YouSaid · the spoken record

Stanley McChrystal

lines on the record: 90
first: 2022-03-08
most recent: 2022-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They succeeding? And am I in some way empowering that? Whether I get credit for it or not, am I giving people opportunities? Am I creating an environment in which they can function and be successful, then that feels like a win. It's a different set of metrics. They're more emotional than when I was younger. But they're probably more powerful as well.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The individual personal level for me success has evolved over the years. I think it was much more, if you'd asked me 30 years ago, I'd have said success. I'd probably said the first thing was my career. I want to be thought of as a good soldier. I didn't have a rank idea, but I want to be respected as a good soldier. I would have said, my family is very important to me, but I may have said that more because I thought I had to say it than I had thought about it. Now I'm at a different point in life. And what's important to me now is my family and how I interact. I have three granddaughters. My interaction with those granddaughters is sacred to me. Their opinion of me is very important to me, even when I'm gone. I want them to be able to look back at what people thought about me. And if it's accurate, I want them to feel good about it. But I also view success as the people I'm around are”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think that there's sometimes people will see me and I'm either quiet or aloof and they'll misread the introversion for something that it's not.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. There was a period of time when people would say that I was aloof and arrogant. And if I was arrogant, it wasn't because of what they saw, because I'm incredibly introverted. I mean, we did psychological tests in special operations when I was a young officer, and I literally pegged the chart on introversion. And I remember telling the psychologist, I said, well, I assume I'll grow out of that and I'll become an extrovert. The guy says, no, it didn't work that way. You become more of whatever you are. You will develop some coping mechanisms. It won't be as evident to people because you'll learn how to do certain things in some situations. But for me, being around people is draining. I tell people, I joke, that if I die and go to hell, it'll be an endless cocktail party where I got to make small talk.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mythology sometimes because people started thinking, you know, McCrystal's some kind of Zen warrior who, you know, the Stoic who eats one meal a day and he's, et cetera, he's never slept in his life. And that's not true. But the reality is that those things which made me Made the people that worked with me intrigued and in some cases inspired by my commitment were helpful. And most leaders have some combination of those things that help them be a little bit more effective in leading people”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was a two edged sword. The people who were on my personal staff during the war, we called it the pain train. There was a pressure there because I eat one meal a day and so during those other meal periods, I typically don't stop and make sure they all go to lunch or breakfast or whatever. I'm tended to be moving. I don't ever tell anybody eat one meal a day because it's not right for many people. But I think there's kind of an implied pressure. And there's this also this mythology that grew up around it, you know, that I've only eaten once a week for, you know, that kind of thing. And so people think if they don't do that, that they're letting me down. And that's not the case. On the other side of the coin,”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, in some ways, if you think about the challenge to consumer package goods, you have companies that used to make this range of products and they sold them. And then you start to have a bunch of garage startups that go with niche organic graham crackers, or you name it. And they're only going after a small part of the market, and they're not coordinated, but there's a school of piranha, each of which is doing this, and they go after the consumer package goods, and they take away the high margin part of the business, and they leave people, the traditional ones, which are hard to fend off much smaller ability to be viable. And you take that to military. We can have countless opponents, and they don't all have to be coordinated. They just have to share a general common intent to do us harm, which makes them more difficult because you have to defeat each one. You can't defeat them as an”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I go, why does my refrigerator? Is it going to send me an email or what? But the point is, there are so many entry points now to the networks that people don't, opponents don't have to go after Fort Knox or Defense Department. They can do bank shots into things, they can hit power, they can hit confidence, they can hit bank. There's so many things to hit that we are a target waiting to be struck. And so as a consequence, what we really need to do is take a look at our defense and then have an overwhelming offensive capability that can target nation states. Now that doesn't solve the non-state actors who can't be deterred as easily. But we've got to be, if we're not at parity and above, we're just extraordinarily vulnerable.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strong in the United States is with cyber or not. Because we can't define the next war clearly, it's hard to do war games or equivalent that show people what could or will happen. And so as a consequence, we underinvest. And I think that we also underappreciate our vulnerability. We're the most connected society in the history of man. I joke. I bought a new refrigerator not long ago, and it's connected to Wi-Fi.