Top 20 Stanley McChrystal Quotes
#1. Attempts to control complex systems by using the kind of mechanical, reductionist thinking championed by thinkers from Newton to Taylor - breaking everything down into component parts, or optimizing individual elements - tend to be pointless at best or destructive at worst.
Stanley McChrystal
#2. If I told you that you weren't going home until we win - what would you do differently?
Stanley McChrystal
#3. The rules and limitations that once prevented accidents now prevented creativity.
Stanley McChrystal
#5. Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.
Stanley McChrystal
#6. In battle, refusal or hesitation to follow orders can spell disaster. But at the same time, the rigid hierarchy and absolute power of officers slows down execution and stifles rapid adaptation by the soldiers closest to the fight.
Stanley McChrystal
#7. Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage.
Stanley McChrystal
#9. As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents, like our Task Force. But this is easier said than done.
Stanley McChrystal
#10. Catchy acronym in the consulting world, "MECE," which stands for "mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
Stanley McChrystal
#11. Our actions, particularly interventions, can upset regions, nations, cultures, economies, and peoples, however virtuous our purpose. We must ensure that the cure we offer through intervention is not worse than the disease.
Stanley McChrystal
#12. We must be bold . . . as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Stanley McChrystal
#13. It is now a building in which individuals toil independently in accordance with top-down, need-to-know reductionist planning. They might as well be spread around the globe.
Stanley McChrystal
#14. As the demands of the positions differed, and as I grew in age and experience, I found that I had changed as a leader. I learned to ask myself two questions: First, what must the organization I command do and be? And second, how can I best command to achieve that?
Stanley McChrystal
#15. There's likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that's your mission.
Stanley McChrystal
#16. Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.
Stanley McChrystal
#17. Taylor despised workers' free association - their attempts to establish horizontal bonds - because it created too many
Stanley McChrystal
#18. physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization. Along with factory assembly lines, the architectural frames of white-collar work have evolved to maximize efficiency.
Stanley McChrystal
#19. It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network." With that, we took the first step toward an entirely new conversation.
Stanley McChrystal
#20. sharing information would help build relationships and the two together would kindle a new, coherent, adaptive entity that could win the fight.
Stanley McChrystal
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