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Welcome to the podcast. This is Tony Robbins and I'm here with... right arm mary b welcome to the podcast folks listen we're very excited today because we're going to be digging deep into a subject that i really believe is one of the most important subjects most important skills to be successful in business, to be successful in finance, politics, parenting, life, and that is leadership.
And if you're going to talk about leadership, I think today one of the biggest challenges is finding really effective leaders. The challenges we see in society really come, I think, from... challenge. So I thought about who would be the best human being to go after alive today, at least one of the very best, who really is a person that emulates leadership in the modern world. And that's General Stanley McRae.
And so I'm very excited to have him with us. And he's also here with co-author of his book, Team of Teams, The New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. The Washington Times said it was required reading for anyone aspiring to 21st century. Chris and Chris is a U.S. Navy SEAL officer and I'll have him step in and share a little bit more of his background but if you'll stay with me let me give you a long introduction who you are and what you've done. I think most human beings...
pretty quite amazing. General Crystal is the former commander of the International Security Assistance Force. He's the commander, was the commander of the United States forces and the four-star general whose career in the U.S. Army spanned 34 years. Desert Shield, the Persian Gulf War, war in Iraq, the war in...
Amazing. But here's what I'd say about him instead of me. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described him as, quote, perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat that I've ever met. Pretty high marks to come from. He's credited being the man who transformed the Joint Special Forces Operations Command and really created the foundation that allowed us to kill the two...
Bin Laden and also Zarqawi. So in Iraq, McChrystal found it wasn't enough to conduct nighttime raids. They needed to tap into the power of information. And he broke protocol and brought outsiders into special operations. And they started night time raids that weren't 18 times a month. They moved them to 300 times a month. And the information they gathered was monumental. They used that information to capture and kill the top Al-Qaeda leaders. He spent five years in Iraq.
in Afghanistan, and then he resigned in 2010. So I can't tell you how grateful we are to have you. I know today you've joined the Yale University faculty. to hear sitting in a class with you. And you wrote your memoirs in 2013, My Sheriff. going to talk today about leadership in your book, Team of Teams. So thank you for letting me go through this long introduction, but you sir deserve it. General McChrystal, welcome to the podcast. And Chris, you will.
It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much. And Chris, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your relationship with the gentleman? Sure, you have to. That's a tough bio to follow, but I spent about 15 years in the SEAL teams, joined in the 90s, and was on active duty until 2012. The majority of that time I served inside of the units that then Lieutenant General McChrystal commanded.
And for one of those years, his last year commanding the Joint Special Operations units, I was his aide-de-camp, so deployed overseas to Iraq for a year and served in a position that's similar to sort of like a chief of staff. big enterprise. I then went on to grad school, did some study, was still inside the service on how these
distributed networks were working because that's really one of those fundamental changes that had taken place inside of the special operations community. Went back into, you know, some battlefield tours for the last few years of my career and then 2012 left active duty. joined Stan here as a partner in McChrystal Group and have been here since. We spent the last few years working on a team of teams and now we're
currently wrapping up a follow-up to that which will come out this spring so it's been a great great run. What's the title of the new book? It will be one mission, many teams.
The idea is... team of teams sort of shaped a theory of the case on why these changes are so important and there's been a big ask in the market okay well how do we do it and so this is more of a practicum told from my optic as a member of the staff that was able to watch these changes evolve and trying to give business readers a real roadmap that they can apply to their own.
well and i left that out you guys have formed your consulting firm the crystal group and i know you advise business leaders on how to really to the world we live in today so let's jump in you know you're bringing up modern leadership really you know the world we live in today is like nothing that we've ever experienced in human history because of i think three forces primarily technology globalization and then social media changed countries at this stage, the way human beings...
the way we think, the way we communicate, and the tempo of change that we all know is so fast is only increasing. So I'd really love to hear, General Crystal, your view of... Kind of the rude awakening I know you had right after 9-11. And I'm wondering if you'd share with us, you know, how you were raised to be a leader, what a leader was supposed to be, what he was supposed to do, how he or she was supposed to be like.
and versus how have changing times maybe changed what leadership is needed today. I know you've talked in the past about kind of the humiliation style of leadership that you experienced earlier in your career as a ranger. And I'd love to know what the antidote to that is or what's most effective.
I probably hit a unique period because I came into the military. I grew up in a military family. My father was a soldier. My father's father was a soldier. My four brothers were soldiers. My sister married a soldier. I was born in an army hospital. went largely to army schools, entered West Point at age 17 in 1972. And although that seems not that long ago, in reality,
That was a very long time back in terms of how things were done and leading, because it was really closer to the World War II model of military operations and organizations. And I think that was true in business as well. And so I began my career as a young lieutenant in the Army in 1976 when I graduated. And I entered an army that was much closer to the army my father and grandfather had been in than the army I would experience 20 years into my career.
So I learned basic leadership skills and many of them were really good. They were a foundation of integrity and lead by example. And all of the things that are basic. but it was a hierarchical organization. There was a boss and a boss's boss and information went that way. You could almost describe it as mechanical in nature, a big mechanical machine designed to be very efficient and predictable.
And the idea was that if you had enough efficiency in that operation, enough predictability, and you had enough scale. that you could make up for a multitude of other weaknesses and big armies would wrestle each other and they would try to be the most efficient beast on the field. And that was fine. And for really the first 20 plus years of my career, I grew up in that environment and I was relatively successful and learned.
how to operate in that environment and I thought that leaders were a command and control. You got information from across your organization. You used your experience and what intellect you had and aided maybe by a staff. You made decisions. And then you directed those decisions down and the organization complied. And if you were a better strategist or decision maker than your opponent, you would win. And so that really went on until about 2000.
And I had spent part of my career in parachute infantry units, airborne units, part in Rangers and part in this Joint Special Operations Command. But in 2003... I took command of JSOC, as they called it. The main part of our force was in Iraq. Our biggest problem was in Iraq, and that was six months after the initial invasion. And this was really the transformative time and experience for me. I brought with it all the leadership I learned, the habits, the culture, some good, some not.
And I became part of a purpose built special operations task force that was designed to go after traditional terrorists. It was designed to do precision raids. at a fairly slow cadence but with great accuracy of intelligence and great effectiveness on the target. And we had this incredible collection of professionals put together to do it. And with painstaking accuracy, we could perform these really elegant operations.
pyramid shaped traditional enemy terrorist network that had a very strong leader and strong internal cohesion. And they also were somewhat mechanical. And that's the way traditional terrorist groups were. In fact, the original Al Qaeda that was formed in 1988 in Pakistan, it was such an But in Iraq, in the fall of 2003, we ran into a newbie.
Al Qaeda in Iraq. It still had the name Al Qaeda which made you think it was going to be traditional and we started to go after it that way. What we found is instead of being a 20th or 19th century entity, it was a 21st century. And Tony, what you mentioned about changes, Al Qaeda in Iraq was as different from traditional Al Qaeda as Uber is from a traditional bus.
It was designed to ride on information technology. And when I say designed, I don't think it was designed by Abu Musab Azarkawi as the evil genius who put together this concept. It came to be that way organically because now social media, information systems and globalization were part of the DNA.
the people who founded it and so they automatically formed entity that was more like a constantly changing network without strict doctrine, without strict hierarchy, without strict prescriptive procedures. But as a result, they were constantly adapting and they were constantly able to do what was best at the moment, as opposed to what the procedure in the manual said. And despite the fact we had more talent, we had more weapons, we had more, in my view, everything.
For the first two and a half years of the fight against this organization, we had tremendous problems because they were fast, they were lethal, they were resilient. And they were constantly adapting to a changing environment. And we came in almost like a football team with a set of really good plays. And suddenly we would find ourselves on a basketball court. And our cleats and our pads were not very healthy.
relatively late in my career, I'm part of this organization that's elite, but has to change to be effective, has to change to win. And so I was lucky enough to be a part of this transformation. Und es hat verändert, wie ich denke, die Organisationen in der Umgebung, wie du erwähnt hast, aber auch was die Liedern haben. Tell me, you know, you talk about this, that leaders stop, you say leaders have to stop trying to control everything.
you know the command and control model that pyramid is the traditional way leaders have always thought and even small businesses you know the tendency there is i know the answers i've got But as you said, what happens is the organization gets bigger. You just don't have the nimbleness. You can't shift. And that's why we see the Ubers take over and become valued more than Hertz or you see Airbnb.