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shane, I think it's several things, and I agree with you. And in fact, the next war may well be won or lost before people actually realized it's on. Maybe so fast that that's occurred. I think first is there's a natural constituency for stuff. Aircraft carriers, tanks, planes, all those kinds of things. There's defense industries that make money doing it. There's a certain familiarity to it. If you don't have enough of these things, you worry that you don't have enough. And the people making most of the decisions are my generation generally. And so we didn't grow up with cyber. We're latecomers to having any appreciation for it. So I think that those habits that way. And then it's hard to get your mind around cyber because you can't touch it as easily. You can't count it. We keep so much of it secret. We don't know how.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long enough, and you start to believe that that's correct, suddenly your perspective may be rational, but it's Improperly informed. And so it's been based on facts that aren't facts. And so you've reached conclusions that aren't good conclusions. That's very dangerous because we're in an era now where disinformation. It's not more powerful than it was in the past, but it's more easy to distribute. And so information technology makes it. It amplifies its effect. And that is dangerous. Because rational people will do irrational things.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is what is so noteworthy in today's society, though, because really we were fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq in the tough years of the war. And rather than hate the Al-Qaeda operatives because they were bloodthirsty and they would do horrible things, you had to step back and say, if I'd had their life journey and their perspective, I might very well have the exact same conclusions and activities as they did. And that gets you back and say, just because I think differently doesn't make me right and them wrong. And that's very important. We're in a critical time in our nation, and I would argue around the world where disinformation is so important because what it is doing is it's impacting people's perspective in a skewed way. If people tell you white is black, up is down.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Criticize from afar. So that's the first one. But I would go back to what I said earlier if someone is making decisions with the right values and a reasonable probability-based assessment of what they think the outcome will be, meaning, was there a reasonable chance that the decision they made would come out right? And if those two things line up, I'm okay with it. And so when a president or a business leader makes a decision If they're in the bounds of acceptability in those two, I'm okay with that. I mean, sometimes I wish there was a different outcome, but to me that's good enough.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing to do is remember that they are making judgments in the context in which they operate. And unless I'm in that context or incredibly informed about it, I'm a little bit careful on making judgments. Because if you haven't stood in somebody's shoes,”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crowded theater. You don't do certain things because we society say that people doing that are outside the bounds of what we can accept in society because it'll be bad for everyone. Now how tight that is, it's a point of argument. But I think there should be self-discipline enforced by ourselves first and foremost and then society should expect us to have it as well.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To people. I know that in the military, we take people from all over society, different parts, and you put them through this series of training events and a lifestyle that forces them to certain behaviors. And they may not love it at first, but they start to stand straighter. They start to fold their underwear. They start to do the right things and treat people. And for the vast majority, it has a very good effect. So I think that those things we can do, and in some ways I would argue in today's society, we've gone a little bit lax there. We've said that everybody can act any way you want to act, and it's your right to do that because nobody should tell you what to do. I don't think that's right. I think there should be norms in society that say you don't act outside of these bounds because we won't have it. You don't yell fire in a”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that it is something that can be taught. You know, I joke with people. I still fold my underwear in my drawer at home. And people laugh at that. My wife laughs at that and says, why do you do that? I said, because they told me to do that at West Point, and so I still do it because that's the right thing to do. Admiral Bill McCraven taught us to make our bed every morning. And I've been doing that for years, but he's exactly right. There are habits you form that are good habits. I exercise every day, not just because I should, but because it's habitual for me. If I don't, something feels wrong. If you are kind to people by habit, it's a good habit. And I think all of those things of discipline are really good habits that you hold yourself to, expectations, standards, whatever it is. I think organizations can have them, but we as individuals. And I do think you can teach them.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we hate the idea and the acts surrounding that. And we should. And so when I think of an African American in a small southern town having to walk by the statue of a Confederate soldier into the courthouse to seek some kind of legal redress, it's a conflicted message. And for the many years in which we have allowed that to sort of send a message of, hey, African American, the whites are in charge here. That's completely wrong. At the same time, not every soldier who fought the Confederacy thought of themselves as a racist or own slaves, the vast majority didn't. And so if we're unable to take a nuanced view of history, then everything is binary, everything's right, wrong, black, or white, and I don't think that's any history I'm aware of, reality I'm aware of. Is where we've got to get to maturity, I think.