Lessons in Leadership from a 4-Star General | Tony Robbins Podcast

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comm slash results schedule that free session today [Music] welcome to the podcast this is Tony Robbins and I'm here with my right arm Mary bee listen we're very excited today because we're going to be digging deep into a subject that I really believe is one of the most important subjects most important skills to be successful business to be successful finance politics parenting life and that is leadership and if you're going to talk about leadership it's I think today one of the biggest challenges is finding really effective leaders the challenges we see in society really come

I think from that foundational challenge so thought about who would be the best human being to go after alive today at least one of the very best who really is a person that emulates leadership in the modern world and that's General Stanley McChrystal and so I'm very excited to have him with us and he's also here with co-author of this book team of teens the new rules of engagement for a complex world The Washington Times said it was required reading for anyone aspiring to 21st century leadership and that's Chris and Chris's US Navy SEAL officer

and I'll have him step in and share a little bit more of his background but if you'll stay with me let me give you a long introduction if I'm a general because who you are and what you've done I think most of the things know but it's pretty quite amazing general McChrystal is the former commander of the International Security Assistance Force he's the commander was the commander of the United States forces in Afghanistan and he's a four-star general whose career in the US Army spanned 34 years Desert Shield the Persian Gulf War war in Iraq

the war in Afghanistan amazing but here's what I'd say about him instead of me former defense secretary Robert Gates described his quote perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat that I've ever met pretty high marks to come from defense secretary he's created to being the man who transformed the Joint Special Forces Operations Command and really created the foundation that allowed us to kill the two most notorious terraces of the 21st century of course about you know bin Laden and also Zaire Carly so in Iraq McChrystal found it wasn't enough to conduct nighttime

raids they needed to tap into the power of information and he broke protocol and brought Outsiders into Special Operations intelligence analysts and they starting nighttime raids weren't 18 times a month they moved up to 300 times a month and the information they gathered was monumental they used that information to capture and kill the top al-qaeda leaders he spent five years in Iraq before it came to top commander in Afghanistan and then he resigned in 2010 so I can't tell you how grateful we are to have you I know today you're you joined the Yale University

faculty teaching course on international relations I've only imagine what those kids get to hear sitting in a class with you and you wrote your memoirs in 2013 my share of the task and of course we're going to talk today about leadership and your book team of teams so thank you for letting me go through this long introduction but you serve deserve it general McChrystal welcome to throw rocks at the podcast and Chris you welcome as well it's an honor to be here thank you so much and Chris can you tell us a little bit about

your background and your relationship with the general start with sure be happy to that's a tough bio to follow but I spent about 15 years in the SEAL Teams joined in 90 and was on active duty until 2012 the majority of that time I served inside of the units that then Lieutenant General McChrystal commanded and for one of those years his last year commanding that the Joint Special Operations units I was his aide to camp so deployed overseas Iraq for your and served in a position that's similar to sort of like a chief of staff

to the function in big enterprise the ident on to to grad school did some study was still inside the service on how these distributed networks were working because that's really one of those fundamental changes that had taken place inside of the Special Operations community went back into you know some battlefield tours the last few years of my career and then 2012 left active duty joined staying here as a partner in McChrystal group and have been here since we spent the last few years working on team of teams and now we're currently wrapping up a follow-up

to that which will come out this spring so it's been a great great run it will be one mission many teams the idea is a team of team sort of shaped a theory of the case on why these changes are so important and there's been a big ask in the market okay well how do we do it and so this is more of a practicum told from my optic as a member of the staff that was able to watch these changes evolve and trying to give business readers a real roadmap that they can apply their

own organizations well and I left that out you guys have formed your consulting for a blue crystal group and I know you advise business leaders and how to really adapt the world we live in today so let's jump in you know you're bringing up modern leadership really you know the world we live in today is like nothing that we've ever experienced in human history because of I think three forces primarily in technology globalization and then social media was just changed countries at this stage the way human beings interact when we think the way we communicate

and the tempo of change that we all know is so fast is only increasing so I really love to hear general crystal your view of kind of the rude awakening I know you had right after 9/11 and wondering if you'd share with us you know how you were raised to be a leader what a leader was supposed to be when he was supposed to do how he or she was supposed to be like and versus how have changing times may be changed what leadership is needed today I know you've talked to the past about kind

of the humiliation style of leadership that you experienced earlier in your career as a ranger and I'd love to know what the antidote to that is or what's most effective today well template Oni thanks for asking I probably hit a unique period because I came into the military I grew up in a military family my father was a soldier my father's father was a soldier my four brothers were soldiers my sister married a soldier I was born in an Army Hospital went largely to Army schools entered West Point at age 17 and 1972 and although

that seems not that long ago in reality that was a very long time back in terms of how things were done and leading because it was really closer the World War two model of military operations and organizations and I think I was true in business as well and so I began my career as a young lieutenant in the Army in 1976 when I graduated and I entered an army that was much closer to the army my father and grandfather had been in then the army I would periods twenty years into my career so I learned

basic leadership skills and many of them were were really good they were a foundation of integrity and lead by example and all of the things that are basic but it was a hierarchical organization there was a boss and a boss's boss and information went that way you could almost describe it as mechanical in nature a big mechanical machine designed to be very efficient and predictable and the idea was that if you had enough efficiency in that operation enough forgiving predictability and you had enough scale that you could make up for a multitude of other weaknesses

and big armies would wrestle each other and they would try to be the most efficient beasts on the field and that was fine and we're really the first 20-plus years of my career I grew up in that environment and I was relatively relatively successful and learned how to operate in that environment and I thought that leaders were commanding control function you got information from across your organization you used your experience and what intellect you had and aided maybe by staff you made decisions and then you directed those decisions down in the organization complied and if

you were a better strategist or decision-maker than your opponent you would win and and so that really went on until about 2003 and I had spent part of my career in parachute infantry units airborne units Partin Rangers and partners Joint Special Operations Command but in 2003 I took command of JSOC as they called it and the main part of our force was in Iraq our biggest problem was in Iraq and that was six months after the initial invasion and this was really the transformative time and experience for me because I brought within all the leadership

I learned the habits the culture some good some not and I became part of a purpose-built Special Operations task force that was designed to go after traditional terrorist networks it was designed to do precision raids fairly slow cadence but with great accuracy of intelligence and great effectiveness on the target and we had this incredible collection of professionals put together to do it and with painstaking accuracy we could perform these really elegant operations and it was designed to go after a pyramid-shaped traditional enemy terrorist network that had a very strong leader and strong internal cohesion and

they also were somewhat mechanical and that's the way traditional terrorist groups were in fact the original al-qaeda that was formed in 1988 in Pakistan it was such an entity but in Iraq in this fall of 2003 we ran into a new beast al Qaeda in Iraq it still had the name al Qaeda which made you think it was going to be traditional and we started to go after it that way what we found is instead of being a 20th or 19th century entity it was a 21st century in today and Tony what you mentioned about

changes al Qaeda in Iraq was as different from traditional al Qaeda as uber is from a traditional bus company it was designed to ride on information technology and when I say design I don't think it was designed by Abu Musab al-zarqawi is the evil genius who put together this concept it came to be that way organically because now social media information systems and globalization were part of the DNA of the people who founded it and so they automatically formed this entity that was more like a constantly changing network without strict doctrine without strict hierarchy without

strict prescriptive procedures but as a result they were constantly adapting and they were constantly able to do what was best at the moment as opposed to what the procedure in the manual said and despite the fact we had more talent we had more weapons we had more in my view everything for the first two and a half years of the fight against this organization we had tremendous problems because they were fast they were lethal they were resilient and they were constantly adapting to a changing environment and we came in almost like a football team with

