And now to introduce our Cushing Orator, Dr. James Eklunds. Well, it's my distinct privilege to introduce our Cushing Orator, General Stan McChrystal. With this year's meeting theme, the privilege of service, I can't think of anyone better to deliver this talk. General McChrystal is a retired four-star Army general who is head of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command. He has been called one of America's greatest warriors by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. I can personally attest that General McChrystal has a legendary reputation for frontline, inspirational, and engaged leadership by our warriors today. He has had a profound impact on so many of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, ranging from my son's company first sergeant to my West Point classmate, Lieutenant General Scotty Miller, who is the current commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. General McChrystal led the military's most sensitive forces and created a revolution in warfare that fused intelligence and operations. His leadership is credited with the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the June 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. General McChrystal now shares his leadership insights off the battlefield. He co-founded the McChrystal Group and is senior fellow at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a graduate seminar on leadership and operation. An advocate for service at all levels, he is chair of the Service Alliance, a project of Be the Change, and the Aspen Institute, which envisions a future service year as a cultural expectation and common opportunity for every young American. He is active on several boards of directors, including Siemens Government Technology, JetBlue, Navistar, and the Yellow Ribbon Fund. He is also author of the best-selling books Maestro of the Task and Team of Teams, which explore how organizations can break down silos at work together more effectively in the modern business environment. In fact, his most recent book, Team of Teams, is mandatory reading for all members of my executive team and our neuroscience institute. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a warm welcome for General Stan McChrystal. Thank you. Please sit down. Please. Wow. Thank you so much. Well, that was humbling. And thank you for the opportunity to be here and a kind introduction. Mr. Bean talked a little bit about dreams. And I have dreams periodically, but also sometimes I have nightmares. And usually when I have a nightmare, I'm dead asleep, I'm lying in a darkened room, and then I wake up and I look up and I see a whole bunch of neurosurgeons looking at me, thinking that if they could get their hands on me, they could fix that. It's kind of intimidating to be a room of people this accomplished. And I'll be honest with you, I've been intimidated before. A few years ago I got to speak at Oxford University in Britain. And if you ever go there, it's stone and it's wood, and the place is older than our country by a factor of about four. And they really play on your mind. I was going to speak at the political union. So they take you in there, this old building. They talk about the history of it. They take you to an area called the Green Room with all kinds of memorabilia. They talk about what a big deal it is to be able to speak there. And then right when you're nervous enough, they walk you down this hallway toward the room where you're going to speak, and they stop partway, and there's an old photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt speaking from the exact spot where I'm about to speak. And the message is, you are no Teddy Roosevelt. I got that. So I go in to speak, and I'm nervous. And I stand in front of the group. And with my first sentence, a person right in front of me falls dead asleep. I look like they're going to break their neck. It was like, boom! And that is really unnerving if you've ever been in that situation, because what do you do? Well, what I do is I look this way, I look that way, I try to talk, and I try not to look at them, but you can't help yourself. Every few minutes, you just want to see if they've woken up. And so finally, toward the end, they still hadn't, until the people politely applauded when I finished my talk, and then she woke up. It was my wife. So my wife, Annie, of 41 years is down here. If anybody sees her not off, just tap her on the side of the head if you would. So thanks for the opportunity to be here. And we're going to talk about a few things. We're going to talk about leadership. We're going to talk about, as it blends into management. And you wonder, okay, what's a former soldier doing talking about this? And the reason I do and the reason I feel so strongly about it is I spent 34 years in the military, but the last decade were completely different from what I expected. They were a hard turn, 90-degree turn, from what I had grown up doing and thinking about leadership. And now I think about leadership and how organizations should run very differently than I did. I'll tell a few stories, some military, some not. If I entertain you, that's great. But if I succeed, what will happen is as we're talking partway through, you'll start to connect dots and you'll say, that sounds familiar. That sounds a little bit like what we're experiencing. Because what I believe is what I experienced is not military unique. It's not war