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I've got mixed feelings on it because on the one hand, I think the idea of Confederate statues around because many of them were placed in a period in which the people who placed them were trying to make a statement about white supremacy in the South. There was a very clear loss-cause narrative to them. And so at that point, I think many of the memories of people like Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders were being leveraged to make a different point on white supremacy. And I don't support that. I find that abhorrent. At the same time, I think that when we overreact and say that suddenly we go from this adoration of someone to this just hatred, blind hatred of them, we confuse ourselves. What we hate is slavery, and what we hate is the Confederacy trying to destroy the United States of America.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we've got to do is mature as a society and decide at which point a person can still be studied or admired for the good parts while realistically being Judged for those things that they weren't good on.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, obviously, on the one hand, I should hate the person who opposed the nation that I've sworn my allegiance to. I should hate the slave owner, as he was, I should hate the person that did all those things. At the same time, there were so many things about his character and his personality and his service before that that I can't hate. And so where I've arrived at Robert E. Lee is that He's a human being. He's flawed. He's like me. There were many things incredibly admirable about him, but on the biggest decision of his life, he was wrong. He literally got to the fork in the road and went the wrong way. So, I'm not prepared to throw him on the ash heap of history and say he's an evil person. I'm prepared to say he was a person who was wrong. And I know a lot of people have been wrong about a lot of things to include me. And so”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discard the bad, then we never get to get all the good that's in all the people who are flawed humans. My personal journey most viscerally has been with Robert E. Lee. I live about 100 feet from the house Robert E. Lee grew up in, and I went to Washington Lee High School. I lived in Lee Barracks at West Point. I went to the same college as Robert E. Lee. And then I served in the U.S. military, same one that Robert E. Lee spent 31 years in. And he was a very effective soldier. And by most respects a very admirable person. In 1861, he made the decision to join first the state of Virginia and then the Confederacy. And he spent the next four years trying to destroy the nation that he had been sworn as allegiance to. And in fact, no commander in history has killed him. More American soldiers, United States soldiers than Robert E. Lee.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a question of maturity. I'll get this wrong, but if I remember correctly, the Scottish poet Robert Burns had a problematic personal life. And Frederick Douglass once described the poet, and he said, you know, if we can't”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It gives you a sense of the man in a way that I think most books can't. And so I think sometimes going back to read those kinds of accounts or read what the person wrote themselves in their letters or diaries can give you a humanity that it's hard to catch otherwise. So I'm really into reading those. I'm not a big military historian. People expect me to. I like to read books about the building of the Hoover Dam and stuff like that because I like big projects that took a lot of people cooperating to get them done and the hard parts of them.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's interesting. I read Lot and I read history almost exclusively. Only occasionally do I read fiction. I've just finished reading Carl Sandberg's biography of Abraham Lincoln. And it's funny, I've been teaching Abraham Lincoln in our course at Yale for 12 years. And I know a fair amount about Abraham Lincoln like most people do. But I went back and read, and Kloss Hamberg wrote in the 1920s this monumental set going through Lincoln. And he wrote in a way that we wouldn't write today. He writes like a poet. And he describes things and he describes Lincoln in adept. And so what I'd say is when you get a chance to study somebody beyond the Wikipedia page, who at when, where, why? All right, that's interesting. It doesn't tell you the person. And often it's incorrect. And Sandberg may be obviously a little out of his time now.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it doesn't have more to it, then there's not much there. There's always going to be this fragility. And I also would argue that if you really want to be rich or you really want to be famous or you really want to be senior, all of those things are pretty attainable. But you can get there and find out if that all there is. There's just not It is not enough to have money. It is not enough to have rank or something because it's empty. And I know that sounds, people say, well, you know, at my age, that's easy to say. But the reality is at my age, it is easy to say because I've seen both sides of it. And I would tell you what's most important in life is not the extrinsics things. It is the intrinsic things. It's how you feel about yourself. It's how my granddaughters think of me mat to me.