A retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. He will be the first to admit that his retirement did not transpire as planned, but the impact that he has had as a private citizen has also been profound.
In 2011, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group, a consultancy that provides "innovative leadership solutions to American businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments," as his site notes. In that role, he has spent considerable time with CEOs across the private sector, helping them understand that the changes he enacted in the military are quite similar to the changes necessary in the business world: silos need to be eliminated, information must flow more freely across the enterprise, ecosystems must be curated carefully and cared for, and companies must strive to innovate while remaining cognizant of an ever expanding threat landscape.
In 2013, McChrystal published his memoir, My Share of the Task, detailing his years in the military, and in 2015, he published Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, describing how the lessons of his military experience apply more broadly. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. He has also joined the boards of JetBlue and Navistar International.
McChrystal describes all of the above and more in this far ranging interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please check out the 300th broadcast of the Forum on World Class IT. This is the 26th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman among others, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: General McChrystal, to say you come from a military family is an understatement. Your father, your grandfather, your four brothers, your father-in-law and all his sons were in the military. Your education and early experiences in the military were predicated on an environment that was largely predictable. However, in 2003, when you took over the Joint Special Operations Command, the post 9/11 world was much more complex and the nature of warfare was changing. Can you discuss the insights that you had when you realized that what had worked in the past was not likely to work in the present or future?
Stanley McChrystal: Let me rewind a bit, to provide some context. The nature of war has always involved change. In the American Civil War, technological changes such as telegraphs, railroads, the minié ball and the rifled musket, altered the nature of war. In the First World War, we saw the dawn of smokeless powder, and then in the Second World War, the advent of blitzkrieg. Change has always occurred. A significant difference is that part of that change occurred over much slower periods. For instance, the tank appeared during the First World War, but it took a generation before it made a difference on the battlefield. Compared to now, the pace of change was glacial. Also, not all, but most wars were between nation states or things that felt like nation states; they might be Native American tribes, for example, but they had many of the same attributes as nation states. The reality is, until about the last 20 years, things changed at a pace and at a level of complication that was manageable. This meant that someone could graduate from West Point as a lieutenant and the way they were trained to organize forces and think about war, with some adjustments for the peculiarities of each situation, put them in pretty good shape for their career. My grandfather entered the military during the First World War and was a colonel during the Second World War, the experience he developed during those intervening years stayed relevant. The rifle that he used in the First World War he still used up until the beginning of the Second World War. His competence was of value to him. However, in the last 20 years, the pace of change has accelerated tremendously and we have crossed the line from things being complicated to things being complex. People might assume those two things are the same, but they are not. Your car is complicated. You probably do not know how it was built or how to fix it. Nonetheless, when you press the button or turn the key, it does the same thing every time, because it was designed to do that. Complexity is different. With complexity, the number of variables, their interconnectedness, and the speed at which they change makes it impossible to predict what will happen in the future. What I have learned is, when the current environment makes it impossible to predict even the near-term future, or the impact of your actions, you have to approach it differently.
That gets to my experience starting in 2003. Whether I would have admitted this at the time or not, I am a product of a military upbringing and I am a product of a big organization optimized for efficiency. The U.S. military is as efficient, in every way it can be, as possible. It takes young people that vary in a massive number of things and makes their behavior as predictable as possible. The purpose of doctrine, procedures, discipline, and chains of command is that when you give an order, certain things happen. In 2003, I was a major general, so I had been around quite a while. We were engaged with an enemy who was a different beast than we had encountered before. It was a networked, constantly changing thing; not like a nation state, and not like a traditional terrorist group. We operated in an environment that was fundamentally different. The speed of information and the impact of our actions were much quicker. Now, if we pulled a lever, we did not know what would happen because the environment did not connect in the same way. We could pull the same lever on Tuesday that we pulled on Monday, and have a completely different outcome. That might sound impossible, but it was the new reality.
When we entered the fight in Iraq, I was part of a counterterrorist force that was purpose-built to destroy terrorist networks. The force had been trained, organized, and culturally shaped for 22 years, since its inception in 1981, to do this extraordinarily well. Then suddenly, we were in an environment where despite the fact that we were performing what we had been taught to do at the highest standard we had ever imagined, the outcome was not what we expected. In this new environment, although what we were doing was technically and tactically correct, it was functionally incorrect because it was not working. Generally, when you start to fail you work harder, or are more disciplined, or yell at your people to work harder - whatever works in your organization. This was not that. We were incredibly competent and working as hard as we could, but it became evident that what we were doing, no matter how well we did it, would be ineffective in that environment.
