a lot of people think civilian leadership is easier because you don't have to wear uniforms it's not life or death and you can give people more money but i will argue almost for all of those reasons it's much harder the military has a very clear culture you wear your rank and your resume on your uniform
people can see where you've been what you've done you can wrap yourself very clearly in the flag the reason for the military's existence and the mission is clearly stated it sometimes gets confused but the basic premise is very good military leaders don't have any money to
distribute and that's an advantage because everybody says that yearly bonuses motivate people and i would argue not really they may be a requirement now because they're an expectation but intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic things like and everybody likes their bonus until
they find out their desk mate got just a little more and then suddenly the bonus becomes an item of dissatisfaction [Music] general mcchrystal welcome to the show well shane call me stan please and thanks for having me i appreciate you coming on let's start with
what is risk i used to think of risk as something bad that could happen and typically the intersection of probability and consequences so what's the chances that something occurs and if it does how bad will that be and and that sort of becomes a risk and you buy insurance or you try to dodge it
and whatnot now i think of it a little differently now i think of it as a mathematical equation and this is the extent of my my math expertise but if you think of it as threats times vulnerabilities equals risk then you suddenly realize that threats are things that are out there that are
inevitably coming our way in most cases and then our vulnerability to them and so if we can drive threats down low or to zero in a perfect world which we usually can't then we'd have no risk but if we can't control the threats that are out there which we usually cannot then we've got to focus on our
vulnerability to them and we have some agency over that not perfect but we can do something about that and that can decrease our risk and so i think of risk as the result there and what we're trying to to have some level of control over is it fair to say that threats are effectively
uncontrollable and our vulnerability to them is controllable or more controllable i think it is there were people who would argue that if we are really good at predicting threats we can dodge them or some threats you can reach out and do something about but i would say
practically speaking you're right we're really not very good at seeing where all the threats are coming from particularly in a complex environment and also we're not very good at predicting when they will come so i think it's a fool's errand to try to think you're going to swat away every threat
but you can do a lot about your vulnerabilities and you did you come to this idea through the immune system or was that just a way to explain this how did you use that well we came to the idea of risk first with this this gap between what i'd studied about the theory of risk and what people had
tried to teach me in my career and then my actual experience with it meaning i didn't actually have very good outcomes with risk even if i'd gone through the checklist and the matrices and all the sort of scientific approaches and then i looked historically at the things just
really in my lifetime and i think of the 9 11 attacks where we had all the information necessary to stop the world trade towers being hit inside the u.s government but we couldn't connect the dots or the financial crisis where all of the bubble and the fragilities were knowable but we couldn't
do we didn't do very well with it and then of course covet 19 so because we've done so poorly at dealing with some pretty predictable risks i wanted to study why is that and that got me to the human immune system when this this immunologist who i met at yale taught me about the human immune system
when we were working on a project on counterinsurgency and she taught me that the human immune system is this extraordinary miracle uh capability we have to detect threats assess them respond to them and then learn from it and you say well okay it's pretty good i say wait a minute
they actually estimate 10 000 times a day we ingest a microorganism that could kill us and yet they don't for the most part it's only when our immune system is weakened that we become vulnerable to things that otherwise wouldn't be a problem and so if we think of that analogy
then suddenly you think of the systems were part of the organizations were part of the nations we're a part of or even us individually we have an ability to detect assess respond and learn and the question is how strong is it how healthy is it determine our ability to withstand the
threats that inevitably show up are there practical things we can do to increase our ability as people to detect respond to these threats yeah that's the good point this is not just something you are born with that you are more resilient than the next person or your organization automatically has
in reality there are we have enumerated 10 risk control factors that make up this system we could have had 12 we could have had 15 it's we tried to make it manageable as we we captured it but really they go around things like communication the ability to communicate inside the organization
do we have a clear narrative and are we aligned on it do we have the ability to respond or act can we overcome the inertia of an action or change our action if we're in the wrong direction can we get the timing right can we swing at the pitch at the appropriate moment
can we adapt when conditions change and the requirement is there do we bring indicate all the different perspectives needed meaning diversity can we overcome biases does leadership provide an umbrella or connection for all of this now if we take each of those they are a
holistic system but we can actually break out almost like the human body we can exercise certain muscles we can make them stronger and then of course we can exercise the entire system so we're more resilient and there are a number of things we can do really on a a daily basis in our
organizations to make ourselves ready for that next threat i want to come back to something you said about 911 where we had the information and we just didn't use it do you think that that's necessarily valuable we'll always have information and then we have to assess the credibility of that information like you
can't chase down every single piece of information that comes in with a threat against the united states so do you think it's possible to eliminate that risk to nothing by internal controls or how do you see that yeah shane i think it's not possible or at least not realistic
and when we studied the 911 situation for the book we found that there had been a lot of information intelligence pumping into the system but if you compared it to the amount of overall intelligence pumping through the system it's a very small amount so having that signal
differentiate itself from the rest of the noise is probably impossible now some people will say well big data will solve this we'll use artificial intelligence and we'll crunch and we'll see patterns and trends and to a degree that will be of help but i don't think it will be the panacea
i think there will still be too much noise too much information pumping in and so what we've got to do is accept the reality that we're probably not going to be very good at it and so what we should accept is the fact a significant amount of those threats will make it through whatever kind of
detection process we have and so we're going to have to deal with them when our when they're on our doorstep the most interesting thing i think about the 911 stuff is multiple departments had different information and in the context of the information and that department the information
didn't sort of trigger a high enough threat but if you aggregated all the information together then you would have any of those departments would have acted on the information well that's exactly right if you think about it it's the analogy of the blind man and the elephant you've got blind men
looking at the elephant one sees a leg or touches a leg thinks it's the elephant's like a tree another hole's a tail think it's like a snake and none of them are wrong but you remember there was a case in the 911 where you had some people doing flight lessons and that didn't rise to the level where the
people who were aware of that said red lights we've got to stop because they just couldn't connect that to the idea of hijacking and and doing what they ultimately did and i think we'd be overly critical to say that they were all wrong that because they saw this narrow picture
they didn't automatically see the big picture and so two lessons for me the first is we've got to try to connect organizations as much as possible to to complete the mosaic way we can but we've also got to be humble enough to say it's unlikely we'll ever have a clear picture so we've
