An instant national bestseller! Stanley McChrystal, the retired US Army general and bestselling author of Team of Teams, profiles thirteen of history’s great leaders, including Walt Disney, Coco Chanel, and Robert E. Lee, to show that leadership is not what you think it is—and never was. Stan McChrystal served for thirty-four years in the US Army, rising from a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division to a four-star general, in command of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. During those years he worked with countless leaders and pondered an ancient question: “What makes a leader great?” He came to realize that there is no simple answer. McChrystal profiles thirteen famous leaders from a wide range of eras and fields—from corporate CEOs to politicians and revolutionaries. He uses their stories to explore how leadership works in practice and to challenge the myths that complicate our thinking about this critical topic. With Plutarch’s Lives as his model, McChrystal looks at paired sets of leaders who followed unconventional paths to success. For instance. . . · Walt Disney and Coco Chanel built empires in very different ways. Both had public personas that sharply contrasted with how they lived in private. · Maximilien Robespierre helped shape the French Revolution in the eighteenth century; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led the jihadist insurgency in Iraq in the twenty-first. We can draw surprising lessons from them about motivation and persuasion. · Both Boss Tweed in nineteenth-century New York and Margaret Thatcher in twentieth-century Britain followed unlikely roads to the top of powerful institutions. · Martin Luther and his future namesake Martin Luther King Jr., both local clergymen, emerged from modest backgrounds to lead world-changing movements. Finally, McChrystal explores how his former hero, General Robert E. Lee, could seemingly do everything right in his military career and yet lead the Confederate Army to a devastating defeat in the service of an immoral cause. Leaders will help you take stock of your own leadership, whether you’re part of a small team or responsible for an entire nation.

Leaders: Myth and Reality

Biographies & Memoirs

Eggers, Jeff

Mangone, Jay

McChrystal, General Stanley

Historical

Portfolio

Product Description 
From the bestselling author of Team of Teams and My Share of the Task, an entirely new way to understand risk and master the unknown.\nRetired four-star general Stan McChrystal has lived a life associated with the deadly risks of combat. From his first day at West Point, to his years in Afghanistan, to his efforts helping business leaders navigate a global pandemic, McChrystal has seen how individuals and organizations fail to mitigate risk. Why? Because they focus on the probability of something happening instead of the interface by which it can be managed.\nIn this new book, General McChrystal offers a battle-tested system for detecting and responding to risk. Instead of defining risk as a force to predict, McChrystal and coauthor Anna Butrico show that there are in fact ten dimensions of control we can adjust at any given time. By closely monitoring these controls, we can maintain a healthy Risk Immune System that allows us to effectively anticipate, identify, analyze, and act upon the ever-present possibility that things will not go as planned.\nDrawing on examples ranging from military history to the business world, and offering practical exercises to improve preparedness, McChrystal 
 illustrates how these ten factors are always in effect, and how by considering them, individuals and organizations can exert mastery over every conceivable sort of risk that they might face.\nWe may not be able to see the future, but with McChrystal’s hard-won guidance, we can improve our resistance and build a strong defense against what we know—and what we don't. 
 Review 
Praise for Risk:\n“An absolute masterpiece on the subject of risk! Brilliant and highly entertaining, this book is essential reading for every leader, regardless of age or experience.”\n—Admiral William H. McRaven, U.S. Navy (Retired)\n“A brilliant user’s guide that demonstrates how managing risk is about 
how we lead, rather than getting mathematical equations right. Fundamental reading for any leader looking to understand and strengthen their team’s Risk Immune System.”\n—Annie Duke, bestselling author of Thinking in Bets and How to Decide\n“General McChrystal is swiftly becoming our most important leadership voice. Measured, meticulous, and filled with practical, pragmatic wisdom from both war and peace, his clear-eyed, unsentimental guidance cuts to the heart of our precarious existence. A must-read leadership bible for troubling times.”\n—James Kerr, bestselling author of Legacy\n“An essential playbook on mastering all dimensions of risk. For soldiers, educators, CEOs, entrepreneurs, government leaders, and everyone in between, the general captures, with precision and clarity, how staying risk fit can unleash your team’s maximum potential.”\n—Keith Krach, former under secretary of state, chairman and CEO of DocuSign and Ariba, chairman of Purdue University Board of Trustees 
 About the Author 
Stanley McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general in the U.S. Army. He was Commander International Security Assistance Forces - Afghanistan. He had previously served as Director, Joint Staff and Commander Joint Special Operations Command. The author of 
My Share of the Task, 
Team of Teams, and 
Leaders, he is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.\nAnna Butrico graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in English after spending time at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She joined McChrystal Group in 2018, where she has advised Fortune 100 companies and partnered with General McChrystal as his speechwriter. This is her first book. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
The Commander\nIt was the summer of 1965. I was ten years old, and in the weeks before my father deployed to Vietnam for another tour of combat, my parents took my five siblings and me to