unique. It's absolutely universal. It's in every organization around now, from politics to business, military, everything. Because things are different than they were. Think back to April 15, 2013. Most of us can remember what we were doing when the Boston Marathon was run. And what happened that day could be called terrorism. It could be called murder. It could be called mayhem. But it was a tragedy. And what happened is the thoughtless actions of two young men affected the lives of a lot of people. And medically, it was an amazing experience that I had the chance to study later. We were very interested in what happened, so we went up to Brigham and Women's Hospital and we got a sense of what had happened overall, the number of hospitals, the number of cases, and what had happened. Because actually, the outcome was really good. And in Brigham and Women's, 31 patients arriving, 28 with significant injuries, 12 had surgeries unlike anything that had been done before, and it was all done on the fly, suddenly unplanned, at a scale that they had never expected. And if you talk to the people that worked in there, it was a case in adaptability. There was a lot of skill from previous experiences, but they did some amazing things. First off, they had a culture of collaboration and how they worked together. They had leaders who understood that at the end of the day, it was a team effort, not the skill of one or a small number of people. And they took people who in a moment's lives had been unalterably impacted and they started to work to give them a future. And that's exactly what they did. They gave people a future that would have been impossible to imagine if the skill and the teamwork had not appeared on that day. It's humbling to see work like that done. It's also really heartening. I was impacted by something that happened in Iran, 1980. This picture is actually from the 4th of November, 1979. Many of you will remember that on that day, frustrated Iranian students seized the American embassy in downtown Tehran. This is about nine months after the Iranian revolutionary government had taken over under the Ayatollah Khomeini. They had seized the embassy once before and given it back. Now in November, they seized it and they kept 50-plus Americans hostage for what turned out to be 444 days. Now, this was a difficult period, a difficult crisis for President Jimmy Carter. The last year of his first term, which turned out to be his only term. He tried to get a diplomatic solution, but it was very, very difficult. And you almost have to step back and think of the 1970s in larger context. Difficult decade for the United States. 1973, oil shock, gas lines frightening the people. 1974, the President of the United States resigns in disgrace. 1975, South Vietnam falls. 1978, 1979, another oil shock. We have what's called economic malaise during this period. We have political impotence, a loss of American confidence. One month after the Americans are taken hostage in Tehran, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Sort of put an exclamation point on what seems to be a time of American uncertainty. And without question, the 1970s proved to be America's most tragic decade in fashion history. So here we are. We're entering a crisis with Americans held hostage. What does the President do? He works it for about five months, and then President Carter does something I think is a courageous decision. He authorizes a rescue attempt. But a rescue attempt is by definition going to be difficult. The hostages are held at two locations in downtown Tehran. The city of Tehran is denied to us, as is the entire country of Iran. So the mission involves flying people in at night to a transload airfield called Desert One in eastern Iran, then moving forward to the city. It's high risk, and it fails. As they are trying to transload at this piece of deserted desert, Operation Eagle Claw unravels. An MH-53 runs into a C-130 transport. There's an explosion. Eight Americans are tragically killed. The mission is compromised, and the rest of the force extracts. And so now President Carter has to go on TV, accept responsibility for a failure, and America's got to look in the mirror and say, the Israelis went to Entebbe four years before. Now we are called, and we fail completely. I was a young Green Beret First Lieutenant at the time, and it felt like a punch in the gut. We'd been asked by our nation to do something that was important and couldn't do it. Now it was a great opportunity for finger-pointing, blame-shifting, but I'm proud to tell you that's not what happened. In reality, there was a study of the operation to determine what went wrong and what could prevent it happening in the future. They found a lot of things, but they could be boiled down essentially to four. It was Navy helicopters flown by Marine Corps pilots linking up with Air Force cargo planes carrying Army commandos and the four groups had never worked together before. So what we did was we had people who were courageous, competent, and committed put together in an ad hoc fashion for something extraordinarily difficult, and it comes apart at the seams. There's no lack of commitment. There's a lack of teamwork. Now following that, the decision was made to prevent that by creating a standing joint task force, a permanent organization capable of doing this kind of mission, and Joint Special Operations, or JSOC as it's known, was formed. Now the