got to be prepared to deal with the unexpected i want to come to that later do you think we're getting better at sort of dealing with risk or are we getting more risk averse as a society at large i think probably a little bit of both we are probably getting better at our ability
to share information at least we have the ability to share information better technology allows that we now have the help of augmented and artificial intelligence which lets us see trends so we can see the effects of climate change and and change but then the counter argument is okay
so what if we don't do anything about it are we really getting better and so i would argue on the one hand there is the ability to assess the risk with greater accuracy and more timeliness but we have problems in our society and our organizations now where it's very hard to overcome inertia
either the inaction or the momentum we have in a certain direction because there are stakeholders there are habits there are fears and so i would argue that we're probably not better although we could be do you think we're we're sort of almost setting ourselves up for that i'm just thinking
in terms of like we seem to have a lot more government around risk now than we've ever had before trying to protect citizens from everything and does that make us how does that affect us do we filter information the same way do we think differently about risk because now we
can absolve ourselves of responsibility or do you have any thoughts on that i do i i think it really is in two levels the first is you talk about responsibility there's a moral hazard here in that organizations like lehman brothers who named a very capable chief risk officer
created an impression inside the organization that other individuals didn't have to worry as much about risk because they had a person who was responsible for that and they would they would cover it and of course that's inaccurate that wasn't even her role and she wasn't allowed in things like
investment committee meetings where the biggest risk decisions were made so i think there's there's that dynamic and then there's another dynamic of i'll call it anonymity and i think it shows up in particularly in american society where someone is grows up in a town they're born in a
community and they spend the first few years there and then they go off to school and after school they go live somewhere else and during that period of life they are interested in certain things in the community they're very interested in the schools and whatnot then they hit a
retirement age and they move yet again and they move to a warmer climate and suddenly in that new environment they're not interested in the schools because they don't have kids or grandkids in the community so they don't have that same level of uh responsibility to the entire depth of the community
and you also haven't been there as long so you don't feel like i'm going to be born raised and be buried here and therefore my legacy is very important and i think that decreases our sense of ownership over risks we tend to be more short term and that more short term is
i think applies nationally as well and you could argue to commercial organizations if they have a short-term profit motive and they can just make goals for a certain period they're not thinking about i'm going to leave this to my my sons or daughters and and grandsons or granddaughters and therefore they
don't have the same kind of long-term view i like that a lot one of the biggest sort of like structural problems that i think of when i think of decisions is the difference in timeline between parties you can think of this as shareholders and ceos but you can also think of this as a mismatch between
politicians and military leaders as an outsider it seems to me that politicians who operate on a four-year election cycle have different more short-sighted timelines and this drives behavior to what extent do you think that's true and how do you think about that i think it's
very true in my own experience separate from politicians you found different parts of the us government the central intelligence agency took a longer-term view they would operate in an area and they would build intelligence networks and capabilities because they were going to be there
forever in some form or fashion the military was typically there for much shorter periods in larger numbers and so the military became convinced they had to do something in relatively short order so we had to come in and because we had mass and expenditure we've got to move fast which
could be weak because the military could be looking at expedience over long term and then the state department had a different view as well and often they had a view that said we're not here to change reality we're here to report it and so those different timelines became at
tension with each other now they could work together they actually could be mutually supportive because they could help each other see a more complete view politicians are the same way i had mayor mike bloomberg one day tell me that he thought that only executives meaning elected mayors
presidents and whatnot are likely to do long-term infrastructure things at the time he was talking about a project to make new york city more resilient against things like hurricane sandy which was a huge expenditure he said legislations or legislatures which thought on a two or four year
cycle had a difficult time making that kind of investment because the payback wouldn't come quickly enough and i think that's true in different versions across many elected officials it's hard for someone as margaret thatcher said when you make a decision you shouldn't be thinking about its
impact tomorrow but the impact 10 years from now and it's hard for an elected official who knows they won't be in office 10 years from now to make that kind of call is it also hard for you as a you know executive or general to make that argument uh to them where you think about
the compromises that you make to have these immediate short-term sort of steps or victories or that might undermine the long-term sort of progress that you actually need to make or distract you from something longer term when you have to take a longer view how do you offer that perspective in a way that people
listen or sort of see it through different eyes yeah i'd start by saying i think the military we we've done it imperfectly the first is because the military has the temptation to have short-term views as well a commander may have a two-year command tour and there's this desire to make certain
improvements or achievements by then and it's hard to take a 10 or 20 year view we think we do but when i'm very honest i think we we don't do it real well and then your really good question about how do you articulate that and tell people well we've got to think 20 or 30 years out on
that because that's how long it will take to create certain entities we sometimes can make that philosophically you know we can rhetorically say we need to do that but know full well that elected officials if they say american forces are going to stay in afghanistan for 20 or 40 or 60
years but that's a really hard sell and that's a hard narrative to make to the american people and so i think that that melding between the military and policy makers has got to be richer and we've got to all be more thoughtful long-term i would argue that probably
after world war ii when we sent american forces back to germany when it was clear that the soviet union was going to be a cold war adversary had we said we are going to be there 70 years from now that the american people probably would have really had a problem with that um and so how do you
[Music] how do you simultaneously be completely honest with what you think the long-term requirement is and yet successful in having your message accepted yeah it sounds like a really tricky thing because there's things that we wouldn't get involved in if we do sort of how long that they
would last and maybe some of those things we should and some of those things we shouldn't uh well i think i tell people with parenthood how often do people come to me and say congratulate us we're going to have a baby and my response is no you're not you're going to have a person
and you're going to have them for at least 18 years and my son i've only got one son he lives next door to me so he's 38. so it's great but it's a relationship that's forever and and thinking about that sometimes is hard totally how would you go about teaching somebody to make decisions
under uncertainty how do you teach soldiers to do that first teach them that certainty is an impossible goal when i was a brand new lieutenant i asked my father how would i know if somebody that i worked for worked for me was going to be a good commander in combat and i asked him how would you tell him
peace time and he says you won't you won't know because people have capabilities or or coping mechanisms that in peacetime look fine that don't play well in war but when you're in combat then i asked him okay when you're in combat how do you know he said some people keep asking for more
