Team of Teams

Stanley McChrystal, writing with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell, argues that the modern world has outgrown the top-down hierarchy most organisations were built on. The book starts from his command of the Joint Special Operations Command, which he took over in 2004, when America was losing the war against Al Qaeda despite vastly greater resources and technology. McChrystal came to see that a faster, more interdependent world had overwhelmed the conventional military chain of command, and that his opponent had already adopted a decentralised network able to move quickly. His answer was to discard a century of management wisdom and pivot from mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. In the middle of a gruelling war, the command was remade into a network combining robust centralised communication with decentralised managerial authority. The wider claim is that the same shift is open to any organisation, from large companies and startups to charities and governments. The best organisations, the authors contend, think and act as a team of teams, small groups that keep the freedom to experiment alongside a relentless drive to share what they learn. Evidence is drawn from military service, the private sector, hospital emergency rooms and NASA.

Written from the open Library catalogue description of the book.

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• Stanley McChrystal