a set of really good plays and suddenly were to find ourselves on a basketball court and our cleats and our pads were not very helpful so relatively late in my career I'm part of this organization that's elite but has to change to be effective has to change the win and so I I was lucky enough to be a part of this transformation and it changed the way I think about how organizations operate in the environment that you describe but also what leaders have to do in that environment tell me you know you talked about this

that leaders stop you say do you have to stop trying to control everything and I think that's you know the command and control model that pyramid is the traditional way leaders have always thought and even small businesses you know the tendency there is I know the answers I've got to direct this but as you said what happens is the organization gets bigger you just don't have the nimbleness you can't shift and that's why we see the Ebers take over and become valued more than you know hurts or you know you see Airbnb coming along and

you know their valuation and their impact is greater than the Marriott's than the Mary that's got more revenue and it's been around a lot longer as an example so we're living in this world where you have to move from controlling I think you describe this as really being predicting from predicting to reconfigure into this ability to adapt tell me a little bit how you made that transition and what does that really look like today well you are exactly right and the first part about it is a big organization that's faced with this kind of environment

with this kind of competition there's a tendency to think well we now have information technology so we can gather more data we can do better analysis and we can communicate with our organization better than ever so there's this illusion that we actually can command and control and just do it better than before faster and more effectively and that's really really deceptively seductive for many leaders and so we see a lot of organizations try and there's also a human side as well when someone's put in charge of an organization as a leader they think that they

are the best qualified person to make decisions they are going to be held responsible for the outcome so there's a tendency to want to make the decisions that determine it and then there's also this almost a sense of guilt it says if I'm the CEO or if I'm the manager I ought to be making decisions or I'm not doing my job and I ran into all of those in my initial part of my time and Joint Special Operations Command but I found that you just can't win that way in fact what you have to do

is take the tools that typically enable the c-suite or senior leaders to get more information and control you have to turn those back down toward the lower levels of your organization so information conduits don't run up to inform they run both ways but most importantly they run down and so you push information down to levels so people at the edges of your organization are provided context more than ever before we call it shared consciousness they suddenly get the strategic level picture of what the organization's doing as well as what they see in their particular part

and then we say okay we have informs you with this now we want you to act using your best judgement because you're able to do it faster and with more close to the problem accuracy than anybody else it was a major cultural shift for us in JSOC but in companies that's exactly what happens you actually find that by letting go of a lot of control and it's very uncomfortable that you actually get a much better outcome because you're leveraging so much more talent than the small group of people that might be at the apex of

the organization you did something really important to me personally and that is leveraging that control you know a lot of people delegate and they say you know delegation very often is I told them what to do or I told them even the outcome to get and they didn't get it but they never stay connected until the task is done and then they see it failed and blame the person or it succeeded and they take mutual credit but I you know Steve Wynn is a good friend of mine who's built most of Las Vegas and you

know he's told me over and over again the exact same approach is how he's built his businesses he said you know it's got to be this leverage back and forth information back and forth and he looks at the front lines at the place where he understands what's really happening what the customers are clients he shared with me that you know every day they have a meeting and with the whole company they do and what he digs for is information to learn about the customers and clients and he wanders around and has those conversations and he

gave me an example of talking to a bellman he said the bellman have helped them change more processes in the company than anywhere else in the hotels because they know exactly what the experience is of the customer and he said one day this bellman and he's up by the way they're always looking for success stories to tell to build their culture which I want to hear how you build yours because it's a lot more difficult task when bullets are being thrown at you and you're trying to coordinate people that are both in the service and

outside the service and from other countries but his approach is he talks this Delvin he finds out the story of what that's been great today how we serve the customers in this bellman here's a person coming in and this woman her husband are there and she realizes is they're getting in the room that she had forgotten the medication and her husband needs to stay alive he's diabetic so she's freaking out and all of a sudden the bellman hears and says well where do you live he thought he heard they lived in Los Angeles and five

hours from Vegas and she said yeah we live in San Fernando Valley so I have a brother-in-law that lives there why don't I call him and see if he'll drive it out here for you this is the type of decision making that goes there now this all happens within you know 10 hours he gets everything he needs and those stories completely changed the hotel another example that I'd give you because I'd like to hear the examples for your culture building would be dr. David Feinberg who runs and used to run UCLA's medical centers and it's

huge task and his biggest challenge they have the lowest ratings that you could possibly have most people don't go to a hospital and feel like they're taken care of and he got their ratings up within a year that were higher than the Four Seasons Hotel the ritz-carlton in terms of satisfaction did the same thing you did he took information that people didn't realize and pushed it he went down to the base of the business and to the hospital and figured out what could be pushed up and he empowered people to make their own decisions once

they had that shared consciousness and the shared consciousness the theme was treat every person as if it your mother if it was your mother what would you do would you tell him no we won't give you a pass to get a taxi because you don't qualify would you tell them would you make them sit here and wait for four hours you know would you come in and turn the lights on when they're asleep and just dump out the trash and he not only did that but he empowered them and one example he gave me was

an example of a woman who is coming in to have her baby and they they nurse overheard that her mother was dying of cancer in a hospital in San Francisco she called the hospital she arranged a flight and arranged to have the operation done at UCLA so that the mother who was dying would be able to be there to meet her granddaughter before she passed and share that experiences with her mom these types of pushing information both directions and empowering people the base build the greatest organizations in the world your task was a hundred times

more difficult than Chris maybe you can share as well about to hear from both of you on this but most people don't think realize you guys are managing general crystal at one stage here what 22 people in 20 different countries you know you are just managing soldiers who are trained to respond but you're dealing with a new type of soldier with a whole different mentality and you were dealing with people outside the service system these other countries trying to coordinate the political process what was the military process tell us how the hell do you do

that how do you build that culture it's great to share the information push it up and down and get people to make local decisions but how do you get that shared culture how do you get that shared consciousness how do you build trust and faith I think the words that you describe when I read your book within groups you shared one example maybe I can give you this as an example to bounce off of I think you shared one time that you had come up with this incredibly difficult task there were people from 20 countries

involved you have to share information you had to get everybody on board how to build the trust given to the faith if they could win you had to sell you know your superiors on the task and then it didn't work the mission failed so how do you build the trust initially but I'm really insured what do you do after failure to build I know I've said a lot here but maybe we start with how do you build the culture that shared consciousness and then how do you keep it going when you face these incredibly difficult

challenges in the short term look like failure they may just be failure of a battle of an approach but people take it in how do you deal with it yeah boy the Steve Wynn stories are amazing um Tony what my straw or my challenge was I had these wonderfully qualified people talented so I didn't have to teach them how to do their particular functions but it was connecting the functions together because the different counter-terrorist units in our organization you'd think that they're all close friends because they're kind of similar the reality is they're very competitive

people they've got tribal cultures so they don't naturally work well with their other organizations and then you take a step further and you go to the Department of State or the FBI or the CIA and each has its own proud insular culture that doesn't naturally work across lines and there's there's reasons for that they've grown up in it they're proud there's information sharing limitations because of worries about secrecy there's a little bit of their equities every organization wants to be the best and it wants to get credit for win so there's some competitiveness so there

are all these reasons while you think you would have this big synergistic collection that you really don't and so what I found is across the 27 countries we were operating and with all of these different organizations and personalities involved that my requirement was not to push people harder to make them harder my requirement or to make them work harder my requirement was not to teach them how to do their functional job my requirement was to be a connector my requirement was to move around the organization orchestrate conversations create connections much like Steve Windows we did

a daily video teleconference across the entire command and I was really sort of a ringleader for it I didn't make a lot of decisions or give guidance but I would make sure that people across the organization that didn't know each didn't think they had shared equities or connecting because we're trying to defeat a networked enemy you create those connections and it's easy to say on a podcast it's hard to do because people are naturally hesitant and so what we did was we started creating the connections we nurture that we would celebrate successes people would take

