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I got the shirt to prove it.
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I said, oh, I m interviewing General Stanley McChrystal.
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And one of the guys there, Brian Wright, shout out to him.
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He s the ABC at 2nd Battalion.
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He said you re one of his heroes.
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And he said one day he saw you, I don t even know, I guess it was in Iraq.
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and he yelled at you, he didn t know who you were, something was amiss with the security or something like that and he just let loose.
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And then he found out who you were and he said, oh my gosh, I m in so much trouble.
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And he said later on, you came up to him and said, I m glad you re still doing your job.
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He was worried and you said, no, this is what you re supposed to do.
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It doesn t matter what s on my epaulets or whatever, right?
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I was on an operation with him and it was at night.
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And so they couldn t tell, you know, all cats are gray in the dark, same as generals.
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And I remember he jacked me up and he was right.
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And I said, hey, good job.
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And I thought that was a funny story and very kind of illustrative of what you hear about, about the way that you work.
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And I really enjoyed the book as well.
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It s really well researched.
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It s not just, hey, I was a general, so I know all this stuff.
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There s a lot of stories in it, there s a lot of history in it, and there s a lot of real application
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for corporate teams to put the special forces team building psychology into action, so I really appreciate it.
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And that s why I wanted to talk to you today, because I think there s so much here, and I really appreciate it.
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I really think there s gonna be a lot here for the AOC audience.
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Well, I appreciate it, too, and I was excited by us writing the book, because I learned so much in the process, and so more people can get the ideas, the better I feel about it.
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Now, one of the things that this book is, of course, focused on, team of teams, are the teams that are created, not only within special forces, but how these sort of same concepts can be applied to business.
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And you mentioned that even guys like Steve Jobs were most proud of the teams they created, as opposed to the products from Apple.
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And yet, when you hear about folks like Steve Jobs, he was so hard on everyone, he was kind of a terrible person to work with as a fault.
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Where s the line between that, or does that not matter?
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Because in the military,
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you kind of don t hear a lot about, well, you know, I really liked working with this person.
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It s more like this guy got the job done or didn t.
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Yeah, I think there s a fine line there.
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The first thing is a small team that takes pride in what it did, the kind you mentioned later in your life.
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You know, it was fun to be a part of that.
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Think of the people you meet that were in Iraq or Afghanistan, even if those wars don t come out like we hope they did.
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Almost all the veterans I talked to that were in good units, you know, they talk fondly about the experience.
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through the lens of, hey, I was with people I really loved and cared about.
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I was proud to be part of it.
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When you talk about the leader, I think there s a line in my experience.
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People want leaders to take them to success.
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They want leaders to demand a lot of them.
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In fact, they take pride in a demanding leader.
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But the tipping point is they don t take pride in someone who is abusive without purpose.
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You know, people took pride that Vince Lombardi pushed his teams hard physically and whatnot, but they never talk with pride with a leader who is personally demeaning to people or a leader who pits people against each other.
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They will sometimes discount that as saying, well, he was a good leader, but he did this.
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I think we need to make sure that we don t think that
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very, very demanding leadership that s also toxic, as we call it, is truly effective.
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Do you care what your subordinates think of you personally, or are you more concerned with what they think of the results or their ability to achieve results?
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I m actually very concerned about what they think about me personally, but maybe on a slightly different level than might be obvious.
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Popularity is not important whether they love you or think you re a good guy we want to be loved but the reality is you want first to be trusted you want people to think that you are competent that you have their best.
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Interest at heart you want them to believe that you are honest to your integrity matters so you could sort of wrap that into you want them to trust and respect your character.
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Now, if they then grow to like you as an individual, that s important, but the first is critical.
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That s interesting, right, because people won t do the job that they need to do if they don t respect the leadership.
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Is that what you mean?
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Well, that s exactly right, and respect
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Really, the longer the task, the more that s important, because you can come in and scream at people, and they will typically do what you first scream at them about, and you ll say, well, hey, I must be an effective leader, even though I m a jerk.
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The reality is, over time, that wanes, because they won t keep doing it.
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They also won t do anything they don t have to do.
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They ll do what you tell them.
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But I don t know how many times in my career I didn t give a good order, or what I did was incomplete, or I dropped the ball.
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And the organization didn t.
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They just understood what had to happen.
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They didn t execute what I said.
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They executed what should have been said.
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And they were thus effective.
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And they did it partly because they just want to do the right thing.
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And they did it partly because I think they gave me the benefit of the doubt.
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They said most of the time,
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Stan McChrystal is either right or tries to be, and so we re willing to help him and fill in the rest of the way.
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Now, was special forces something you had your eye on early in your career, and if not, how did you end up going in that direction?
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It was.
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In reality, I grew up in the, really, I guess I came of age late 60s, early 70s.
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My father was in Vietnam, my brother s in Vietnam.
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You remember the stories of the Green Berets in Vietnam.
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That was something that sort of captured my imagination.
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I d watched movies like The Longest Day, and I remember the Rangers climbing Ponto Hawk in the movie.
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So the romance of that idea got in my mind when I was young.
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And then when I was at West Point, it became even stronger.
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So finally getting there, I say finally getting there, I got there after two years in the 82nd first, and then went to Special Forces, wasn t a surprise for me.
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Now were you kind of the model West Point student who sits down, studies hard, grinds it out, and just outworks everyone?
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If you think your listeners will believe it, that s what I ll say.
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But the record would quickly prove me a liar.
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No, there were several problems with me at West Point.
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The first was I went to West Point not taking academics seriously.
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And I wasn t well prepared in math and science.
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And the first two years of West Point are math and science heavy.
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So the first year of West Point we had like
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1,370 people started in my class, I think it was.
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And I was in the bottom like 10.
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10% or 10 people?
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SPEAKER_00
No, the bottom 10, not 10%.
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I wish it had been 10%.
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And so I just did horribly for much of my first two years.
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And then as we switched subjects to things that were history and English, a greater percentage, and I got a little bit more serious in life, particularly about West Point, I started doing much better.
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But that was academics.
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The other side of it was my conduct.
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I got to West Point thinking that this was sort of a short-term thing I would go through en route to being an Army officer.
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So my goal in life wasn t to be a West Point cadet.
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To me, that was a means to an end.
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And so I got to West Point not taking the place very seriously in terms of personal conduct and discipline.
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And so my first year and a half there, I got massive amount
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disciplinary trouble in fact i logged 128 punishment tours that s 128 hours walking on the area they call it it s a place between the barracks in dress uniform with your
1
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rifle and you just walk back and forth for an hour at a time.
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And I had to do 128 of those.
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And then I also got confined in my room for months on end.
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I came within a few demerits at the end of my first or previous freshman year of getting thrown out.
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SPEAKER_00
And it was all just lack of personal maturity, a lack of discipline.
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SPEAKER_00
I got religion, in a sense, toward the second half of my sophomore year.