High: I have heard you liken Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC], historically, to being the bullet; that there were others who determined and aimed the direction of the bullet, and you simply went where they sent you. According to what I have read, you believed that JSOC had to become the gun, both aiming and delivering force, in order to be effective.
McChrystal: I used to refer to JSOC as the bullet because we were a wonderfully engineered projectile, which if aimed correctly and fired at the right moment, would have the perfect effect. We had optimized what we were. We did not have to decide the strategy or worry about the politics, we just waited until they called us, walked in, and did our job. If people did not get it right that was too bad, but it was not our fault. Suddenly though, we were in an environment where nobody had the vision or the effectiveness to aim the gun and pull the trigger, except us. We were the only people who could effectively do that because we were closer to the problem, and we had sensors, meaning our people and entities, all over the battlefield. This was different from earlier years of the organization. Previously, we would wait until somebody got the information, curated it for us, shaped it, put it in what we call a “target folder,” and then gave it to us to execute. Now, nobody could do that. We had to become our own entity, figure out the problem, and then execute. JSOC had to change. Command used to be 80 percent operations and 20 percent intelligence. Our 20 percent intelligence meant that we were basically consumers of intelligence; people would give it to us, we would critique it, and then operate. A year or two after 2003, those percentages flipped. Command became 80 percent intelligence and 20 percent operations, and a good part of that 20 percent operations were activities conducted entirely to get more intelligence. It became a fight for who could understand the fastest - the foe or us. If we could understand them well enough, we could win. The operational, or kinetic, part of it was not the hard part. It is a little like the story of the guy who was brought in to work on the New York subways. He brings in a little hammer, taps at a place, says, “OK, do this,” and then charges them $10,000. When they get upset, he says, "OK you want an itemized bill? Ten dollars for tapping with a little hammer, $9,990 for knowing where to tap.” We became the people that knew where to tap.
High: Another analogy that you use is that you rose up through the ranks in an environment where leaders were chess masters, but now you needed to think like gardeners. This new environment required you to plant seeds and provide the fertilizer, but then allow them to grow. Effectiveness now depended on leaders disseminating information to the troops in a way that made them capable of making decisions without them. This was different from the traditional environment of information going up and a decision coming back down. What was the rationale here? How did you make such a profound cultural change?
McChrystal: If you consider Admiral Perry, who was sent to open up Japan in the 1840s, he essentially said to those under his command, "Go do it. Let us know how it comes out." He could not micro manage because once they sailed, there was no way to communicate with them in a timely fashion. All he could do was send them out with general orders and let them use their best judgment. Then we had an era of more and more communications. Beginning with the Civil War, telegraph lines could run in close proximity to the battlefield, which meant President Lincoln and others in Washington, D.C. could send and receive reports and browbeat the generals to do more, and so on. On the one hand, that sounds helpful, but on the other hand, they were not on the battlefields. Then in the First World War, there was the tyranny of wires. Officers on the Western Front were greatly criticized for being “chateau generals” because they were back at the comfortable headquarters, not near the trenches. However, that is where they had to be, there was no other choice because that is where the wires connected. Radio was in its infancy, so if they were forward on the ground, they could not see anything other than the spot they were standing on. Conversely, if they were back with the maps and other inputs at headquarters, they had some chance of knowing what was going on overall.
This is similar to when we let our entire corporate and organizational structures grow into pyramid- shaped structures where all the information only goes one way, up to the C-suite. It seems logical that the people up there make the decisions and send directives down because all the conduits of information are directed to them, so they should be the best informed. As long as things are going slowly enough, and do not change too often, that works. But what happens when suddenly you get to a period on the ground where things are changing quickly and are nuanced at the point of action? Our inclination is to use all the great information technology that we have today and amp up the information to headquarters. We constantly pump up information through video screens and we connect to everywhere in our arena with cell phones so that the person at the apex of the pyramid is, in a theoretical sense, perfectly informed. This person, who is also hopefully the cleverest person in the organization, should therefore be the perfect chess master. Except, it does not work. If you draw it out, it ought to work. This person should be able to get a contextual understanding and make great decisions that no one else can because they are receiving information in real time from across the field. However, it does not work because they are not close enough. What has happened is that the speed of change is faster than even modern technology can communicate. The environments are much more nuanced and complex; they are constantly changing and unpredictable. There is still self-deception that you can be the chess master. Despite the fact this is a loser's game, people try it over-and-over because it ought to work. It looks good on the whiteboard and you think, I am a clever guy, so particularly for me, it should work. But it does not work.
You have to do the counterintuitive thing, which is turn it on its head and pump the information down. People say, "Wait a minute; I have all this great information at the top of the organization, and I am going to pump it to these people at the edge of the organization who are younger and less experienced? They will not know what to do with it. It will be like a hog looking at a wristwatch.” But that is not what happens. We have to do what is counter to our nature and counter to what we think about risk. We have to push the context down and then let them execute. This is the thing that is so difficult for organizations and leaders to deal with. It feels illogical and uncomfortable, but it is also the only thing that works. I tell people, we are going to decentralize to where we are uncomfortable, and then decentralize some more.
High: Another idea that I find interesting from your book Team of Teams, is the concept of the centuria, the 100-person team. You talk about how we need to think in terms of smaller groups, as opposed to a single monolith or the traditional silos in order to make more effective decisions. How did you arrive at this idea?
McChrystal: It is based on human behavior and psychology. We know it, but we keep ignoring it. Your company or your organization gets big, and suddenly we forget it. I talked to a Second World War veteran a few years ago who had been in the famous 82nd Airborne Division. When I asked him what unit he was in, he said, “3rd Platoon.” I said, “3rd Platoon what? What company? What battalion? What regiment?” I expected him to say I was a paratrooper in the 82nd. Instead, he said, “I was in the 3rd Platoon. That is the way I think about it today. That is the way I thought about it then. That is the way we identified." People identify with an organization the size that their mind can get around. There is a lot of data that tells us that people’s level of engagement, their happiness, and whether they stay in an organization, is based upon their immediate supervisor more than anything else. We can hire a new CEO and get great leadership, but the reality is, the thing that makes the biggest difference to our clients is the person closest to them, our first line supervisors. If they are not good, we are not going to retain and we are not going to be effective. There are also a lot of studies that say there are a limited number of relationships we can maintain; the number thrown out is often 150. I argue that this number is even smaller in terms of real relationships: people that you call, spend time with, lend money to, or whatever defines a relationship for you. These are the relationships that move you, that drive how you dress, how you think, and how you act.
If your organization is more than a small team, you have to think about what this means for your people. You might want everybody to be one big happy family, but that will not work. You can have a bunch of little, hopefully happy, families. Once you understand that, then you say to yourself, “OK, I have all these little families inside my big family. Do I have a series of separate tribes? Have I now built silos that are walled off from each other?” Too often, the answer is yes because small teams want to be cohesive so they will develop their own lexicon and cultural attributes. This also happens because the groups are functionally different. For instance, people in human resources and in finance have different backgrounds and expertise from each other, so they are naturally going to bond with people similar to them.
If you realize you have competence and cohesion in those small teams, do not fight it. That is not the idea. The goal is to make the strength of the connections between those small teams similar to the connections between individuals in each small team. The relationships between the teams should be complimentary and functional, not competitive or dysfunctional. That is not the natural state, however. The reality is people in organizations will focus within themselves and drift apart. They may not be openly negative to the other groups, but they will not be organically connected because they do not see a reason to be. Connecting the groups takes work and is culturally tiring. However, if you want an effective organization, you have to create that.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Max Weber’s studies of bureaucracy and organizational theory treated each of these small groups as a piece in the machine. The idea was to hook the pieces of the machine together, and then if each piece worked, the machine worked. There is a certain logic to that, but there is also a mechanical rigidity because the efficiency comes from the machine performing predictable tasks over and over. However, when the tasks change, reorganizing or reconstructing the machine is hard. If you are only doing that every two or three years it is probably manageable, but what about when you have to do it every day or multiple times every day? You cannot mechanically accomplish this because the pieces will not work. The question becomes, how do you create organic connections across teams that are constantly shifting? The answer is culture. You cannot write a process for it. You can create things that help the process like forums that increase dialogue and expectations of how people connect for communities of interest or on tasks, but the biggest part is cultural. People have to think differently. We do not ask them to leave their team or stop being a member of human resources; that is who they are, and they want to be that. What we have to do is convince them the most important metric of success is the success of the entire organization. They have to see and feel that, and that takes work. I often refer to it as holding two magnets with the same poles together; they push each other away. Connecting them takes high energy and constant management because you are creating an organization that is flexible and works fast.
High: You said that in 2003, it was an "advantage" that previously effective methods were not working because that created a mandate for change. In the absence of that, especially when you have clients who do not perceive the need for change, what are the most effective ways to create that mandate?
McChrystal: That is an important point. People will often say, "No, we are doing fine, why would we change?" There will be strong advocates for the status quo; they may be stockholders, they may be board members, or they may be customers. However, it is fascinating, we have found time and again, that the organization knows it needs to change. At the McChrystal Group, we formed a team called Team Discovery, which is led by a person who worked against al-Qaedain Iraq for me. We were looking at the enemy, now we are looking at allies. The team goes in and examines how the organization is truly run. There is always an org chart and a manual that shows this is how the organization works, but it is never accurate because culturally it always works a bit differently than that -- sometimes dramatically differently. As we all know, the most important people are not always the people with the best offices and parking places. We look at that, understand that, and ask the organization how it is running. The organization invariably comes back and says, “There are a lot of things we have to do differently.” They know they need to change. They may not have said it out loud before that, but they understand that on the front of wherever they are, uncertainty is much greater than it has been in the past, and they have to change to meet it. We use that to create an impetus, or a consensus, for change. We also sometimes go outside the organization to customers, clients, or other people who interface with the organization to get feedback about the organization to figure out where change is needed.
It is essential that the senior leaders look toward the future. Now and again, we show a wonderful TV clip from 2007 with the CEO of Research in Motion, the company that makes BlackBerry. He is asked the question, "What do you need to change?" He says, more or less, "Nothing. The Apple iPhone is going to be a flash in the pan." Of course, their stock today is less than 10 percent of what it was then. It was not his fault because he is representative of a lot of people who believe if you are warm and dry, do not rock the boat.
High: You have spoken about how the pace of change and the complexity of our ecosystems require a role reversal in organizations, to some extent. You argue that because these changes are mastered first by those who are the so-called digital natives who are the younger people in organizations, that often it is necessary to tap them for insights because they have a more natural understanding of the important rising trends in the military, in business, or beyond. How does an organization do this?
McChrystal: Today, people operate their lives differently. They use different tools, mostly information technology, but a number of other things too. The work gets done differently, as well. Not by everyone, but by a lot of people, and it is increasingly that way. Management and senior leaders tend to be older and tend to have grown up in a previous way, it is not that they are always against the new order, but they do not know it and therefore may not be comfortable driving the organization toward it. Sometimes the case is they do not appreciate the fact that things are already done dramatically differently than they are comfortable with. If the senior leadership is oblivious, the missives they put out from on high will largely be ignored down in the trenches. A lot of what is said from the top may be good, but it will all be devalued if they are out of touch. We have to create a sense of respect, at the bottom, that the seniors are clued in. Similarly, the seniors have to respect that the people in the lower levels understand what is working and what is not because they are the ones figuring it out by interacting with the world, with the market, and with what we are doing. We have to respect them and ask them for their insights. They may not be right in every case, and they probably will never be entirely right, but they will bring an additional perspective.
In a complex world, you cannot divorce what is working on a granular scale from what we are seeing at the strategic level of an organization. They have to be connected in a way they never were before because people at the lower level have to understand the strategic context to make appropriate decisions, and people at the top have to understand what is happening at the lower levels or the strategy will not work. It has never been the reality that we should not listen, but now it is essential.
This level of constant interaction levels the playing field in a way that can be uncomfortable because we are used to it only being the senior people, those with more experience, more wisdom, and more power, making the decisions. The leveling process can be unnerving for senior leaders who spent their whole lives working to get to a senior position, and then suddenly a 22-year-olds are calling me “Stan,” which is what I tell them to do. I am not the only senior leader who has wanted to tell all the millennials, “Get in the backroom. I will throw some coloring books in there and tell you when you are done.” It does not work. At the end of the day, we are much better off if we harness their energy and allow it to work. We should provide the contextual wisdom we have gained through experience. There is real value in that and its worth is increasing. Experienced, clever people are going to be more valuable than ever, they are not going to be irrelevant, but they have to be connected, they cannot only be ivory tower wise.
High: Cyber crime or cyber warfare, which is a rising trend in the private and public sectors, can feel similar to what you experienced in the military. There are often state-sponsored actors who seek to damage their foes and conduct acts of espionage. How has your thinking evolved as you have counseled companies, some of who have been the victims of these sorts of attacks?
McChrystal: Let’s start at the strategic level and work down to the ground. At the strategic level, we do not know what to make of cyber yet. There is progress. We have the United States Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, and we are starting to view cyber as a domain where nations compete; like we do space, the sea, and the ground. We do not feel completely comfortable with cyber though because it is not quite like anything else we have come up against. If you start at one end, cyber is e-commerce, then it is espionage, and then you cross a line and it is something different. Now it is stealing secrets and leaking them, which is more like an act of war. Or cyber is going in and attacking and creating disruption, almost like a kinetic strike. We have not yet figured out where the line is, where cyber warfare is an act equivalent to dropping a bomb. You can be just as damaging with some of these actions even though they do not have the same feel as a bullet, a missile, or a bomb.
The first thing we have to do is to decide where to draw the line. If the United States will not decide, society and the world will. But the line is going to have to be drawn and looked at. Then we will be able to say if some entity crosses the line, we are legally and morally within our rights to respond disproportionately, maybe even kinetically by bombing them. Until you get some construct that people understand, we are not going to have deterrence. If we think back to nuclear doctrine, it was all based upon deterrence and the idea that there was a rational person on the other side who understood if you bomb me, I will bomb you. That type of deterrence works as long as you have rational people and a clearly understood set of rules. We do not have a set of rules for cyber yet. If we did, deterrence between nation states would probably work. What makes it harder though, and this is true for things like weapons of mass destruction too, is that the threat no longer comes only from responsible nation states that you can hold at risk. For instance, if you are a terrorist and have a nuclear weapon, I cannot necessarily deter you by threatening to bomb your capital because you do not have one, you do not care. Now we are in a different game because you cannot deter someone who does not care. It applies in weapons of mass destruction, which is chilling, and it applies in cyber even more. Who do you respond against? You may attack the computers they used, maybe an individual, maybe a non-nation state actor, or maybe a gray area. What makes it even more difficult is that getting into the cyber arena is easy. The cost of entry is almost nothing. With just a computer and a little bit of cleverness, you can get in the game on a low-level sense.
In the private sector level, most companies buy or pay for cyber security, but they do not know how much to spend because their senior leaders do not understand it. Even young team members will not talk about serious cyber security threats. What we end up doing is looking to our left and to our right to see what our peers are spending, and then match that with no idea of whether that is enough or too much. We do this to try to mitigate or buy down the risk, but we do not understand it well enough to know if we are, which is disconcerting because even a massive expenditure might not be appropriate.
Organizations also have to protect against internal threats, which are employees. We try to mitigate this risk by saying that if you work for our company we have the right to monitor every email and phone call you make. We watch your access badge to see when you are coming and going and look out for changes in your behavior. If suddenly in October, you start coming in during hours you never went in before, we will question what is going on.
We are entering a time and space when cyber is frightening and potentially damaging to an extraordinary degree. For years, I have been saying that in an upcoming election somebody was going to leak totally false information about a candidate on Sunday. Then they would have somebody come in with, also totally false, corroborating information on Monday. The election on Tuesday would be impacted by this misinformation. By Thursday, when people figure it all out, it is done. We sort of had this in the American presidential election this time, not quite that time line, but similar. Most American voters could not understand what happened, or what was true and what was not. We still do not know, at least we do not think we do. As a consequence, all we know is we do not feel as confident in the information that we receive as we once did. People have always used propaganda and lies, that is not new, but the idea that we can so insidiously undermine our sense of what is true and what is false is deeply disturbing.
The speed aspect of it creates a firestorm. We can now communicate much faster than we can think, and lots of media and people feel the need to do that. If they stepped back and spent some time thinking about how it would play out for them, they might act differently, but we are hardwired not to do that now. The other part of it is, sometimes those immediate responses work, whether it is by a person, a company, or a politician. And because it works, we are breeding bad behavior. I do not know how to back away from it or how we will solve that.
High: As you developed the McChrystal Group over the past several years, what sort of backgrounds have you sought to surround yourself with in developing the business?