concept was to take part of American Special Operating Forces, not all of them, but a subset that were right for counterterrorist missions, Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the Rangers, some aviation organizations, and bin them together in a dream team construct. This is a group of people, all of whom are specially selected. The organization is exquisitely trained, lavishly resourced, and it's focused on things like counter-hijacking, hostage rescue, and the like. From its formal founding in 1981, it's successful. The resources and focus are put on so we create a world-class organization, and I had the opportunity to grow up and spend most of my career in it and ultimately be the commanding general. But I became the commanding general at an inflection point in the organization, which was the fall of 2003. JSOC was 22 years old, had been effective in Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, a number of things you haven't heard about, and then after 9-11, it had been involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, early in both conflicts, with great success. Later, of course, it would be involved in all the high-profile successes you've heard about since 9-11, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the rescue of Captain Phillips off the coast of Somalia. But now we hit an inflection point that was not expected. This is six months after the initial invasion of Iraq. Regardless of what you think politically about that decision, operationally it was expected it would be fairly straightforward. Military forces would go in, they'd topple the government of Saddam Hussein, take the keys to the government out of his hands, give them to a new government, and drive out. Now those assumptions were completely wrong. And within a few weeks, you started to have looting, then you had violence in the beginning of an insurgency, a popular insurgency, that played out with things like roadside improvised explosive devices, people shooting shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades at coalition forces, and, of course, Iraqis killing other Iraqis with tremendous rapidity. I come in to take command of JSOC in the middle of October, just as this inflection point starts to play out. From afar, it looked as though we had a popular insurgency that was loosely organized, but largely just sort of a rejection of foreign forces in Iraq. And then late summer, early fall, there were two things that were different from everything else we saw. There were two attacks. One was the attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and the other was the destruction of the Jordanian embassy, also in Baghdad. And what made them stood out from the loosely organized violence of other operations is they were clearly well-planned, carefully rehearsed, and exquisitely precise in execution, and they were remarkably lethal. And so in the midst of the rather loosely organized violence, it was clear that we'd had the metastasizing of a terrorist network, a cancer inside the larger violence. There were terrorists who had formed a network who knew what they were doing and were focused on an outcome. Now, I arrive in-country as the new commanding general of the Counterterrorism Joint Task Force to extraordinary levels of violence starting to erupt, and most of the victims were innocent Iraqis. And so what we try to do is address the problem. Now, they bring me in, and they say, Okay, you don't worry about the rest of the problem in Iraq. You focus entirely on the terrorist network for which JSOC was purpose-built. And, of course, that's a good set of guidance for a leader to get, because I'm in an organization that that's what we were created for, that's what we trained for, that's what I'd spent my career doing. And so we'll go after terrorists. Now, I first got to sort of describe JSOC forces to you. Many of you have sons, daughters, nieces, nephews who serve in the military. They might enter at 17 or 18 years old, or maybe after college. They're young, they're excited, they're committed, and they go off. This force is not that. This force averages 35 to 45 years old. If you've seen Black Hawk Down or you've seen Zero Dark Thirty, you see commanders with big shoulders, big gnarly fingers, beards, and surly, arrogant attitudes, that's these guys. Exactly. Extraordinarily committed professionals. Everybody's got a house, a mortgage, a family, kids in high school or college. 50% of the force had been wounded before. Everybody's a combat veteran. So it's a very seasoned group of people. To give you a feel, a couple years later I'm going to go on an operation with them. I'm like 51 or 52 years old, and we're going to do a vehicle interdiction in daylight. And what that is is something you've probably seen, a similar thing on a police show on TV. That's a speeding vehicle going out across the desert. You've got a series of helicopters. One goes and strafes in front of it, two helicopters with guys sitting on outside pods, come and land on either side of this thing as it's speeding. Another lands in back, and there's often a gunfight when it lands. It's very exciting. And so I decide I'm going to go with them just to sort of show the flag, accept risk with the team. And it's about 16 or 17 Delta operators. So I get all my equipment on, and I go out there, and there's a sergeant major running the operation. I say, Sergeant Major, here I am. He says, Great. Here's