Sublime

is Stanley McChrystal’s My Share of the Task (McChrystal 2013).

In a presentation I heard General McChrystal give at the New York Times New Work Summit in the summer of 2016, he said, “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’”

Although appointed to oversee the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, the choice of McChrystal belies the popular notion of a wholesale shift to a less kinetic campaign intent on building relations with the local population. In his earlier role, McChrystal had led Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for 5 years; this was t

the traditional heroic decision maker. In the Task Force, we found that, alongside our new approach to management, we had to develop a new paradigm of personal leadership. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.