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know you're not perfect, then that gives you an excuse for saying, well, I can't be Abraham Lincoln, so I'm just going to be lousy because it's unattainable for me to be a great leader, so I'm not going to bother. Well, in reality, nobody is 10 feet tall. So that means that all of us can be taller than we are if we hold ourselves to that standard. So that's sort of the first one. The second is you've got to commit yourself to something. And we talked about being moored in values, but commit yourself to a cause or an organization or to people and sometimes to all of those things. And your commitment's got to be real. If it's not more than you, your personal wealth or your personal ambition or any of those.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a bunch of them. One is that leaders are important, but the sun doesn't rise and set on leaders, great men or great women. You know, we had this tendency for many years to put our leaders on pedestals, and those people we admired, we admired completely. You know, they were perfect in every way. And of course none were. And so we're going through an age now where we find the fault in everyone and we get very disappointed when we find out that George Washington owned slaves and didn't free his slaves when he died. We get very disappointed with other iconic leaders. Woodrow Wilson was a raging racist, and yet he did much good for the nation. And so I think one of the first things I've learned from leaders is don't expect perfection. Expect humanity. Because if you expect perfection and you put your leaders on a pedestal,”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we talk about ourselves as leaders, if we can ground ourselves in who we are, if we identify ourselves only with our rank or our position or our popularity or any of those things, as soon as the wind blows hard or we get toppled, we're in a bad way. But if we are much more careful or tightly moored to things which can't be taken away from us, our integrity, our sense of commitment to others, no matter when you start to lose those other things, you aren't threatened. There's you there that you can fall back on.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wrote that the things which made him effective in his resistance to that pressure, because he couldn't stop the torture, couldn't stop anything else, was his grounding in his faith and philosophy. The study he'd done in philosophy, because he gave him a sense of identity. And it gave him a sense of what's truly important in life and was more important than his physical well-being at the moment or his ability to control the environment, which he couldn't. But instead, it gave him this sense of confidence and purpose, I would say, as a foundation upon which he stood. And he found prisoners who didn't have that very, very vulnerable. And so I would say that”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's in several things. I think one of the first things is that you've got to build a sense of who you are. And part of that is the organizational narrative. I am a member of this organization. I am proud to be that. That is important to me. I identify with that. And they identify with a set of values, some of which are associated with the organization. Some are my personal values. Those two things together give the person a sense of who they are. Admiral James Stockdale was captured and for seven years was held in captivity in Hanoi Hilton. And he was tortured tremendously. And he wrote some interesting things afterward. And he won the Medal of Honor for his conduct.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invest there, whereas the military, for all its weaknesses, spins an awful lot of time developing leaders. And as I described, the military takes very average talent and gets above average performance. So I think military leaders actually have a significant advantage. Now, one thing that civilian leaders can do that's much better is they can make big decisions. A military leader in combat can make a big decision, but in peacetime, laws, regulations, tables of organization equipments really narrow them down to a pretty small area of maneuver space. They can train their unit, but they really can't do much outside of that. A civilian corporation, whether it's private or public, if the CEO is decisive, they can go 180 degrees tomorrow. Now, they may take some scrutiny and pressure on it, but they can do it. And that's a big advantage.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Military leaders don't have any money to distribute, and that's an advantage because everybody says that yearly bonuses motivate people, and I would argue not really. They may be a requirement now because they're an expectation, but intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic things like. And everybody likes their bonus until they find out their desk mate got just a little more. And then suddenly the bonus becomes an item of dissatisfaction. And so civilian leaders have got to navigate a bunch of things. And then you add on top of that the market, the market requiring certain behaviors, the fact that most civilian corporations don't spend much time on leader development anymore. They've decided that that's an expenditure that is not worth the cost. And so the vast majority of them don't.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people think civilian leadership is easier because you don't have to wear uniforms. It's not life or death and you can give people more money. And so it's easier. But I will argue almost for all of those reasons, it's much harder. The military has a very clear culture. You wear your rank and your resume on your uniform. People can see where you've been, what you've done. You can wrap yourself very clearly in the flag. The reason for the military's existence and the mission is clearly stated. It sometimes gets confused, but the basic premise is very good.