what we're going to do. And then I look at the guys. And I said, Sergeant Major, I've known him for many years. Your guys look really old. They look like me. And he said, Sir, we're not worried about getting shot. We're worried about falling and breaking a hip. I said, My goodness. All right, let's go. But that's the kind of people that they were. Now, for all of that sort of panache, if you scratch the surface of that organization, it's a traditional hierarchy. It's organized like General Motors. It's organized like a government, like a university. And we've got very strict bureaucratic processes, how we do things, change of command, what you do, what you don't do. Now, we're designed to be efficient, and we are. But we've got all the limitations of a military-like bureaucracy, an industrial-age organization. But that's actually okay, because what we're going against is an organization led by a young Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He's been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He's affiliated with al-Qaeda and creates al-Qaeda in Iraq. Now, what we expect to find, because we have always found this before, is this. And you look at that and you say, wait a minute, that looks like General Motors. That looks like University of X. I thought it was a terrorist network. Every terrorist group in history before that looked like that. And you go, wow. Strong founder who provides discipline, guidance, set procedures for how they communicate, how they operate, how they do things, because when they're small, they need that to survive. And as a consequence, they're slow. They're ponderous. They can do things with great precision because they plan them carefully and execute, but they're ponderous. They can't do fast because everything takes a while to communicate, plan, coordinate. And so what you see is these organizations move at a slower pace, but are very, very effective. Now, the secret is just being better than they are. And so we're designed to be a better, efficient organization than they are, by training, by background, by intelligence. And so that's what we're going to do. We're going to destroy them. So I take over in October. I'm told to destroy this network, which has shown up. And I get with the force and I say, okay, forget everything else in Iraq. Focus on al Qaeda in Iraq. Find it. It has to be here. And you're trying to separate the signal from the noise. And find this, identify the key players, and destroy it. You start by getting easels with flip charts or whiteboards or even computer screens now and you draw this out you start to fill in names as you find it and we go after this and we can't find it and I'm leaning on the force saying wait a minute it has to be here because this is an organization it has to look like this. Al-Qaeda which was formed in 1988 in Iraq was exactly like this a traditional hierarchy what's left of them still is so Al-Qaeda interact must be that but for weeks and even several months we're in denial because that's not what we're seeing we're not seeing the symptoms of this we're not seeing midnight meetings we're not seeing careful communication we're not seeing a slow ponderous organization we're seeing one that's lightning-fast we're seeing one that learns constantly we're seeing one that operates and then adapts to the conditions of the ground everywhere they are and the conditions of that moment every day and what we realize is the organization we're looking for isn't there something entirely different is there this constantly shifting organic like network that never seems to be right except for what they're doing in the moment at a certain place and then they're very right and they're very effective and they're constantly shifting and they're wickedly fast and so they're tying us in knots even though we have more equipment better trained people more professionalism for two years they're beating us so the first thing you ask yourself is how does this happen we said well maybe I'm a or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the evil genius terrorist leader the first guy in history to figure out a new way to do things we said well he's clever but he's not that good and then we said well maybe they hired consultants and went on an off-site and they might have but then we came to the conclusion over time that there was something more fundamental that had happened and what had happened is in your pocket or purse right now it's information technology al-qaeda had been formed in 1988 in Pakistan traditional pyramid-shaped hierarchy al-qaeda in Iraq was formed in 2003 in Iraq and in the intervening 15 years something had happened that changed everything and that was the proliferation of information technology every Afghan and Iraqi had a cell phone sometimes more than one they all had access to the internet so as a consequence they operated with an entirely different operating model a different DNA and you say well how did they figure that out did Zarqawi get them together and give this guidance the answer is no they did it automatically reflexively he couldn't have had them do differently because they did it in their real lives so they did it in their terrorist lives but it made them extraordinarily different than they were and it made them very very effective so we had to change now the first thing you do is what do you do because we're this extraordinarily effective counter-terrorist force nobody