1
SPEAKER_00
and sort of flew straight and narrow after that, but I was pretty much in danger for the first almost two years.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s an interesting learning curve.
1
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Was there anything that you were doing then, even when you were thumbing your nose at authority in some way, that you brought over to your role as a commander in Afghanistan?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know, I say this in retrospect.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think so.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you really go back to, it was prioritization.
1
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to be a soldier, and I wanted to be a combat soldier, and West Point is important
1
SPEAKER_00
But it didn t feel like it was about that.
1
SPEAKER_00
It felt like it was kind of Mickey Mouse.
1
SPEAKER_00
It felt like it was very bureaucratic.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I developed an impatience for that kind of thing.
1
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I developed an impatience for leaders who wrap themselves in the process, wrap themselves in the rules.
1
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And I actually think that helped me long term.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I had some colleagues at West Point who were very similar as cadets and were similarly successful later as senior officers because
1
SPEAKER_00
Rules should have a purpose, and if they re not serving their purpose, they should be ignored or changed.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think that did help me.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s an interesting comment.
1
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If rules aren t serving a purpose, they should be ignored or changed.
1
SPEAKER_01
Sounds a little bit like the special forces rules of operation, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, look, if this isn t working for us, we re not here to check all the boxes, we re here to get it done.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s exactly right.
1
SPEAKER_00
We used to have a saying, if it s stupid and it works, it ain t stupid.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the idea is the army develops doctrine and processes.
1
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And if you don t watch it, you create an organization that learns that if they follow the rules, if they follow the processes, that they never get in trouble.
1
SPEAKER_00
Even if they don t win, they don t get in trouble because they follow the processes.
1
SPEAKER_00
And yet that s not the way war should be fought, particularly special operations war.
1
SPEAKER_00
You should only look at what it takes to accomplish the mission.
1
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And as long as it s not illegal or immoral,
1
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the force ought to be able to do it.
1
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One of the things I found most effective when I was leading special operations soldiers, I got more senior, was if you give people a lot of specific guidance or limitations on how to do something, what you ve really done is created a bunch of excuses for not getting the job done.
1
SPEAKER_00
And yet, if you take all those away, and you say, as long as it s not illegal or immoral, do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t care what it costs.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t care this, this, this.
1
SPEAKER_00
do it, then suddenly they are left with a pretty wide ability to get it done and very little ability to come back and say, well, we couldn t do it because of this or that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I found special operations soldiers really reacted well to that because they don t like to be told what to do or how to do something.
1
SPEAKER_00
They just like to be told the end result.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I believe that s true in just about all organizations as well.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, I definitely think that there s probably a lot of room to remove bureaucracy when it comes to organizations like the military, and it seems like you had a real strength there.
1
SPEAKER_01
And there s a lot of talk in the book and in other articles written about you and by you about sort of cutting the fat or trimming the fat.
1
SPEAKER_01
What is this thing about you only eating one meal a day?
1
SPEAKER_01
You re just famous for not eating much.
1
SPEAKER_01
What s that all about?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know, I get all kind of zen credit for that, and it s true.
1
SPEAKER_00
I eat one meal a day, and I haven t eaten yet today.
1
SPEAKER_00
Ali a little bit after we finish this it s just something i started when i was a first lieutenant cuz i thought i was getting budget.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so i started to for gratification until the end of the day and then i eat anything i want.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not smart it s not what health people say but i m sixty two i m in good shape so why change.
1
SPEAKER_01
I get that and I m really glad that you said that because my note here for this is essentially a lot of people I know that were talking to you or writing about you, they took that as some sort of life hack, but I think it s really dangerous to take everything successful people do and assume they re doing it for this very specific purpose that they ve measured and that if we emulate it, we ll get similar results because going back to the Steve Jobs example,
1
SPEAKER_01
we could just as easily say, look, the key to running a good tech company is to be a huge jerk to everyone, just like Steve Jobs.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s a dangerous assumption, the not eating any breakfast or lunch for that matter.
1
SPEAKER_01
It seems like almost an example of that.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s more circumstantial.
1
SPEAKER_01
You re getting pudgy in your own mind.
1
SPEAKER_01
When you re a general, you probably don t have time to eat.
1
SPEAKER_01
You don t want to eat in front of soldiers who aren t eating.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so you just go, screw it, I m not gonna eat until nine, and that s what happened.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s not some sort of like, hey, if you don t eat till nine, you can become a general too, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
You nailed it.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, people will watch somebody successful, like the habits of highly successful people, and they will get very confused.
1
SPEAKER_00
I had a period of time when I slept four hours a night.
1
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And I never told anybody that that s a good idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s a good idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I don t do that now.
1
SPEAKER_00
I did it because I had a period of five years where that s all I had.
1
SPEAKER_00
But people will get that and they ll go, well, he s achieved a higher level of consciousness by doing this.
1
SPEAKER_00
And therefore, you know, I will do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s good that you ask.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, here s what you have, Eaton, which is a lot of flack.
1
SPEAKER_01
You are a popular piñata, my man.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have a lot of can t-win situations between the politicians, the public, and the media.
1
SPEAKER_01
What occurred to me was it seems like a bad idea to try and have our warriors, and I mean our soldiers and military, consider politics in their wartime decision making.
1
SPEAKER_01
It just seems like a terrible,
1
SPEAKER_01
and I wondered, how do you stay focused on what s important when there are so many distractions and other people trying to influence your actions that in their influence, their outcome has nothing to do with military winning?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, at first I d say you cannot separate politics and war.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Clausewitz taught us that war is just an extension of politics, and he was right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Warriors, particularly senior leaders, have got to understand politics.
1
SPEAKER_00
And politics are why you re doing things.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I m not arguing for a simplistic separation of war and politics.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when a military leader is in a job, if the military leader finds that they start to watch all the things that are written about them, that they start to be impacted by
1
SPEAKER_00
the calls that they get of people who are excited, you know, different political figures trying to push you one way or another for various reasons.
1
SPEAKER_00
What happens is you stop being effective.
1
SPEAKER_00
You start being consumed with this.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s almost like I think I ve never run for office, but I think a politician running for office, if he s watching or she is watching the polls every day, I think they can become fixated on something that really isn t a measure of whether they re doing what they should do.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that s really important for leaders and
1
SPEAKER_00
What I used to tell leaders junior to be following me is as you get more senior in command, you re going to take some flack and you re going to be questions.
1
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes it s going to be very legitimate.
1
SPEAKER_00
You will do things that are stupid or, or whatever.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so some of it s right.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then some of it won t be, but you can t, can t spend your life worried about it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so you ve got to treat every job like it s your last job.
1
SPEAKER_00
Don t take command saying, if I do well at this command, I ll get a next higher command.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because if you do, you ll spend all your time worried about not making mistakes to get to the next one.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that gets to this risk averse culture that haunts a lot of organizations, just not the military.
1
SPEAKER_00
You ve really got to be willing to say, I m going to do everything that I think is right and let the cards come out as they do.