And their valuation and their impact is greater than the Marriott's. And the Marriott's got more revenue and it's been around a hell of a lot longer. So we're living in this world where you have to move from controlling, I think you've described it as really being predicting, from predicting to reconfiguring, to this ability to adapt. Tell me a little bit of how you made that transition and what does that really look like?
You are exactly right. And the first part about it is a big organization that's faced with this kind of environment, with this kind of competition. There's a tendency to think, well, we now have information technology so we can gather more data, we can do better analysis, and we can communicate with our organization better than ever.
So there's this illusion that we actually can command and control and just do it better than before faster and more effectively. And that's really, really deceptively. seductive for many leaders. And so we see a lot of organizations try. And there's also a human side of it as well. When someone's put in charge of an organization...
As a leader, they think that they are the best qualified person to make decisions. They are going to be held responsible for the outcome. So there's a tendency to want to make the decisions that determine it. And then there's also this almost a sense of guilt. It says if I'm the CEO or if I'm the manager, I ought to be making decisions or I'm not doing my job. And I ran into all of those in my initial part of my time in Joint Special Operations Command. But I found that you just can't win that.
In fact, what you have to do is take the tool... that typically enable the C-suite or senior leaders to get more information and control. You have to turn those. back down toward the lower levels of your organization. So information conduits don't run up to inform. They run both ways, but most importantly, they run down. And so you push information down to level.
So people at the edges of your organization are provided context more than ever before. We call it shared consciousness. They suddenly get. the strategic level picture of what the organization's doing as well as what they see in their particular part. And then we say, okay, we have informed you with this. Now we want you to act using your best judgment because you're able to do it faster and with more close to the problem accuracy than anybody else. It was a major cultural shift for us in JSON.
but in companies that's exactly what happens you actually find that by letting go of a lot of control and it's very uncomfortable that you actually get a much better outcome because you're leveraging so much more talent than the small group of people that might be at the apex of the organization. You just said something really important to me personally, and that is leveraging.
They say, you know, delegation very often is I told them what to do or I told them even the outcome to get and they didn't get it. But they never stay connected until the task is done. And then they see it failed and they blame the person or it succeeded and they take mutual credit. But, you know, Steve Wynn is a good friend of mine who's built most of Las Vegas.
You know, he's told me over and over again the exact same approach as how he's built his businesses. He said, you know, it's got to be this leverage back and forth, information back and forth. And he looks at the front line. as the place where he understands what's really happening with the customers or clients he shared with me that you know every day they have a meeting and with the whole company
And what he digs for is information to learn about the customers and clients. And he wanders around and has those conversations. And he gave me an example of talking to a bellman. He said, the bellman have helped them change more processes.
anywhere else in the hotels because they know exactly the customer and he said one day this bellman and he's by the way they're always looking for success stories to tell to build their culture which i want to hear how you build yours because it's a lot more difficult task when bullets are being thrown at you and you're trying to court They're both in the service and outside.
He talks to this bellman. He finds out the story of what has been great today, how we serve the customers. And this bellman hears a person coming in and this woman and her husband are there. And she realizes as they're getting in the room that she had... forgotten the medication that her husband needs to stay alive. He's a diabetic.
She's freaking out and all of a sudden the bellman hears and says, well, where do you live? He thought he heard they lived in Los Angeles and five hours from Vegas. And she said, yeah, we live in San Fernando Valley. She says, well, I have a brother-in-law that lives.
why don't i call him and see if he'll drive it out here for you this is the type of decision making that goes there now this all happens within you know 10 hours he gets everything he needs and those stories completely change the hotel another to be Dr. David Feinberg who runs, used to run UCLA's medical. And it's a huge task. And his biggest challenge, they have the lowest ratings that you could possibly have. Most people don't go to hospitals.
they're taking care of and he got their ratings up within a year that were higher than the four hotel, the Ritz Carlton, in terms of satisfaction, did the same thing you did. He took information that people didn't realize and pushed it down. He went down to the base of the business.
and to the hospital and figured out what could be pushed up and he empowered people to make their own decisions once they had that shared consciousness and the shared consciousness theme was treat every person as if it's your mother if it was your mother what would you do would you tell them no we won't give you taxi because you don't qualify would you tell them would you make them sit here and wait for four hours you know would you come in and turn the lights on when they're asleep and just
And he not only did that, but he empowered them. And one example he gave me was an example of a woman who was coming in to have her baby, and the nurse overheard that her mother was dying of cancer. Francisco. She called the hospital. She arranged a flight and arranged to have the operation done at UCLA so that the mother who was dying would be able to be there to meet her granddaughter before she passed. These types of pushing information both direct
empowering people at the base, build the greatest organizations in the world. Your task was 100 times more difficult than Chris made. as well i'd love to hear from both of you on this but most people don't think realize you guys are managing general crystal at one stage here what 20 different people in 20 different countries
You know, you weren't just managing soldiers who are trained to respond, but you're dealing with a new type of soldier with a whole different mentality. And you were dealing with people outside the services from these other countries trying to coordinate the political process as well as the military process.
Tell us, how the hell do you do that? How do you build that culture? It's great to share the information, push it up and down and get people to make local decisions. But how do you get that shared culture? How do you get that shared consciousness? How do you build trust?
Faith, I think, are the words that you described when I read your book within groups. I think you shared one example. Maybe I can give you this as an example to bounce off of. I think you shared one time that you had come up with this. incredibly difficult task there were people from 20 countries involved you had to share information you had to get everybody on board how to build the trust get into the faith that they could win you had to sell you know your superiors on
And then it didn't work. The mission failed. So how do you build the trust initially? But I'm really interested. What do you do after failure to build that? So I know I've said a lot here, but maybe we start with how do you build the culture, that shared consciousness? And then how do you keep it going when you face these incredibly difficult challenges that in the short term look like failure? of a battle of an approach, but people take it in. How do you deal?
Yeah, and boy, the Steve Wynn stories are amazing. Tony, what my problem or my challenge was, I had these wonderfully qualified people, talented, so I didn't have to teach them how to do their particular function.
But it was connecting the functions together because the different counter-terrorist units in our organization, you'd think that they're all close friends because they're kind of similar. The reality is they're very competitive people. They've got tribal cultures, so they don't naturally. work well with their other organizations. And then you take a step further and you go to the Department of State or the FBI or the CIA.
And each has its own proud insular culture that doesn't naturally work across lines. And there's reasons for that. They've grown up in it. They're proud. There's information sharing limitations because of. worries about secrecy. There's a little bit of their equities. Every organization wants to be the best and wants to get credit for wins. There's some competitiveness. So there are all these reasons why you think you would have this big synergistic collection that you really don't.
And so what I found is across the 27 countries we were operating and with all of these different organizations and personalities involved. That my requirement was not to push people harder to make them harder. My requirement were to make them work harder. My requirement was not to teach them how to do their functional job. My requirement was to be a connect.
My requirement was to move around the organization, orchestrate conversations, create connections Much like Steve Windows, we did a daily video teleconference across the entire command. And I was really sort of the ringleader for it. I didn't make a lot of decisions or give guidance, but. I would make sure that people across the organization that didn't know each other, didn't think they had shared equities, were connecting because we're trying to defeat a networked enemy.
And it's easy to say on a podcast, it's hard to do because people are naturally hesitant. And so what we did was we started creating the connections. We nurtured it. We would celebrate successes. People would take risks and somebody from the CIA would give information to one of my units and we would have a success. We'd celebrate it.
But the people who passed information were always a little scared that they might get in trouble or particularly if there was a failure, something would happen. And then you. You mentioned a case which was seared into my memory. We had worked for months to get a strike against an enemy terrorist leader, actually in East Africa. I had to go all the way to the White House for approval.
