The general who led a new kind of warfare to take on Al-Qaeda
WIRED UK MAGAZINE
MARCH 2015
Photo by Chris Crisman
It's 05:45 hours on a dark, cold October morning. Washington, DC is ringed by an orange, pre-dawn light. The city's bureaucrats are asleep. A tall man with grey eyes is sheathed in black running gear and trainers.
His team -- former Navy SEALs and Green Berets who have killed enemy fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan -- are huddled in an open-air rotunda. A five-metre-tall bronze statue, covered in pigeon guano, looms over them. "Our journey starts here, with Thomas Jefferson," says one of his men, addressing 45 business executives -- here from global technology giants such as Seagate, Intuit and Microsoft -- shivering and yawning in the chill of the early morning.
The special-ops atmosphere is a little red meat for the executives, who have journeyed here from across the US to immerse themselves in the retired four-star general's CrossLead training programme, now in its fourth year. McChrystal and his team of former elite military operatives teach executives how to use the same organisational design, social psychology, network theory analysis and communications technology that helped him transform the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and take on Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The pre-dawn, seven-kilometre run (or jog or walk, depending on ability or enthusiasm) around the national monuments is one part of a two-day seminar. It's meant to foster good habits and better health, build fellowship and, most importantly, impart lasting lessons on leadership. After hearing how Jefferson doubled the size of US territory, McChrystal leads a jogging team of 17 people (his jog is your run) to the Washington Monument. Here, with the Sun rising at his back, he could be rallying troops on a battlefield. "The essential man, they called him," McChrystal says to the hushed team encircling him. "He had opportunities to become a dictator. That's what some people wanted. But he said, 'I've grown half blind in service of my country. My title should be Mr President.' Setting a tone. His greatness was not in being president, but setting a tone for the nation."
To hear McChrystal, 60, talk about leadership is like hearing Steve Jobs talk about innovation or Henry Ford talk about productivity. The former general is a warrior and visionary who turned a bulky bureaucracy into a fast-moving force that helped wipe out Al-Qaeda in Iraq and is credited with turning the tide of that war as well as the one in Afghanistan.
It wasn't easy. During his five years commanding JSOC, from 2003 to 2008, his team of spies and black-ops fighters faced the enormous challenge of moving quickly enough against an enemy that used off-the-shelf technology, worked in cells with no hierarchy, and were boosted by a seemingly endless supply of fighters. Waging war against an amorphous enemy in 26 countries (with only two publicly declared) meant teaching a sprawling organisation -- Navy SEALs, Army Deltas, the SAS from the UK and Australia, and the CIA -- to think and act with a single hive mind.
McChrystal's approach relied on a wave of new technologies --
GPS, Predator drones, night-vision goggles, smartphones, fingerprint scanners and video conferencing uplinks straight from raid targets. He dismantled the hierarchy that dominated the military to become, in his words, "like the enemy, decentralised, fast". The result was a force so secretive, lethal and agile, it decisively destroyed Al-Qaeda in Iraq and dealt a significant blow to insurgents in Afghanistan.
Since retiring in June 2010, McChrystal has taken the battle to large corporations. They see a parallel in the threats that coalition forces faced in Iraq to the ones they face every day from lean, scrappy competitors. Threats to today's established companies are asymmetrical too, and require new thinking. Speed to market, new product lifecycles and super-tight margins mean businesses need to be fast, nimble and restructured to enable high-performing teams in different time zones. "Legacy technology companies, the big guys, are all worried about the same thing, the small startup coming out of the dorm room, borne on the latest technology, taking huge swipes at us," says Brad Smith, CEO of software giant Intuit, a CrossLead client. "How do you take a company at scale and move it with the speed of a startup?"
It's not just the threats that are analogous. The communications technology and shared thinking that McChrystal employed militarily makes sense to the Silicon Valley's CEOs. "The tactics they used to accelerate productivity, to improve the communications layer, can be used very effectively in the business world," says Todd Bradley, former head of Hewlett-Packard's printers and PC division, which accounts for $16 billion (£10bn) of HP's revenue. Bradley brought McChrystal's team in to streamline his sales force. "The pace of our industry makes it especially relevant to the tech world, to the pace of change in products, sales force and customers."
“There's this concept of courage. To lead and exemplify it, and they know how to communicate those capabilities and to bring them out in others”
The tech industry has become the biggest convert to CrossLead's approach, accounting for as much as 85 per cent of its clients, says David Silverman, a 38-year-old former Navy SEAL who served under McChrystal. The company has doubled in size each year. It now employs 80 people -- drawn from the military, psychology, social science, motivation specialists, HR, consulting -- providing a hybrid of skills, viewpoints and expertise. On-site engagements last from three months to 18 months, during which time McChrystal's team offers a combination of leadership philosophy, practical advice, executive coaching, systems analysis that mirrors combat targeting analysis and hands-on assessment on how to use technology for internal communication to provide what CrossLead calls "shared consciousness", or thinking as one.