1
SPEAKER_00
I feel good about it because at the end of the day, people have beat on me and whatnot.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when I look myself in the mirror,
1
SPEAKER_00
or I look my wife and son in the face, I don t feel bad about anything I did or didn t do.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think that had I thought differently, that might be a different case.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, Newsweek called you a snake-eating rebel and a Jedi commander.
1
SPEAKER_01
That must be pretty cool.
1
SPEAKER_01
Other people are paying attention to you, not necessarily following the flock.
1
SPEAKER_00
When people write stuff like that, you just sort of roll your eyes, because what s a Jedi guy anyway?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s a movie character.
1
SPEAKER_00
I get what they re trying to say, and sometimes, some of the things people write can make you think, hey, I must be really smart, or I must be a cool guy.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the thing I remind people is, the very complimentary things written about you are no more correct than the very hateful things.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so if you start believing the good, then you better believe the bad as well.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is it true that you carry custom-made nunchucks with a Bruce Lee quote on them?
1
SPEAKER_00
If I carried nunchucks, I d hit myself in the head.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, it says here he carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy, engraved with his name and four stars.
1
SPEAKER_00
See, we always joked about nunchucks.
1
SPEAKER_00
Nobody ever uses, nobody who really fights ever used nunchucks.
1
SPEAKER_00
We joked about it, so my security detail went and got a set of nunchucks from someone who lived where, and they stenciled my name on the handles and put them in the car as a joke.
1
SPEAKER_00
The problem is knuckleheads get in there and they see that and they go, this is serious.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re the kind of person to think that s serious, then I can t help it.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, right.
2
SPEAKER_03
Well, there s Newsweek for ya.
2
SPEAKER_03
You said it, not me.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you ll wanna know, I do still have those laying around somewhere.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, if you can take a picture of those, we ll make it the show art for this episode.
2
SPEAKER_03
You did go out on dozens of nighttime raids, though, during your time in Iraq, and in our research for the show, we saw some quotes from some of these British officers who said something like, the lads love Stan McChrystal, you d be out somewhere in Iraq, and someone would take a knee behind you or beside you, and a corporal would be like, who the hell is that?
2
SPEAKER_03
And it s frickin  Stan McChrystal.
2
SPEAKER_03
Of course, they probably said, it s frickin  Stan McChrystal, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
And you re in the trenches.
2
SPEAKER_00
I did, but you know, if I really take it down to a corporate characterization,
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, a good leader in a manufacturing plant goes and walks on the shop floor.
2
SPEAKER_00
A good leader goes and checks in rooms and watches people do their job.
2
SPEAKER_00
My unit did its job on nighttime raids.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the only way I could see my unit do a job on nighttime raids was to go on them.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it wasn t to try to be, you know, Hollywood to get on the raid.
2
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t trying to get myself killed.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was making sure that I knew what we were doing on raids, how the force was operating.
2
SPEAKER_00
But also, there s a little bit of, it s important to show the people you work with that you re willing to share the danger.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I would go on raids with an SAS troop, the Bredzer, Delta Force of the SEALs, and they were happy to have me come along, but they didn t want me to get hurt on their watch.
2
SPEAKER_00
So they, you know, they re always kind of like, oh, wow, if something happens to the boss, the sergeant major s going to kill us.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, it was me trying to share some danger with them,
2
SPEAKER_00
and also to see what s going on.
2
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t because I was particularly valuable on the mission, because they certainly didn t need me, but it was really good for me.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you can forget.
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what s happening down close to the point of action in any business if you re not willing to roll your sleeves up.
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I see that.
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And for startups and the military both, or any company for that matter, we re plagued by this legacy baggage and old ways of doing things and not wanting to get down from the management office and go walk on the shop floor or be in the trenches.
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SPEAKER_03
But how do we shake loose of some of that old baggage without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
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I mean, there has to be some good
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from the old ways, from the bureaucracy itself.
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SPEAKER_03
How do you test and figure out the new model, what you need to shake off versus what you need to keep without going backwards and sacrificing lives learning that lesson?
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SPEAKER_00
No, that s a really good one.
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And I ll start by saying first you have to understand how the organization operates, which means you have to understand the macro picture, the environment in which the organization operates.
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You ve got to understand how your organization operates from top to bottom.
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And you ve got to understand what your role as the leader is in that organization and where your value add is.
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When I went on nighttime raids with my force, my value add was not the tactical participation there.
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It was me understanding what they do and me improving their morale so they do their job better.
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And I understand the big picture better.
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show everything has to come back to what is the overall success of the organization and then what is my role in contributing to that.
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There s another factor that happens today and it s probably more difficult than any time in the last hundred years and that is because of the pace of change and particularly technology it s very easy to be a senior person organization and be completely unfamiliar
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with what is done down at the lowest level.
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Because if you think about it, in a more static world, you grow up in an organization and you do shop level like jobs.
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And as you matriculate up, you have experience that is still relevant when you get senior.
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But now because the technology has changed what we use, how we do things, the senior leader can go down to the shop floor and it s completely unfamiliar to them.
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It s totally different from anything they ever did.
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So the relevance of their earlier experiences stretch pretty thin.
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That causes some senior leaders to retreat from it.
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Because if a senior leader goes down and they don t know what they re doing, they worry that they re not credible.
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They worry that they come down and they make a fool of themselves, or that sort of thing, and so there s a natural tendency to stay away.
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I started with that because things had changed.
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I d grown up on the shop floor doing ops, but then as I got senior and I went down and were using new equipment,
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technology of all kinds i go down there and i just sort of be honest with the guys that said i don t know how we do this so show me and you know once you get over that unwillingness or hesitance to do that i found the force likes to show you they re not critical that you don t know they understand why you don t and they sort of appreciate asking and they take pride in being able to say here boss here s how we do this.
2
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2
SPEAKER_03
In the book, you make a distinction between complicated versus complex, and I want to get that distinction and talk about why that s important and how we can harness it, because I think it is very tempting to make things complicated or complex, and with special forces and the way that you re teaching us to lead our businesses and team of teams, we see that flexibility and adaptability is actually more important than any kind of complex or complicated plan that we can come up with.
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SPEAKER_00
You re exactly right to give you the short summary the difference between complicated complex is your ability to predict what is going to happen in a complicated world think the industrial revolution.
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You might have to study a problem in great detail and you might have to build a very complicated solution to it think of a complicated organizational structure or assembly line or process but once you figure out the problem and you build this complicated solution.
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Then you can operate it and everybody does their part.
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It sort of works because there s a predictability to it.
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It takes a while to understand, but if you pull this lever, it goes through all the steps and X comes out as the result.
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And that s fine.
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As long as the result that you need is static, meaning it doesn t change very fast so that you don t have to change your machine often.
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In a complex world, what you ve got is too many variables, too much interdependency between those variables and too much speed.
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SPEAKER_00
And so predicting a situation, the relationship between cause and effect is fundamentally impossible.