information and what they're trying to do is drive uncertainty to zero so that there's really not a question on the right course of action because you know everything but you can't do that it's not achievable and so they become hesitant they become tentative and they become focused on getting more and more
information to to ratchet the uncertainty out of the situation and they don't act and good commanders know when they've got to take a risk there's a certain amount of absolute due diligence you do to get information responsibly but there's a moment in which you have to act either
take advantage of the opportunity or negate the risk and part of that is learned and i think part of that is a person's makeup i think everyone has a relationship with risk and it doesn't really change you may get a little better with a little more experienced but you have a certain
ability to deal with that uncertainty and i think that comes from birth i i think about this in the sense of when do you stop gathering information and i i have sort of a heuristic around this which is called stop flop or no so you stop gathering useful information flop is
your first lost opportunity or you know what to do and at that point you can make a decision i'm wondering if you've developed any heuristics over your career that sort of can guide you and when to decide i've never captured them as clearly as you just did there but my tendency is to make decisions too
quickly i have a tendency to get too little information and shoot from the hip and make a decision and let's go and so what i did learn about myself is i had to bring people around me who were not that way and every once in a while i've been lucky enough to get some people around
me who i say this pejoratively but it's unfair are hand wringers they're always seeing the problem etc and what that does is it gives us a balance because i will sometimes be irresponsibly rapid superficial and if i've got people who want to look under every stone and and sort out
everything we can meet somewhere in the middle they pull me to a reasonable area and i can pull them to where we need to be so i did do that but one thing we do practice that i learned from a mentor of mine and that is sort of phases of decision making there's a phase in which
you gather information and you get inputs from everybody and then there's a point at which you make a decision and he used to very clearly announce and he taught me to do the same phase one and phase two are different phase one i want all your inputs i want this once we've made a decision and
we're in phase two unless you have information that substantively changes our feeling of reality we're in the execute mode and and you're focused and it's not fair to come back and revisit the decision just because you didn't like it unless something real has changed shut up and row yeah i
like that a lot jeff bezos has the disagree and commit it's okay to disagree but you got to commit once we decide which direction we're going in are there types of decisions that you made sort of or that you forced yourself to slow down with more than others
because you're faced with only difficult decisions right you no no easy decision is getting to you and yet you have to make all these decisions how do you decide which ones to make quickly and which ones to take your time with your one technique that's worked very well for me is you start
with what action would need to be executed to be effective and then you back plan and figure out how long it would take to implement that action and so that's your decision point you must make the decision which gives you time to propagate the decision out to everybody
and then time to actually act on it and you go by the point the last possible time you can make that decision and have an effective outcome that's very useful because i mentioned that i tend to make decisions too quickly i find if i go on and say this is when the decision has to be made and there
may be no value in making the decision before that no advantage it doesn't get better so that taught me that i had a lot more time in many cases to gather more information increase my conviction all that kind of thing over the decision uh so so that's kind of number one and
then as soon as i think i know enough and i'm not kidding myself about it you know i tend to make the decision there you know i i had a conversation earlier today with someone about a phenomenon and we've probably all seen someone comes to you and says i think old stan's not performing very well
and i think we may have to let stan go or reassign him but i'm going to wait i'm going to give it three months to to analyze it and you go now what are you going to know three months from now about battle stand that you don't know now and usually the answer is nothing and what could he possibly do
changing his behavior that's realistic in the next three months it would change it and the answer is often well nothing really so you already know the right answer you're just delaying because it's uncomfortable and often i see those tough decisions get delayed just because we don't like
them we don't like to make them yeah that's really interesting right we don't like to deal with the consequences of the decision whether it's a hard conversation with somebody or you know we have to hurt somebody or it's really but they don't get easier they don't tend to get easier with time
they actually get harder exactly and you're better once you know the right answer you're better to act there are no easy decisions in battle troops are often put into moral dilemmas or situations where there is no right answer there's something you can't be
taught is there sort of an experience that comes to mind that you can think of and and how do you assess people's ability to handle that degree of or that type of dilemma surprisingly good shane particularly in professional military forces where people have a fair amount
of experience because most of them will know pretty quickly that there's not a good answer um we would do military operations where you were going to conduct it particularly in the counter-terrorist world in iraq during the the height of the fight 2005 and 6. we were designed to fight at night
but at times the opportunity came during daylight and the only time you could get at the enemy was when you could find him and that was during daylight which was when they wanted to fight and so you have to make these decisions that say okay we are going to give away some of our advantage
because we have to get them while we can and we did some operations that were pretty difficult we lost i remember one instance when we lost a little bird pilot uh actually two in a daylight fire fight using a weapon system that was designed for night and the father of one of the pilots who
was lost had that had a fair question afterwards he said what are you doing having that my son flying that helicopter during daylight and his conditions and our response was that's the only time we could get at the enemy we had to do that and he accepted that you know which is
tough because of the loss but usually i found in the organization if you communicate clearly that this is the rationale that we are using this is why we are doing this that people were remarkably understanding and bought in and sometimes what you do is you help yourself because you make the argument
that says this is why we're doing this and you'll get someone inside the organization who points out there's a better way saying wait a minute we can do this differently and achieve the outcome we need to and the command sort of rises but but i think i was pleasantly pleased
that people were willing to accept really difficult decisions and orders if they understood the purpose clearly is that sort of the commander's intent or is there something deeper to that the commander's intents that's part of it but it's probably better for me to explain commander's intent in the idea that
you have a in a military order you have a what we call a mission statement and it normally says who what when where why and how you're going to do that and it tells an organization this organization will do this on tuesday to accomplish this mission but that's kind of sterile
it's usually a single sentence and what the commander's intent was designed to do was tell everyone in the organization this is what i actually mean and if everything goes to hell as long as we get this done accomplish this outcome that's success and so while i've got a plan that says
we are going to do it this way if the plan falls apart whatever we can do to accomplish this outcome is good and it's letting all of the force into the commander's head understanding what to do and so when the plan goes badly as they invariably do you know and you're picking the pieces
up and adapting everybody can pick up the piece and adapt by themselves they don't need you to tell them exactly what to do i like that because it gives a level of autonomy right if you lose radio contact or you lose something else at least you have you have that next step you know which direction that