And we went up to the White House and it was politically sensitive. It was militarily difficult. We got approval and we conducted the operation. And in reality, at the end of the day, what we asked for was not exactly what we needed. but we execute what we ask for and it didn't work.
And so we had all these people up the chain of command to the White House holding their breath. And then I had to go, OK, I've come to you. I've asked you to give me approval to do this. You gave it and it didn't work. And so first I had to deal with a lack of confidence where certainly some reduction in confidence in my senior leaders in me. But then inside the organization, I'd asked everybody to take a chance, reach out, collaborate. And we'll have this success. And it didn't.
Fortunately, what happened is, of course, I tried to communicate, study what had happened, inform everybody, tell them where we made mistakes and where we didn't. And we got another chance. five weeks later. And the second time, fortunately, we succeeded. But it's a confidence thing because people need to be reinforced at what they're doing is okay.
And not just okay that it's expected. That's the way you want it to be. That's the way you want organizations to operate. And that's a challenge. I'd like to pass it to Chris for a moment to add in. Well, like the winning... Stan just told us treat everybody out on the battlefield like they're your mother and we'll get along. It's funny that you say that because what really did happen was a
there was a very relationship-based change. All kidding aside, that was not a direct quote, but there was a quote along the lines of, you're in these very elite, highly tribal small teams, as you can well imagine. The word from our leadership was treat other teams as if they were part of your team.
And for, you know, someone like myself growing up in the SEAL teams to hear, I have to talk with this Army unit and this Air Force person over here, intelligence, that's a really big tribal barrier to try to break through. And the message from our leadership where in the past it would have been very transactional. You do this and you do this. That's what we were used to hearing when it shifted to treat these other teams as if they're part of your tribe.
And I'm going to hold you accountable to that level of connectivity and relationship building. That's a whole different way to approach it. And coupled with. These information flows, much like the example you gave, Tony, in the way that Stan described running the global force, you had access to all the information that you could possibly want at a cadence that was faster than Al-Qaeda.
So there was really no excuse not to make that cultural shift. And if you didn't want to do it, you just couldn't. environment so it really empowered and expected teams to get out in front of that transactional relationship so they there was no excuse to wait for guys You had to know enough, connect the dots inside of the extended network.
we're being built and take action knowing that you know that there's there's risk every time you do that but this is the system that the the leadership is building for us and this the risks they expect us to take so a really a really sort of flipping the pyramid on its head. How do you, after those situations, though, how do you rebuild that? You know, I remember a story, I think it was in Team of Teams, where you talked about General.
some of the, you know, you had to put in some rule structures for all these organizations and you got these young soldiers coming over. wanting to do their duty, wanting to kill bad guys for the higher good, so to speak. And they're living in an environment that's different than any environment that we would traditionally think of as war.
And you're telling people that they can't, you know, they can't engage people if they don't have a gun. And they're in their mind going, what are you talking about? These people, we turn our back, they're going to blow us up. So I know there were times, many times. in which whether you know things didn't work out or there was just general discontent in an environment where people are coming back again and again tour after tour.
um but you i i read i know where it was i read in the rolling stones articles where it was where you he described that you went out and you had a soldier write to you and talk to you about how you don't care and you wrote him back immediately and then you showed up and did toured with him or i should say went on patrol with him and other members of his team i've heard other people talk
some things that I've read that, you know, you're the guy that they look over and there's a guy in the trench on a knee beside him and it's you. You know, how important is that and how do you rebuild after those failures? That's what I'm digging. Because everybody deals with it. You had to deal with it on a life and death level. But every business deals with failure. Nobody wants to talk about it. Everybody wants to talk about success.
But I really believe it's how you deal with failure that shapes your destiny. You know, when people succeed, they tend to party. When they fail, they tend to ponder. And out of pondering, you either beat yourself up or you find new answers. So how do you rebuild in those situations? Yeah, I think it's exactly right. And to go to the story you described, what had happened, I was in Kabul as the four-star commander and I got an email from a sergeant.
in an area north of Kandahar, a very difficult area. And he basically goes, sergeants don't write a lot of emails to force. That's the world we're in today though, General. I don't think you understand what's going on here. I know you're giving orders from there. I don't think you understand this war. I thought I did, but I got on a helicopter the next day and went down there to join his squad for a combat patrol.
And it was amazing because although I'd been on a lot of different ops, they were operating in an area that was used for vine growing grain. But because there's no wood or not a lot of wood in Afghanistan, they use mud walls instead of trellises to hold up the vine. So what you get is if you think of corduroy, but with the corduroy ridges six feet high.
you have literally square miles of what consists of a maze, of mud-walled areas. And they were operating against the Taliban in this area, and it was like operating in a rat's maze. with incredible danger because the enemy can put your your stuff going inside these ridges or inside these furrows.
They can put mines, and also they can just turn a corner at the end, shoot, and there's nowhere to go. So they're operating in there, and I went down and spent an entire day on a combat mission with them. At the end of that day, we sat and we talked about the war. I explained it from my perspective. They explained it from theirs. I think I was able to give them a bit of the bigger context of what we were trying to do. They were certainly able to give me greater understanding.
And then I went back to Kabul and about three weeks later, I got an email from the same sergeant. And he said that I had gone on on the patrol with one of his fire. a four-man team led by a sergeant. And he said, Sergeant X had just been killed. I got quite well. So I went right back down again. and and went on another combat patrol with them because it you know i wasn't going to make their combat patrol easy And I wasn't going to really add to the combat effectiveness.
But I think it was important for them to know that I cared enough. It is important periodically to share the hardships and sometimes the danger because you need to. both display the empathy, but you also need to understand, you need to walk a mile in their shoes to understand what it's like. You can't make it easier for them, but you can certainly convince them that what they're doing matters.
And that you are willing to take the time to do that. And when something fails, I think it's the same way. somebody or an organization does something and it doesn't come out well they become a little bit of a pariah and you notice suddenly everybody kind of avoids them and doesn't say much to see if they're you know everybody thinks it might be contagious Right. But the reality is the opposite. You know, it's George Patton said, it's not whether you fall, it's how high you bounce.
That's really the time when you've got to reach to people and you got to get with. tell them and tell them they're not, they may have failed, but they're not a failure. Well, that's the difference between that and blame, which is usually when failure happens or goes. It really sounds like your model, if I was going to grossly simplify it, it's moving from command and control to where the power is, is in relation. You're using, having to use technology.
be there to touch the guy's shoulder and look him in the eye but in spite of technology you've still made a point to do that you know how much of that relationship is built by the code i mean you talked chris about you know the different tribes I know that, you know, maybe you can share the Ranger code and how that bonds the Rangers. And then what becomes the code when you're trying to bring these tribal groups together? I'd love to hear that from you both. Sure. Yeah.
I think starting out, all these tribes have their own, you know, SEAL teams are the pirates of the organization, you know, don't really pay attention to the rulebook, don't even know that one exists. You know, the Rangers are the ultimate disciplined force. the you know everybody has their own various specialty uh all really good strengths um but when you try to smash them together obviously they we were i was bred
think that the Rangers were sort of an odd cult before I ever even met them. And they were bred to think the same. So you have all these biases and then we're on the battlefield. and obviously all the tension can begin. What I really believe happened and what can happen when leaders approach their organizations with this sort of style, saying, I understand everybody.
really strong narratives. They're tribal norms that are incredibly powerful and have a great history, and you're doing good things out there in the field, whatever your industry must be. But we need to tie into a higher level approach that unifies us. So the story that was told to us every day by our senior leadership was if we don't become.
a global organization that trusts each other and that lives on relationship then we're going to fight a bunch of little wars everyone can pat themselves on their back on the back and we're So it suddenly puts you as an individual member of that organization in a black and white sort of decision space where I can either just think about being in a SEAL platoon, part of a little band of brothers.
And potentially lose or I can overcome these tribal boundaries and buy into this relationship idea and start reaching across into other teams sharing information sharing insight and helping the Ranger unit or the Air Force unit or all the other folks as if they were part of my own team. And that doesn't happen overnight. There was not an order that came down and said do this. It was a constant reminder every day from our leadership.