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SPEAKER_00
And so when you get in a complex situation and you really cannot predict what s going to happen, you can prepare yourself, you can put yourself in a boxer stance to be as flexible as possible, but you ve got to go in knowing that you re almost never going to have the right answer to the problem when you start.
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SPEAKER_00
You re only going to figure it out as it goes along and you re going to constantly adapt.
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SPEAKER_00
And most of our organizations and the leaders we developed, that s not the way we took it on.
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And so, particularly in special forces, what we tried to say is, the plan is never going to go according to plan.
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plan, things will never be something you can predict.
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Instead, what we ve got to produce people who see emerging problems and deal with them in the most flexible and innovative way possible.
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SPEAKER_00
Right.
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So it s possible to be so efficient and streamlined that you re no longer flexible enough to react to different variables in the equation or the situation.
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SPEAKER_00
And flexibility and adaptability can make up for the lack of ability to predict the outcome.
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That s exactly right.
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If you think of our economic system, we have
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a tension there because there s a pull to efficiency.
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I m on the board of an airline, and if you do on a sunny day without a lot of maintenance problems, you tweak all of the schedules and the use of your aircraft and your crews to this really tight system that is just incredibly efficient because everybody s doing something.
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That looks good on paper, and if it all worked as planned, that would be very profitable.
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Unfortunately, it doesn t.
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rain clouds, other things come, maintenance problems, employees that have to go home sick.
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And suddenly you re in this constantly adapting situation.
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So you have to put some flex in the system.
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You have to give yourself some slack, some room to adapt.
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And that s that constant tension between people who want to be perfectly efficient and then in organizations that need to be adaptable.
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SPEAKER_00
One of the things that you mention in the book that I found really interesting was that you said the number one thing that moves things along and makes a difference that translates to the battlefield is relationships.
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And AOC, we run these live programs every week where we teach people relationship building skills, networking, and things like that.
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I was surprised to hear that because in the military, you kind of think net hierarchy, even if we re talking flexibility, why would relationships play such a large role?
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Can you explain that a little bit?
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I can if you think of the military is a big machine as millions of people and everybody is a part in that machine and you put them in uniform and parts are are fitted to where they go it would appear that the process is relationships.
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When in reality it s the opposite if you take special operating forces is a microcosm of that.
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What they do in these small teams is they build these relationships.
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Sometimes the team of five people will stay together for 10 or more years without a change in a single person.
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And they develop these deep relationships.
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And what that does is it allows them to operate with a level of understanding of the other person, a sense of common purpose, a sense of trust.
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And then this flexibility, because to use a business term, there are no transaction costs between them.
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You know the other person s gonna do this if you need them to do this and you absolutely can consider that done so in a small group that comes short of organic.
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When you get to a large organization you can t build those relationships between thousands and thousands of people what you can do.
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is build relationships between key leaders.
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You can build some relationships, generals in warfare from movies of the old days, from the Civil War, World War II.
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They ve got one persona when they re on the battlefield in front of the troops, but then when they re among their fellow commanders, sometimes they ll lapse into first names and they ll lapse into, hey, remember 20 years ago when we were together, I was at your wedding.
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And those relationships create this ability to get things done.
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in Afghanistan in 2007 was a classmate and lifetime friend of mine named Dave Rodriguez.
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I was commanding JSOC, and we had to do this operation in eastern Afghanistan.
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Nobody directed us to cooperate together.
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Instead, we brought our forces together.
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He lent me equipment and forces.
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I did the same.
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All things that weren t mandated, but they were just because we were close friends and
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We had worked really hard.
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It was pretty difficult.
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And one night he had a young sergeant show up about one in the morning to my headquarters with a little handwritten note.
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General Rodriguez had written this quote that had come from General Sherman to General Grant during the war that said, Grant, I always knew that wherever I was, you thought of me.
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And if I was in trouble, you would come, if alive.
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And it s this extraordinary statement of, I m there for you no matter what.
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When you get that kind of trust between key leaders, then suddenly organizations can do things together they can t do otherwise.
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SPEAKER_00
This is almost an intense concept or principle seemingly throughout special forces in general.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you have schools like BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition School, which is, I guess, a Navy SEAL kind of training initiation.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t really know what you would call that other than BUDS.
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SPEAKER_00
And you re building trust there as well as any training that you see with special forces, it seems to be more about
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group cohesion and group activity and flexibility and adaptability and teamwork than pretty much any other principle.
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That s exactly right.
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And we reinforce it in the training by things like buddy teams.
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You can never be without your assigned buddy.
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Everything you do is either a boat team or a squad and ranger train, that sort of thing.
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And they do peer ratings.
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You re not looking for the smartest guy to be in special forces.
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You re not looking for the strongest.
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You re looking for the person who can and will build those relationships and the person who will stick to it.
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I mean, the person who won t quit.
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Those are really the core traits that need to come out.
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So people who build strong relationships are the same people that will go out and rescue their buddy on the battlefield.
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People who won t quit are the same people who, even though the unit is badly hit with casualties, will continue the mission and get it done.
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That s something that has to be
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bread into individuals and then also bread is the culture of the organization.
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SPEAKER_00
For future special operations guys, it seems like in the book, you re looking for the best guys in terms of pure ratings, not necessarily the highest achievers with pristine records.
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SPEAKER_00
Luckily for you, given your record at West Point, I suppose.
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SPEAKER_00
When you interview and vet people for the McChrystal Group, how do you elicit the information that you need?
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SPEAKER_00
You gotta have some tricks up your sleeve, maybe like unfinished statements or something that forces people to fill in the blanks that shows that they ve got the right stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah you re exactly right the first thing we do we re lucky enough to get really high quality young people applying for jobs we got a pretty good population to look from the first thing that we learned is just standard set of interviews just won t get you there because a set of interviews or something somebody can.
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prepare for, they can put on a certain persona.
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So the first thing we do is we try to talk to people who ve known them before.
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Like almost nobody ends up getting hired in the crystal group, unless they ve done a full 10 week internship here, or they were recommended by somebody in the organization.
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There are exceptions, but most people, there s some kind of longer term relationship that has been built that allows you to really vet somebody.
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And then in the process,
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We ask different questions.
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One of the questions I always like to ask is, okay, if somebody was going to say, Stan is a good guy, but what would the rest of the sentence be?
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And you know, people do say that.
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And so it s a person s willingness to be honest, their self-awareness.
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You re really trying to get into, can they fit into a team?
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Because if they can fit into a team, they can succeed here.
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Even if they re brilliant and they don t fit in, we won t be successful.
3
SPEAKER_00
So how do you find who has a great track record in terms of fitting into a team?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, what makes a track record at that level of performance?
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SPEAKER_00
What types of metrics are you looking for?
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SPEAKER_01
No, there s no set thing.
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SPEAKER_01
I like to look for people who ve served on sports teams or been part of organizations and they stuck to it.