risks and somebody from the CIA would give information to one of my units and we would have a success we'd celebrate it but the people who passed information were always a little scared that they might get in trouble or particulate there was a failure something would happen and then you you know you mentioned a case which was seared into my memory we had worked for months to get a strike in against a enemy terrorist leader actually in East Africa and I had to go all the way to the White House for approval and we went

up to the White House and it was politically sensitive it was militarily difficult we got approval and we conducted the operation and in reality at the end of the day what we asked for was not exactly what we needed what we execute what we asked for it it didn't work and so we had all these people up the chain of command to the White House holding their breath and then I had to go okay I've come to you I've asked you to give me the approval to do this you gave it and it didn't work

and so first I had to deal with the lack of calm well certainly some reduction in confidence in my senior leaders in me but then inside the organization I'd asked everybody to take a chance reach out collaborate and we'll have the success and it did and fortunately what happened is of course I tried to communicate study what had happened inform everybody you know tell them where we made mistakes and where we didn't and we got another chance at at about five weeks later and the second time fortunately we succeeded but but it's a competence thing

because people need to be reinforced at what they're doing okay and not just okay that it's expected that's the way you want it to be that's the way you want organizations to operate and that and that's a I'd like to pass it to Chris for a moment to dad in well like like the Wynn example Stan just told us treat everybody out on the battlefield like they're your mother and we'll get along say that because what really did happen was a there was a very relationship-based change all kidding aside that was not a direct quote

but there was a quote along the lines of urine these off these very elite highly tribal small teams as you can well imagine the the word from our leadership was treat other teams as if they were part of your team and for you know someone like myself growing up in the SEAL Teams to here I have to talk with this army unit and this Air Force personal intelligence that's a really big tribal barrier to try to break through and the the message from our leadership where in the past it would have been very transactional you

do this and you do this that's what we were used to hearing when it shifted to treat these other teams as if they're part of your tribe and I'm gonna hold you accountable to that level of connectivity and relationship building that's a whole different way to approach it and coupled with these information flows much like the example you gave Tony in the way that Stan described running the global force you had access to all the information that you could possibly want at a cadence that was faster than al-qaida was moving so there was really no

excuse not to make that cultural shift and if you didn't want to do it you you just couldn't operate in this environment so it really empowered and expected teams to get out in front of that transactional relationship so they there was no excuse to wait for guidance you you had to know enough connect the dots inside of the extended networks that were being built and take action knowing that you know that there's there's risk every time you do that but this is the system that the leadership is building for us and this the risks they

expect us to take so a really really different sort of flipping the the pyramid on set in a way how do you after those situations though how do you rebuild that you know you know I I remember a story I think it was in then team of teams where you talked about general some of the you know you had to put in some rules structures for all these organizations they got these young soldiers coming over wanting to do their duty wanted to you know kill bad guys for the high oh good so to speak and

you know they're living in an environment that's different than any environment that we would traditionally think of as war and you telling people if they can't you know they can't engage people if they don't have a gun and they're in their mind going what are you talking about these people we turn our back they're gonna blow us up so I know there were times many times in which whether you know things didn't work out or there was just general discontent in an environment where people are coming back again and again to her after tour and

but you I read I know it was I read in The Rolling Stones articles where it was where you he described it you went out you got a soldier write to you and talk to you about how you don't care and you run him back immediately and then you showed up and did actually toured with him or I should say went on patrol with him and other members of his team I've heard other people talk about some things that I've read that you know you're the guy that they look over and there's a guy in

the trench on the knee beside them and it's you you know how important is that and how do you rebuild after those failures that's what I'm digging for a little bit cuz yeah everybody deals that you have to deal with it on a life-and-death level but every business deals with failure nobody wants to talk about it everyone's talking about success but I really believe it's how you deal with failure that shapes your destiny you know when people succeed they tend to party when they fail they tend to ponder and out of pondering you to beat

yourself up or you find new answers so how do you rebuild when those situations occur yeah I think it's exactly right and and to go to this story you described what had happened I was in Kabul as the four-star commander and I got an email from a sergeant in an area north of conda har a very difficult area and he basically goes sergeants don't run a lot of emails to four stars that's the world were in today though in general I don't think you understand what's going on here I I know you're giving orders from

there I don't think you understand this war and I thought I did but I got on a helicopter the next day and went down there to join his squad for a combat patrol and it was was amazing because although I've been on a lot of different ops they were operating in an area that was used for vine growing grapes but because there's no wood or not a lot of wood in Afghanistan they use mud walls instead of trellises to hold up the vine so what you get is if you think of corduroy but with the

corduroy bridges 6 feet high you have literally square miles of what consists of a maze of mud-walled areas and they were operating against the Taliban in this area and it was like operating in a rat's maze with incredible danger because the enemy can put your you're stuck going inside these ridges or inside these furrows they can put mines and also they can just turn a corner at the end shoot there's no way go so they're operating in there and I went down and spent an entire day on the combat mission with them at the end

of that day we sat when we talked about the world I explained it from my perspective they explained it from theirs I think I was able to give them a bit of the bigger context of what we were trying to do they were certainly able to give me greater understanding and then I went back to Kabul and about three weeks later I got an email from the same sergeant and he said that I had gone on on the patrol with one of his fire teams a four-man team led by a sergeant and he said sergeant

X had just been killed oh my god quite well so I went right back down again the next day and and went on another combat patrol with him because it you know I wasn't gonna make their combat patrol easier and I wasn't gonna really add to the combat effectiveness of it but I think it was important for them to know that I cared enough it is important periodically to share the hardships and sometimes the danger because you need to both display the empathy but you also need to understand you need to you know walk a

mile in their shoes to understand what it's like you can't make it easier for them but you can certainly convince them that what they're doing matters and that you are willing to take the time to do that and when something fails I think it's the same way so some body or an organization does something and it doesn't come out well they become a little bit of a pariah and you know just suddenly everybody kind of avoids him and doesn't say much to see if they're you know everybody thinks it might be contagious right but but

the reality is the opposite you know it's George Patton said it's not whether you fall it's how how how high you bounce that's really the time when you've got to reach to people and you got to get with gentlemen tell them they're not you know they may have failed but they're not a failure and that's where leadership lies well that's the difference between that and blame okay which is usually when failure happens it goes it really sounds like your model if I was going to grossly simplify it it's moving from command and control to where

the power is is in relationship and you're using having to use technology to do it you can't always be there to touch the guy's shoulder and look them in the eye but in spite of technology you still made a point to do that you know how much of that relationship is built by the code I mean you talked Chris about you know the different tribes these incredible specialist Forces teams for example I know that you know maybe you can share the Ranger code and how that bonds the Rangers and then what becomes the code when

you're trying to bring these tribal groups together I'd love to hear that from the both sure yeah so that I think starting out every all these tribes have their own you know SEAL Teams or the the Pirates of the organization you know don't really pay attention to the rulebook don't even know that one exists you know the Rangers are the ultimate disciplined force the you know everybody has their own various specialty all really good strengths but when you try to smash them together obviously they we were I was bred to think that the Rangers were

sort of an odd cult before I ever even know and they were bred to think the same thing about SEAL Teams right so you just you have all these biases and then we're on the battlefield together and obviously all that all the tension can can begin but the what I really believe happened and what can happen when when leaders approach their organizations with this sort of style saying I understand everybody has their really strong narratives they're they're tribal norms that are incredibly powerful great history and you're doing good things out there in the field whatever

whatever your nesting that must be but we need to tie into a higher level approach that that unifies us so are the story that was told to us every day by our senior leadership was if we don't become a global organization that trust each other and that lives on relationship then we're going to fight a bunch of little wars everyone can pat themselves on their back on the back and we're gonna lose so it suddenly puts you as an individual member of that organization in a black and white sort of decision space where I can

either just think about being a in a seal platoon part of a little Band of Brothers oh and potentially lose or I can overcome these tribal boundaries and buy into this relationship idea and start reaching across into other teams sharing information sharing insights and helping the Ranger unit or the Air Force unit or all the other folks as if they were part of my own team and that doesn't happen overnight there was not an order that came down and said do this it was a constant reminder every day from our leadership to your earlier point