To your earlier point, Tony, highlighting examples of where this was succeeding that gave everyone the roadmap to track. when it came to that cultural change. The tactical stuff was going to take care of itself. It was that culture shift that was the critical part. Tony, can I jump in on priorities a little bit?
It was something I had to learn. When I was young, when I went to West Point, I remember they were fanatical about every piece of discipline of your uniform and whatnot, and then different parts of my career. There were these rules of the priorities of things you had to do. And some of my thought were pretty pointless and some of them were were very good. When I got into the special operations command income.
What I felt I learned over time was establish certain priorities, but then be very flexible on others. Because if you say everything's important, if every soldier's got to do everything exactly this way. then it's hard to tell them what's most important. So I remember the organization wanted to wear different baseball hats at one point. And I said, knock yourself out. They said, well, we want to grow beards. I said, great, grow beards. What are you going to do?
But the things and that would earlier in my career, that would have been absolute. because you never do that. But instead of the things that were very important, how they conducted certain operations, the speed of the tempo where they operated, I was absolutely unwavering. And so I think what happened was it helped. If you can pick certain priorities and make them very clear to everybody, but then be willing to say the other things don't matter very badly.
It highlights him. And I found particularly with that culture of people. it was much appreciated and turned out to be very effective. Well, what you're really addressing is what small companies and big companies deal with when they talk about how to deal with millennials, because it's a different world. They're not used to being commanded. They're used to being the center of the focus.
And perhaps your background, if I've heard it accurately, is when you were in West Point, I heard that you were a person that kind of bucked authority right to the edge, but knew where to stop. Is that a fair representation of you at that stage of your life? I'm not sure I knew where to stop. For the record, I could have done better. Well, it really adapts. Now, I remember you telling a story somewhere.
One of the ways you work to bring everyone together to get that... common sense of mission was very often you know in your conversations with these men would be say where were you on 9-11 and one of the stories you shared was that you said this to the
soldier and he looked up and said I was in the sixth grade. How dealing with all these different ages and stages, how were you able to keep that relationship with spite of the kind of the challenges they're facing because in the rangers you know you the traditional discipline as you describe you guys have a model maybe share that model that no matter what happens you know i'm going to come for you maybe explain what that did
How do you create that with this diversity? Chris addressed it a little bit by the higher power, but I'd love to hear your point of view. Yeah, I mean, in the rangers traditionally, we had this wonderful cultural discipline and we had a ranger creed and a famous line of that. And under no circumstances will I leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the... And that means whether the person is wounded or the person is in fact already dead, we are not going to leave.
And it's a promise that every ranger makes to every other ranger. It creates this incredible bond between them. Now, one of the things that I found interesting since you mentioned millennials is. As we got into the fight here and things had changed so much from the army of my youth that what we were doing on the battlefield was something I had never done.
I just had never done. So as I'm dealing with these units out on the battlefield, whereas when I was young, if the colonel or the general came around, they are sort of this exalted figure that theoretically knew everything, and we should just listen to their wisdom. So as I would go around to the organization, I spent most of my time asking them, what are you doing? What works? What doesn't work? What do you need to do more? Because it was really the classic case of reverse mentoring.
I had to figure out what they were figuring out. I had to help cross-level that across the organization. Interestingly enough, I was at first concerned that my ignorance at that would be a vulnerability and that people would look at me and say, well, if you don't know what's going on, why are you the commanding general?
And that would have been a fair question, but that's not the response I got. That's not how they seem to result in it. They seem to appreciate that I was willing to say, I don't know. And they seem to appreciate the respect that you give them when you ask them. Tell me what works. Tell me what to do. And particularly millennials seem to do well with that because, you know, they're smarter, smarter than us. Tony, it's Chris here. I'd give you an example of that as the role that I played on.
as the aid to camp, part of it was sort of movement around the battle. input into these bigger communication forums. So those are always two areas that people say, well, how'd you know where to go and how'd you structure agendas for people to talk?
because of the interconnectivity that was built inside the organization, those things came to us as the staff. It was the only place I've ever worked inside the military where people on the ground, you know, normally... who wants the senior leadership to show up and kind of inspect their area.
That was completely reversed. We had more requests for visits than we could handle. So you're always trying to index those against priority areas because people knew if the senior leadership shows up, we're going to have a real honest, transparent conversation. what's going on here and that will affect their strategic decision-making very quickly.
resource allocation, etc. Those sorts of things. And the same thing in these big communication structures. The agenda shaped itself because people understood the priorities of the leadership and then they would be the ones reaching up and saying, well, I need five minutes. I need 10 minutes to talk about this. Everyone needs to read this white paper on what's going on in my sector. So people saw this not as a burden, but as an avenue to really inform and drive operations on the ground.
It really, I think this language may come from you, General. so much that I don't know where the location was. Really, it sounds like your approach to leadership was so radically different. It's based on relationship. It's listen, learn, and then lead. And not, as you say, not feeling bad about that because how in the world can you possibly not... mentored up instead of mentored down when technology is creating so many
that if you spend all your time trying to understand that, you couldn't actually strategically lead. But when you look at that change, when you look at the type of shifting that's happening, how do we get people today to have more empathy? Because really, that's what you guys have had. You've had more empathy. I think you wrote that empathy and values don't seem to make it enough boardroom.
How do you create that? Because that's not the picture you think of a general patent. It's not what I think a lot of people think of as a successful general, much less a success. And yet the most powerful ones I found today because the world has changed leadership has to change and that sense of shared values and empathy and the ability to not blame But learn and teach seems to be absolutely critical
I absolutely believe that's right. If you think of an organization as a big sort of 19th century. sailing ship with sails and rudders and all the different things that have to constantly adjust it because of the wind and the sea and whatnot and you say okay great leader do it and you expect that person to run around and do
And it's even impossible to yell out enough commands. The organization's got to do a lot of what they just know is right. And so my opinion is what the leader does now is create an environment where people just like Steve Wynn did. that individual felt empowered enough to get his brother-in-law to get the medication and bring it there. Steve is smart enough to celebrate.
So I think that you have to create an environment where you are admitting that the organization is a team. Your role on the team is a facilitator. You're not. Traditionally, the person who tells everybody what to do, but you're creating an environment where people feel comfortable to do it. It's not always going to work. And when they make mistakes, that's OK.
But the key thing is the entire organization is operating. And I think that's a big shift from traditional leadership. And I think some of our pressures in society work against this. Because if you look, if you have a CEO and there's something happened in company X down at the edges of the company. People are saying, CEO, did you know that this person of your 50,000 employees did this or didn't do this? And if the CEO says, no, I didn't know that, they go, why didn't you know that?
Well, the reality is we don't want them to always know every detail. That's a fool's errand to try to do. but we do want them to know understand and shape the culture because that's how you're going to fix things. I'm on the board of an airline and I'm on the safety committee. And safety is not just a checklist you check. Safety is a culture. where everybody sees things and is constantly adjusting them. And I think that's the way leadership is today.
You describe that. Dr. David Feinberg, who ran UCLA, he was a psychiatrist. And he was running at one point the psychiatric hospital, but he wasn't running with a larger. organizations in the world and they all have their own code just like the military right all these short letters he didn't know what 90 percent of the people were saying when he first took over but it was the same component of empathy the same component of listen and learn he spent the first three months
walking around talking to everyone and talking to patients as well as staff and finding out what made him crazy what made him angry what made him hurt what really worked what really didn't and instead of beating up the He kept coming up with this empathetic approach of, it's your mom. And when they failed, he brought the failure forth and owned it all. Unlike you, he'd show up. There was a woman who was given an operation that she was not supposed to have. They messed up the paperwork.
