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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“Of what's happening than they do. Use that position and that visibility to gain some perspective, but then listen talk. Do everything else you can and support the person on the ground because ultimately they do know better. They have a much more visceral feel of what's possible and what isn't, and you can help them with a perspective. But you have to defer to them because they have a sense of it.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two dimensional depictions of the battlefield specifically from unmanned aerial vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan over every fight we could have at about 10,000 to 20,000 feet full motion video. So the commander could sit in the command center and watch from above a movie of what's happening almost like a war game. And so you have the tendency to think that you have this godlike perspective. You see all the forces, you can move them around like chess pieces if you want because you have the capability, the communication to do that. What you have to remind yourself, and we had to keep telling ourselves you're not there. You don't know how dark it is, how cold it is. You don't know, you don't hear the crack of the bullet. You're not tired. And so don't fall into the self-deception that you have a better understanding.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Staying in communication with people as much as you can, listening. You know, there's a lot of text communication now, but there was incredible value in voice communication. You could talk to a subordinate and you could tell by the tone of their voice how their morale was, whether they were upset, whether they were shaky, and you could hopefully be reassuring voice to them that's hard to do in a printed thing. Finally, it's gotten trickier in recent years because we have the ability to get”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is really important because, as you know, by the time it gets up to you, it's been sort of homogenized to the point where it looks neat and clean, and military units are depicted as symbols on a map and you move military units around. And the little symbol doesn't get tired, doesn't get frightened, doesn't suffer casualties, but on the ground it's very human and very different than that. There are several things. First is experience on the part of the commander having been there, having looking at a movement of an organization across the map and you go, wait a minute, I've made movements like that. I know what it does, how tiring it is or difficult. The second is”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what the commander's intent was designed to do was tell everyone in the organization, this is what I actually mean, and if everything goes to hell, as long as we get this done, accomplish this outcome, that's success. And so while I've got a plan that says we are going to do it this way, if the plan falls apart, whatever we can do to accomplish this outcome is good. And it's letting all of the force into the commander's head, understanding what to do. And so when the plan goes badly, as they invariably do, and you're picking the pieces up and adapting, everybody can pick up the piece and adapt by themselves. They don't need you to tell them exactly what to do.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The commander's intents are part of it, but it's probably better for me to explain commander's intent in the idea that In a military order, you have what we call a mission statement. And it normally says who, what, when, where, why, and how you're going to do that. And it tells an organization, this organization will do this on Tuesday to accomplish this mission. But that's kind of sterile. It's usually a single sentence.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people were remarkably understanding and bought in. And sometimes what you do is you help yourself because you make the argument that says, this is why we're doing this. And you'll get someone inside the organization who points out there's a better way. Same, wait a minute, we can do this differently and achieve the outcome we need to. And the command sort of rises. But I think I was pleasantly pleased that people were willing to accept really difficult decisions and orders if they understood the purpose clearly.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, too. In a daylight firefight using a weapon system that was designed for night. And the father of one of the pilots who was lost had the fair question afterward. He said, what do you do in having that my son fly in that helicopter during daylight and its conditions? And our response was, that's the only time we could get at the enemy, and we had to do that. And he accepted that, you know, which is tough because of the loss. But usually I found in the organization, if you communicate clearly that this is the rationale that we are using, this is why we are doing this.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surprisingly good, Shane, particularly in professional military forces where people have a fair amount of experience because most of them will know pretty quickly that there's not a good answer. We would do military operations where you were going to conduct it, particularly in the counter-terrorist world in Iraq during the height of the fight 2005 and 2006. We were designed to fight at night, but at times the opportunity came during daylight. And the only time you could get at the enemy was when you find him, and that was during daylight, which was when they wanted to fight. And so you have to make these decisions that say, okay, we are going to give away some of our advantage because we have to get them while we can. And we did some operations that were pretty difficult. We lost, I remember one instance when we lost a little bird pilot.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tend to make the decision. I had a conversation earlier today with someone about a phenomenon we've probably all seen. Someone comes to you and says, I think old Stan's not performing very well. And I think we may have to let Stan go or reassign him. But I'm going to wait. I'm going to give it three months to analyze it. And you go, now, what are you going to know three months from now about Old Stan that you don't know now? And usually the answer is nothing. And what could he possibly do changing his behavior that's realistic in the next three months it would change it? And the answer is often, well, nothing really. So you already know the right answer. You're just delaying because it's uncomfortable. And often I see those tough decisions get delayed just because we don't like them. We don't like to make them.