Tony highlighting examples of where this was succeeding that get gave everyone the roadmap to track toward when it came to that cultural change the tactical stuff was going to take care of itself it was that culture shift that was the the critical part Tony can I jump in on priorities a little bit because oh it was something I had to learn when I was a young when I went to West Point I remember they were fanatical about every piece of discipline of your uniform and whatnot and then different parts of my career there were these

rules of the priorities that things you had to do and some of my thought were pretty pointless and some of them were were very good when I got into the Special Operations Command in combat what I felt I learned over time was establish certain priorities within be very flexible on others because if you say everything is important if everything has got to do everything exactly this way then it's hard to tell them what's most important so I remember the organization's wanted to wear different baseball hats at one point and I said knock yourself out they

say well we want to go beards I said great grow beards what but the things and that would earlier in my career that would have been absolute heresy because you never do that right but instead of the things that were very important how they conducted certain operations the speed of the temple where they operated I was absolutely unwavering and so I think what happened was it helped if you can pick certain priorities and make them very clear to everybody but then be willing to say the other things don't matter very much I'm okay if you

blow them off it highlights him and I found particularly with that culture of people it was much appreciated and and turned out to be very effective well what you're really addressing is what small companies and big companies deal with when they talk about how to deal with Millennials because it's a different world it's not it they're not used to being commanded that used to being the center of the focus and perhaps your background if I've heard it accurately is when you're in West Point I heard that you were a person that kind of bucked Authority

right to the edge but knew where to stop is that a fair representation of you at that stage of your life well I'm not sure I do where to stop record I could have done better well it really a dad's night I remember you telling a story somewhere all of the things I was reading where you said you know you one of the ways you'd work to bring everyone together to get that common sense of mission was very often you know in your conversation so these men would be say where were you on 9/11 and

one of the stories you shared was that you said this to this the soldier and he looked up and said I was in the sixth grade you know how dealing with all these different ages and stages how were you able to keep that relationship with them and in spite of the kind of the challenges they're facing cuz in the Rangers you know you the traditional discipline that you're described you guys have a model maybe share that model that no matter what happens you know I'm gonna come for you maybe explain what that did and then

how do you create that with this diversity Krista addressed it a little bit by the higher power but I let me hear your point of view about that yeah I mean in the Rangers tradition we had this wonderful culture of discipline and we had a Ranger creed and a famous line of that and under no circumstances while I leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and that means whether the person is wounded or the person is in fact already dead we are not going to leave you and it's a promise

that every ranger makes to every other ranger it creates this incredible bond between them now one of the things that I found interesting since you mentioned Millennials is as we got into the fight here and things had changed so much from the army of my youth that what we were doing on the battlefield was something I had never done so they were fighting a war you know with the tactics and equipment I just had never done so as I'm dealing with these units out on the battlefield whereas when I was young if the colonel of

the general came around they are sort of this exalted figure that theoretically knew everything and we should just listen to their wisdom actually I didn't have that much wisdom to offer so as I would go around the organization I spent most of my time asking them what are you doing what works what doesn't work what do you need to do more because it was really a classic case of reverse mentoring I had to figure out what they were figuring out I had to help cross level that across the organization interestingly enough I was at first

concern that my ignorance that would be a vulnerability and that people would look at me and say well if you don't know what's going on why you the command in general and that would have been a fair question but that's not the response I got that's not how they seemed to result in it they they seemed to appreciate that I was willing to say I don't know and they seemed to appreciate the respect that you give them when you ask them tell me what works tell me what to do and particularly Millennials seem to do

well with that because you know they're smarter or smarter than us Tony's Chris here I'd give you an example of that as the role that I played on this the senior staff as that aide-de-camp part of it was sort of movement around the battlefield right and also input into these bigger door communication forums so those are always two areas that people say well how'd you know where to go and how how'd you structure agendas for people to talk the because of the interconnectivity that was built inside the organization those things came to us as this

staff it was the only place I've ever worked inside the military where people on the ground you know normally who wants the senior leadership to show up and kind of inspect their area or whatever that was completely reversed we had more requests for visits than we could we could handle so you're always trying to index those against priority areas because people knew if the senior leadership shows up we're gonna have a real honest transparent conversation they're gonna get a better sense of what's going on here and that will affect their strategic decision-making very quickly when

it comes to resource allocation etc those sorts of things and the same thing in these big communication structures the agenda shaped itself because people understood the priorities of the leadership and then they would be the ones reaching up and saying well I need five minutes to talk about this I need 10 minutes to talk about this everyone needs to to read this white paper on what's going on in my sector so people saw this not as a burden but as an avenue to really inform and drive operations on the ground it really I think this

language may come from you general I've read so much and absorb so much that I don't know where the location was but really it sounds like your approach to leadership was so radically different it's based on relationship it's listen learn and then lead and not not as you say not feeling bad about that because how in the world can you possibly not be mentored off instead of mentor down when technology is creating so many specialties if you spend all your time try to understand that you couldn't actually strategically lead but when you look at that

that change when you look at the type of shifting that's happening how do we get people today to have more empathy because really that's what you guys have had you've had more empathy I think you wrote it you know empathy and values don't seem to make it enough boardrooms today you know how you know how do you create that because that's not the picture you think of a General Patton it's not what I think a lot of people think it was a you know a successful general much less a successful CEO and yet the most

powerful ones I found today because the world has changed leadership has to change and that sense of shared values and empathy and the ability to not blame but learn and teach seems to be absolutely critical to be an effective leader today yeah Tony I absolutely believe that's right if you if you think of an organization as a big sort of 19th century sailing ship with sails and rudders and all the different things that have to constantly adjust it because of the wind and the sea and whatnot and you say okay great leader do it and

you expect a person to run around and do these excuses it's impossible and it's even impossible to yell out enough commands the organization's got to do a lot of what they just know is right and so my opinion is what the leader does now is create an environment where people just like Steve Wynn did that that individual felt empowered enough to get his brother-in-law to get the medication and bring it there Steve is smart enough to celebrate that so I think that you have to create an environment where you are admitting that the organization is

a team your role on the team is a facilitator you're not traditionally the person who tells everybody what to do but you're creating an environment where people feel comfortable to do it it's not always going to work and when they make mistakes that's okay but the key thing is the entire organization is is operating and I think that's a big shift from traditional leadership and and I think some of our pressures in society work against this because if you look if you have a CEO and there's something happened in company X down at you know

the edges of the company people are saying CEO did you know that this person of your 50,000 employees did this or didn't do this and if the CEO says no I didn't know that they go why didn't you know that well the reality is we don't want them to always know every detail that's a that's a fool's errand to try to do that but we do want them to know understand and shape the place for the organization because that's how you're going to fix things I'm on the board of an airline and I'm on the

the Safety Committee and safety is not just a checklist to check Safety's of culture where everybody sees that sees things and is constantly adjust to them and I think that's the way leadership is today I you describe that you know you really dr. David Feinberg who ran UCLA he was a psychiatrist and he was running at one plenty psychiatric hospital but he wasn't running or the largest hospital organizations in the world and they all have their own code just like the military write all these short letters he didn't know what 90% of the people were