And then when she was supposed to go home, she didn't have money for a car and they turned her down for a taxi drive. taxi pass, and so she had enough money to get mostly home and had to walk the rest of the way. When he found out about this, he drove to the woman's home, personally apologized, brought her back, asked her if she'd share the story with all the staff, the doctors, the nurses, every...
to see what they did, what it meant to her, what she felt, and how to change. And so this kind of approach... nurturing a culture. I think the language you used in your book was it's less today leadership about playing chess than it is being a gardener. Maybe you can clarify. No, that's exactly right, Tony. You know, for years I thought that.
chess master was the best analogy to a successful leader because a chess master controls 16 chess pieces and moves them and if he's a good or she is a good strategist they win and they are micromanaging each of those chess pieces and when i got into a rack i started And then I found out that my opposition Al Qaeda in Iraq was not a chess master controlling pieces. It was a set of chess pieces that all connected and had relative autonomy. So as a consequence.
There's no way one person can defeat a multiple group like that that's constantly adapting. So slowly, and I didn't suddenly have a revelation on this, I was sort of forced into... to learning it i realized that the gardener is a better analogy for it because if you think what a gardener does a gardener doesn't grow anything only plants can grow But the gardener's critical because the gardener creates the environment. The gardener prepares the ground, the gardener plants, the gardener waters.
feeds, weeds, protects, and at the appropriate time, harvests. And if the gardener does it right, all those plants can do that concurrently. And so suddenly you can scale. And so the gardener is completely busy. This is not a case of empower your subordinates, go home and let me know how it works.
You're constantly protecting the garden, but the garden's plants are able to do it. And so I believe it's a less egocentric way of leading. It takes a little bit of... courage to do it because you're allowing your entities to execute and there's always a chance it's not going to come out and you're going to be held responsible.
But it's, in my view, the only way that will operate in an environment that's changing fast. And it also has the added benefit. The people who are doing it with you feel like they are part owners. They don't feel like they are employees of the league. Tony, I might add, Chris here.
You know, it's easy to read that, especially like a gardener and listen to the description and think this is a soft approach. I didn't feel like that at all. It's an appropriate approach, I think, for the information age because it allows a leader to say. But there was actually a mic. what's going on in progressive organizations.
there's a truly heightened level of accountability down into those small teams because the senior leadership is saying, okay, I get it. Here's what we're trying to accomplish. I will tell you everything that I can about our strategy and our view. Tell me what resources you need. Tell me what information you need. Tell me what decision authorities you need at your level and then go do it. And so that's true empowerment. Empowerment isn't.
Empowerment comes with all this other stuff that makes it possible and then I know I felt it and teams often feel it. That's a scary place to be when you're used to being able to complain about the senior leadership that they didn't get. They didn't let you do it. They didn't give you the info, whatever the case may be. Suddenly, when all that. And you just have to know how to reach into the garden, to extend the analogy, to make that all.
that can be a frightening place for junior leaders to be. It's what they're asking for, but when you really bring it to bear, it's a new muscle for many people. Well, careful what you ask for, right? I read the description in the Rolling Stone article described you general. while you were so empathetic and connected. respected you had the with one look the ability to have a man through your eyes without saying a word
That they didn't want to disappoint you. So I think it's really important, Chris, to point out that it's not that you don't have strength still. It's just that the focus is truly on empowerment. And it's a humble approach, but it's still an approach where results are expected. I do. Hello General. for joining us. I have a question for you. And I have to say, you know, you guys talk about you treat every everyone you meet like your mother, I think as a young woman.
And I think this is pretty universal. I think you treat every wise man that you meet like your father General McChrystal. You just remind me so much in so many ways of my father. you know he served uh in the army and he was out by the time i was born but you never know it by the way he ran our house
He had six kids. I think he would have told you he had six little soldiers. I'm not sure he was, he needed your gardener metaphor. I think General McChrystal, where were you? But I appreciate that. And I just, you know, talking about millennials, you and Chris had mentioned.
You were running around. You were a Green Beret under Jimmy Carter in April of 1980. I've heard you say I wasn't even born yet at that time. So I love speaking to men like you who just offer this perspective. And I think at this time where America. As a young woman, looking to senior leadership, this is a little bit more big picture.
But General Mercishul, in one of your talks you wrote, you said, we have to look at the hard statements, hard statements like America doesn't lead well anymore, which means Americans don't lead well anymore, which I do not believe.
And I don't think you do either. I was raised to believe this is a great country. I think for the first time in my life, I do find myself just just fearful maybe of saying do what what is the state of leadership so i go to someone like you with history just like we need to learn just that whole top-down mentoring and top-up mentoring at this point i think a lot of young people are looking to men like you and saying you've seen it all you've seen what we haven't seen
What's a true picture of the America that we live in today and the leaders that America has today? Yeah, that's a great question. And of course, you make me feel very old, but that's fair. Wise, she said. Wise, not old. Last week I had my second granddaughter born, so I'm starting to really feel a march of time here. No, I think your question is really good. And let me put it how I think about it. This is one guy's opinion.
You know, we were raised with the idea that America is an exceptional place. It is, you know, the most favorite nation in the world, just lucky in many ways. And if you look at sort of a sweep of history from World War II on the baby boomer generation up to today, although we've had a lot of bumps and grinds, for sure.
We've generally gone from this position at the end of World War II where we were 46% of the world's gross national product. I mean, we had this just incredible position in a largely damaged world. And so America has had a preeminent position. And to be honest, to a degree, I think we let it go to our heads. You know, as I as I've gone around the world to different places and served and I've seen opportunities that Americans take for granted that absolutely is not anywhere within.
with people in other countries that are just as good of people as we are, just as smart, just as values driven, but they don't have that opportunity. I think that America probably needs to look at itself in the mirror right now and say, wait a minute, nothing about America is God didn't suddenly one day say, America this is, you are the United States.
You have great this. You will be a great country. It really was a group of people who came together and created a covenant between themselves to create a nation at great risk and at significant cost. And then our forebearers built it with a lot of flaws.
over many many years and now instead of us looking and saying wow you know it was great and it's not great anymore you know who did this to us i think we need to look in the mirror and say okay If it's going to be what we want it to be, it's going to also be what we need. We are going to have to look at each other at every age, in every background, in every zip code in America.
And we're going to have to say if the United States of America is going to be a good place to live. And I'm not talking about international power. I'm talking about does it deliver on the hopes and dreams of the people who are American. then we're going to have to make that way. It's not an automatic thing. And so I think our sense of citizenship in the United States, which for many of us probably has.
eroded a bit and we think that if we pay our taxes and we vote, we've checked the blocks and I would argue no. Citizenship is also about responsibility for other citizens. And so I would say that when I think of America at this time and we feel like maybe we've lost some of our sense of omnipotence around the world and our sense of infallibility, well, that's OK.
It would be better if we approach this with, in my view, first, humility, humility, how hard things are, but also a sense of resolve. And that's where I think. I think leadership shouldn't call to the weakest, darkest corners of our personality, which all of us have. shouldn't summon in us our fears and it shouldn't play to the petty side that is in each of us. at times, instead it should try to pull out of us a sense of, hey, we can be a little better than we were yesterday. We can be...
better than we think we are. We can be as good as people hope will be. And I think that's where we have to go. And I don't consider that soaring rhetoric. I consider that sort of a practical roll up your sleeves. Okay, if we're going to fix this. It's on us and it's on each generation. And I certainly my generation should take a lot of responsibility for where we are and where we aren't. But your generation.
right or wrong is going to have your sleeves rolled up and do the same. Sorry to sort of preach a bit, but I feel pretty strong. That's why Mary's with me. I want to have perspectives of different generations. She's a brilliant young lady, to say the least, who's got her own career and success that she's built, but it's great to hear that. I'm curious...
One of the things that you talk about a lot is that we have to get more uncomfortable with the unknown. I often, not often, I most always when I'm teaching people say that the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live. survive but comfortably live with. Because if you have to be certain about everything, your world is limited.
structure so you've said before the leader isn't good because they're right what makes a leader really great what would be to be crystal clear i'm a crystal clear excuse me what would be what is what is your definition of leadership today what makes somebody a great leader You know, it's interesting you ask that because when I was a young officer just out of West Point, I asked my father, who'd spent a career in the military and a lot of time in combat, what makes a good command?