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SPEAKER_01
You know they were on it for a while i also like to see people who are on a team and got selected to be a leader on the team like the captain or a leader on debate or whatever because it shows that they were committed to something and people were respecting them during that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that s really key if someone is work somewhere else you wanna know what other people thought of you wanna know why they left somewhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
because even if somebody said, yeah, they were great, but they left, you kind of, you want to understand what about their dynamics with other people either caused them to want to leave or other people happened to see them.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know that you read a lot of audio books, which is similar to what I do as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m curious about what you read and how you apply those to your work as well, because I know you believe in constantly learning and taking in info and sharing that info as well inside the organization.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s really popular because a lot of us just like to read.
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SPEAKER_01
I happen to do more audiobooks than reading, but I like to read a lot of history, listen to a lot of history, a lot of biography because I think you learn a lot of leadership from people went into situations, what they did about it.
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It s a realistic, not academic discussion of people are motivated by this.
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I really want to see what happened when people were in situations that were difficult and maybe how they succeeded or how they didn t.
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SPEAKER_01
I also like
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books about big challenges like building the Boulder Dam or something because it s something that is an immense thing that has to be done by a team ultimately.
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SPEAKER_01
So how
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How do they scope the problem?
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How do they come together a team?
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What were all the problems that came through?
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A war s the same thing.
4
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It s a big challenge that a bunch of people have got to come together to solve.
4
SPEAKER_00
Every once in a while, I ll read business books, but as you saw in Team of Teams, we try to make our points through stories.
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We could say, this is that, and you could take us on faith, but if we show you historically the point and then say, and here s the derived truth that happens to be universal, I think it sticks better with someone like me.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ve seen this a lot as well.
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SPEAKER_01
We interviewed Julian Guthrie about her book, How to Make a Spaceship, which the amount of sort of teamwork, shared consciousness that was required for projects like launching something into space is very similar to what you re describing here.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you also mentioned shared consciousness in organizations in the book as well.
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SPEAKER_01
How do we develop that shared consciousness
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SPEAKER_01
It seems like you believe strongly in info sharing.
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SPEAKER_01
It s key, especially for startups and things like that.
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SPEAKER_01
How do you begin to form that?
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Because it s big enough of an endeavor that, especially in a big company, where do you even begin?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s a huge endeavor, and it s not intuitively obvious that it s needed to a lot of people who grew up in a different environment.
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SPEAKER_00
So what we mean by shared consciousness is everybody having a contextual understanding of the big picture, of what the entire organization is trying to do.
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There s the old story years ago about the guy walking down the road and runs into two people with rocks in front of them and chisels.
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And he asked the first person, what are you doing?
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And the person says, well, I m chiseling this rock.
4
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And he asked the next person, what are you doing?
4
SPEAKER_00
And he says, I m part of a team building the cathedral.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s a mindset of individuals
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that hopefully implies that not only do they know they re part of a team that has purpose to it but also how does my rock fit in what do i have to do about my rock to make it the right fit in organizations today if you go back even in our youth organizational structure dependent upon silos and specialization.
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People develop expertise.
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They did a certain thing on the assembly line, a certain part of the process.
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And the theory was nobody really needed to know the entire process except the orchestrators of it.
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Everybody else could sort of be in their little spot.
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They could focus down, they could hoe their own row, whatever you want to call it.
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SPEAKER_00
And the genius of it, it was all come together and it would be whatever you wanted it to be.
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But nowadays, because things change so fast,
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and because things are so complex, what we believe is you ve got to achieve this level of contextual understanding of shared consciousness that s way past anything we ve ever done before.
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And you ve got to do it by pushing information in amounts and timeliness unlike anything we ve ever done.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the good news is, although our world got more complex to a great degree because of information technology,
4
SPEAKER_00
That same information technology gives you the opportunity to create shared consciousness and even pretty big organizations, but it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of discipline.
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SPEAKER_00
What we have done in organizations is we ve created in our clients at Keystone forums, we call it, we re on a periodic basis that they set, but a very regular basis.
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SPEAKER_00
They bring a large part of the organization together and not for an all hands pep talk, but for,
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synchronization everybody sees what s going on everybody gets updates they re talking about it virtually in most cases sharing notes and then they re all going out and continuing on with their mission but they re now informed and when they re informed through this shared consciousness they can make decisions without going back up the chain because
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they re suddenly empowered with knowledge that people at their level typically didn t have.
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And so suddenly they re part of the solution.
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SPEAKER_00
They don t have to wait for micromanagement from the top.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in modern pace of things, we found that that micromanagement at the top just doesn t work anymore.
4
SPEAKER_00
Even with a genius at the top, you just can t micromanage because it s too fast and too complex.
4
SPEAKER_01
With the emphasis on transparency and info sharing and things like that, I was wondering what you think of things like WikiLeaks and this sort of ultra-transparency, the Snowden type of stuff, where we take transparency and we just kind of crank it up to 11.
4
SPEAKER_00
I tend much more to 11 than I do towards the lower end of the spectrum.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a certain limitation.
4
SPEAKER_00
There are things of information that shouldn t be shared, I think, that Edward Snowden was wrong, but I think that
4
SPEAKER_00
If you think about the solution to something like that is locking things down and not sharing information to avoid information that shouldn t be shared being shared, the cure is then worse than the disease.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I believe that if you lean heavily towards transparency, that usually you ll be right, there ll be some problems.
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SPEAKER_00
But in aggregate, you re going to get much more value than cost from the risks involved.
4
SPEAKER_01
When we re looking at building flexibility, building transparency, how do we build flexibility into our lives?
4
SPEAKER_01
It seems like we ve got to be willing to let go of the side of the swimming pool and make some changes.
4
SPEAKER_00
The challenge of building flexibility in our lives is in most organizations, and even in our personal life, we re sort of programmed not to take risk.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so,
4
SPEAKER_00
You say, how do you avoid risk for your subordinates?
4
SPEAKER_00
What you often do is you put rules in where they can t do this or they can t do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
So they can t make a mistake.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or you sometimes even put yourself in a situation where.
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SPEAKER_00
You have a process that prevents you from making a decision too fast or doing something that s never been done before.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s all designed to mitigate risk.
4
SPEAKER_00
The problem is that to a great degree, it prevents taking advantage of opportunities.
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SPEAKER_00
So when you re building flexibility in your life, I think the first thing to do is look at what are the opportunities?
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SPEAKER_00
What are the costs of certain risks versus the opportunities?
4
SPEAKER_00
And we tend to be much more
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SPEAKER_00
risk averse than we are opportunity oriented so i think analyzing that there s some risks you shouldn t take but if you really look at what the opportunities are many of those risks.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can not to be nearly as high as we pretend they are so that s one of the first things to do the second thing to do is give yourself the opportunity.