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's your decision point. You must make the decision, which gives you time to propagate the decision out to everybody and then time to actually act on it. And you go by the point, the last possible time you can make that decision and have an effective outcome. That's very useful because I mentioned that I tend to make decisions too quickly. I find if I go on and say this is when the decision has to be made and there may be no value in making the decision before that. No advantage. It doesn't get better. So that taught me that I had a lot more time in many cases to gather more information, increase my conviction, all that kind of thing over the decision. So that's kind of number one. Also, it's Soon as I think I know enough and I'm not kidding myself about it.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One technique that's worked very well for me is you start with what action would need to be executed to be effective. And then you back plan and figure out how long it would take to implement that action.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practice that I learned from a mentor of mine, and that is sort of phases of decision making. There's a phase in which you gather information and you get inputs from everybody. And then there's a point at which you make a decision. And he used to very clearly announce, and he taught me to do the same, phase one and phase two are different. Phase one, I want all your inputs. I want this. Once we've made a decision and we're in phase two, unless you have information that substantively changes our feeling of reality, we're in the execute mode and you're focused. And it's not fair to come back and revisit the decision just because you didn't like it, unless something real has changed, shut up and row.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never captured them as clearly as you just did there, but my tendency is to make decisions too quickly. I have a tendency to get too little information and shoot from the hip and make a decision and let's go. And so what I did learn about myself is I had to bring people around me who were not that way. And every once in a while I've been lucky enough to get some people around me who I say this pejoratively, but it's unfair, are handwringers. They're always seeing the problem, et cetera. And what that does is it gives us a balance because I will sometimes be irresponsibly rapid, superficial. And if I've got people who want to look under every stone and sort out everything, we can meet somewhere in the middle. They pull me to a reasonable area and I can pull them to where we need to be. So I did do that. But one thing we do...”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's a moment in which you have to act either take advantage of the opportunity or negate the risk. And part of that is learned. And I think part of that is a person's makeup. I think everyone has a relationship with risk, and it doesn't really change. You may get a little better with it, a little more experienced, but you have a certain ability to deal with that uncertainty. And I think that comes from birth.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I asked him, How would you tell him peacetime? And he says, You won't, you won't know because people have capabilities or coping mechanisms that in peacetime look fine that don't play well in war. But when you're in combat, then I asked him, okay, when you're in combat, how do you know? He said, some people keep asking for more information. And what they're trying to do is drive uncertainty to zero so that there's really not a question on the right course of action because you know everything. But you can't do that. It's not achievable. And so they become hesitant. They become tentative and they become focused on getting more and more information to ratchet the uncertainty out of the situation and they don't act. And good commanders know when they've got to take a risk. There's a certain amount of absolute due diligence you do to get information responsibly.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, teach them that certainty is an impossible goal. When I was a brand new lieutenant, I asked my father, how would I know if somebody that I worked for worked for me was going to be a good commander in combat?”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tell people with parenthood how often do people come to me and say congratulate us, we're going to have a baby? And my response is, no, you're not. You're going to have a person. And you're going to have them for at least 18 years. And my son, I've only got one son, he lives next door to me, so he's 38. So it's great, but it's a relationship that's forever. And thinking about that sometimes is hard.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sometimes can make that philosophically, you know, we can rhetorically say we need to do that, but know full well that elected officials, if they say American forces are going to stay in Afghanistan for 20 or 40 or 60 years, that that's a really hard sell. And that's a hard narrative to make to the American people. That melding between the military and policymakers has got to be richer. And we've got to all be more thoughtful long term. I would argue that probably after World War II, when we sent American forces back to Germany, when it was clear that the Soviet Union was going to be a Cold War adversary, had we said we are going to be there 70 years from now, that the American people probably would have really had a problem with that. How do you simultaneously be completely honest with what you 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'd start by saying I think the military, we've done it imperfectly. The first is because the military has the temptation to have short-term views as well. A commander may have a two-year command tour, and there's this desire to make certain improvements or achievements by then. And it's hard to take a 10 or 20-year view. We think we do, but when I'm very honest, I think we don't do it real well. And then your really good question about how do you articulate that and tell people, well, we've got to think 20 or 30 years out on that because that's how long it will take to create certain entities.