Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Hardcover/General Stanley McChrystal

Descriere

What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization? THE OLD RULES NO LONGER APPLY . . . When General Stanley Mc Chrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training--but none of that seemed to matter. TEACHING A LEVIATHAN TO IMPROVISE It's no secret that in any field, small teams have many ad-vantages--they can respond quickly, communicate freely, and make decisions without layers of bureaucracy. But organizations taking on really big challenges can't fit in a garage. They need management practices that can scale to thousands of people. General Mc Chrystal led a hierarchical, highly disci-plined machine of thousands of men and women. But to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, his Task Force would have to acquire the enemy's speed and flexibility. Was there a way to combine the power of the world's mightiest military with the agility of the world's most fearsome terrorist network? If so, could the same principles apply in civilian organizations? A NEW APPROACH FOR A NEW WORLD Mc Chrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade the Task Force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to ex-tend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a oneness that would have been impossible even a decade earlier. The Task Force became a "team of teams"--faster, flatter, more flex-ible--and beat back Al Qaeda. BEYOND THE