Issue No. 345 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (June 28, 2016) notes that when he faced Al Qaeda in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McChrystal quickly discerned that “efficiency was no longer enough” against the “networked mayhem of the 21st century.” And this reminder: click here to check out my 20 management buckets.
Maps to Whiteboards: The 21st Century Metaphor
“When musician Dave Carroll's guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers, he spent nine months navigating the company's telephone-directory maze of customer service representatives to no avail, so he wrote a song called ‘United Breaks Guitars’ and posted the video on YouTube. “Within one day the video had racked up 150,000 hits and Carroll received a phone call from an abashed director of customer solutions at United. Within three days the video had more than a million hits and United's stock price fell 10 percent, costing shareholders $180 million in value—600,000 times the value of the guitar." Within a week, the song peaked as the number one download on iTunes, and the company made a public show of donating $3,000 (the cost of a new guitar) to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at Carroll’s request (the makers of his broken instrument, Taylor Guitars, sent him two for free after watching his video).Click here to watch the entertaining 4-minute video, "United Breaks Guitars."
 Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army, Retired, shares this story on page 63 of his amazing/terrifying/trend-bending book,
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Amazing…because the airline customer service debacle is just one of dozens and dozens of
memorable stories that you’ll talk about with your team for months and years to come.
“United Breaks Guitars,” by the way, now has almost 16 million YouTube views, a website, a book,
a case study, and more entertaining videos—all focused on “how social media has changed
customer service forever.”Terrifying...because Gen. McChrystal’s war on Al Qaeda (AQI) was unlike any the U.S. military
had fought before. Any! He writes, “When we first established our Task Force headquarters at
Balad [in Iraq], we hung maps on almost every wall. Maps are sacred to a soldier. In military
headquarters, maps are mounted and maintained with almost religious reverence. A well-marked
map can, at a glance, reveal the current friendly and enemy situations, as well as the plan of future
operations. Orders can be conveyed using a marked map and a few terse words.”But to out-think and out-gun Al Qaeda, everything had to change. “For most of history, war was a
bout terrain, territory held, and geographic goals, and a map was the quintessential tool for seeing
the problem and creating solutions,” the general notes. “But the maps in Balad could not depict a
battlefield in which the enemy could be uploading video to an audience of millions from any house
in any neighborhood, or driving a bomb around in any car on any street.”Then… (and here’s my favorite metaphor for all organizations that must move from
“complicated to complex”): “In place of maps, whiteboards began to appear in our
headquarters. Soon they were everywhere. Standing around them, markers in hand,
we thought out loud, diagramming what we knew, what we suspected, and what we
did not know. We covered the bright white surfaces with multi-colored words and
drawings, erased, and then covered again. We did not draw static geographical features;
we drew mutable relationships—the connections between things rather than
the things themselves.”The lack of hierarchy and “adroit use of information technology” was a game-changer. McChrystal
quotes military analyst John Arquilla, “We killed about 20 of Al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the
past decade, but everyone in a network is number three.”The old organizational charts (“what we were designed for”) mandated new strategies and
new solutions because of “what we were facing.” The chart on page 25 is terrifying—both for
the U.S. military and for our outdated management approaches:
.jpg) Trend-bending…because this book will rock your comfortable foundation. McChrystal writes,
“When we realized that AQI was outrunning us, we did what most large organizations do when
they find themselves falling behind the competition: we worked harder. We deployed more
resources, we put more people to work, and we strove to create ever-greater efficiency
within the existing operating model.“Like obnoxious tourists trying to make themselves understood in a foreign country
by continuing to speak their native tongue louder and louder, we were raising the
volume to no good end.”So as you and your team are facing uphill battles on multiple fronts and the myriad issues
in the military acronym VUCA… • volatility
• uncertainty
• complexity
• and ambiguity…what’s your plan? McChrystal has some solutions for you. In his chapter, “Leading Like a
Gardener," the general messes with my favorite movie, The Hunt for Red October, starring
Sean Connery as Capt. Marko Ramius, the cool-headed CEO of a new Soviet nuclear submarine.McChrystal says we must reject our love affair with “heroic leaders.” Not easy for a four-star
general, who led the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq during the Persian Gulf Wars,
and retired in 2010 after serving as commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Confessing to his own struggles, he writes:“Although I recognized its necessity,
the mental transition from heroic leader to humble gardener
was not a comfortable one.” In the chapter recap (three succinct bullet points summarize each chapter), he cautions,
“The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization,
must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.”Maybe my most compelling endorsement would be this: I’ll be at board planning retreat
next month and all of us are reading Team of Teams and sharing the implications for our roles
as board members, such as why moving from “complicated to complex” will require a “robust
and resilient” response, per McChrystal. We’ll address this year’s book within the context
of the last two books we’ve read: • The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities, by Ram Charan • Boards That Lead: When to Take Charge, When to Partner, and When to Stay Out of the Way,
by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey and Michael Useem.Sorry—but if you still want to be the leader of your organization (or department) next year,
this is a must-read book this year.To order from Amazon, click on the title for
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World,
by Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Gen. McChrystal said the “map was the quintessential tool for seeing the
problem and creating solutions,” yet everything changed. What “quintessential
tool for seeing the problem and creating solutions” are you still
relying on—even though everything has changed?
2) Like “United Breaks Guitars,” you may be one video, one blogpost, or one
Yelp comment away from immense and harmful social media. What’s your
crisis plan—and when is the last time you’ve reviewed it? Who has authority
to respond when senior leaders are all on vacation? (Visit The Crisis Bucket.)
Would “team” describe your culture—or are you a “team” in name only? Or are you a “team of teams,”
as Gen. McChrystal describes the opportunity in his book (per above).
Here’s a question: “If your organization or department were on trial for having
a ‘team-based culture’ (per Gen. McChrystal, Patrick Lencioni, and others), would
there be enough evidence to convict you?”
For more resources from “The Team Bucket,” Chapter 9, in Mastering the Management Buckets,
visit this webpage, plus check out another leadership/team book and my review
of Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, by Simon Sinek.
The review includes a powerful excerpt of a former Under Secretary of Defense’s
speech—with his own humbling confession.
NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com
are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be
archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon.
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