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning elected mayors, presidents, and whatnot, are likely to do long-term infrastructure things. At the time, he was talking about a project to make New York City more resilient against things like Hurricane Sandy, which was a huge expenditure. He said legislations which thought on a two or four-year cycle had a difficult time making that kind of investment because the payback wouldn't come quickly enough. And I think that's true in different versions across many elected officials. It's hard for someone, as Margaret Thatcher said, when you make a decision, you shouldn't be thinking about its impact tomorrow, but the impact 10 years from now. And it's hard for an elected official who knows they won't be in office 10 years from now to make that kind of call.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some form or fashion. The military was typically there for much shorter periods in larger numbers, and so the military became convinced they had to do something in relatively short order. So we had to come in, and because we had mass and expenditure, we got to move fast, which could be weak because the military could be looking at expedients over long term. And then the State Department had a different view as well, and often they had a view that said, we're not here to change reality, we're here to report it. And so those different timelines became at tension with each other. Now, they could work together. They actually could be mutually supportive because they could help each other see a more complete view. Politicians are the same way. I had Mayor Mike Bloomberg one day tell me that he thought that only exactly”
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 very true. In my own experience, separate from politicians, you found different parts of the U.S. government. The Central Intelligence Agency took a longer-term view. They would operate in an area and they would build intelligence networks and capabilities because they were going to be there forever.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not interested in the schools because they don't have kids or grandkids in the community, so they don't have that same level of responsibility to the entire depth of the community. And you also haven't been there as long, so you don't feel like I'm going to be born, raised, and be buried here, and therefore my legacy is very important. And I think that decreases our sense of ownership over risks. We tend to be more short-term and that more short term, I think applies nationally as well. And you could argue to commercial organizations if they have a short-term profit motive, and they can just make goals for a certain period, they're not thinking about, I'm going to leave this to my sons or daughters and grandsons or granddaughters, and therefore they don't have the same kind. Of long term view”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they go off to school, and after school, they go live somewhere else. And during that period of life, they are interested in certain things in the community. They're very interested in the schools and whatnot. Then they hit a retirement age, and they move yet again, and they move to a warmer climate. And suddenly in that new environment,”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it really is in two levels. The first is you talk about responsibility. There's a moral hazard here in that organizations like Lehman Brothers who named a very capable chief risk officer created an impression inside the organization that other individuals didn't have to worry as much about risk because they had a person who was responsible for that. And they would cover it. And of course, That's inaccurate. That wasn't even her role and she wasn't allowed in things like investment committee meetings where the biggest risk decisions were made. So I think there's that dynamic. And then there's another dynamic of I'll call it anonymity. And I think it shows up in particularly in American society where someone grows up in a town. They're born in a community and they spend the first few years there.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I actually haven't answered that one before. I think probably a little bit of both. We are probably getting better at our ability to share information. At least we have the ability to share information better. Technology allows that. We now have the help of augmented and artificial intelligence, which lets us see trends so we can see the effects of climate change. But then the counter-argument is, okay, so what? If we don't do anything about it, are we really getting better? And so I would argue on the one hand, there is the ability to assess the risks with greater accuracy and more timeliness, but we have problems in our society and our organizations now where it's very hard to overcome inertia. Either the inaction or the momentum we have in a certain direction because there are stakeholders.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that didn't rise to the level where the people who were aware of that said, red lights, we've got to stop because they just couldn't connect that to the idea of hijacking and doing what they ultimately did. And I think we'd be overly critical to say that they were all wrong, that because they saw this narrow picture, they didn't automatically see the big picture. And so two lessons for me. The first is we've got to try to connect organizations as much as possible to complete the mosaic where we can, but we've also got to be humble enough to say it's unlikely we'll ever have a clear picture. So we got to be prepared to deal with the unexpected.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. If you think about it, it's the analogy of the blind man and the elephant. You've got blind men looking at the elephant. One sees a leg or touches a leg, thinks it's the elephant's like a tree, another holds a tail, thinks it's like a snake. And none of them are wrong. But you remember there was a case in the 9-11 where you had some people doing flight lessons.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, a significant amount of those threats will make it through whatever kind of detection process we have. And so we're going to have to deal with them when they're on our doorstep.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shade, I think it's not possible, or at least not realistic. And when we studied the 9-11 situation for the book, we found that there had been a lot of information, intelligence pumping into the system. But if you compare it to the amount of overall intelligence pumping through the system, it's a very small amount. So having that signal differentiate itself from the rest of the noise is probably impossible. Now some people will say, well, big data will solve this. We'll use artificial intelligence and we'll crunch and we'll see patterns and trends. And to a degree, that will be of help. But I don't think it will be the panacea. I think there will still be too much noise, too much information pumping in. And so what we've got to do is accept the reality that we're probably not going to be very good at it. And so what we should accept is...”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's leadership provide an umbrella or connection for all of this. If we take each of those, they are a holistic system, but we can actually break out almost like the human body. We can exercise certain muscles. We can make them stronger. And then, of course, we can exercise the entire system so we're more resilient. And there are a number of things we can do really on a daily basis in our organizations to make ourselves ready for that next threat.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the good point. This is not just something you are born with, that you are more resilient than the next person or your organization automatically has. In reality, there are, we have enumerated 10. We could have had 12, we could have had 15. We tried to make it manageable as we captured it, but really they go around things like communication, the ability to communicate inside the organization. Do we have a clear narrative and are we aligned on it? Do we have the ability to respond or act? Can we overcome the inertia of inaction or change our action if we're in the wrong direction? Can we get the timing right? Can we swing at the pitch at the appropriate moment? Can we adapt when conditions change and the requirement is there? Do we bring all the different perspectives needed, meaning diversity? Can we overcome biases?”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yet they don't for the most part. It's only when our immune system is weakened that we become vulnerable to things that otherwise wouldn't be a problem. And so if we think of that analogy Suddenly you think of the systems were part of the organizations were part of the nations were a part of or even us individually, we have an ability to detect, assess, respond and learn, and the question is how strong is it, how healthy is it, determine our ability to withstand the threats that inevitably show up.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inside the US government, but we couldn't connect the dots or the financial crisis where all of the bubble and the fragilities were knowable, but we couldn't do very well with it. And then, of course, COVID-19. So because we've done so poorly at dealing with some pretty predictable risks, I wanted to study why is that? And that got me to the human immune system when this immunologist who I'd met at Yale. Taught me about the human immune system when we were working on a project on counterinsurgency, and she taught me that the human immune system is this extraordinary miracle capability we have to detect threats, assess them. Respond to them and then learn from it. And you say, well, okay, it's pretty good. I say, wait a minute, they actually estimate 10,000 times a day we ingest a microorganism that could kill us.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we came to the idea of risk first with this gap between what I'd studied about the theory of risk and what people had tried to teach me in my career. And then my actual experience with it, meaning I didn't actually have very good outcomes with risk, even if I'd gone through the checklist and the matrices and all the sort of scientific approaches. And then I looked historically at the things just really in my lifetime, and I think of the 9-11 attacks where we had all the information necessary to stop the World Trade Towers being hit.”
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 is. There were people who would argue that if we are really good at predicting threats, we can dodge them. Or some threats you can reach out and do something about. But I would say practically speaking, you're right. We're really not very good at seeing where all the threats are coming from, particularly in a complex environment. And also, we're not very good at predicting when they will come. So I think it's a fool's errand to try to think you're going to swat away every threat, but you can do a lot about your vulnerabilities.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There, which we usually cannot, then we've got to focus on our vulnerability to them. And we have some agency over that. Not perfect, but we can do something about that, and that can decrease our risk. And so I think of risk is the result there and what we're trying to have some level of control over.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to think of risk as something bad that could happen. And typically the intersection of probability and consequences. So what's the chances that something occurs? And if it does, how bad will that be? And that sort of becomes a risk and you buy insurance or you try to dodge it and whatnot. Now I think of it a little differently. Now I think of it as a mathematical equation. And this is the extent of my math expertise. But if you think of it as threats, times vulnerabilities equals risk, then you suddenly realize that threats are things that are out there that are inevitably coming our way in most cases. And then our vulnerability to them. And so if we can drive threats down lower to zero in a perfect world, which we usually can't, then we'd have no risk. But if we can't control the threats that are out there,”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we did some operations that were pretty difficult. We lost, I remember one instance when we lost a little bird pilot, actually two In a daylight firefight using a weapon system that was designed for night. And the father of one of the pilots who was lost had the fair question afterward. He said, what do you do in having that my son fly in that helicopter during daylight and its conditions? And our response was, that's the only time we could get at the enemy and we had to do that. And he accepted that, which is tough because of the loss. But I think I was pleasantly pleased that people were willing to accept really difficult decisions and orders if they understood the purpose clearly.”
2022-03-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT