Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Written by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, Chris Fussell and David Silverman

Narrated by Paul Michael

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, read by Paul Michael.

What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization?

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment and training - but none of the enemy's speed and flexibility.

McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom to create a 'team of teams' that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. Faster, flatter and more flexible, the task force beat back al-Qaeda.

In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to any leader. Through compelling examples, the authors demonstrate that the 'team of teams' strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA and has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

'A bold argument that leaders can help teams become greater than the sum of their parts' Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit

'An indispensable guide to organizational change' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin UK Audio
• Release date: Jul 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9780241979556

Reviews for Team of Teams

[jpsnow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having read several books recently on teamwork and collaboration, what I've not found is one that demonstrates how a leader realized what limiting factors needed to be addressed in their particular situation. Team of Teams does just that. Based on McChrystal's successful tour commanding the hunt for insurgents in Iraq, this book uses that journey as a story arc for explaining how to achieve the teamwork needed in our complex, fast-changing modern world. The military cases are as illuminating as they are gripping, and the author shares just as many examples from business and medicine so as not to make this a self-congratulatory biopic. To overcome the natural inertia of siloed intelligence gathering and decision making in an interdependent, fast-changing world, the answer is to develop great teamwork within teams and across teams. These teams of teams won't naturally bond the same way a smaller team of ten or up to thirty people might. By seeding at least some individual rapport across teams and encouraging open access to common information, leaders can cultivate shared purpose and trust, which gets reinforced the more the whole network sees examples of success toward their common end.

[paven-14534 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not even the military thinks classic command and control is an good way to work.