you're headed as a commander you you have to make decisions with maps not physical maps but sort of abstractions of reality that have been filtered through a lot of people before it gets to you and the decisions you can make are only as good as the information that you get
how do you make sure you're dealing with reality on the ground to make sure that you're really understanding what's happening yeah this is really important because as you know by the time it gets up to you it's been sort of homogenized to the point where it looks neat and clean and
military units are depicted as symbols on a map and you move military units around and the little symbol doesn't get tired doesn't get frightened you know doesn't suffer casualties but on the ground it's very human and very different than that there are several things first is
experience on the part of the commander having been there having looking at a movement of an organization across a map and you go wait a minute i've made movements like that i know what it does how tiring it is or or difficult the second is staying in communication with people as much as you can listening
you know there's a lot of uh text communication now but there was incredible value in voice communication you could talk to a subordinate and you could tell by the tone of their voice how their morale was whether they were upset whether they were shaky and you could hopefully be a reassuring
voice to them that's hard to do in a in a printed thing finally it's gotten trickier in recent years because we have the ability to get two-dimensional depictions of the battlefield specifically from unmanned aerial vehicles in iraq and afghanistan over every fight
we could have at about ten thousand to twenty thousand feet full motion video so the commander could sit in the the command center and watch from above a movie of what's happening almost like a war game and so you have the tendency to think that you have this god-like perspective
you see all the forces you can move them around like chess pieces if you want because you have the capability the communication to do that what you have to remind yourself we had to keep telling ourselves you're not there you don't know how dark it is how cold it is you don't know you don't hear the
crack of the bullet you're not tired and so don't fall into the self-deception that you have a better understanding of what's happening than they do use that that position and that visibility to gain some perspective but then listen talk do everything else you can and support the
person on the ground because ultimately they do know better they they have a much more visceral feel of what's possible and what isn't and you can help them with a perspective but but you have to defer to them because they have a sense of it i think it's really interesting because we we
think that our perspective is sort of all there is to see and you know the boots on the ground have one perspective the person watching on the video screens have a different perspective and reality is a blending of sort of those two perspectives but whichever perspective you're in is the
one you default to and it's interesting because in a chain of command in a corporation in a government or a military as you go up you tend to have a bigger strategic view and down on the lowest level you tell someone to accomplish something and they go this is really hard
but from here it looks really important so you say shut up and make it happen sometimes you're right sometimes you're not right sometimes it's really not worth it or smart and building trust and building communication all the time so you can get as rich a picture so you don't try
to move chess pieces around when it doesn't make sense or sometimes you have to push organizations to go when they don't want to but but that's critical to have that that connectivity that's richer than just a sterile communication is there an example sort of that comes to mind where
the information you were given and then seeing up close the reality of the situation were just different i mean i can't tell you how many times i would do that i i once went uh out to this small area in afghanistan i say small it was far away from kabul and we've given a strategy out to them that says okay
this is how we're going to deal with the locals and whatnot and i got an email from a young sergeant of sergeant a staff sergeant a squad leader and he sent me this email that says sir with all due respect i don't think you understand what's going on out here and of course as a commander my my
feelings are hurt and whatnot and we got in a helicopter the next day and i said we're going down there we're going to see so we went down to this area and it was outside of kandahar and it was an area that was a pretty tough fight and it was the damnedest thing i've ever seen
in afghanistan there's not a lot of wood to make trellises for grapes and things like that so they do it using mud walls and those mud walls are about six to seven feet high and they pack them together and then the vines of the uh the plant are inside the mud wall and and the uh
the blossoms on the top so what you've created is like suddenly being shrunk down and being into corduroy and you are suddenly in this corduroy landscape for miles literally square miles well think about that in a combat sense you can't see over the walls you could probably raise yourself up and
then somebody shoot your head off instead you're moving in this corridor area that goes maybe a hundred feet before it turns so the enemy if you're it's like fighting in a big maze and the enemy all they have to do is get at one end shoot down it there's nowhere to go and then disappear
and i mean it's extraordinary and then they could put unma or mines and booby traps in that area so you got to be incredibly so i went down to this organization and i said i'm going to spend the day with you so we spent all day going on a combat patrol and i came out of there going
that's that's the most difficult thing i've ever seen tactically and he goes yep we're in there every day sir and you're trying to get us to control this area and it's really hard and he was right and we sat down and we talked and at the end of it i said yeah but i can't take away the requirement we have to
secure this i can't make it easier i can appreciate it but my requirement our requirement strategically is this so we got to get it done so i don't think they were in love with what i said and i certainly did wasn't in love with the situation but the reality was you close the gap
between perceptions and that's so leaders have got to get out sometimes and get on the ground in the corridor and feel it you know understand how hard it is and then sometimes you got to tell people what they don't want to hear but they know you know and that's key do you think it would be
beneficial for politicians to spend some time in uh deployments or in theater and where they're actually getting a different sense i mean it's one thing to sort of like sit in washington or wherever your headquarters is and make decisions that affect people it's another thing to get on the
ground and see it yeah and in in the defense of politicians a lot of them did do that not not all of them by any means and all those press tours though are those like real sort of like engagements it ran the gamut there were people who were battlefield tourists and
they were there to check the block and and tell people they'd been there and there are other people who were literally when they got out there they asked thoughtful questions they focused on it they tried to get as close as they could to the uh to the action and listen to to junior
soldiers so they got a a good view of it it's hard to do usually in compressed trips and when they fly over halfway around the world they're exhausted when they get there so there are challenges but there were a lot who did it very well and i i really admired the effort they put in to try to
to try to really understand because you know the truth is if you sit back in dc and you listen to what the military tells you you know the military god bless us will say what we want to be true it's not that we're lying but we've been given a mission and we desperately want it to be going well and
so there's a tendency to portray it that way and it's better to go everywhere yeah go on the ground and feel it yourself how do you think about the risk of not deciding like not making a decision especially in like a chain of commanding government sort of carries a risk but
people seem to punt on that the people who don't make decisions delay or avoid making the decision the opportunity gets lost but they don't get held to the same standard as other people no they don't um i've described my experience with some bureaucrats when i was in the counter-terrorism world where you had to
go up the chain of command multiple levels sometimes to the white house for permission to do something that was a bit sensitive and you'd get to a decision maker somewhere in route and that decision maker would ask a question like how much wood can a woodchuck chuck and i go what
