Chris Fussell Quotes
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The reality, as the battlefield taught us, is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age.
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The information age has ushered in a networked and interdependent world, one in which challenges and opportunities appear and disappear faster than traditional organizational models can manage.
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As a leader, you sit at a different level of perspective from your team, either with line of sight higher and across the organization structure or connected at more senior levels with your clients and partners.
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As I found while leading special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the problem is interconnected, your organization must be, as well.
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The 20th century was all about hierarchies: if you want to create something, if you want to start a country, create a product, whatever it is. Your goal is to create a highly efficient hierarchical model, scale it, because that's what the competition's doing.
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The 21st century is dominated by networks because the introduction of the information age, we can suddenly create, free flow these globally distributed, organic, shaped networks of individuals.
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As a leader, you must consistently drive effective communication. Meetings must be deliberate and intentional - your organizational rhythm should value purpose over habit and effectiveness over efficiency.
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When we first met, I was probably six layers down in the military structure, but General McChrystal at that time was a soldier's leader, and he was part of the task force. So everyone developed close relationships.
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Before you can trust your team to make decisions better than you would have, you need to build their capability to connect the dots.
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A dynamic team cannot rely solely on orders; they must be able to read each others' every move so they can act as parts of a coordinated whole.
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On any high-performing team I've been a part of, putting mission first, and team before self, was always key to collective success.
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When the collective mentality of any organization is self and self-preservation first, it's a sure sign of pending doom.
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If the most deeply interconnected individuals can exemplify the behaviors that your official top brass sets out, then the rest of the organization will follow suit.
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In the military, and in business, the most elite and effective teams I've seen or been part of are filled with individuals who take responsibility for their choices. Life is a series of decisions that you make and actions you take, not a series of things that happen to you.
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If you're trying to stay productive, stop and think, 'Are my meetings actually productive, or are we merely having meetings for meetings' sake?'
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By providing clear objectives for your team, and setting guardrails for how they get there, you will set them on the path to success.
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Most teams are naturally flat; they have fewer members than a large enterprise, which allows for intimacy and trust to form. This makes collaborative problem solving in individual teams more straightforward.
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How often are you really realigning yourselves on strategy? And does it need to be faster, based on how quickly your market actually changes? The answer is usually yes.
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In any bureaucracy, there's a natural tendency to let the system become an excuse for inaction.
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Leaders in an interconnected organization must be comfortable sitting in the middle of a network, not at the top of an org-chart.
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As the insurgency in Iraq started to grow, we realized this is a connected network of individual actors that can move at light speed.
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Special operations are small, highly specialized. They do amazing work when they're put into the fight, but it's a limited resource. And so if we become overly dependent on an organization that's designed for a very specific mission and expect them to solve all problems around the world, you're naturally going to overextend it.
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The truth is that key influencers exist in all effective organizations, but a solid-line org chart won't tell you where they are.
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In 2010, I was an executive officer in the Navy, splitting my time between U.S. headquarters and being deployed to an international location.