And he said, well, in combat... can tell who's not a good commander and I said okay who's that he said that's the person that keeps asking for more information or intelligence They've got to do an operation and they keep asking for intelligence. And I said, well, everybody should want intelligence, shouldn't they? He says, of course, it's responsible to want to know. much as you can to mitigate risk but there is a point beyond which you're trying to mitigate risk to zero and that's not
People start to do that. We see this in business all the time. They want to get more information, more information. And what it does is it delays them from taking action because they want to be sure that there's no risk involved in their decision.
And as a consequence, what happens is they're typically late to when they had to So I would say that this uncertainty, the thing that's made it so much harder than before, as you mentioned at the beginning, everything's going so much faster now that the requirement to decide and act has been compressed. Information does come more quickly, but instead of information just coming more quickly, it comes in this
And so the typical decision maker isn't constrained by a lack of information. They're constrained by a lack of ability to digest it, make sense of it, enact, and they can get into analysis. And some people say, well, no problem, because now we've got big data and we've got the computing power to crunch it. So we're going to solve the problem. But the reality is information is growing faster than our ability.
to bring data together. And so that's going to be an aid, but it's actually going to be even more uncertain in the future because of the speed and the complexity of things. I'd make one point. It's a really interesting way to look at it. You know, if you look at small teams inside the special operations community, especially really anywhere in the military, at the small unit level, and you can see this in sports, etc., obviously the battlefield is largely...
So you have to be comfortable. So teams train as a cohesive unit for sometimes years together so that they can step off that helicopter. they know if they can do one thing well it's adapt in the moment because they're in a world of massive uncertainty sometimes but they know they can adapt presents. I think the best leaders in our community then adopted that as their own person.
And it probably correlates quite closely. As you get more senior, the uncertainty goes up. But those that had developed a real core ability to adapt to the situation were comfortable balance. risk versus reward in the uncertainty space. And it's really one of the core tenets I've sort of taken away from the whole experience. So this whole adaptability, this whole capacity to be resilient seems to be more important than planning.
I think that's absolutely true because things are going to change so fast now. As Heraclitus said, you never step in the same river twice. You're not even going to come up with the same solution to a very similar problem twice and have it come out. So the reality is I think you are going to be in a constant learning, constant adaptation mode. I think forever. Yeah, I tell you, a group that we worked with a while back that really took hold of this as their sort of structural model.
One of their senior leaders actually said to us, I would put my strategy online on January 1st every year if I was allowed to, because I know my competition. what they would do all year. They would chase that strategy. And I know the strategy is going to deviate three weeks into the year because something's going to happen.
now and adapt throughout the year. I don't need this static plan. It sets a baseline, and then I'm going to move from there. Yeah, I teach business people how to grow their business 20% to 150% in a year. five-day immersion programs these these drill camps and one of the things that we have to show these Having a five-year business plan today is a joke. Seven years ago, there wasn't an iPhone. And you think about how our lives...
such a short period of time. I also talked with Ray Dalio, the number one hedge fund guy in the world manages $165 billion. And he was saying, Tony, you know, one of the biggest problems for intelligent people is very often their terrible investors.
Because they want to, before they can make a decision, they want to be certain that they understand all the parameters. And he said the problem with that, the reason they're terrible investors is by the time you know everything about it, the opportunity is gone.
And so I think that's a it's a good reflection for what's here. But let's talk about decision making, because that's what makes somebody a great leader to a great extent. You know, tell me, you know, in business, you've got to make decisions. And if you're right or wrong.
the amount of money, you might lose your business, you might lose jobs for all the people you're responsible for and yourself. Those are big consequences. But you guys, the decisions you make literally are life and death decisions. How should leaders approach decision-making today when the enormity of the impact can be so huge and the world is so uncertain? How do you get yourself to make those decisions and how do you evaluate whether or not it's going to be the best?
It's really key. I start with talking to leaders and saying, understand what decisions you should make. There's a tendency of the chain of command or the levels of the organization to make a lot of decisions. In reality, most of those can be pushed down. And so a good senior leader identifies those things that only they can make or are most appropriate for them.
When you've done that, you've typically given yourself a little bit more breathing space and you've pushed down responsibility and ownership to people lower. Then at the level... i like to say okay first off what is the decision let's define it when does it have to be made What is the cost for making it later as opposed to earlier? Some are time sensitive, some less so. And then say, okay, what information do I have to have to make that decision? And it's never as much as you'd like to.
What do I have to have? And then the last part that people often forget is who are the other stakeholders who ought to have a say in the decision? i.e. it's going to touch them and they can either provide you input so they ought to get a vote or at least be informed of that during the decision-making process if they do all of those kinds of things and often that can happen very very rapid Then they socialize the decision as they make it. Then it tends to come out pretty well.
What I find is most often people, as you described, want to delay a decision long after it is best made. And then they also often don't involve the right people involved in it. And so what happens is... They make the decision, and then all these people come out of the woodwork and go, wait a minute, that decision's wrong, or you didn't understand the impact, and they find implementation.
But if they've been part of the process and been consulted, it becomes a different game. They're in the game with you. I'm privileged at this stage of my life. I've grown my companies to where I have 31 companies. We do about 5 billion in sales. We have 1,200 employees. I used to struggle with one little organization with 10 or 15 people, and it's because I had to make all the decisions.
My listeners know how that's changed in my life. And the change went from being an operator to an owner. It went from... I'm the only one who can do it to really owning the mission and the vision and being able to connect it. push that information down, get those decisions made. And seeing that change has been huge. How do you do that from a practical perspective? I mean, you're doing that. How do you make sure that that happens when you have a culture as large as the ones that you're making?
Yeah, as you pull yourself up, one of the first things you have to do is that transition to owner from operator. I think that's a great description. You have to understand that you're not going to touch it. and don't try to. And hopefully you've got the personality at that point and enough experience not to overreact to every Christ. If every time something seems to go a little wrong, you want to launch and get personally involved or whatever, I think that that tends to undercut your effect.
You've got to be able to step back a little bit, know that the seas are going to go up and down, the wind's going to blow, and you can react in that way. I think I'd have thrown one comment. our organization, the communication approach that was driven by our senior leadership forced those people that were closest to the problem to think at a different level. The questions that were asked.
unique to the organization um i think because the goal was to say i'm i'm going to sit up here and here to the earlier point about here the the levers that i'm going to pull or the things that that i'm going to insist upon you had to be able to think deeply about those at the ground level because you knew that these broad communication And, you know, an operation, a typical question might be, well, tell us how it went.
What'd you do? Any lessons for the team? Instead, the questions that we would get were, well, should we have done something else? How does that connect to our strategy in this region? What other teams need to know about what you just learned? So, not transactional questions, very thoughtful questions.
questions that you know the first time you were in that environment you would step all over it you know but eventually you'd realize it's not enough just to be a good player I need to do this and think about the broader organization because that's what I'm going to be
it's a network of connections where everyone is sharing as you say the consciousness the awareness of the outcome the purpose and yet everyone has got to solve the problems locally or they don't get solved there's no way to scale Tell me, General, you're known, many people I've talked to. worked with you and I've read everything about you and many people talk about this unbelievable
demand that you put on yourself that made you seem almost superhuman to some of those people. I understand you sleep four hours day you know you just eat one meal a day tell us a little bit about your own physical resume and do you believe that that gave you more power by demonstrating your own personal
yourself to be effective and do leaders today in organizations need to show that level of discipline you know no alcohol no goofing off that kind of thing around their employees in order to command respect or is there a different approach or is this just your personal approach i'd really like that Yeah, no, I'd get a certain sort of Zen credit.
The legend always gets bigger. The reality was during the fight, I was there for an extended period. I took command for two years and stayed for five in the one command, and that was deployed the entire time. And so our cycle was we would fit in the night and then go to bed right a little after dawn. And then I would sleep for four hours and then get up and work out. And then we'd start the day and fight into the night.