McChrystal's role is to attract clients via talks at events such as TED, as well as offering expertise on the ideals of leadership.
That's why today's run includes stops (and mini lectures) at memorials to the second world war (bringing together bickering nations to defeat a common enemy); Martin Luther King Jr (change through inspiration and leadership); Franklin D Roosevelt (facing fear itself and using technology, in his case fireside radio chats, to rally millions of people).
McChrystal seems particularly fond of George Washington, who, like him, was a lifelong soldier. "When he died, the country asked,
'How do we honour him?'" says McChrystal, with the echo of a man half speaking of his own legacy. "We named a city after him. We built this monument. It was supposed to be elaborate at first, but that's not who he was." With that, he sprints off to a crossing with a red light. "Embrace the risk," he jokes, before leading his fellow runners across.
McChrystal's team works from a first-floor former call centre two blocks from the main drag in Old Town -- the historic centre of suburban Alexandria, Virginia, which is about 11km from DC. The space is lined with glass-walled conference rooms with whiteboards and inspirational slogans on the walls. The main attraction is at the end of the floor -- the Situational Awareness Room (Sar), a mock-up of the general's own Sar at JSOC. Tables are arranged in concentric hexagons, fanning out from a wall of clocks showing local time in various countries, and a dozen flatscreens, similar to the set-up from which the general once called up spooks and fighters in combat zones.
'It's kind of like in a Batman movie," says the general, dressed an hour or so after the run in baggy pleated khakis, a blue shirt and a pair of cross trainers. "But you have to imagine it with the lights down low and a lot of yelling."
McChrystal might be the face of the outfit, but Silverman is the one who started it all with a business plan in the general's living room, in 2011, just weeks after McChrystal retired. Born in California, the son of a Naval aviator, Silverman is CEO of CrossLead and is equal parts military brat, surfer dude and highly focused Valley entrepreneur. "I said to him, 'If you want to make a boatload of money, you want to go into defence contracting, or run for office. I'm pretty sure those options are on the table,'" says Silverman, who displays the energy and physique of a wrestler, has the blond eyebrows of a beach athlete, and wears stars-and-stripes cufflinks. "But I knew he had this internal passion for changing organisations and was amazed when he said, 'Let's do it.'" They began the McChrystal Group, the umbrella company for CrossLead as well as the general's speaking tours, with Silverman as cofounder and CEO.
The Sar is packed and bustling as the executives settle down with coffee and pastries. Today's seminar is a refresher for top clients as well as a pitch to potential new ones. There are top executives from companies such as Microsoft, Intuit, Seagate, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and national security software provider SAP, as well as private equity firms, healthcare companies, oil and gas outfits and startups.
When McChrystal took over JSOC in 2003 -- six months after the invasion of Iraq -- his sole job was to capture or kill high-value targets such as Saddam Hussein, his sons and leaders of the Ba'athist regime. But quickly his mission changed. The period after the invasion gave rise to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which devastated coalition troops with its hit-and-run tactics. JSOC's mission changed to a deadly and frustrating game of finding an enemy that was largely hidden among civilians. "Here we are, we're really good at fighting," he says, "and we're losing."
The military had the best equipment any fighting force had ever had -- technology that lets combatants fly faster, see in the dark and communicate via video uplinks. They had the internet, mobile phones and, for the first time in the history of combat, drones.
They could see in real time what their bombs hit from the air. But they were applying this new technology using worn-out processes. "We had taken technology and applied it to a hierarchical structure that did not work," says McChrystal.
To take out the bad guys, JSOC relied on warfare that had worked for centuries: find, fix, finish, exploit, analyse (a paradigm known as F3EA). The spies on the ground find the enemy. Signals intelligence, somewhere like GCHQ, listen to phone calls and geolocate them; special operations (Navy SEALs or the SAS) finish (capture or kill) and exploit the intelligence found (mobile phones and laptops), sending it back to the intelligence agencies to be analysed. Once that data has been processed, new targets can be found, fixed and neutralised. The loop is supposed to be continuous and ongoing. That's how you smash an enemy and win a war.
But when McChrystal arrived, the groups worked in silos. They didn't share information. They hoarded it. The spooks doing the finding and fixing might pass on their intelligence, or they might not because it could kill off their sources of intelligence and data collection. The special-ops teams didn't know why they hit a particular house and didn't have enough background to know which people were key members of the enemy cells. "The raid force goes on target to a house and is told, 'Pick up Dave,'" says McChrystal. "Dave's not there, but Stan is there. So you leave and come back to base and somebody says to you later, 'Well wait a minute, Stan is Dave's boss.' And you go, 'Well, you didn't tell us that. We didn't know.'"