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lieutenants were doing it, and none of the captains were. One rank up. And so finally I had to ask, okay, what's up with this? Well, the battalion commander was a very charismatic guy. And he told people that in Vietnam they wear their t-shirts on backwards, so less of their skin showed, and the Vietnam couldn't see it as easily and wouldn't kill them. And I thought that was questionable. But anyway, he was this charismatic leader who pushed it out. And that same charismatic leader later got himself in significant trouble for his personal conduct, and he deserved to get in significant trouble for his personal conduct. But he had created this cadre of younger leaders that he'd influenced tremendously. And so it became, in my view, a pretty dangerous situation where they could be led into thinking this person we admire so much.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad luck or randomness. Similarly, you can make a stupid decision, get a good outcome, and commence yourself. You're a genius when you're not. And so as you come through that, it's really important to come back and not reinforce bad habits just because you lucked out, because the organization is always going to school on what you do. They are modeling your behavior. They are emulating you. And if you do things the wrong way, even process-wise or interpersonally, all those things become reflected in young leaders. Once when I joined a battalion when I was a captain, all the lieutenants ran around with their t-shirts on backwards under their blouse. And I thought, I saw the first couple of guys and I said, these guys get up early in the morning. They need to pay a little more attention. And then I saw most of the”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I get those two things right, something that has a reasonable chance of success and reflects my values, then I'm probably dealing with the crisis. And can I communicate that clearly to my team? Can I give them the kind of atmosphere that reassures them? Can I show clear confidence? I can absolutely communicate. This is a tough moment. It is a time for everybody to be focused, but not a time for panic because I haven't seen any situations where panic contributes to the good outcome. So you're trying to create the environment, create confidence, focus people on that, make a clear decision. Now here's the thing about the outcome. It may come out wrong. And just because you got it wrong or you get a bad outcome doesn't mean the decision was bad. You can make the best possible decision.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. I want to say its voices say panic right away. Now, typically what I try to do when I met my best, I have to step back and say, okay, what is the problem I'm faced with and what is the outcome that I'm trying to achieve? Because you can sort of drown out some of the noise around it if you can focus on that and say what we really have to do is this and achieve this particular outcome. And then I try to think, okay, what's governing my decision here? And I think it should be two things. I think it should be my values. Am I sticking to my values so I don't drift off those? And two, am I making a probability-based decision? Because I can't make a perfect decision. I'm not smart enough to do that. But I can make a decision that is reasonable in judging the probability”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I would say that the military has not been very good about that. We have not created an environment. And I see the same thing in civilian corporations. I hear leaders say, I want people to take more risk. I want them to push the bounds, all the rhetoric that you hear about that. But then you ask them to point out the people who've failed significantly and where they are in the company now. And typically there'll be a pause and a silence. They might bring up an example of something really small. But the reality is people who made big mistakes or push programs that didn't succeed are very rarely rewarded with a significant move forward. And so everybody in the organization watches that. Everyone goes to school on it. And if you are safe and you don't make any mistakes, it's Possible to rise up. And that's a negative.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ridiculous, and somebody holds you to account for it. If you don't get a second chance, all that experience is gone. Now, what you don't want to do is create an environment where people feel that they can be negligent or cavalier because it's okay, there won't be held to account. But on the other hand, I think it's really important to say that if people haven't pushed the bounds a little bit, they probably haven't pushed as hard as we want them to.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you think about any organization that punishes failure, whether they do it intentionally or unintentionally, the United States Army in the period in which I served was really bad about punishing any mistake by a leader. So if a leader made a mistake in their personal lives, their conduct, even if they're fairly young leader at the time, that's a ding on their career that typically ended their upward mobility. You think of the Navy, if a ship's captain has a mistake, often they pay for it with their career. But if you think about where you learn the most, you typically learn the most when you've screwed something up really badly and you've gotten scuffed up for it. You've lost a lot of money or you've gotten physically hurt if you're young, you do something really.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who do, and so that's why you'll find in many organizations that have layers a difficulty in getting really important decisions made.