saying when he first took over but it was this same component of empathy the same component listen and learn he spent the first three months walking around talking to everyone and talking to patients as well as staff and finding out what made him crazy what made him angry what made him hurt what really worked look really didn't and instead of beating up the staff he kept coming up with this empathetic approach of it's your mom and when they failed he brought the failure Forest forth and owned it all unlike you he'd show up there was

a woman who was given an operation with that she was not supposed to have they messed up the paperwork and then when she was supposed to go home she didn't have money for a car and they turned her down for a taxi driver ever you know free taxi pass and so she had enough money getting mostly home now to walk the rest of the way when he found out about this he drove to the woman saw personally apologized brought her back after she she heard the story with all the staff the doctors the nurses everybody

to see what they did what it meant to her what she felt and how to change and so this kind of approach of nurturing a culture I think the language is used in your book was it's less today at leadership about playing chess than it is being a gardener maybe you can clarify what that means to you no that's that's exactly right Tony you know for years I thought that chess master was the best analogy to a successful leader because a chess master controlled 16 chess pieces and moves them and if he's a glitch or

she is a good strategist they win and they are micromanaging each of those chess pieces and when I got into a rack I started that way and then I found out that my opposition al-qaeda in Iraq was not a chess master controlling pieces it was a set of chess pieces that all connected and had relative autonomy so as a consequence there's no way one person can defeat a multiple group like that that's constantly adapting so slowly and I didn't suddenly have revelation on this I'm sort of forced into to learning it I realized that the

gardener is a better analogy for it because if you think what a gardener does a gardener doesn't grow anything only plants can grow things but the garden is critical because the gardener creates the environment the gardener prepares the ground the gardener plants to go out or waterers feeds weeds protects and at the appropriate time harvest and the gardener does it right all those plants can do that concurrently and so suddenly you can scale but the and so the gardener is completely busy it's not this is not a case of empower your subordinates go home and

let me know how it works you're constantly protecting the garden but the gardens plants are able to do it and so I believe it's a it's a less egocentric way of leading it takes a little bit of courage to do it because you're allowing your entities to execute and there's always a chance it's not going to come out they're gonna be how responsible but it's in might be the only way that'll operate in an environment that's changing fast and it also has that the added benefit the people who are doing it with you feel like

they are part owners they don't feel like they are employees of the leader well Tony I might might add Chris Erbe the you know it it's easy to read that especially like a gardener and so listen to the description and think this is a soft approach I I didn't feel like that at all it's an appropriate approach I think for the information age because it allows a leader to set conditions but there was actually a month in my experience and then I think what's going on in progressive organizations there's a truly heightened level of accountability

down into the small teams because you're the senior leadership is saying okay I get it here's what we're trying to accomplish I will tell you everything about that I can about our strategy and review tell me what resources you need tell me what information you tell me what decision authorities you need your level and then go do it and so that's true empowerment empowerment isn't power you the empowerment comes with all this other stuff that makes it possible and then I know I felt it and teams often feel it that's a scary place to be

when you're used to being able to complain about the senior leadership that they didn't get they didn't let you do it they didn't give you the info whatever the case may be suddenly when all that's at your fingertips and you just have to know how to reach into the garden to the extent extend the analogy to make that all happen that can be a frightening place for junior leaders to be it's what they're asking for when you really bring it to bear it takes it's a new muscle for many parts of the organization to get

comfortable careful what you ask for right I read the description and the Rolling Stone article described you general and said that while you were so into that it can connected it and respected you had the with one look the ability to have a man through your eyes without saying a word himself melts that he but they didn't want to disappoint you so I think it's really important Cris to point out but it's not that you don't have strength still it's just that the focus is truly on empowerment and it's a humble approach but it's still

an approach where results are expected I'm nearly had a question for you guys I do hello general look Chris thanks for joining us I have a question for you and I have to say you know you guys talk about you treat every everyone you meet like your mother I think as a young woman and I think this is pretty universal I think you treat every wise man that you meet like your father General McChrystal you just remind me so much in so many ways of my father and I think you know he served in the

Army and he was out by the time I was born but you never know it by the way he ran our household kids I think he would have told you yet six little soldiers I'm not sure if he was he needed your gardener metaphor and I just you know talking about Millennials you and Chris had mentioned you were running around you were a green beret under Jimmy Carter in April of 1980 I've heard you say I wasn't even born yet at that time so I love speaking of two men like you who just offered this

perspective and I think at this time where America is at I find myself as a young woman looking for looking to senior leadership this is a little bit more big picture but general McChrystal in one of your talks you wrote you said we have to look at the hard statements hard statements like I'm America doesn't lead well anymore which means Americans don't leave all anymore which I do not believe and I don't think you do either I was raised to believe this is a great country I think for the first time in my life I

do find myself just just spear full maybe of saying do what what is the state of leadership psyche go to someone like you with history just like we need to learn just that whole top-down mentoring and top up mentoring at this point I think a lot of young people are looking to men like you and saying you've seen it all you see what we haven't seen what is what's a true picture of the America that we live in today and the leaders that America has today yeah add merits great question and of course you make

me feel very old because that's fair last week I had my second granddaughter born so I you know I'm starting to really feel a march of time here no I think your question is really good and let me put it how I think about it this is one guy's opinion you know we were raised with the idea that America is an exceptional place it is you know the the most favorite favorite nation in the world just lucky in many ways and if you look at sort of a sweep of history from World War two on

the baby boomer generation and up to today although we've had a lot of bumps and grinds for sure we've generally gone from this position at the end of World War two where we were 46 percent of the world's gross national product I mean we had this just incredible position in a largely damaged world and so America has had a preeminent position and to be honest to a degree I think and we let it go to our heads a little bit you know as I as I've gone around the world to different places and served and

I've seen opportunities that Americans take for granted that absolutely is not anywhere within reach with people in other countries that are just as good at people as we are just as smart just as values-driven but they just they don't have that opportunity I think that America probably needs to look at itself in the mirror right now and say we nothing about America is automatic God didn't suddenly one day say America this is you are the United States you have great dish you will be a great country it really was a group of people who came

together and created a covenant between themselves to create a nation at great risk and it's significant cost and then our forbearers built it with a lot of flaws over many many years and now instead of us looking and saying wow you know was great it's not great anymore you know who did this to us I think we need to look in the mirror and say okay if it's going to be what we want it to be it's going to but also be what we make it we are going to have to look at each other

at every age in every background and every zip code in America and we're gonna have to say if the United States of America is going to be a good place to live and I'm not talking about international power I'm talking about does it deliver on the hopes and dreams of the people who are Americans then we're gonna have to make that way it's not an automatic thing and so I think our sense of citizenship in the United States works for for many of us probably has eroded a bit and we think that if we pay

our taxes and we vote we've checked the blocks and I would argue no citizenship is also about responsibility for other citizens and so I would say that when I think of America at this time and we feel like maybe we've lost some of our sense of omnipotence around the world and our sense of infallibility well that's okay if it would be better if we approach this with in my view first humility immunity humanity how hard things are but also a sense of resolve and that's where I think leadership comes in - I think leadership shouldn't

call to the the weakest darkest corners of our personality which all of us have shouldn't shouldn't summon in us our fears and it shouldn't it shouldn't play to the petty side that that is in each of us at times instead it should try to pull out of us a sense of hey we can be a little better than we were yesterday we can be better than we think we are we can be as good as people hope will be and I think that's where we have to go and I don't consider that soaring rhetoric I

consider that sort of a practical roll up your sleeves okay if we're gonna fix this it's on and in its own each generation and I certainly my generation should take a lot of responsibility for where we are and where we aren't but your generation right or wrong is going to have your sleeves rolled up and do the same sorry to sort of preach a bit but I feel pretty strongly about that well that's why Mary's with me I want to have perspectives of different generation she's brilliant wait it's at least who's got her own career