are you talking about it's got nothing to do with it and they'd say well i need to know that and we'd go back and we'd try to gather that information we'd come back and they would say well the opportunity's gone you know that the intelligence is no longer good and they
would look at me and they go you didn't come prepared but what had happened was they hadn't made a decision to approve it and they hadn't made a decision to disapprove it so their hands were clean they had no responsibility at all now we still failed because we didn't take advantage of the opportunity we in
the aggregate and they were able to push back and say no you didn't come prepared when it wasn't realistic to have come with that kind of information and that's to your point of sometimes not making a decision is making a decision it's creating an outcome but avoiding responsibility for
it and it's pretty common in bureaucracies where people are not incentivized to take risk where people tend to be punished for bad decisions but really not rewarded for good ones or even for contributing to a good one getting made now there are a lot of good people who
don't fall prey to this but there are too many good people who do and so you that's why you'll find in many organizations that have layers a difficulty in getting really important decisions made talk to me a little bit about that asymmetry you just mentioned between sort of um
not getting rewarded for good decisions and being punished for bad decisions and how organizations can go about changing that if you think about any organization that punishes failure whether they do it intentionally or unintentionally the united states army in the period in which i served
was really bad about punishing any mistake by a leader so if a leader made a mistake in their personal lives their conduct even if they're fairly young leader at the time that's a ding on their career that typically ended their upward mobility you think of the navy if if a ship's
captain has a mistake often they pay for it with their career but if you think about where you learn the most you typically learn the most when you've screwed something up really badly and you've gotten scuffed up for it you've lost a lot of money or you've gotten physically hurt or you know if you're young you you do
something really ridiculous and somebody holds you to account for it if you don't get a second chance all that experience is gone now what you don't want to do is create an environment where people feel that they can be negligent or cavalier because it's okay there won't be held to account
but on the other hand i think it's really important to say that if people haven't pushed the bounds a little bit they probably haven't pushed as hard as we want them to so i would say that the military has not been very good about that we have not created an environment and i
see the same thing as civilian corporations i hear leaders say i want people to take more risk i want them push the bounds all the rhetoric that you hear about that but then you ask them to point out the people who've failed significantly and where they are in the company now
and typically there'll be a pause and a silence they might bring up an example of something really small but the reality is people who made big mistakes or push programs that didn't succeed are very rarely rewarded with a significant move forward and so everybody in the organization watches that
everyone goes to school on it and if you are safe and you don't make any mistakes it's possible to to rise up and that that's a negative message in itself because the safe sort of bureaucrat is rewarded when someone who pushes harder often is not that's a really interesting point i'm curious when
you're under stress what what do you tell yourself what does that internal monologue sound like i want to say its voices say panic right away now uh typically what i tried to do when i met my best i have to step back and say okay what is the problem i'm faced with and what is
the outcome that i'm trying to achieve because you can sort of drown out some of the noise around it if you can focus on that and say what we really have to do is this and achieve this particular outcome and then i try to think okay what's governing my decision here and i think
it should be two things i think it should be my values am i sticking to my values so i don't drift off those and two am i making a probability based decision because i can't make a perfect decision i'm not smart enough to do that but i can make a decision that is reasonable in judging the probability
and if i get those two things right something that has a reasonable chance of success and reflects my values then i'm probably dealing with the crisis and can i communicate that clearly to my team can i give them the the kind of atmosphere that reassures them can i show clear confidence i can
absolutely communicate this is a tough moment it is a time for everybody to be focused but not a time for panic because i haven't seen any situations where panic contributes to the the good outcome so you're trying to create the environment create confidence focus people on that
make a clear decision now here's the the out the thing about the outcome it may come out wrong and just because you got it wrong or you get a bad outcome doesn't mean the decision was bad you can make the best possible decision and bad luck or randomness similarly you
can make a stupid decision get a good outcome and convince yourself you're a genius when you're not and so as you come through that it's really important to come back and not not reinforce bad habits just because you lucked out because the organization is always going to school on what you do
they are modeling your behavior they are emulating you and if you do things the wrong way even process wise or interpersonally all those things become reflected in young leaders once when i joined a battalion when i was a captain all the lieutenants ran around with their t-shirts on backwards
under their blouse and i thought i saw the first couple guys and i said these guys get up early in the morning they need to pay a little more attention and then i saw most of the lieutenants were doing it and none of the captains were one rank up and so finally i had to ask okay what's
up with this well the battalion commander was a very charismatic guy and he told people that in vietnam they wore their t-shirts on backwards so less of their skin showed and the vietcom couldn't see it as easily and wouldn't kill and i thought that was questionable but anyway he was this
charismatic leader who pushed it out and that same charismatic leader later got himself in significant trouble for his personal conduct and he deserved to get in significant trouble for his personal conduct but he had created this cadre of younger leaders that he'd influenced tremendously
and so it became in my view a a pretty dangerous situation where they could be led into thinking this this person we admire so much but shows this does that mean that's okay and the answer is no you've said that military leadership is easier than civilian leadership i'm curious as to what
variables go through your mind when you said that and why you think that a lot of people think civilian leadership is easier because you don't have to wear uniforms it's not life or death and you can give people more money and so it's easier but i will argue
almost for all of those reasons it's much harder the military has a very clear culture you wear your rank and your resume on your uniform people can see where you've been what you've done you can wrap yourself very clearly in the flag if the reason for the military's existence and the mission is
clearly stated it sometimes gets confused but the basic premise is very good military leaders don't have any money to distribute and that's an advantage because everybody says that yearly bonuses motivate people and i would argue not really they may be a requirement now because
they're an expectation but intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic things like and everybody likes their bonus until they find out their desk mate got just a little more and then suddenly the bonus becomes an item of dissatisfaction and so civilian leaders have got to navigate a
bunch of things and then you add on top of that the market the market requiring certain behaviors uh the fact that most civilian corporations don't spend much time on leader development anymore they they've decided that that's an expenditure that is not worth the cost
and so the vast majority of them don't invest there whereas the military for all its weaknesses spends an awful lot of time developing leaders and as i described the military takes very average talent and gets above average performance so i think military leaders actually have a significant advantage
now one thing that civilian leaders can do that's much better is they can make big decisions a military leader in combat can make a big decision but in peace time laws regulations tables of organization equipments really narrow them down to a pretty small area of maneuver space they can train