McChrystal: When we work with clients we need a number of things. A good product offering is essential, which means we need intellectual property that is underpinned with academic rigor. The McChrystal Group has a Concept and Design Team that studies the academic literature on behavioral science and other subjects to ensure that our foundation is built on credible and legitimately proven concepts and information. At the front end of it, we have people with management and leadership experience. Some have military or CIA experience and have led a whole lot of people in complex environments, and some have business experience and have been responsible for profit and loss. That combination is essential. The team members who interface with our clients must be people our clients will listen to so they need a certain amount of credibility, presence, and charisma. It is pointless to have the right answer if people will not listen to you. We bring in young people, as well, because they add a different type of understanding, they have different views, and they learn quickly. We meld them into the teams.
We are different from many firms because we do not come in and tell an organization what the answer to their problem is, take their check, say “Good luck,” and then walk out the door. We go in, work with them to figure out the problem, and say, “OK, let’s fix it.” We do not fix it for them, we put a small team with them and say, "We are going to stay here and help until we get to a good outcome." That works well for a couple of reasons. One is, anybody, can tell you how to be in better health: Do not smoke. Do not drink too much. Eat right. Sleep enough. Work out. However, it is easier to do these things if you have somebody to help you; that is why we hire personal trainers, nutritionists, etc. The McChrystal Group functions like that. We are there to help clients make changes that would be too hard if they were standing alone. Plus, people are busy. They are working hard trying to make quarterly results, etc., which means change often goes on the back burner. It is effective for us to come in and help them, but they have to own it.
High: Can you describe some of the many hats that you wear within the McChrystal Group?
McChrystal: The first thing is, I try to be a stamp of credibility. I underwrite and stake my reputation on everything we do, or fail to do. I look CEOs in the eye and say what we will deliver. That is important because it gives the relationships a personal aspect, which is difficult for some corporations. The second thing is, I work to be a leader in the organization. I am highly involved in shaping the team in terms of who we bring in, what the right size of it is, what the right composition is, and what the culture is here. I do not claim to create the culture, I input on the culture. The culture is created by the interactions between the team members and it is constantly morphing. Regarding the actual work with clients, I tend to interact with the CEOs of the organizations we partner with. For instance, when we have a long-term engagement with a corporate client, I do not do most of the work, but I will be the connection with the CEO. My role is part coaching, part keeping things focused, and part getting feedback. That is about appropriate. If I get too involved, it screws it up. I learned that a long time ago.
High: One of the themes across our conversation is the need for learning agility. How do you make sure that you are agile in your learning?
McChrystal: I am constantly engaged in what we do and what we are learning. One of the great things about our company is that we work with many different organizations that do a bunch of things well in their sector. I am constantly exposed to people that are doing something better than I have ever seen it done, and in a way, I never thought of. It is fascinating. I also go to a number of events, like conferences, every year. Sometimes I speak at them, but often I am just taking the information in. It is interesting from a science standpoint and from a business standpoint. There are just not enough hours in a day to absorb it all.
We are starting another book. We just released One Mission, which was written by my partner and was a sequel to Team of Teams. We are developing a book on leadership that tries to elevate the conversation by using Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans as a model. We are asking questions like: Why did Plutarch write about these people? What did he say? Who should we be looking at as leaders now? What should we be saying about them? What should we be thinking about them? It is an interesting process because it forces us to step back and see that leadership has been made almost two-dimensional. We use two-dimensional metrics and decide that someone is a leader if they are a celebrity, if they have a lot of Facebook friends, if they have a lot of Twitter followers, or if they have a big paycheck. These are metrics of something, but they are not metrics of leadership. This has led us to questions like: What is leadership, really? What is the difference between someone who is hugely impactful on a field or some other arena, but is not a celebrity? What about somebody who does everything right, follows all the checklists, has all the leader behaviors, attributes and education of leaders, but constantly fails? What is happening there? Maybe our checklists are wrong. Remember the CEO studies that some the percentage of CEOs that are over six feet tall and have straight teeth, etc. is huge? Yet, the percentage of CEOs who succeed in one company and then go to another company and succeed is pretty small, which makes you think, if the leader is the same person and did not change, what were the actual drivers of success or failure? Maybe our assessment of the leader being the all-critical variable is not right. I am coming to that conclusion late in life, and it is a tremendously interesting concept to consider.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
