Ayla Kohler
Professor Golden
Executive Forum CRN 97499
December 3rd, 2015

General McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams, contains chapters with examples of war and business strategies that provide valuable lessons. I will present seven important lessons that stood out to me in the book, Team of Teams.
In the first chapter a practical lesson the author addresses is understanding the environment an opposing force operates in and adapting to that environment to overcome the challenge. Overall we must embrace change, it does not matter how well you can play a game, if you’re not playing an opponent, you will never win. A well known company that is a perfect example that absolutely failed to embrace this lesson, is Blockbuster. Blockbuster failed to adapt and change to the technology their customers demanded. They were excellent at offering movie rentals, they had a wide selection and affordable prices but their competitors were changing to the environment and profited, whole Blockbuster went bankrupt.
A second lesson that is important to remember in any industry is that efficiency is necessary but not sufficient. An example McChrystal gives is the construction of the “Maginot Line, the modern day Chinese Wall”. Although its purpose was to avoid trench warfare it was insufficient to airplanes and new tech tanks. France was the host country of the Maginot Line and surrendered after only two months during World War two.
A third lesson McChrystal explains is “ in spite of our increased abilities to track and measure, the complexity of the world has become, in many ways, vastly less predictable.” An individual employee that worked for a company that used data from facebook and various search engines tried to determine what the author would have for lunch that day. The problem with that attempt is that the complex technology the world offers today can only give the most likely output, not the actual output.
General McChrystal learns much about the AQI enemy in the war, and the fourth lesson is being resilient. If companies and organizations can learn how to be resilient in today’s world they can also be very successful. A coral reef is a system that implements resilience into their defense. When coral reefs are damaged by hurricanes or storms they can regenerate. when an organization prepares for the unexpected and strengthens after an attack like an immune system, it can be almost impenetrable.
The Fifth lesson I read that I considered important, was the structure of teams and the trust that developed in them. Some companies work well with one leader and employees that follow instructions. General McChrystal goes on to say that forming a team will help oversee elements that one leader could miss by themselves. The AQI enemy had developed a team so large it worked like a network. A company example he used was the United one airways. If flight attendants and pilots worked as a close knit team they can communicate under stressful situations quickly and avoid crashing.
A sixth lesson I found important in Team of Teams is information sharing. businesses and organization must use today’s technology and its speed to their advantage. In chapter seven he uses Nasa as an example. In Nasa they had to train their employees to talk to each other practice work culture and unlearn fundamental approaches to efficiency.
The last and 7th lesson I read was the practice of cooperation in teams. This lesson may sound simple and obvious but cooperation is defined differently to different people. For a team to be effective its “best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for themselves . . . and the group.” Bill Ford the founder of Ford implemented cooperation in his company by issuing internal competition, and demanding honesty and transparency.
The genesis of the changes addressed by General McChrystal came from his personal experience in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan against the AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) and his discussions he had with his teammates. He discussed how his team operated with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. They discussed why they were losing the war and how they could adapt. They realized they needed to learn more about their enemy and the environment they worked in. General McChrystal would fight the way they troops were trained for decades and have no results. He reported that they killed hundreds of AQI’s number three’s AQI was an enemy they have never faced before. AQI did not have a chain of command, eliminating commanders had no effect. AQI worked as a network and now the U.S military had to as well. The U.S military was forced to adapt to the technology and use it effectively.