and success that she's built but it's great to hear that I'm curious talking about leadership here what one of things that you've talked about a lot is that we have to get more uncomfortable with the unknown I often not often almost always went on teaching people say that the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with not survive but comfortably live with because if you have to be certain about everything your world is limited you're gonna keep doing the same things you've always done in this

certain structure so you've said before the leader isn't good because they're right what makes a leader really great what would be to be crystal clear of a crystal clear excuse me what would be what is what is your definition of leadership today what makes somebody a great leader today you know it's interesting you ask that because when I was a young officer just out of West Point I asked my father who'd spent a career in the military and a lot of time in combat what makes a good commander and he said well in combat I

can tell who's not a good commander and I said okay who's that he said that's the person that keeps asking for more information or intelligence they got to do an operation and they keep asking for intelligence and I said well everybody should want intelligence shouldn't they he says of course it's responsible to want to know as much as you can to mitigate risk but there is a point beyond which you trying to mitigate risk to zero and that's not possible and what happens is people start to do that we see in business all the time

they want to get more information more information and what it does is it delays them from taking action because they want to be sure that there's no risk involved in their decision and as a consequence what happens is they are typically late to when they had to operate so I would say this this uncertainty the thing that's made it so much harder than before as you mentioned at the beginning TVs everything's going so much faster now that the requirement to decide and act has been compressed information does come more quickly but instead of information just

coming more quickly it comes in this avalanche and so the typical decision-maker isn't constrained by a lack of information they're constrained by a lack of ability to digest it make sense of it and act and they can get into analysis paralysis and some people say well no problem because now we've got big data and we've got the computing power to crunch it so we're gonna solve a problem the reality is information is growing faster than our ability to bring data together and so that's gonna be an aid but it's it's actually going to be even

more uncertain in the future because of the speed and the complexity of things you make one point this is it's a really interesting way to look at the you know if you look at small teams inside the Special Operations communities especially it really anywhere in the military that that small unit level and you can see this in sports etc obviously the battlefield is largely on uncertain so you have you have to be comfortable so teams train as a cohesive unit for sometimes years together so that they can step off that helicopter in the middle of

nowhere and they know they can do one thing well it's adapt in the moment because they're in a world of massive uncertainty sometimes but they know they can adapt to whatever the situation presents right so and I I think are the best leaders in our community then adopted that as their own personal behavior and it probably correlates quite closely as you get more senior the uncertainty goes up but those that had developed a real core ability to adapt to the situation were with we're comfortable balancing that risk versus reward in the uncertainties space and it's

really one of the core tenets I've sort of taken away from so this whole this whole adaptability this whole capacity to be resilient seems to be more important than planning today is that true I think that's absolutely true because things are going to change so fast now this Heraclitus said you never step in the same river twice you're not even going to come up with the same solution to a very similar problem twice and haven't come out right so the reality is I think you are going to be in a constant learning constant and adaptation

mode for I think forever yeah I'd say a group that we we worked with a while back it really took this took hold of this as they're sort of structural model one of their senior leaders actually said to us I would put my strategy online on January 1st every year if if I was allowed to because I know my competition would download it and that's what they would do all year they would chase that strategy and I know the strategy's gonna deviate three weeks into the year because something's gonna happen I can pivot my organization

now and adapt throughout the year I don't need this static plan sets a baseline and then I'm gonna move from there yeah I teach you know business people oughta grow their business you know twenty two hundred and fifty percent in a year my promise to them when they come through our five-day immersion programs these these drill camps and one of the things that we have to show these people is having a five-year business plan today as a joke you know seven years ago there wasn't an iPhone and you know you think about how our lives

change in such a short period of time I also talked with Ray Dalio the number one hedge fund guy in the world manages 165 billion dollars to become a good friend and he was saying Tony you know one of the biggest problems for intelligent people is very often they're terrible investors because they want to before they can make a decision they want to be certain that they understand all the parameters and he said the problem with that the reason they're terrible investors is by the time you know everything about it the opportunity is gone and

so I think that's a it's a good reflection for what's here but let's talk about decision making is that's what makes somebody a great leader to a great extent you know tell me you know in in business you got to make decisions and if you're right or wrong and increases or decreases the amount of money you might lose your business you might lose you know jobs for all the people you're responsible for and yourself those are big secuence is pretty you guys the decisions you make literally are life and death decisions so how should leaders

approach decision-making today when the enormity impact could be so huge and the world is so uncertain how do you how do you get yourself to make those decisions and how do you evaluate whether or not it's gonna be the best decision yeah it's really I start with talking the leaders and saying understand what decisions you should make there's a tendency of the chain of command or the the levels of the organization to make a lot of decisions in reality most of those can be pushed down and so a good senior leader identifies those things that

only they can make or most appropriate for them when you've done that you've typically given yourself a little bit more breathing space and you push down responsibility and ownership to people lower then it at the level I like to say okay first off what is the decision let's define it when does it have to be made what is the cost for making it later as opposed to earlier some summer time sensitive some left so and then say okay what information do I have to have to make that decision and it's never as much as you'd

like to have what do I have to have and then the last part that that people often forget is who are the other stakeholders who ought to have a say in the decision ie it's going to touch them and they can either provide you input so they ought to get a vote or at least be informed of that during the decision-making process if they do all of those kinds of things and often that can happen very very rapidly then they they socialize the decision as they make it then it come tends to come out pretty

well what I find is more most often people issue describe to one a delay a decision long after it is best made and then they also often don't involve the right people involved involved in it and so what happens is they make the decision and then all these people come out of the woodwork and go wait a minute that decision is wrong or you didn't understand the impact and they find implementation but if they've been part of the process of been consulted it becomes a different game they're there in the game with you you know

I'm privileged at this stage of my life I've grown Mike but he used to wear I have 31 companies we do about 5 billion in sales we have 1200 employees in seven different industries I used to struggle with one little organization with 10 or 15 people and it's because I had to make all the decisions so this my listeners know that that's how that's changed in my life and the change went from being an operator to an owner and went from me saying I'm ill and one can do it to really owning the mission and

the vision and being able to connect everyone and push that information down get that those decisions made and seeing that change has been huge how do you do that from a practical perspective I mean you're doing that how do you make sure that that happens when you have a culture as large as the ones that you're managing yeah as you pull yourself up one of the first thing you have to do is that transition to owner from operator I think that's a great description you have to understand that you're not going to touch everything and

don't try to and hopefully you've got the personality at that point and enough experience not to overreact to every crisis if every time something seems to go a little wrong and you want to launch and get personally involved or whatever I think that that that tends to undercut your effectiveness you've got to be able to step back a little bit know that the seas are gonna go up and down the winds gonna blow and you can react in that way I think I have throw him one commented the way that our organization the communication approach

there was driven by our senior leadership force those people there were closest to the problem to think at a at a different level of questions that were asked or unique to the organization I think because the goal was to say I'm gonna sit up here in here to the earlier point about here the the levers that I'm gonna pull or the things that that I'm gonna insist upon you had to be able to think deeply about those at the ground level because you knew that these broad communication structures and you know an operation a typical

question might be well tell us how it went and what you you know what you do any lessons for the team instead the questions that we would get were well should we have done something else how does that connect to our strategy in this region what other teams need to know about what you just learned so not transactional questions very thoughtful questions that you know the first time you were in that environment you would step all over it you know but eventually you'd realize it's not enough just to be a good player I need to

do this and think about the broader organization because that's what I'm going to be questioned on it's it's a network of connections where everyone is sharing as you say the consciousness the awareness of the outcome the purpose and yet everyone has got to solve the problems locally or they don't get solved there's no way to scale that in the world we live in today tell me general your knowing that many people I've talked some people that actually worked with you and I've read everything about you and many people talk about this unbelievable physical regimen this