wants to change because we're the best in the world of what we do and if you change there's a risk you won't be and then we said well maybe we should change and become like them become a network but you realize you give up an awful lot if you just throw out many of the good things you've got so we ended up with a hybrid through iterate iterative learning and the hybrid said we'll do those things routinely that need to be done routinely human resources financing logistics but what we will change are the two most important things about how we operate that's how we manage information and how we make decisions and we change those fundamentally if you talk about an organization be effective we always start with trust trust in common purpose trust in someone's intentions and capabilities and this sense of a common purpose you've all been on teams we could finish each other sentences where you could throw some up and just know someone else would catch it it's hard to write a description but you know it when you see it I don't have a boat but I think that is really cool and the reality is in the military we have to build this because you had very difficult operations sort of pretty short amount of time you got to bring people together to do something of incredible importance now the way it's done in the military is not different from way it's done in many places we start by putting individuals through very difficult things that build their competence and their competence and then we do it in teams so that they build strong bonds between them from the shared experience when I took over JSOC in 2003 we already had trust in common purpose that was good but it was in our small teams in most of the JSOC organizations when you get on an assault team you may stay there for 10 years before you move and you typically don't leave those forces and go back to the regular army so you know everybody you're godparents to their kids so you build that and we had it so I didn't have to really worry about this what I had to worry about was something I didn't even know we didn't have and it's something I'll call shared consciousness because the reality is JSOC is a collection of small teams if you think of SEAL Team 6 they're a collection of assault teams put into platoons put into squadrons and put into a team same with Delta Force same with the Rangers so in these small teams they're incredibly cohesive once you get past the small teams what you run into the fact is they're not only cohesive they're insular they're tribal there's a great quote from a SEAL that I was talking to and he said there's a point at which everyone else sucks and what he means is people close to me my my teammates are my family my platoon or my extended family everybody else isn't and we think about how that grows in all of our organizations you become proud and focused but tribes are not famous for collaborating well with other tribes and so for us shared consciousness was something we learned we didn't have because we're fighting against this extended network and our force is not one place it's across 27 countries at 76 different bases now I said we're good at what we did and when we went out to do what we do operations the skill of the teams their courage their tactical skill their ability to handle weapons is peerless we can win most of the firefights and so we feel very good about ourselves you go on an operation you do well you have a good outcome you come back and you say okay six weeks after I took over we were told we needed to capture Saddam Hussein we did the president of the United States called us at how good we are so you start to feel okay why would we change well we would change because although what we're doing is very good when put against the larger problem of Iraq we're not moving the needle so we can feel good about our part but if the rest of the effort is failing we're going to be along with that so we look at that and we say what do we do like any leader I probably did the obvious thing I said well we got to do more of what we're doing and so in early 2004 I said we got to speed up we had been doing four raids a month one a week which is pretty fast because you have to get in fair information you have to prepare rehearse collect the or execute the operation digest the information you get so one a week we thought was really impressive but we're not able to have an impact on al-qaeda in Iraq so I told the force speed up slam down the accelerator do more by the summer of 2004 we're up to 18 raids a month now we're going through our same processes that we've been set up our bureaucratic processes is as commanding general I'm personally approving every operation because they're important we're trying to make sure our processes and our standards are up are kept up and 13 we're doing 18 raids a month which is one every other day that's a breakneck pace that's as fast as this organization can do we're about 70% successful which means we capture or kill the person we're after 70% of the time so 13 or 14 enemy leaders a month or what we're taking out of al-qaeda in Iraq and we're feeling very good about that because what organization can lose 13 or 14 senior leaders every month I remember thinking wow what if somebody got in the Pentagon and took out 13 or 14 senior leaders what would happen now I said well we get better I didn't actually say that but that's what I thought but we're doing 13 or 14 al-qaeda in Iraq leaders