their unit but they can't do much outside of that a civilian corporation whether it's private or public if the ceo is decisive they can go 180 degrees tomorrow now they may take some scrutiny and pressure on it but they can do it and that's a big advantage yeah that's an
interesting one i hadn't really thought about that how do we develop mental toughness how would you teach somebody to develop mental toughness i think it's in several things i think one of the first things is that you've got to build a sense of who you are and part of that is the
organizational narrative i am a member of this organization i am proud to be that that is important to me i identify with that and they identify with a set of values some of which are associated with the organization some are my personal values those two things together give the
person a sense of who they are um admiral james stockdale was captured and for seven years was held in captivity in hanoi hanoi hilton and he was tortured tremendously and he wrote some interesting things afterward and he won the medal of honor for his conduct there and he wrote that the things which made
him effective in his resistance to that pressure because he couldn't stop the torture he couldn't stop anything else was his grounding in his faith and philosophy the study he'd done in philosophy because he gave him a sense of identity and it gave him a sense of what's truly important in life and was
was more important than his physical well-being at the moment or his ability to control the environment which he couldn't but instead it gave him this sense of confidence and purpose i would say as a foundation upon which he stood and he found prisoners who didn't have that
very very vulnerable and so i would say that when we talk about ourselves as leaders if we can ground ourselves in who we are if we identify ourselves only with our rank or our position or our popularity or any of those things as soon as the wind blows hard or we get toppled we're in a bad way
but if we are much more careful or tightly moored to things which can't be taken away from us our integrity our sense of commitment to others no matter when you start to lose those other things you aren't threatened there's there's you there that you can fall back on
you mentioned uh stockdale you're an advocate of studying history what are some of the important lessons that you've learned from studying history and how have you applied them yeah there are a bunch of them one is that leaders are important but the sun doesn't rise and set on leaders great
men are great women you know we had this tendency for many years to put our leaders on pedestals and those people we admired we admired completely you know they were perfect in every way and of course none were and so we're going to an age now where we find the fault in everyone and we get
very disappointed when we find out that george washington owned slaves and didn't free his slaves when he died we get very disappointed with other iconic leaders woodrow wilson was a raging racist and yet he did much good for the nation and so i think one of the first things i've
learned from leaders is don't expect perfection expect humanity because if you expect perfection and you you put your leaders on a pedestal but you know you're not perfect then that gives you an excuse for saying well i can't be abraham lincoln so i'm just going to be lousy because it's unattainable for me
to be a great leader so i'm not going to bother well in reality nobody is 10 feet tall so that means that all of us can be taller than we are if we hold ourselves to that standard so that's sort of the first one the second is you've got to commit yourself to something and we talked about being
moored in values but commit yourself to a cause or an organization or to people and sometimes to all of those things and your commitment's got to be real if it's if it's not more than you your personal wealth or your personal ambition or any of those if it doesn't have more to it
then there's not much there there there's there's always going to be this fragility and i also would argue that if you really want to be rich or you really want to be famous or you really want to be senior all of those things are are pretty attainable but you can get
there and find out if that's is that all there is there's just not it is not enough to have money it is not enough to have rank or something because it's empty and i know that sounds people say well you know at my age that's easy to say but the reality is that my age it is easy to say because
i've seen both sides of it and i would tell you what's most important in life is not the extrinsic things it is the intrinsic things it's how you feel about yourself it's how my granddaughters think of me matters a lot to me and so you got to figure those measures that are real for you
and focus on them the idea is to turn our future hindsight into our current foresight well said are there particular history books that have influenced you more than others you know it's interesting i i read a lot and i read history almost exclusively only occasionally do i read
fiction i've just finished reading carl sandberg's biography of abraham lincoln and it's funny i've been teaching abraham lincoln in our course at yale for 12 years and i i know a fair amount about abraham lincoln like most people do uh but i went back and read and carl
sandberg wrote in the 1920s this monumental set going through lincoln and he wrote in a way that we wouldn't write today he writes like a poet and he he describes things and he describes lincoln in a depth and so what i'd say is when you get a chance to study somebody beyond the wikipedia page
who what when where why all right that's that's interesting it doesn't tell you the person and often it's incorrect and sandberg may be obviously a little out of his time now but it gives you a sense of the man in a way that i think most books can't and so i think sometimes going back to read
those kinds of accounts or read what the person wrote themselves in their letters or diaries can give you a humanity that it's hard to catch otherwise so i'm really into reading those i'm not a big military historian people expect me to i like to read books about the building of the
the hoover dam and stuff like that because i like big projects that took a lot of people cooperating to get them done and the hard parts of them you sort of mentioned perfection and humanity within the last two answers and it reminds me that we're so focused today on that perfection that if we find a
blemish with somebody we sort of dismiss them outright it's like we can learn nothing from them because they're not perfect is there a way that we can get around that like mentally trick ourselves you know with my kids i try to teach them i'm like you're like sherlock holmes
right you meet somebody you're a detective and your goal is to learn something from everybody because everybody knows something you don't but as adults we tend to and i get this all the time right we'll include a link in our newsletter that's uh by somebody that's done something in
the past and i'll inevitably get a thousand replies on sunday saying uh you know i don't trust you anymore this is crazy like what are you doing why are you promoting this person and it's like well you didn't you didn't hear the idea that was in there you didn't actually read the article you didn't take
anything away from it is there a way that we can change that for society or go about doing that better i think it's a question of maturity i'll get this wrong but if i remember correctly the scottish poet robert burns had a problematic personal life and frederick douglass once described
the poet and he said you know if we can't look at someone and take the good and discard the bad then we never get to get all the good that's in all the people who are huge flawed humans my personal journey most uh viscerally has been with robert e lee i live about a hundred feet from the
the house robert e lee grew up in and i went to washington high school i lived in lee barracks at west point i went to the same college as robert e lee and then i served in the u.s military same one that robert e lee spent 31 years in and he was a very effective soldier and
in by most respects a very admirable person in 1861 he made the decision to join first the state of virginia and then the confederacy and he spent the next four years trying to destroy the nation that he had been he had sworn his allegiance to and in fact no commander in history has killed more american
soldiers united states soldiers than robert e lee and so obviously on the one hand i should hate the person who opposed the nation that i've sworn my allegiance to i should hate the slave owner as he was i should hate the person that did all those things at the same time there were so many
things about his character and his personality and his service before that that i can't hate and so where i've arrived at robert e lee is that he's a human being he's flawed he's like me there were many things incredibly admirable about admirable about him but