Worse, the raid teams didn't speak Arabic or Pashto so they couldn't read seized documents. Intelligence, in the form of phones, laptops and documents, was stuffed into a storage room at headquarters until it could be sent to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for analysis. "When I took over, I went into this storeroom in Iraq and there's a huge stack of these plastic bags of documents," says McChrystal, still incredulous at his find. "I said, 'What is that?' They go, 'That's what we've captured and we're going to read them soon.' I said, 'Why don't we read them now?' And they said, 'We don't speak their language, have only got two interpreters and they do it in their spare time.'So stuff just sat there. And intelligence is worse than bananas. It goes bad fast and worthless quickly."
What McChrystal instituted in 2005 helped destroy Al-Qaeda. He started a daily 90-minute video teleconference, through secured satellite uplinks, that was open to anyone who wanted in, from the CIA director in Washington, DC to the Navy SEAL sergeant in theatre. It eventually drew 7,500 people a day -- from the US to Iraq -- so everybody now had a shared understanding of what was going on. He also moved the pilots who flew intelligence aircraft into living quarters near the raid teams who were going on the target. At last they could close the real-time raid loop.
Now, when special forces raided a target they knew the history of the house and everyone in it. They took biometric data (retinal scans and thumbprints) of everybody on target and seized information from phones and laptops and sent it straight to intelligence back at Bagram airfield or cryptographers
at the NSA. "We could exploit the database of a laptop in real time," Silverman says. "We could say 'OK, here's all the things this person might know' and then interrogate them." An hour later they conducted a video conference from an intelligence garage at HQ, presenting their findings to the intelligence team there, across Iraq and back at Langley. "The analysts could point and say,
'Who had that? Where did you find it? What does it mean? You captured Stan, ask him this. He ought to know who and where this guy is,'" McChrystal says.
Special-ops team raids grew from about one every other night, in 2004, to four a night in 2006, according to McChrystal. "We were dropping the throttle and maxing out," Silverman says. "I could hit one target and then bounce to three others that night. We started pressing the fight and changing the environment."
McChrystal had changed JSOC culture from one where knowledge was power to one where sharing is power. In the process, he had given everyone an ownership stake in the results. He had increased productivity -- with lethal effect. His teams called in the air strikes that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notorious head of Al-Qaeda, in Iraq in 2006. (He personally accompanied his men to the bombed-out safehouse near Baqubah where he identified the body.) The next year, JSOC and CIA paramilitary units ran covert raids in tandem with the US's 30,000 troop surge, killing or capturing hundreds of senior Al-Qaeda leaders.
All of which -- the simplifying of complicated tasks, improved communication among far-flung divisions and increased productivity -- resonates with big tech companies that are facing their own insurgencies in marketplaces. "We've been around 35 years and have to adapt constantly," says Mark Whitby, senior vice president of hardware giant Seagate's branded products group, who oversees a sales force of 350 people and splits his time between his home in London and the company's California headquarters. "Our business model is changing rapidly thanks to cloud computing, and the product cycles get faster every day."
Seagate had traditionally worked with the "big iron guys" such as IBM, which brands Seagate drives as its own. But the rise of social media and search meant that it was now selling to Google, Facebook and Alibaba. And those companies' requirements -- running massive server farms -- were far different to what Seagate had done before. "They are much more interested in areas like cost per use, how much energy is this using in my data centre in terms of heat dissipation," Whitby says. "And it's a very different dialogue that we had to learn how to have."
Whitby's group accounted for 15 per cent of the company's $14 billion (£9bn) of annual sales in August 2012. With its business model under pressure, it called in McChrystal's team 18 months ago.
Ryan Faul, CrossLead's director of operations, trouble-shooted with the sales and product units. What he found was a battle between two groups that had different objectives. Seagate's sales team was paid by the number of units they sold. When a client asked for a discount on a large purchase, it seemed like a no-brainer. But the product planning division was in charge of setting prices and growing the company's bottom line, and they baulked.
Laura Maasdam, a Harvard graduate and former US Navy pilot who flew Seahawk rescue helicopters, is an expert on the psychology of decision-making and negotiation tactics. She coached the Seagate executives on how to trust and talk to each other and take their emotions and egos out of their decision-making. As a leadership coach, she asks each executive: why are you here? What are you core values? What are your success metrics? Do they fit the corporate values? "We talk about trust, concrete behaviours and skills they need to incorporate in core principles," she says. "They were able to sit down and decide what was best for the organisation, align their interests. They closed a $20 million deal in six days versus six weeks," says Faul. Shared cultural values are as important to McChrystal's teams as they are to their clients. "We feel aligned with them," Whitby says. "They are capable people who have worked in very difficult situations and they engage quickly and deeply on a personal level."
That internal drive and unwavering commitment is what led Bradley to work with CrossLead when he was at HP, and later at TIBCO Software, where he served as CEO before exiting late last year after it was sold for $4.3 billion. "These guys understand leadership in fast-paced, challenging environments," Bradley says. "But there's this concept of courage.
To lead and exemplify it, and they know how to communicate those capabilities and to bring them out in others."
Shortly after 3pm, the executives at the CrossLead seminar break into teams and retreat to one of several conference rooms.
Once there, Maasdam, Silverman and other CrossLead mentors run them through a role-playing exercise. Each person has to imagine they head a unit McChrystal oversaw -- Navy SEALs, Army Deltas -- or had to work with, such as the US Department of State or the CIA, and create a culture in which they could collaborate.
Maasdam's team works through the exercise, playing out the rivalries between the gung-ho SEALs and Army Deltas (whose primary tasks were to raid and neutralise targets), the State Department (the goal of which in Iraq increasingly became one of nation building) and the CIA (which wanted to withhold
information that could put sources at risk). As they voice their unit's concerns and work together to identify their mindsets, agree on core principles and resolve differences, Robert Mitchell, a doctor with Carolinas HealthCare System, one of the largest healthcare networks in the US, has several breakthrough moments. "I keep shaking my head and thinking our people need these communication skills," says Mitchell, who helps to co-ordinate work among several diverse medical specialties.
Maasdam purses her lips and slowly nods her head. "Exactly," she says to the room. The point is clear: the consultancy's drills aim to help corporate decision-makers visualise the dysfunction within their own network of silos. CrossLead encourages clients to set up some form of Sar inside their operations, to deliver daily or weekly briefings to achieve shared consciousness and encourage buy-in.
Among the company's success stories -- and its first client -- is a business in the gardening sector. Scotts is not the kind of brand you'd associate with high-tech threats and challenges. It's a leader in the turf business, with sales of $3 billion a year internationally. It's been around in one form or another since 1868. Its products, such as Miracle-Gro and Turf Builder Grass Seed, are ubiquitous in DIY stores. It's a hyper-seasonal business:
75 per cent of the company's annual sales happen in the six weeks from mid-March to the beginning of May. So it was a real problem when, in the spring of 2011, a small regional competitor attacked the quality of Scotts' grass seed in a series of damning TV and radio spots, and across social media. "They basically said, 'Scotts is lying, our stuff is cheaper and better,'" says Barry Sanders, the company's COO and president. "And we thought, well, that's cute, but they're not going to keep doing that." But they did. It took Scotts 49 days to respond, during which time sales had eroded. "By the time we responded the damage was done," Sanders says. "We lost a couple of hundred basis points a share. That did not go well with our board. We had not thought through, 'If this type of thing happens, what do we do?'"
The digital media assault challenged Scotts' corporate decision-making process, the speed of which is crucial when a sales season is so short. Management devoted countless meetings to solving the crisis, convening for two hours each week, over seven weeks, to discuss and discard various strategies. "That's a lot of hours," says Will Smith, a 26-year-old CrossLead project manager on the Scotts account. A former PricewaterhouseCoopers strategy consultant for the US Department of Defense, Smith is a cavalry officer in the Army National Guard. "That's hundreds of thousands of dollars in executive pay being wasted as well," he says. "And they're not even fixing the problem."
McChrystal's team put in a system that helped executives make decisions quickly. One of his senior people, John Vines, a retired three-star general and former commander of the US Army's 82nd Airborne division in Afghanistan, joined Scotts' board. "One of the things they encourage is war gaming," Sanders says. "What if the battle doesn't turn out like we thought? What's our contingency plan?"
The company spent $750,000 building a Sar room such as the one at CrossLead (with 18 42-inch flat screens) and 50 mini operations centres in seven counties, to conduct weekly meetings that were open to its 7,500 associates around the world, says Sanders. Now, with regular weekly video conference meetings, drawing 200 top executives, "We have a regular battle rhythm," Sanders says. "I become accessible to everybody and they can say: 'I understand why Sanders is saying this. Next time, I'll make the decision myself.'"
And that, McChrystal believes, is the entire point of CrossLead. "That's what leaders have to learn," he says. "Technology allows people to send a request for every decision to a leader, through emails, mobile phones, texts. And he could make every decision. But he'd be quickly be flooded. And then you say, 'I'm here in the field, I could make a decision just as good as him.' The leader has to be humble enough to know how big his brain is. And if he's any good in his job he will push the great mass of decisions way down."
