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New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Portfolio
May 2015
On Sale: May 12, 2015
290 pages
ISBN: 1591847486
EAN: 9781591847489
Kindle: B00KWG9OF4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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 McChrystal 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 advantages—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 McChrystal led a hierarchical, highly
disciplined 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
McChrystal 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 extend 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 flexible—and beat back Al
Qaeda.
BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD
In this
powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the
challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless
businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The world
is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for
those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to
experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn
across the entire organization. As the authors argue
through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has
worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It
has the potential to transform organizations large and small.
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