every month and the reality is we're not moving the needle they're getting bigger they're getting faster they're getting more effective and more confident with that but now we're running the organization as fast as physics will allow it you can't do this faster with the processes we've got and so in the summer of 2004 we come to this realization we have to have a bigger impact on the enemy but we can't do it by what we're doing so we have to change the way we're operating and so what we did was we fundamentally changed how the force operated we connected everybody we threw out the traditional stove pipelines and communication and direction and we connected everyone in the organization and the effect it had was to change how the organization interacted and become more like a circuit board or a brain we got stunningly faster as a result now what did that look like on a daily basis when I took over the command we had a meeting every morning we called it operations and intelligence video teleconference we had two locations we had the rear headquarters at Fort Bragg North Carolina and we had the Ford headquarters outside of Baghdad where I was and we get about 25 people at either side and we'd have a video teleconference for 30 minutes we talk about what situation is what we could do about it and that you had to have it every day because wars move fast now the theory was that information would then be propagated out for the organization new information will be collected across the battlefield and tomorrow we go through it again the problem is there are six levels in the chain of command so if you start to do the math if we do this one at nine in the morning and do the next level of 10 next one at 11 by the time you get to the bottom or the edge of the organization there's no time to fight the war and they don't have time to gather information and send it up so what happens is they don't we're essentially like two gears that aren't meshed and so as a consequence what we're doing isn't really working and so we say well what do you do can you speed it up and then you can't speed up time you can't compress time how do you get the information out and still respect the very rigid chain of command and processes we had the answer is you can't do both so we changed the way we did it we first connected more people in each room and then we said we'll go to more rooms I mentioned we were at 76 different bases we connected all of them and then we connected every operator in the organization through their laptop or desktop so if they weren't on an operation or asleep they could they could dial in we had had 50 people a day for 30 minutes and now what we ended up with was 7,500 people a day for 90 minutes now I know some of you are going oh that's the mother of all meetings you're starting to shake uncontrollable the reality is it's the most efficient thing I've ever been a part of in my life because what happened is in 90 minutes everybody found out what the situation was everybody heard what we're trying to do we didn't issue instructions we didn't make decisions we didn't have to because would you have informed everybody to a level that used to be kept at the top part of the organization they can decide for themselves what to do because they know what fits in the overall intent what we essentially had done is taken common purpose and trust which had been present in JSOC and we'd mixed with it this shared consciousness now shared consciousness was new to us and it was also available because we had information technology that didn't exist even five years before so while information technology had aided the enemy by changing the way they were it was now part of our solution as well because we could connect everyone in a way we couldn't before when you put those together what you do is you allow empowered execution and when you think of empowered execution don't think of decentralized authority don't think of hey everybody decide what you want to do and just do it think of an organization designed in the Industrial Age to pump information to the c-suite or the headshed or whatever you want to call it they become the most informed people of the overall context so they can make the best decisions turn that upside down push that information down to everyone and now you have people at levels that never were empowered with that before able to make decisions and all it takes is the courage for the organization then to accompany that with their authority to do that and the expectation that they do that now did it work I mentioned that I took over in October 2003 I took over a very effective professional organization at doing what we do and we're doing four raids a month seventy percent successful we have to speed up so starting in January of 2004 I push it we get up to 18 raids a month every other night that's as fast as that machine will go so we have to fight differently so we change the way we operate by the summer 2006 we're at 300 raids a month we go from one a week to ten a night now somebody goes well how long could you keep up that pace we kept that pace up for two and a half years we ran Al Qaeda in Iraq into the ground that's how they were defeated they came back as ISIS later for political reasons but they got run into the ground simply because we got to the point where we could operate at a pace they couldn't keep up with and we did it achieving 17 X improvement not by increasing the size of