And so the four hours was based upon our battle rhythm, we called it. And it was about the minimum amount of sleep that I could do and function. And I don't think it was as much as I should have. In fact, I'm quite sure it wasn't. But it was enough to function. And it was just a. it was an adaptation to a requirement i i try to sleep more now although you know you get habits and they stick i tend to i've always tended to rise early anyway i i work out every
and I started that many many years ago and part of it's to be in shape because I like to be in shape but part of it is I do think it's a it's a personal discipline thing it makes you
It makes you do something that no matter what happens in the rest of the day, I accomplish something that day. And it's a sign of... self-respect i think as well and it works very well in the military culture because you're expected to be in shape but as you get older and people typically would make allowances for you if you didn't make as many allowances for yourself They kind of go, hey, the old man, he pushes himself. I appreciate that. And then the one meal a day.
You know, this is something that I started back about 35 years ago. And to be honest, I was a lieutenant and I thought I was getting fat. I just started eating one meal a day in the evening because it was easier for me. I'm not disciplined enough to eat like five small meals like people say you should. Instead what I do is I don't eat all day and then when I eat dinner, it's a monumental affair.
But it works for me. And again, it's one of those things that's almost deferring gratification. I get up in the morning, I work out, I work. And then at the end of the day, I look forward to... slowing down, eating, relaxing a little bit and whatever works for individuals. I think everybody's got to find their own personal rhythm, their personal discipline.
And it it can be a good signal to the people who work with you. If you have the discipline to be kind to people, if you have the discipline not to take short. not to do what your subordinates are not allowed to do. If you have the discipline to dress in the way you want them to. And I use that just as whatever it is. The people who work with you will look and they say, I know that Tony could get away with not doing that because he's Tony Robbins. But he does.
He does this because he thinks it's important and he's single. And I think that's remarkably valuable in the leader because. People used to ask me, well, when do you lead by example? And I say every minute of every. Couldn't agree with you more. I couldn't agree with you more. I think there's no way I can do what I do. People see me get up and do 50 hours in a week, and it's not what you do, General. I don't have life and death and bullets coming at me.
All I gotta do is keep people's attention, which can seem like a similar task in a world where, you know, people won't sit for a three-hour movie. I'm going to keep these people for 50 hours in a weekend, day and night, without the ability to command them. It really is about meeting their needs. But it's because I go first. I've met many people over the years.
later and go, I saw you. I was so skeptical. My arms were tied. And he said, the first hour, two, he said, but about hour 12, when you're still up there and you're sweating like crazy and the sweat is down, literally covering your... and you're giving every ounce of your soul, I thought, you know, maybe I could do some of this myself. So I don't think there's any better way to lead them by example.
that everywhere for the guy that's in the foxhole the guy that will show up the guy that will lead um tell me you went through a tough time you know the rolling stone reporter you know traveled with you for a month and uh you know he reported some conversations where you questioned some of your superiors including uh biden and many people's perception of the president himself and of course you know a few days after that my understanding is the president asked you
you did. It's got to be incredibly tough. I'd love to hear your perspective on that, what you learned from it, and what advice you give to someone else because every leader still answers to someone else. Even if you're the leader of the business, you answer to the client. these days to your employees because they're really your partner.
tough we all have different perspectives so i'd love to understand your kind of recap of what happened there and what you learned from it what you pulled from it what advice you give to someone else in a similar Sure. I'll start with just the story and then I'll tell you what I learned from it. We were in the spring of 2010 and we were doing a lot of press because the American people's support for the war in Afghanistan.
as was it in Europe. And so it was determined that we needed to do more of that so that we could educate and build support. And so I did a bunch of press and the individual that from Rolling Stone, who was a freelancer working for Rolling Stone, he embedded with us, but he wasn't there a month. He was actually there about two days. about three times. So there was really very limited. interaction with him, but it was over about a month or six week period.
And at the end of this, we expected I had dealt with him and he couldn't have been more pleasant or more nice. At the end of it, I thought it was going to be sort of a simple story about how the command group was operating. But instead, what he had done is he collected a number of comments that he'd heard from members of my staff and whatnot that he felt. a locker room attitude or any hurt banter, I'm sure.
What happened was an article came out in the Rolling Stone magazine in June of 2010, and it sort of created an instant firestorm because it had a... and the idea was here's this general who in many ways is hard charging but you know maybe is he and his team are not as respectful as they should be. I thought the story was unfair. I thought it was an incorrect depiction of my team who had been at war together for many years.
But it didn't matter because what happened is it created this media event or firestorm that put the president of the United States, my boss, in a tough position. So on request, I flew back the day after the article came out, went to see the secretary of defense and then went to see the president. And when I went to see the president, he asked me what happened.
You know, very good conversation. And I told him I really didn't know. I hadn't had time to investigate it and whatnot. But I offered him my resignation and I told him. Here's my resignation. If you want to accept it, I completely understand. If you don't want to accept it and want me to go back to Afghanistan, I'm happy to do that. Whatever is going to work for the war, because that's what matters.
And that's my responsibility as a leader to accept responsibility. And so he accepted my resignation and we parted on very amicable terms. Now, that was 34 years into my career. And 38 years into the time after which I entered West Point. So that had been my entire life, my entire being. And I left the White House. We drove back to Fort McNair where my wife was living while I was in...
Afghanistan and I went into the home because I'd flown all night to get back and then I came into the home and she was standing there not knowing what was going to happen and I told her I said it's over you know my career is done. And she had grown up as a child of an army officer. And then she'd spent, at that point, 33 years married to me, almost 34. And her life had just been changed. And I was the reason.
And, you know, I would have expected most people to look and go, oh, you got screwed. You got a bad deal, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And she didn't do that. She just looked at me and she said, good. We've always been happy and we always will be. Incredible. Incredible. Extraordinary. And she's never wavered from that. She's never whispered in my ear, you know, aren't you mad about this? Aren't you bitter? Because one of the things I learned from that moment is you have two choices.
I could either have spent the next few years arguing about that and saying, I don't think it was fair. I think I didn't get a good deal. Or I could look forward. But it takes a lot of energy to be bitter. And it takes a lot of time to look back and argue over things that you can't.
And instead, I made the decision that what I was going to do was live my life looking forward. I was going to try to conduct myself in a way that anyone who met who had read that article and known what happened, would meet me and they'd say, wow, I saw one thing on the story and some of the press, but the person I meet, that doesn't.
And then the people who for years had served with me and some of them had invested a lot with me. And then suddenly I was gone. I wanted them to see how I behaved and say, no, I wasn't wrong. I didn't put my faith in a relationship with somebody who wasn't who I thought he was. He was, he is, and he will be. And so, you know, it was very interesting. And that was.
With the help of my wife, I made that decision and every day since that, and I'm not going to say this was ever easy because anyone who goes through any kind of failure or controversy, it always stays with you to some degree. But it's been remarkably good because you got something forward. You're trying to do something. You're not wallowing in pity for yourself. You're trying to make a difference.
It came as an automatic reaction, but it turned to have been probably the most fortunate decision I've ever made. General, you led probably even more. I don't know if you can say even more in that moment and the way you've lived your life since. I think you could teach not just soldiers now, you could teach anyone how to live.
I believe the most important decision you can make in your life, I've always believed it's who you spend time with, it's who you become, who you choose to live with, who you choose to love.
But I've since come to believe that it's the decision to live in a beautiful state, not to suffer no matter what. Because when you suffer, when you beat yourself up, when you feel you've had injustice and all those things do happen, all that happens, as you said, as you suffer more and suffering begets more suffering and the people around
And you made that decision to say, I'm going to live in a beautiful state. I'm going to be the best me I can be no matter what. You know, even if it rains on my brain, even if all hell breaks loose.
All the things that we can respect about you, the way you're living your life today and since that time and the way you've dealt with that, at least for me as an individual, is incredibly inspiring. And I thank you for your... well i've been lucky tony i mean i've got great friends great comrades now and i uh i've just been fortunate Chris, what would you say is one of the defining qualities of this man who has been a commander for you in the past? How would you describe him to the public?