on the biggest decision of his life he was wrong he literally got to the fork in the road and went the wrong way and so i'm not prepared to throw him on the ash heap of history and say he's an evil person i'm prepared to say he was a person who was wrong and i know a lot of people have been
wrong about a lot of things to include me and so i think what we've got to do is mature as a society and decide at which point a person can still be studied or admired for the good parts while realistically being judged for those things that they they weren't good on
it's interesting especially in the context of this and i don't know if there's a movement with robert e lee but there seems to be a lot of movements to erase people like this from history where we rename the high school we rename the streets we want to forget that this happened what do you see as
the consequences to that yeah i i've got mixed feelings on it because on the one hand i think the idea of confederate statues around because many of them were placed in a period in which the people who placed them were trying to make a statement about white supremacy in the south there was a very
clear lost cause narrative to them and so at that point i think many of the memories of people like robert e lee and other confederate leaders were being leveraged to make a different point on white supremacy and i don't support that i i find that abhorrent at the same time i think that when we
overreact and we say that suddenly we go from this adoration of someone to this just hatred blind hatred of them we we confuse ourselves what we hate is slavery and what we hate is the confederacy trying to destroy the united states of america and we hate the idea and the
acts surrounding that and we should and so when i think of an african-american in a small southern town having to walk by the statue of a confederate soldier into the courthouse to seek some kind of legal address it's a conflicted message and for the many years in which we have allowed that to
to sort of send a message of hey african-american the whites are in charge here that's completely wrong at the same time not every soldier who fought the confederacy thought of themselves as a racist or owned slaves the vast majority didn't and so if we're unable to take a nuanced
view of history then everything is binary everything's right wrong black or white and i don't think that's any history i'm aware of a reality i'm aware of so this is where we've got to get to maturity i think i like the concept of maturity how would you go about teaching someone self-discipline
is that something we're born with or something that can be instilled like the military through discipline like through just through structure or is it something that we can do will ourselves to yeah i think that it is something that can be taught you know i joke with people i still fold
my underwear in my drawer at home and people laugh at that my wife laughs at that and says why do you do that i said because they told me to do that at west point and so i still do it because that's the right thing to do um admiral bill mcraven taught us to make our bed every morning
and i've been doing that for years but he's exactly right there are there are habits you form that are good habits i exercise every day not just because i should but because it's habitual for me if i don't something feels wrong if you are kind to people by habit it's
a good habit and i think all of those things of discipline are really good habits that you hold yourself to expectations standards whatever it is i think organizations can have them but we as individuals and i do think you can teach them to people i know that in the military we take
people from all over society different parts and you put them through this series of training events and a lifestyle that forces them to certain behaviors and they may not love it at first but they start to stand straighter they start to fold their underwear they start to do the right things and treat people
and for the vast majority it has a very good effect so i think that those things we can do and in some ways i would argue in today's society we've gone a little bit lacks there we've said that everybody can act any way you want to act and it's your right to do that because
you know nobody should tell you what to do i don't think that's right i think there should be norms in society that say you don't act outside of these bounds because we won't have it you don't yell fire in a crowded restaurant you know a crowded theater you don't do certain things because we
society say that people doing that are outside the bounds of what we can accept in society because it'll be bad for everyone now how tight that is it's a point of argument but i think there should be self-discipline in enforced by ourselves first and foremost and then society
should expect us to have it as well i like the idea of sort of rituals and habits and environment encouraging or enforcing self-discipline too like you said you get up every morning you make your bed that becomes a ritual for you it's how you start your day and then that ritual takes takes
hold you know at the start you have to put a lot of effort and energy into it but as the weeks sort of turn into months and months turn into years you don't even think about it anymore it's just this unconscious action exactly i think being a good citizen is often a habit you you establish
certain habits that you do for society for other people and you just start to think that they are automatic and that's good yeah how would you assess the judgment of somebody else in terms of sort of a civilian organization or even a military with somebody who had a lot of
decision-making authority the first thing to do is remember that they are making judgments in the context in which they operate and unless i'm in that context or incredibly informed about it i'm a little bit careful on making judgments because if you haven't stood in somebody's shoes
it's easy to to criticize from afar so that's the first one but i would go back to what i said earlier if if someone is making decisions with the right values and a reasonable probability-based assessment of what they think the outcome will be meaning was there a reasonable chance that the
decision they made would come out right and if those two things line up i'm okay with it and so when a president or a business leader makes a decision if they're if they're in the bounds of acceptability and those two i'm okay with that i mean i sometimes i wish there was a different outcome but
but to me that's good enough there's sort of like an axiom in clinical psychology which is everybody's behavior makes sense from their point of view so if you understand their point of view like they're not doing anything intentionally to hurt other people or themselves or
but you know they're they're processing different information or have access to different information so i like the idea of putting yourself in their shoes too they should see that first this is what is so noteworthy in today's society though because you know it really
in we were fighting al qaeda in iraq uh in the the tough years of the war and rather than hate the al-qaeda operatives because they were bloodthirsty and and they would do horrible things you had to step back and say if i'd had their life journey and their perspective i might very well
have the exact same conclusions and activities as they did and that gets you back and say just because i think differently doesn't make me right and then wrong and that's very important we're in a critical time in our nation i would argue around the world where disinformation
is so important because what it is doing is it's impacting people's perspective in a skewed way if people tell you white is black up is down long enough and you start to believe that that's correct suddenly your perspective may be rational but it's improperly informed and so it's been based on facts that
aren't facts and so you've reached conclusions that aren't effective or aren't good conclusions that's very dangerous because we're in an era now where disinformation it's not more powerful than it was in the past but it's more easy to distribute and so information technology makes it
it amplifies its effect and that is dangerous because rational people will do irrational things it's sort of a good segue into the next question which is i used to work in cyber security and i always wondered why the budgets were so skewed towards physical weapons like ships and planes when the next war is
clearly likely to be a cyber war there seems to be a structural allocation problem what's going on behind the scenes here that keeps us anchored to the past fighting the last war and not moving forward into the future yeah shane i think it's several things and i agree with you
and in fact the next war may well be won or lost before people actually realize it's on maybe so fast that that's occurred i think first is there's a natural constitu constituency for stuff uh aircraft carriers tanks planes all those kinds of things there's defense industries that make money doing it