the force not by getting a lot of new technology now we got better because we did a lot of repetitions but the reality is it's because we managed information differently we made decisions at different levels and in different places in our success rate which had been 70% went up and that's counterintuitive because I thought when we sped up that much what would happen is we get faster get a little sloppy but what I found was repetition help but the other thing is when people close to the problem make the decision they understand the problem better they understand the timing better and they typically know what will work better than anyone can higher up in an organization Heraclitus said you can't step in the same river twice he couldn't be more right but now the river is going faster than ever before so what's it mean for leaders like the people in this room if you'd asked me to get a picture of a leader 15 years ago this is the very much like the one I would have given you I grew up in the army I was born in an army hospital my father was a soldier my father's father was a soldier my four brothers are soldiers my sister married a soldier Annie's father is a career soldier her three brothers are soldiers her sister is the widow of a soul you got it right that's what we did this is what I thought leadership looked like a very proud decisive leader walking down given orders bunch of flunkies behind them writing down real fast and trying to execute that's what leadership had to be but now when you deal with people in your organization particularly Millennials did they ever ask you uncomfortable questions what would you say you do here do you ever wonder what do you say I mean I have an answer I give them I say I inspire people nothing is over until we decide it is was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor and when I go into my speech they kind of roll their eyes and they go he'll be done in a minute we'll get on with work but the reality is I think leadership's different I think what used to work what used to be appropriate this isn't it wasn't that this was wrong it's at times changed think about what we do what gets you in most organizations it's education it's experience it's a particular skill it's something you've got then they interview you and they say yeah she's a nice person should also be a good fit but it's that written resume and those skills that get you there but what do you actually do on a daily basis in many cases we find that what we do is actually very different we spend a lot of time coaching teaching communicating inspiring people what we're really doing is making the next generation the people who are doing the work now capable of doing the job we're enabling the organization to be successful not just ourselves so now I start to think I started thinking about leaderships differently I started about thinking about leaders not like generals but like gardeners and someone says gardener what's a gardener do and you could say a gardener grows fruit or vegetables or flowers but I would disagree I don't think a gardener does that I think only plants can do that but gardeners aren't unimportant a gardener prepares the soil a gardener plants a gardener waters a gardener feeds a gardener weeds a gardener protects and at the appropriate time a gardener harvests if the gardener does their job well they create an environment or an ecosystem in which plants do that which only plants can do and if gardeners do it in a thoughtful way the plants can do it simultaneously so the gardener doesn't slow the scalability or speed the gardener isn't the thing that limits the ability to succeed the gardener is a thing that the person that enables it and I think it changes how we think it's a little less ego-driven it's a little less general on the battlefield it's a little more about the organization's got to work so just a parting thought I know some of you are sitting there and you're saying okay we got this retired soldier up there that's nice and he's saying we got to lead differently but the reality is you're at the top of your game you're very established you've been doing things a certain way for a long time and they've been very successful you look around the room and you say I can do this I'm not sure of all these other people but I can do it I got two cellphones a laptop a great assistant I'm willing to work weekends so I know what Stan says is nice but for me it's not necessary and the reality is you might be right you probably can do it until you can't and here's the deal it's not because you're lazier or stupider than your parents or grandparents the game changed it's different now things have sped up things are more complex and so what we don't do is say wow darn I hate that just realize it and we all have to deal with that and then you say well why would I do it why does it matter and I think it's self-evident to everyone in this room why things matter but this still sends chills down my spine they choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard the very fact that they're hard think about how we respond when someone says something it's hard but you know the difference it makes two one zero all engine running liftoff we have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour thank you very much it's been my honor you

General Stan McChrystal

leadership

trust

collaboration

technology

decision-making

operational effectiveness

transformation