4
SPEAKER_00
to adapt and what I mean by that is if you have a job you work 10 hours a day and you set it up so that you are busy those 10 hours of the day doing tasks that you assigned yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
You are not going to adapt or innovate very much because what you ve done is you ve taken away all your flexibility to do that if you re spending all your time doing things.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what I tell leaders is they re promoted is the first thing is avoid the temptation
4
SPEAKER_00
to make yourself essential to the organization by doing certain things people will tend to want to do that just to feel like they re earning the pay i believe leadership vastly under task themselves push things down to subordinates that you naturally would do it in fact it first you feel a little guilty because you re having other people doing work that you think i could do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
But the reality is, by giving yourself that white space on the counter of flexibility, suddenly you ve got the ability to adapt to emerging requirements, or the ability to innovate, or just the ability to get out and lead.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think that military leadership is easier than civilian leadership, or vice versa?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a great question.
4
SPEAKER_00
In some ways it s easier, but it s not easier in the way many people perceive it.
4
SPEAKER_00
The first thing is people think that military leadership s easy because you stand in front of the troops and you say, everybody go left and everybody goes left because they re so disciplined.
4
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t happen.
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And where it does happen is on a parade field where you have a bunch of soldiers and a sergeant barks a command and they all do it.
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And they do it because on the parade field, they re more scared of the sergeant than they are of anything else.
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If you get in combat, soldiers are not more scared of their leaders than they are of the enemy.
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And so suddenly they don t do things because you intimidated them or barked at them.
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They do them because they think it s the right thing to do, because they trust you.
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They think that most of the time what you tell them will be right.
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And they do it because they don t want to let their comrades down.
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So it s a completely different set of motivations.
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So from that standpoint, military leadership is very similar to civilian leadership.
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Where it differs is,
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Military leadership always has the ability to wrap itself in the flag, the mission to say, we re doing it for the country, we re doing it for the great cause that we re on.
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It is harder in a civilian company to do that because a leader can stand up and say, we and Acme, whatever, are about saving the world.
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But at the end of the day, if it s a for-profit company, everybody knows it s a for-profit company.
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And so saving the world really is, we ll save the world on the way to making money.
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And then the other thing is,
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And people are sometimes surprised by this.
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The military can t use money as an incentive.
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There s no way to give a person in the military a bonus.
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There s no way to give them a raise.
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That comes from Congress only.
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And so you say, well, you don t have all these important extrinsic motivating tools that we have in the civilian world.
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And I used to say
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in the military, thank God we don t, because money is never discussed.
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Nobody comes in and asks you for a raise.
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Nobody is ever unhappy because their bonus is lower than somebody else s.
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It takes all that out of the discussion, and it just makes it simpler.
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And so in reality, in many ways, military leadership is easier.
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Where it s harder, and this might be surprising as well,
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is in combat, military leadership has a lot of flexibility.
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You make decisions, you go.
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In garrison or peacetime, there are a million bureaucratic limitations on you, starting with laws, politics, and whatnot.
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Suddenly, making the kind of decisions that a good CEO would make in a company is really hard for a senior military leader to do.
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and so it s much more constrained.
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How do you stay focused on objectives and the mission in the face of the human cost on both sides?
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How do you insulate yourself or steel yourself or otherwise protect your mind and do what has to be done in a military operation?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, leaders at every level have really got to get their mind around that one.
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General Grant, during the Civil War, very rarely did he go to combat hospitals because he knew if he went there that the carnage he d see
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might weaken his resolve, might weaken his nerve to give orders that he knew would produce more carnage.
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It s not that military leaders are hardened to that.
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It s that military leaders have to stay focused on what it takes to win.
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And so I think the first thing a military leader s got to do is understand there s going to be a cost.
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And the cost is not a number of casualties.
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It s a bunch of individuals.
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And when you go to hospitals or at
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people that you know are badly injured or killed and you around that.
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It can be very, very difficult to justify to yourself that what you ordered actually made sense when you re up close to the cost.
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And so the leaders got to step back and constantly say, OK, this is what we have to do.
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It is worth a cost.
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The nation has decided it s worth the cost.
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You as a military leader have made a calculation that if I do this operation, there is very likely going to be
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uh, wounded and killed and get yourself ready for it beforehand.
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But it s never simple because before, during, and particularly after the operations, when that really comes home to your mind.
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Looking at the teams and looking at shared adversity that you construct in the military, what are some ways that you design adversity experiences for teams and business?
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Sort of tangential to that, what are some of the strategies or ideas that you have for creating rapport and connection in person or throughout an organization?
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I mean, when you led JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, it seems like you were able to get a lot of different organizations in Iraq to work extremely effectively together, and I would assume that you import some of that
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to the McChrystal Group with your work in corporations in the civilian world?
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That s exactly what we do.
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The first thing is to build teams that work together.
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One common technique is to have them do something that s very difficult together.
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It doesn t have to be related to their job.
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So in the military, you ll have a tendency to do things that are physical.
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You ll go to the field and do an exercise that is just brutal.
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It might be frightening as well.
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Things that you do could be physically scary.
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And when people go through that kind of shared hardship and situation, they become much more connected to each other.
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We used to say privation pulls you closer.
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And so that s traditional military.
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In
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business, you ll often see that organizations will use similar things.
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They ll go on off-sites, they ll go on hikes, they ll go on climbs, and they re pretty valuable.
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They work very well.
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The other thing that you ll notice is if an organization has been through something that felt like an existential crisis, we ve worked with some of the big banks, and those that went through a really difficult time in 2008 with the financial crisis, there s a different bond between the people who survived that
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if they feel like they did a good job against great adversity, they feel much closer to everyone and much closer to the organization as a result of that.
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SPEAKER_00
So you ll often see in organizations, particularly younger startups, when you have those first few years where money s tight, seems like every other month you lose a client, the business is going to go under, that very tight bonds are formed, there s loyalty to each other.
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As the organization gets more successful and it grows,
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and the newer people have not shared that experience, then suddenly those bonds get terrifically weaker.
5
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And in some cases, the older people resent the newer people because they weren t there when it was tough.
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And so when we work with organizations, we try to create ability, different venues to have people who don t sit next to each other also do things that work together.
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And sometimes they re work related.
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Sometimes they re physical things.
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we do see that relationships are really the sinew that holds organizations together.
5
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And I even saw this in the Ranger Creed, and I m not sure all the history behind that, of course, but leave no man behind.
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It s not accomplish the mission at any cost.
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It s not make sure to do all these different things.
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It s just about the team.
5
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And so I thought that was really interesting to see that a lot of special operations guys, as diverse as they come, you ve got the face-piercing computer hackers,
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the commando working together on things, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
5
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You see this even inside the organization itself.
5
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But one of the biggest issues that it seemed like towards the end of your military career was a deficit of that trust between you and
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President Obama, and we don t do politics at all on the show, but I m bringing this up to, again, sort of highlight the importance of relationships in getting things done, even or perhaps especially at the highest levels of any organization and for any task, whether we re talking Walmart or war.
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This, for me, sort of started to bubble out of the book and bubble out of the things that I was reading about you.
5
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You say leaders can let you fail, but not let you be a failure.
5
SPEAKER_01
What does that mean in practice?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s really important.
5
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And what it means is you can make mistakes and you can do things wrong, but people look more holistically.
5
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They look at your entire record or they look at all you re doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so they don t say, okay, just because Stan, you failed on this, you therefore go in the failure pile.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if you look more broadly, that s very rarely true of anyone or they have failure, but you can make someone feel like a failure if you focus on one thing.
5
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You mentioned something I think is very important.
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In my time in the command in Afghanistan, I was dealing with a new administration of President Obama, not just a new president, but an entirely new team around him, an entirely new apparatus.
5
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And they were trying to figure out how they interacted with each other.
5
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At the same time, I m trying to interact with them from thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.
5
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I ve told people many times after
5
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What we should have done before I went to Afghanistan is we should have taken the vice president, the president, secretary of state, secretary of defense.
5
SPEAKER_00
you know, 10 or 12 key players and me and going whitewater rafting, not talk about the war, just build a little bit of rapport and relationships with each other away from the White House where everybody s in a uniform or a suit and sitting at a table and trying to play a part because that s very stilted.
5
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And had we done that, we would have built relationships that would have had a little more senior.
5
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And I got along really well with President Obama.
5
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But our relationship was pretty superficial.
5
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We d really only met and spoken a few times.
5
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So if he hears or reads something about me, he can t triangulate that.
5
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He can t say, well, wait a minute, I know General McChrystal better than that.
5
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Let me put that in the broader experience I ve had with that individual and decide if that makes sense.
5
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And that was true of all the relationships between the key players.
5
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And so I think that as we look at a new administration coming in now,
5
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My recommendation would be almost the same.
5
SPEAKER_00
I would take the new president and key members who aren t going to know each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
And in some cases, they re going to have slanted perspectives of each other from the past and sometimes carry attitudes related to that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I would try to break that down and build as close up an informal relationship as I could between them, because in the months and years ahead, they re going to be constant external things that pull and push
5
SPEAKER_00
at the structure, the team that they are trying to create.
5
SPEAKER_00
It ll rip apart if they don t have the sinew to hold it together.
5
SPEAKER_01
When this article came out, you were on 60 Minutes on CBS News.
5
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Your first concern was letting your staff know that they didn t fail.
5
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to your earlier point, and it s true.
5
SPEAKER_01
History wants to tell the story about the person, but when you break it down, it is really all about the relationships and the network around that person, and I was surprised to see that echoed in a book like yours, because I just, I figured there would be more sort of top-down principles that came from all that, and it really wasn t like that.
6
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just as relationship based, if not more so, than any successful agile startup.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s the special forces, if you lay them on top of Silicon Valley startups that are doing the right stuff, you just basically, instead of a bunch of people sitting down coding, you have a bunch of guys who are in really great shape.
6
SPEAKER_00
And those are the primary differences here.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s exactly right and true every time.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was dealing with one of the key investors out in Silicon Valley and I asked him about when he s judging a new young company
6
SPEAKER_01
What are the things you look forward first he says i m looking for more than one founder.
6
SPEAKER_01
At the top i m not looking for a single person who s pulling this company along because if they have one or more partners at the top that means they are willing to able to work with other people i found that fast.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, you retired in 2010 from the military after being unfortunately relieved of your position as the top commander in Afghanistan by President Obama following that Rolling Stone article, in case people were wondering what we were talking about back there.
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I just wondered, just on a personal note, how did that feel?
6
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I mean, what was the first thing that you felt when you found that out, when you heard that?
6
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Well, it wasn t exactly like that.
6
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What happened was this Rolling Stone article came out as a result of this guy who embedded for a very brief period with us.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it was very different than we thought it was.
6
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And it basically took a view that my staff had been free in their talk, locker room talk is what they say, critical of key members of the administration, vice president, whatnot, and that I was running a sort of a loose ship in my command group.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that obviously became a big news story, particularly in a new administration and that people perceive military civilian tensions
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I was asked to fly back and explain myself to the Secretary of Defense and the President, which I did.
6
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And I prepared my resignation.
6
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What I did was I went in to see the Secretary and then I went to see the President.
6
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And I offered him my resignation.
6
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And I said, you know, obviously, I don t know how valid this article is.
6
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I don t think it reflects my team because I know my team, most of us have been together for years in war.
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So I don t think it reflects them.
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I haven t had time to fact check this article.
6
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But
6
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me as a commander is not supposed to be a reason for a big news story that causes you a challenge as the president, because you re my commander in chief.
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SPEAKER_01
And so I m not supposed to be putting problems on your plate, I m supposed to be keeping them off.
6
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And so I offered him my resignation.
6
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And so, and I told him, you can either accept my resignation, and I m fine with that.
6
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And I ll move on, if that s best for the mission.
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If you don t want to, and you want me to go back to Afghanistan and soldier on, I m fine with that too.
6
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And he said,
6
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He made the decision there that he would accept my resignation.
6
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And then, uh, after 34 plus years of commission service, you know, wink of an eye, my career s over.
6
SPEAKER_01
And of course you go through a moment there.
6
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It s got a multitude of feelings.
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There s a bit of shock inside.
6
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You want to be outraged.
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I did because I thought that the article was incorrect.
6
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And I thought that I had been done unfairly, not the president accepting the resignation as much as this.
6
SPEAKER_01
this article coming out, receiving this kind of notoriety.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the most important thing was the mission I was responsible for, and then the people who had been a part of my team, who had been loyal to me, whether they made mistakes or not, they were loyal to me, and it s my job to accept responsibility.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so that s a number of things.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then, of course, I go home and I immediately see my wife, who I d been married to at that point for 33 years.
6
SPEAKER_01
She has been loyally with me through my whole career and in an equally short amount of time.
6
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Everything about her life has been changed by me, not with her approval or suggestion or anything like that.
6
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So I feel like I put her in a difficult position as well.
6
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So you go through this, it s a hurricane of emotions.
6
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And there s a temptation to feel sorry for yourself, a temptation to feel angry, a temptation to lash out, you know, all those things.
6
SPEAKER_01
The thing I m happiest about is with the advice and support of my wife and then a number of friends, I made the decision there that looking back, everything that had happened from that moment back, I couldn t change.
6
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That was history.
6
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And I wasn t going to do my life a whole lot of good, spending time worrying about
6
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So what I decided to do was try to conduct myself from that moment on in a way that everybody who ever met me or saw me, even if they read the article or they d heard third-hand stories about it, what they saw of me would cause them to say, wow, if they had heard negative things, that doesn t equate to the things I saw.
6
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If they heard positive things, they ll say, oh, I heard he was a good guy and yeah, seems to be.
6
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And most importantly, for the people who believed in me, the people who had sacrificed for me, you know, the people who had given an awful lot because I asked them to, I wanted them to conclude that they made the right decision in doing that.
6
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And that I was the person that they had always believed and hoped I was.
6
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And again, you can t go back and do that in the rear.
6
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You only do it forward.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so keeping that mindset, you know, I had been perfect at it, but that s been the goal.
6
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And I think it s been very helpful.
6
SPEAKER_00
It seems like you ve trained yourself over the last several decades to see avenues around every contingency, so it sounds like you really treated this just like you would treat any other surprise in any kind of other theater of operations.
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SPEAKER_01
I think so, because surprise throws you off balance.
6
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It disorients you, and that s exactly what this is.
6
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I think the thing I learned most is when you are disoriented by surprise
6
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by something, if you ve got relationships to fall back on, if you ve got strong family relationships, if you ve got strong friendships, if you ve got people who trust in you, if you maintain that trust with them, I found that they re like a safety net.
6
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When you fall, suddenly you find you fell into a net.
6
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And I don t know that I earned it, but I certainly enjoyed that.
6
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You know, I benefited from the fact that at my lowest point, just when I sort of should have hit the ground, there were all these people that
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in their own way sort of caught me and put me back on my feet.
6
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And so I ve been just extraordinarily fortunate and appreciative of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
It seems a little depressing that someone writing for a magazine with an obvious slant can impact someone s career so severely.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, do you think they blindsided you for the sake of controversy or clicks or whatever?
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, I m sure there s part of that in different motivations.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that, and I don t know this for a fact, but I think that the author, I know he had a strong bias against the war
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that he had a bias against me.
6
SPEAKER_01
Face to face, he could never have been more friendly.
6
SPEAKER_01
But then he s dead now, so I ve never been able to talk to him after, I never saw him after the article came out.
6
SPEAKER_01
Wait, he died?
6
SPEAKER_01
He died in a one car car crash out three or so years ago out in Los Angeles.
6
SPEAKER_00
Wow, okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s hard to stay mad at somebody who had a tragic end.
6
SPEAKER_01
There was no point in me ever being mad at him anywhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
To be honest, I think he wrote the article and I think he was surprised
6
SPEAKER_01
at how it got so much notoriety and traction.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that after it came out, he probably then reacted in interviews to say, yeah, yeah, that s what I was doing.
6
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My guess is there was a bit of surprise on his part.
6
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And I don t know if there was intent.
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I can t judge
6
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hard to say, hard to get inside someone s head.
6
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And when something like this happens, at least for me, it seems like there has to be a part of you that feels like something is missing.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you ve dedicated your life to the service of the country, and you end up having to resign over some not even that great, frankly, magazine article written by a freakin  freelancer.
6
SPEAKER_00
Is there any pang of regret or something similar as a result?
6
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
6
SPEAKER_01
I regret the end of my career, because I let a bunch of people down.
6
SPEAKER_01
I left my post undone.
6
SPEAKER_01
And for the rest of my life, my career will sort of have an asterisk behind it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Anything Guy Good will always have an asterisk because of this.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I regret that deeply, but I don t live that regret every day because there s no fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
If I want to be bitter, I can, but I don t because it takes a lot of energy to be bitter.
6
SPEAKER_01
It takes a lot of energy to hate.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it d take me a lot of energy to hate that author, and so why would I do that?
6
SPEAKER_01
whatever energy I have is better spent elsewhere.
6
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, and I ll be honest, your wife s reaction was funny, it was so priceless.
6
SPEAKER_00
You walk in and you say, it s over, and she says, good, and I m thinking, she just wants to go on vacation without 27 other people in tow.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, my wife is so strong, and it was amazing when she did that, because even I was shocked.
6
SPEAKER_01
She said, we ve always been happy, we ll always be happy, and she has never once looked back, she s never once
6
SPEAKER_01
you know, kind of leaned in my ear and said, you know, you got screwed.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because if she had, it would sort of pull at the smaller part of me and it might cause me to let that happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
But she doesn t.
6
SPEAKER_01
She just goes, hey, it happened.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, we move on.
6
SPEAKER_00
I love it.
6
SPEAKER_00
General, thank you so much.
6
SPEAKER_00
This has been amazing.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I apologize.
6
SPEAKER_00
We wore out your voice a little bit, but man, in my opinion, this was worth it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I really loved it.
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SPEAKER_00
It was my honor, and I really enjoyed it.
7
SPEAKER_00
You were very, very informed, and that s key.
7
SPEAKER_01
General, have a great dinner.
7
SPEAKER_01
Finally, one meal a day.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have earned it, my friend.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I m ready.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much.
7
SPEAKER_01
Team of Teams will be linked up in the show notes for this great book.
7
SPEAKER_01
Really interesting.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you like military, business, or history, you ll find something in there for you.
7
SPEAKER_01
General, phenomenal.
7
SPEAKER_01
Next time, in person.
7
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
7
SPEAKER_00
I look forward to it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Wow, Jason, that was awesome.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we just ran his voice into the ground.
7
SPEAKER_01
I feel bad, but it was worth it, from my perspective.
7
SPEAKER_01
I do feel bad.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think we owe him a couple bags of Ricola at this point.
7
SPEAKER_01
I know, man.
7
SPEAKER_01
We ve got to send him a case of cough drops, the Jakemans.
7
SPEAKER_01
I prefer the Jakemans myself.
7
SPEAKER_01
But man, the leadership techniques, the flexibility and adaptability, and just how candid and open he was with
7
SPEAKER_01
both the professional and personal side of his career was just phenomenal.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the overlap with relationships having to do with the AOC principles, the relationship principles, and how that fits into the military as well as his elite-level clients and business was just such a cool tie-in to what we do here.
7
SPEAKER_01
So a great big thank you to General Stanley McChrystal.
7
SPEAKER_01
The book is called Team of Teams.
7
SPEAKER_01
That ll be linked up in the show notes for this episode.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you enjoyed this episode, don t forget to thank The General on Twitter.
7
SPEAKER_01
We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
7
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You can engage with us there.
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You can tell me what we re doing wrong, what we re doing right, or what you want us to do.
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That s again, at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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And you can tap our album art in most podcast players that you got on your phone.
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Anything where you re listening to this, you can tap the screen.
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You should see the show notes there.
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So we ll link up the Twitter s.
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up there and our boot camp our live program details this is by far and away my favorite part of running AOC they re just so rewarding see how far people go with this what we see with our own eyes building those relationships our live programs we run you through the process uh it s our it s our buds for civilians here bootcamp.theartofcharm.com
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is where you can find info on that, and we sell out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it, you re curious about it, get in touch, we ll get you some info so you can plan ahead.
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Also, we ve got the AOC Challenge, theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or as I mentioned earlier on the show, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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The challenge is about improving your connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop personal and professional relationships with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I do regular videos with drills and exercises, very practical stuff that you can use to move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, it ll make you a better connector, and of course, it ll make you a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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For the full show notes for this and all previous episodes,
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head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website, those are by Robert Fogerty, and I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.