level of demand that you put on yourself that made you seem almost superhuman to some of those people I understand you sleep for hours and night you'd run if I heard correctly seven hours each day you know you just you to eat one meal a day tell us a little bit about your own physical regiment and do you believe that that gave you more power by demonstrating your own personal control over yourself to be effective and do leaders today in organizations need to show that level of discipline you know no alcohol no goofing off that

kind of thing around their employees or to command respect or is there a different approach or is this just your personal approach I really like to understand yeah now that I get a certain sort of Zen credit for this and the legend always gets bigger the reality was during the fight I was I was there for an extended period I took command for two years in stayed for five in the one command and that was deployed the entire time and so our cycle was I would we would fail early and then go to bed right

a little after dawn and then I would sleep for four hours and then get up and workout and then we'd start the day and fight into the night and so the four hours was based upon our battle rhythm we called it and it was about the the minimum amount of sleep that I could do in function and I don't think it was as much as I should have in fact I'm quite sure it wasn't but it was enough to function and it was just a it was an adaptation to a requirement I I try to

sleep more now although you know you get habits and they stick I tend I've always tended to rise early anyway I work out every day and I started that many many years ago and part of its to be in shape because I like to be in shape but part of it is I do think it's a it's a personal discipline thing it makes you it makes you do something that no matter what happens in the rest of the day I accomplish something that day and it's a sign of self-respect I think as well and it

works very well in the military culture because you're expected to be in shape but as you get older and people typically would make offenses for you if you didn't make as many allowances for yourself they kind of go hey the old man he he pushes himself I appreciate that and then the one meal a day was you know that this is something that I started back about 35 years ago and to be honest I was a lieutenant and I thought I was good I thought I was getting fat and so I just started eating one

meal a day in the evening because it was easier for me I'm not disciplined enough to eat like five small meals like people say you should instead what I do is I don't eat all day and then what I eat dinner it's a monumental affair so you know but but it works for me and it again it's one of those things that's it's almost deferring gratification I get up in the morning I work out I work and then at the end of the day I look forward to slowing down eating relaxing a little bit and

whatever works for individuals I think everybody's got to find their own personal rhythm their personal discipline and it it can be a good signal to the people who work with you if you have the discipline to be kind to people if you have the discipline not to take shortcuts not to do what your subordinates are not allowed to do if you have the discipline to to dress in the way you want them to dress or to and I use that just as whatever it is the people who work with you we're looking they say I

know that Tony could get away with not doing that because he's Tony Robbins but he doesn't he does this because he thinks it's important in signal and I think that's from more probably valuable in the leader because people used to ask me well when do you lead by example and I say every minute of every day couldn't agree more I couldn't agree more I think there's no way I can do what I do people see me get up and do 50 hours in a week and it's not what you do general or I don't have

life and death and bullets coming at me but all I gotta do is keep people's attention which can seem like it's a similar task in a world where you know people won't sit for a three hour movie someone spent 300 million dollars on I'm gonna keep these people for 50 hours in a weekend day and night without the ability to command them it really is about meeting their needs and but it's because I go first I've met that many people the years have see me 5 or 10 years later no I saw you I was

so skeptical my arms are tied this you know at first our to is it but about an hour 12 when you're still up there you're sweating like crazy and the sweat is down literally covering your tie and you're giving every answer your soul I thought you know maybe I could do something this myself so I don't think there's any better way to lead by example you sir they're known for that everywhere the guy that's in the Box all the guy that will show up the guy that will lead by example um tell me you went

through a tough time yeah the Rolling Stone reporter you know travel with you for a month and you know he reported some conversations where you questioned some of your superiors including you know Biden and many people's perception of the President himself and of course you know a few days after that I have my understanding as the president asks you to resign and you did got to be incredibly tough I'd love to hear your perspective on that what you learn from it then what if they should give to someone else because every leader still answers to

someone else it's even if you're the leader of the business you answers that the client can answer to these days to your employees because they're really your partners and it's tough we all have different perspectives so I'd love to understand your kind of recap of what happened there and what you learned from it what you pull from Italy what advice you give to someone else in a similar situation sure I'll start with just the story and then I'll tell you what I learned from it um we were in the second we were in the spring

of 2010 and we were doing a lot of press because the American people's support for the war in Afghanistan is wavering this was it in Europe and so it was determined that we needed to do more of that so that we could we could educate and build support and so I did a bunch of press and the individual that from Rolling Stone who was a freelancer working for Rolling Stone he embedded with us but he wasn't there a month he was actually there about two days about three times so there was really very limited interaction

with it but it was over about a month or six week period and at the end of this we expected I had dealt with him and he couldn't have been more pleasant or more nice at the end of it I thought it was going to be sort of a simple story about how the command group was operating but instead what he had done is he collected a number of comments that he'd heard from members of my staff and whatnot that that he felt represented a locker room attitude or and any heard banter I'm sure what

happened was an article came out of the Rolling Stone magazine in June of 2010 and it sort of created an instant firestorm because it had a and at a very catchy title and the idea was here's this general who in many ways is hard-charging but you know maybe is he and his team are not as respectful as they should be I thought the story was unfair I thought it was incorrect depiction of my team who had been at war together for for many years but but it didn't matter because what happened is it created this

media event or firestorm that put the President of the United States my boss in a tough position so on request I flew back the day after the article came out went to see the Secretary of Defense and then went to see the president and when I went to see the president he asked me what happened you know very good conversation and I told him I really didn't know I hadn't had time to investigate it and whatnot but I offered him my resignation and I told him here's my resignation if you want to accept it I

completely understand if you don't want to accept it want me to go back to Afghanistan I'm happy to do that whatever is gonna work for the war because that's what matters and that's my responsibility as a leader to accept responsibility and so he accepted my resignation and we parted on very amicable terms in whatnot now that was 34 years into my career sorry officer 30 38 years into the time after which I entered West Point so that had been my entire life my entire being and I left the White House and I we drove back

to Fort McNair where my wife was living while I was in Afghanistan and I went into the home because I'd flown all night to get back and then I I came into the home and she was standing there not knowing what was gonna happen and I told her I said it's over yeah my career is done and she had grown up as a child of an army officer and then she'd spent at that point 33 years married to me almost 34 and her life had just been changed and I was the reason and you know

I would have expected most people to look and go oh you got screwed you got a bad deal you know etc etc and she didn't do that she just looked at me and she said good we've always been happy and we always will be an incredible wife you know that's extraordinary it was and she's never wavered from that she's never whisper to my ear you know aren't you mad about this aren't you bitter because one of the things I learned from that moment is you have two choices I could either have spent the next few

years arguing about that and saying I don't think it was fair I think I didn't get a good deal or I could look forward but it takes a lot of energy to be bitter and it takes a lot of time to look back and argue over things that you can't change and instead I made the decision that what I was gonna do was live my life looking forward I was gonna try to conduct myself in a way that anyone who met me who had read that article and known what happened would meet me and they'd

say wow I saw one thing on the story in some of the press but the person I meet that doesn't that doesn't seem the same and then the people who for years had served with me and some of them had invested a lot with me and then suddenly I was I wanted them to see how I behaved and say no I wasn't wrong I didn't put my faith in a relationship with somebody who wasn't who I thought he was he was he is and he will be and so it was very interesting and that was

you know with the help of my wife I made that decision and every day since that and I'm not gonna say this was ever easy because anyone who goes into any kind of failure or controversy it it always stays with you to some degree but it's been remarkably good because you got something forward you're trying to do something and you're not wallowing in pity for yourself you're you're trying to make a difference and and that just it came as an automatic reaction but it turned off we've been probably the most fortunate decision I've ever made