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What had happened was they hadn't made a decision to approve it and they hadn't made a decision to disapprove it, so their hands were clean. They had no responsibility at all. Now, we still failed because we didn't take advantage of the opportunity. We in the aggregate, and they were able to push back and say, no, you didn't come prepared when it wasn't realistic to have come with that kind of information. And that's to your point of sometimes not making a decision is making a decision. It's creating an outcome but avoiding responsibility for it. And it's pretty common in bureaucracies where people are not incentivized to take risk, where people tend to be punished for bad decisions, but really not rewarded for good ones or even for contributing to a good one getting made. Now, there are a lot of good people who don't fall prey to this, but there are too many good.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they don't. I've described my experience with some bureaucrats when I was in the counterterrorism world where you had to go up the chain of command multiple levels, sometimes to the White House for permission to do something that was a bit sensitive. And you'd get to a decision maker somewhere in route, and that decision maker would ask a question like, how much wood can a woodchuck chuck? And I go, what are you talking about? That's got nothing to do with it. And they'd say, well, I need to know that. And we'd go back and we try to gather that information. We'd come back. And they would say, well, the opportunity's gone, you know, that intelligence is no longer good. And they would look at me and they'd go, you didn't come prepared.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ran the gamut. There were people who were battlefield tourists and they were there to check the block and tell people they'd been there. And there are other people who were literally when they got out there, they asked thoughtful questions. They focused on it. They tried to get as close as they could to the action and listened to junior soldiers so they got a good view of it. It's hard to do usually in compressed trips. And when they fly over halfway around the world, they're exhausted when they get there. So there are challenges. But there were a lot who did it very well. And I really admired the effort they put in to try to really understand. Because, you know, the truth is, if you sit back in DC, and you listen to what the military tells you, you know, the military, God bless us, will say what we want to be true. It's not that we're lying, but we've been given a mission and we desperately want to be a good thing.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was right. And we sat down and we talked. And at the end of it, I said, yeah, but I can't take away the requirement. We have to secure this. I can't make it easier. I can appreciate it, but my requirement, our requirement strategically is this. So we got to get it done. So I don't think they were in love with what I said, and I certainly wasn't in love with the situation. But the reality was you close the gap between perceptions. And that's, so leaders have got to get out sometimes and get on the ground in the corduroy and feel it, you know, understand how hard it is. And then sometimes you got to tell people what they don't want to hear. But they know you know, and that's key.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could probably raise yourself up and then somebody shoot your head off. Instead, you're moving in this cordright area that goes maybe 100 feet before it turns. So the enemy, it's like fighting in a big maze. Mines and booby traps in that area, so you got to be credibly. So I went down to this organization and I said, I'm going to spend the day with you. So we spent all day going on a combat patrol. And I came out of there going, That's the most difficult thing I've ever seen, tactically. And he goes, yep, we're in there every day, sir, and you're trying to get us to control this area. And it's really hard.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, as a commander, my feelings are hurt and whatnot. We got in a helicopter the next day and I said, we're going down there. We're going to see. So we went down to this area and it was outside of Kandahar and it was an area that was a pretty tough fight. And it was the damnest thing I've ever seen. In Afghanistan, there's not a lot of wood to make trellises for grapes and things like that. So they do it using mud walls. And those mud walls are about six to seven feet high and they pack them together. And then the vines of the plant are inside the mud wall and the blossoms on the top. So what you've created is like suddenly being shrunk down and being into corduroy. And you are suddenly in this corduroy landscape for miles, literally square miles. Well, think about that in a combat sense. You can't see over the walls.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I can't tell you how many times I would do that. I once went out to this small Aryan Afghanistan. I say small. It was far away from Kabul. And we've given a strategy out to them that says, okay, this is how we're going to deal with the locals and whatnot. And I got an email from a young sergeant, a staff sergeant, a squad leader. And he sent me this email that says, sir, with all due respect, I don't think you understand what's going on out here.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's interesting because in a chain of command, in a corporation, in a government or in a military, as you go up, you tend to have a bigger strategic view. And down on the lowest level, you tell someone to accomplish something and they go, this is really hard. But from here, it looks really important. So you say, shut up and make it happen. Sometimes you're right. Sometimes you're not right. Sometimes it's really not worth it or smart. And building trust and building communication all the time so you can get as rich a picture so you don't try to move chess pieces around when it doesn't make sense. Sometimes you have to push organizations to go when they don't want to, but that's critical to have that connectivity that's richer than just a sterile communication.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT