Sublime

Exhibit an inner toughness emanating from four of the most effective survival tools a leader can possess: expertise, composure, patience, and common sense.

Though we didn’t call it such at the time of the Iraq war, a team of teams is an operating framework for an organization that we’ve seen work on the battlefield and in industry. It is grounded in the creation of true strategic alignment across an organization; executing disciplined, broad, and transparent communications; and decentralizing decision

In the Task Force, physical and virtual realms were created to provide potential boundary spanners with the ability to independently familiarize themselves with one another’s teams, perceive one another’s needs, and identify which of them might be facing a higher-priority issue at any given moment. They could then solve their own issues, well ahead

ensure they: Verbally highlighted the people who helped them get this project get done. Openly asked of the participants how this project might be applied to other clients or existing incidents.

He had created perfection on paper, and we couldn’t execute it. But he kept pushing us to get better.

What helped tamp down this risk—that of insubordination and continued whisper guidance informed by the unit-level narrative—was the fact that McChrystal himself would become personally responsible for approving and considering new nominations for liaison roles. This was not only helpful in ensuring that the individuals selected held the right perso

a very mortal human who was willing to demonstrate behavioral standards and facilitate the interaction of teams rather than pretending to know all answers to their many problem sets.

Your challenge is to create an enterprise that is comfortable constantly adapting to the complexity around it, while avoiding constant disruption to the parts of the organization that should remain stable.

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