You've been the right seat to him for quite a long time. Give us your perspective, if you would. Sure, yeah. Going back early in the service long before I met him, just known as a phenomenal mentor, an extremely well-respected leader who set an amazing example. All of that was heightened obviously after
required a different type of leadership. And I think, you know, Stan was the right person at the right time. But really under the hood, so to speak, when you get the inside view, what I take away in my... daily view on myself as a leader as a part of a business etc is the sense of humility that has to grow I think in larger scale as you move up the the ranks up the however you want to look at it the more senior you get and this has been my big
from working with Stan for all these years, the humility has to be larger than the environment, which is where I think most people, that's a really hard equation to keep balance of, because there's so many external forces, I didn't realize. a senior officer and then seeing that environment. There's so many forces external to what they can even see that tells them not to act like that. And it's so easy to make a lot of little misses and not truly embody.
sense of servant leadership that I think is so critical, especially today. So that's been my biggest takeaway. I'm much earlier in the process. I think if you lose track of that early, the problem can pass. So it's something that whenever I talk to mid or senior level leaders in any environment, say, look, this is something you have to closely monitor as you move up.
I think leaders could have gotten by with not having that humility when people were trained into the command control model. But we live in a different age with different human beings who've been trained to think and feel and respond differently. You know, Harvard did a study with CAP.
vertical lines and what they found was and they put other cats in ones with horizontal lines and if they swap two years into their being in those rooms they couldn't see the opposite because the brain is stimulated by the way it grows by the way it's stimulated so if you see horizontal
to see see vertical that's all you see and I think today we have to see everything and then we see everything is to enter other people's perspectives and you can't do that if you believe you are the all-knowing answer who's the commander-in-chief So that leads me to an interesting question.
Mrs. Clinton is a friend of mine. Mr. Trump is a friend of mine. I know they're both, so it made it for a very interesting time for me. I'm curious what advice you might give, and I know you're quite humble, but as a leader, speaking leader to leader, in chief, what would be your advice to President-elect Trump in terms of how to best lead and also maybe how to best interact with the military? I'm curious what your views would be because you certainly
Yeah, I kind of watch this, but I don't have any political acumen. What I would say that the thing that jumps out at me... If I were advising a new administration or anything else, the first thing I would do is build a team.
You know, there's a tendency to look at the problems in front of you. They might be an economic problem. They might be a war. They might be Russian hacking or whatever it is. And so there's this tendency to look at issue by issue and say, OK, how are we going to solve this issue? How are we going to solve that issue?
And it's sometimes viewed as if you go out and get the right talent, build the right cabinet, bring in other people that you've put talent against the problem. And then each of these issues will be solved. I actually don't think that. I actually think that if you go back to the idea of the dream team, that's always... a mistake to have that view because just putting talent together doesn't equal a good outcome.
Even people with good intentions, a lot of talent doesn't equal a good outcome. What I think they ought to be thinking about, if I would tell any new administration, I would get the key leaders together. And I literally, I joke about this sometime. I said, they should go whitewater. They ought to go together and they shouldn't talk about politics and they shouldn't talk about governance. And maybe they take beer, whatever they do, and they camp out at night and they just build relationships.
so that when it gets hard, and it's gonna get hard, They suddenly realize they sat across a boat from someone and laughed and had a good time or they sat across a campfire. So there's some kind of sinew to the relationship. So when things pull and push, it's not transactional. When things get that way, there's something to fall back.
And, you know, people say, well, that's kumbaya training or something like that. I would tell you, I think it would be better time spent than almost anything else a team that has to go undergo a tough task. i love that i think that comes back to what i was asking about earlier i mean one of the lines in the ranger promise is no matter what happens no matter what it costs me if you need me And that can only be created very often by going through difficult...
And that's what molds people together. And I have not had the privilege of serving my country in this way and being with men that would die for each other. But I can only imagine what that bond is really like and how that really is the glue. Well, it does. You start with values in yourself. You have to have self-respect and have core values. But then you have to build those bonds with other people whose values you respect and empathize with.
you know when you do that exactly as you describe it's then not transactional it's it's the ability to withstand things and so I think that You know, you have a team that forms a government and pretty soon there are press reports about this person doesn't like that person. And whether those. stories are true or there's any accuracy. They're like little fissures in the stone where the water gets in and freezes and starts to create cracks.
suddenly you read in the paper that somebody doesn't like you or something and you start to the organization of the team starts to to pull apart and and that's what you got to fight against because it's so much harder today than it used to that regard because there's so much scrutiny, there's so many pressures. I think that that is going to be a big requirement.
Well, this has been a magnificent time spending with the two of you. I feel so grateful and want to thank you both for your service and for the service you've also provided our country. service today. I think leadership is the most important skill and leaders can be judged not by how their lips move but how their feet move and the way yours have moved for three and a half decades plus says a lot about who you are and Chris beside you there overall.
that as well. I just have one final question which is what's next for you? Tell us what's your mission today for the two of you and what's the plan for execution? No, thanks for asking. We've got this company that we are co-owners of, McChrystal Group, and what we do is we work with organizations to deal with this new environment, and they can be big companies or they can be small companies.
And it's leadership advisory because we basically help them face a requirement where a world is in such rapid change. They're going to have to be constantly adapting and yet organization. typically try to get organized and they very quickly form themselves into silos and different little tribes.
Getting those to work together at speed in a constantly changing environment is something that's really got us passionate. And so as we've worked with corporate partners, it's been just extraordinarily rewarding to watch them. And some of them have been just extraordinarily good in the past, but are prescient enough to know that they've got to change for the future. Watch them make those changes. Yeah, it's a really exciting.
There's no other environment I'd rather be in because what we've realized, and it's sort of our theory of the case, as I know for me transitioning out of the military, that what we learned there on the battlefield probably is impacted. in other environments. That is far more true than I could have ever imagined. And we're seeing it now every day, obviously. The world is in this stage of just massive disruption. We'll come out of it.
But what we look like as organizations and how we have to act as leaders is going to be significantly different. We're already in the transition. So we're sort of dead center in that. It's a lot of it's a lot. I'm excited to have organizations have access to you, and I want to recommend team of teams to anyone who's listening in. And one final question I know Mary B. wanted to ask you. I just wanted to ask you, General McChrystal, it's been a delight hearing from you and getting to know your...
Even working alongside Tony has given me an interesting perspective to see men like you. Human beings are tasked with giving advice and with leading other human beings. they sure come under a lot of scrutiny of a decision every word that comes out of their mouth and so to have to hear from you and have you go from being you know a guy's name you hear on the news to the essence of a man to hear your principles, to hear your values, to experience your resolve that you talked about.
i just think is one of the most beautiful gifts that human beings can give another human being to get to know each other and i just i want to ask you what you hope your legacy would be in the military as a man what you hope people there's all the things that have been written comments and stories and glory days at West Point, all these things that we can find about you out there. What do you hope is the essence that's distilled from you, the man you are?
You know, that is a very thoughtful question. And, you know, you think legacy, you win a battle or something. That's not really important, too. the campaigns that we're a part of. The legacy I really hope lasts is the people who served alongside me. If asked, I would hope that they would say he was somebody I trusted. He did as well as he could. And then we would see some glimmer.
the relationship we had the values we shared not only in them but in the generation after them as they pass it on and people might be doing things that we did and building relationships not knowing that that's the way we did it and where it came from but because they think it's the right thing to do that would be a pretty pretty incredible legacy. I don't kid myself that it's overblown, but if you can do that, I think you make a difference.
You certainly have General. General Schwarzkopf was a friend of mine before he passed. There have been very few individuals in my life that I could have that level of respect for because they didn't command it by demand. They delivered so much value to human beings and to the culture and to their country.
Certainly one of those. And Chris, I want to thank you for partnering in this process. And I hope to have the privilege of meeting you in person again soon. I enjoyed the brief time we had on the Today Show together, and I look forward to it. honor and I really want to thank you. Thanks Tony. Thank you guys. The Tony Robbins podcast is directed and hosted by Tony Robbins and Mary Buckheit. Carrie Song is our executive producer. Strategy and distribution by Anna Yorg and Tyler Colbert.
Jimmy Carvajal and Adriel De La Torre are our digital editors. Copyright Robbins Research International.