there's a certain familiarity to it if you don't have enough of these things you worry that you don't have enough and the people making most of the decisions are my generation generally and so we didn't grow up with cyber we're late comers to having any appreciation for it
so i think that there's that those habits that way and then it's hard to get your mind around cyber because you can't touch it as easily you can't count it you don't we keep so much of it secret we don't know how strong the united states is with cyber or not and so because we can't define the next war
clearly it's hard to do war games or equivalent that show people what could or or will happen and so as a consequence we under invest and i think that we also under-appreciate our vulnerability we're the most connected society in the history of man i joke i bought a new refrigerator not
long ago and it's connected to wi-fi yeah and i go why why does my refrigerator was he gonna send me an email what but the point is there are so many entry points now to the networks that they people don't opponents don't have to go after fort knox or or defense department they
can do bank shots into things they can hit power they can hit confidence they can hit bank there's so many things to hit that we are a target waiting to be struck and so as a consequence what we really need to do is take a look at our defense and then have an overwhelming
uh offensive capability that can target nation states now that doesn't solve the non-state actors who can't be deterred as easily but we've got to be if we're not at parity and above we're we're just extraordinarily vulnerable it's interesting you mentioned nation states and non-nation states it used to
be we'd have to worry about nation states because they could afford the physical infrastructure the ships the missiles the bombs all of that stuff but now you have these loosely coupled groups of people that can cause arguably as much if not more damage that you never had to consider before in
fact in some ways if you think about the challenge to consumer packaged goods you have companies that used to make this range of products and they sold them and then you start to have a bunch of garage startups that go with niche organic graham crackers or you name it
and they're they're only going after a small part of the market and they're not coordinated but there's a pr a school of piranha each of which is doing this and they go after the consumer package goods and they take away the high market high margin part of the business and they
leave people they leave the big ones the traditional ones which are hard to fend off much smaller ability to be viable and you take that to military we can have countless opponents and they don't all have to be coordinated they just have to share a general common intent to do us harm
which makes them more difficult because you have to defeat each one not you can't defeat them as a network and that's uh i think that's the future if you were to allocate the budget today and talent so it's budget and talent across the armed forces how would you think about doing that knowing what you
know now yeah talent is by far the biggest one and that's where you have to invest so you've got to invest in the people part and you've gotta i would allocate a tremendous amount on an ability to win an information war and i can't say exactly how many dollars or whatever but
essentially it would be a blank check and i would change how we get the talent because i think there's this huge pool of talent in america who would like to support the us government we make it really hard to you know to come in to support uh either department of defense or other parts of our cyber defense
it's kind of a hard road to get in there you don't make much money there's a lot of constraints and so there's a lot of negatives there's a huge positive because people derive a lot of satisfaction but i think we're going to have to meld this we're going to have to meld it so that people
with those unique skills can be who they are in support of the larger effort without having to be sergeant x or corporal y or you know depart department of defense civilian switching gears a little bit you're famous for your one meal a day thing it gets a lot of attention i
listen to a lot of interviews with you uh and i have a different question about it than i think i've heard you've been asked before so i'm curious as to what impact that you think that had on the people who worked for you yeah i think it's it was a two-edged sword the people who were on my personal staff
you know we you know during the war we called it the pain train um there was a pressure there because i i eat one meal a day and so during those other meal periods i typically don't stop and make sure they all go to lunch or breakfast or whatever i'm tending to be moving i don't ever
tell anybody eat one meal a day or because it's not right for many people but i think there's kind of an implied pressure and there's this also this mythology that grew up around it you know that i've only eaten once a week for you know that kind of thing and so people think
if they don't do that that they're letting me down and that that's not the case um so i think that's the effect it had around on the other side of the coin you know there's a value in sort of mythology sometimes because people started thinking you know mcchrystal's some kind of zen warrior
who you know this stoic who eats one meal a day and he's etc he's never slept slept in his life and that's not true but the reality is those things which made me made the people that worked with me intrigued and and in some cases inspired by my commitment um we're helpful
and most leaders have some combination of those things that that help them be a little bit more effective in in leading people what's the greatest misperception that you think other people have about you and who you are there was a period of time when people would say that i was aloof and
an arrogant and if i was arrogant it wasn't because of what they saw because i'm incredibly introverted i mean we did psychological tests and special operations when i was a young officer and i literally pegged the chart on introversion and i remember telling that the psychologist i said well i
assume i'll grow out of that and i'll become an extrovert the guy says no it doesn't work that way you become more of whatever you are you will develop some coping mechanisms which it it won't be as evident to people because you'll learn how to do certain things in some situations
but for me it's um being around people is draining you know i tell people i joke that if i die and go to hell it'll be an endless cocktail party where i got to make small talk and so i think that there's sometimes people will see me and i'm either quiet or aloof and they'll misread
the introversion for something that it's not oh that's that's very perceptive i want to add with sort of uh or end i guess with one one last question which is how do you define success i think it's a question of whether we're talking personal or organizational success i
think if i talk organizational success i got to step back and say okay what are we trying to accomplish if it's a military force we're trying to win a war but everyone within that has they want to survive they protect they may want to be promoted they want to do any number of things so
it's very clear to define at various levels what success looks like the overall mission has to be clearly laid out and said this would be acceptable this is what we want this is what we can live with and somewhere in between that and then at each level you've got to define what success is for
individuals and you've got to think about it because if people aren't getting their success needs met then you're probably not going to get them aligned on what you're trying to do at the individual personal level for me success has evolved over the years i think it was much more
if you'd asked me 30 years ago i'd have said success i'd probably said the first thing it was my career i want to be thought of as a good soldier i didn't have a rank idea but i want to be respected as a good soldier and i would have said my family is very important to me but i may have said that
more because i thought i had to say it than i had thought about it now i'm at a different point in life and what's important to me now is my family and how i interact i have three granddaughters my interaction with those granddaughters is sacred to me um their opinion of me
is very important to me even when i'm gone i want them to be able to look back at what people thought about me and if it's accurate i want them to feel good about it but i also view success as the people i'm around are they succeeding and am i in some way empowering that whether i get credit for
it or not am i giving people opportunities um am i creating an environment which they can can function and be a be successful then that's that feels like a win it's a different set of metrics they're more emotional than when i was younger but they're probably more powerful as well for me [Music] you