Risk: A User's Guide

Butrico, Anna

Reference

“Never shall I fail my comrades. . . . I will shoulder more than my share of the task, whatever it may be, one hundred percent and then some.” —from the Ranger CreedIn early March 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding officer of all U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, walked with President Hamid Karzai through a small rural bazaar. As Afghan townspeople crowded around them, a Taliban rocket loudly thudded into the ground some distance away. Karzai looked to McChrystal, who shrugged. The two leaders continued greeting the townspeople and listening to their views.
That trip was typical of McChrystal’s entire career, from his first day as a West Point plebe to his last day as a four-star general. The values he has come to be widely admired for were evident: a hunger to know the truth on the ground, the courage to find it, and the humility to listen to those around him. Even as a senior commander, McChrystal stationed himself forward, and frequently went on patrols with his troops to experience their challenges firsthand.
In this illuminating memoir, McChrystal frankly explores the major episodes and controversies of his eventful career. He delves candidly into the intersection of history, leadership, and his own experience to produce a book of enduring value.
Joining the troubled post-Vietnam army as a young officer, McChrystal witnessed and participated in some of our military’s most difficult struggles. He describes the many outstanding leaders he served with and the handful of bad leaders he learned not to emulate. He paints a vivid portrait of the traditional military establishment that turned itself, in one generation, into the adaptive, resilient force that would soon be tested in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the wider War on Terror.
McChrystal spent much of his early career in the world of special operations, at a time when these elite forces became increasingly effective—and necessary. He writes of a fight waged in the shadows by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which he led from 2003 to 2008. JSOC became one of our most effective counterterrorism weapons, facing off against Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Over time, JSOC gathered staggering amounts of intelligence in order to find and remove the most influential and dangerous terrorists, including the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The hunt for Zarqawi drives some of the most gripping scenes in this book, as McChrystal’s team grappled with tricky interrogations, advanced but scarce technology, weeks of unbroken surveillance, and agonizing decisions.
McChrystal brought the same energy to the war in Afghanistan, where the challenges loomed even larger. His revealing account draws on his close relationships with Afghan leaders, giving readers a unique window into the war and the country.
Ultimately, My Share of the Task is about much more than war and peace, terrorism and counterinsurgency. As McChrystal writes, “More by luck than design, I’d been a part of some events, organizations, and efforts that will loom large in history, and more that will not. I saw selfless commitment, petty politics, unspeakable cruelty, and quiet courage in places and quantities that I’d never have imagined. But what I will remember most are the leaders.”

My Share of the Task: A Memoir

Leaders & Notable People

What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization? THE OLD RULES NO LONGER APPLY . . . When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter. TEACHING A LEVIATHAN TO IMPROVISE It’s no secret that in any field, small teams have many advantages—they can respond quickly, communicate freely, and make decisions without layers of bureaucracy. But organizations taking on really big challenges can’t fit in a garage. They need management practices that can scale to thousands of people. General McChrystal led a hierarchical, highly disciplined machine of thousands of men and women. But to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, his Task Force would have to acquire the enemy’s speed and flexibility. Was there a way to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network? If so, could the same principles apply in civilian organizations? A NEW APPROACH FOR A NEW WORLD McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade the Task Force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a oneness that would have been impossible even a decade earlier. The Task Force became a “team of teams”—faster, flatter, more flexible—and beat back Al Qaeda. BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

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

Business & Money

Collins, Tantum

Silverman, David

Fussell, Chris

Business Culture

The retired four-star general and and bestselling author of My Share of the Task shares a powerful new leadership model Former General Stanley McChrystal held a key position for much of the War on Terror, as head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In Iraq, he found that despite the vastly superior resources, manpower, and training of the U.S. military, Al Qaeda had an advantage because of its structure as a loose network of small, independent cells. Those cells wreaked havoc by always staying one step ahead, sharing knowledge with each other via high-tech communications. To defeat such an agile enemy, JSOC had to change its focus from efficiency to adaptability. McChrystal led the transformation of his forces into a network that combined robust centralized communication (“shared consciousness”) with decentralized managerial authority (“empowered execution”). Now he shows not only how the military made that transition, but also how similar shifts are possible in all kinds of organizations, from large companies to startups to charities to government agencies. In a world of rapid change, the best organizations think and act like a team of teams, embracing small groups that combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share what they’ve learned. McChrystal and his colleagues explain their process for helping organizations embrace this model. They also share fascinating research and examples from settings as diverse as emergency rooms and NASA’s mission control center. Read by Paul Michael. Introduction and recaps read by General Stanley McChrystal.

Penguin Audio

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