general you you you've led probably even more I don't know if I could say even more in that moment and the way you've lived your life sense I think you could teach not just soldiers now you can teach anyone how to live you know what I believe the most important decision you can make in your life I've always believed it's who you spend time with this who you become will you choose to live with you choose to love but I've done since come to believe that it's the decision to live in a beautiful state not

to suffer no matter what because when you suffer when you beat yourself up when you feel you've had injustice and all those things do happen all that happens as you said when it's something you can't control as you suffer more and suffering baguettes more suffering and the people around you suffer and you made that decision to say I'm gonna live in a beautiful state I'm gonna be the best me I can be no matter what you know even if it rains on my brain even if all hell breaks loose and I say all the things

that we can respect about you the way you're living your life today and since that time and the way you dealt with that at least for me as an individual is incredibly inspiring and I thank you for your example well I've been lucky Tony I mean I've got great friends great comrades now and I yeah I've just been fortunate Chris what would you say is the defining one of the defining qualities of this man who's been a commander for you in the past how would you describe him to the public you've had you know you've

been the right seat to him for quite a long time give us give us your perspective if you would sure yeah you know it going back earlier in the service long for them just known as a phenomenal mentor it should be well respected leader who set an amazing example all that was heightened obviously after 2001 you know the current age just required a different type of leadership and I think you know Stan was the right person at the right time but really under the hood so to speak when you get the inside view what I

take away into my sort of daily view on myself as a leader as a you know father husband you know part of a business etc is the sense of humility that has to grow I think in larger scale as you move up the ranks up the however you want to look at it the more senior you get and this has been my biggest lesson from from working with Stan for all these years then the humility has to be larger than the environment which was where I think most people that's a really hard equation to keep

balanced up because there's so many external forces I didn't realize this until sitting next to us a senior officer and then seeing that environment there's so many forces external to what they can even see that tells them not to act like that and it's it's so easy to make a lot of little misses and and not truly embody this a sense of service servant leadership I think it's so critical especially today so that's been my biggest takeaway you know I'm much earlier in the in the process but I think if you lose track of that

early the problem compounds itself quickly so it's something that whenever I talked to mid or senior level leaders in any environment say look this is something you have to closely monitor as you move up I think leaders could have gotten by without having that humility when people were trained into the command control model but we live in a different age with different human beings who's been trained and think and feel and respond differently you know Harvard did a study with cats where they put him in rooms with vertical lines and what they found was and

they put other cats in one floors lines and that they swapped them two years into their being in those rows they couldn't see the opposite because the brain is stimulated by the way it grows by the way it stimulated so if you see horizontal all the time that's what you're trained to see is the vertical that's all you see and I think today we have to see everything and then they see everything is to enter other people's perspectives and you can't do that if you believe you are the all-knowing answer who's the commander-in-chief of everything

I'm sorry that leads me to an interesting question I know you know mrs. Clinton is a friend of mine mr. Trump is friend of mine I know that ball so it made it very interesting time for me I'm curious what advice you might give and I know you're quite humble but as a leader speaking leader to leader not speaking to the commander-in-chief what would be your advice to president-elect Trump in terms of how to best lead and also maybe how to best interact with the military I'm curious what your views would be because you certainly

have the experience in that area yeah um I kind of watch this but I don't have any political acumen what I would say that the thing that jumps out of me is if I were advising a new administration or anything else the first thing I would do is build a team you know there's a tendency to look at the problems in front of you they might be an economic problem they might be a war they might be Russian hacking or whatever it is and so there's a tendency to look at issue by issue and say

okay how we gonna solve this issue I'm gonna solve that issue and it's sometimes viewed is if you go out and get the right talent build the right cabinet bring in other people that you've put Talent against the problem and then each of these issues will be solved I actually don't think that's right I actually think that if you go back to the idea of the dream team that's always up a mistake to have that view because just putting talent together doesn't equal a good outcome even people with good intentions a lot of talent doesn't

equal a good outcome what I think they ought to be thinking about if I would tell any new administration I would get the key leaders together and I literally some time I said they should go whitewater rafting they are they ought to go together and they shouldn't talk about politics and they shouldn't talk about governance and maybe they take whatever they do and they they camp out at night and they just build relationships so that when it gets hard and it's gonna get hard they suddenly realize they sat across a boat from someone and laughed

and had a good time or they sat across a campfire so there's some kind of sinew to the relationship so when things pull and push it's not transactional when things get that way there's something to fall back on and you know we people say well that's kumbaya training or something like that I would say yeah I think it would be better time spent then almost anything else a team that has to go undergo a tough task could do I love that I think that comes back to what I was asking about earlier I mean one

of the blinds and the ranger promise is no matter what happens no matter what it costs me if you need me I'm coming and that that can only be created very often by going through difficult times together or shared experiences it can't be created by just skillsets and that's that's what most people together and I have not had the privilege of serving my country in this way and being with men that would die for each other but I can only imagine what that bond is really like and how that really is the glue yeah I

would assume that makes everything work well it does you start with values in yourself you have to have self-respect and have core values but then you have to build those bonds with other people whose values you respect and empathize with and you know when you do that exactly as you described its then not transactional it's it's the ability to withstand things and so I think that you know look in the modern environment you know you have a team that forms a government and pretty soon there are press reports about this person doesn't like that person

and whether those stories are true there's any accuracy they're like little fissures in the stone where the water gets in and freezes and starts to create cracks and suddenly you read in the paper that somebody doesn't like you or something and you start to the organization of the team starts to to pull apart and and that's what you got to fight against because it's so much harder today than it used to be in that regard because there's so much there's so many pressures I think that that that is going to be a big requirement this

has been a magnificent time spending with the two of you I feel so grateful and want to thank you both for your service and for the service you've also provide our country but also this service today I think leadership is the most important skill and leaders can be judged not by how their lips move but how their feet move and the way ears that move for three-and-a-half decades plus says a lot about who you are and Chris beside you there over all these years says that as well I just have one final question which is

what's next for you tell us what's your mission today for the two of you and what's the plan for execution no it's it's thanks for asking we've got this company that we are co-owners of McChrystal group and what we do is we work with organizations to deal with this new environment and they can be big companies or they can be small companies and it's leadership advisory because we basically help them face a requirement where a world is in such rapid change they're gonna have to be constantly adapting and yet organizations typically try to get organized

and they very quickly form themselves into silos and and different little tribes getting those those two work together and speed and a constantly changing environment is something that's really got us passionate and so as we worked with corporate partners it's been just extraordinarily rewarding to watch them and some of them have been just extraordinary good in the past butter butter prescient enough to know that they've got to change for the future watch them make those changes yeah it's a really exciting space and there's there's no other environment I'd rather be in because what we're what

we've realized I'm sort of out theory the case as we know for me transitioning out of the military that what we learned there on the battlefield probably is impacting others you know and other in other environments that is far more true than I could have ever imagined and we're seeing it now every day obviously the world is in this stage of just massive disruption will come out of it but what we look like as organizations and how we have to act as leaders is going to be significantly different we're already in the transition so we're

sort of dead center in that it's a lot of it's a lot of fun well excited to have organizations have access to you and I want to recommend team of teams to anyone who's listening and then one final question and I know Mary wanted to ask you I just want to ask you general McChrystal it's been a delight hearing from you and getting to know your essence you know even working alongside Tony has given me an interesting perspective to see men like you and human beings that are tasked with giving advice and with leading other

human beings they sure come under a lot of scrutiny every decision every word that comes out of their mouth and so to have to hear from you and have you go from being you know a guy's name you hear on the news to the essence of a man to cure your principles to hear your values to experience your resolve that you talked about is I just think it's one of the most beautiful gifts that human beings can give another human being to get to know each other and I just I want to ask you what

you hope your legacy would be in the military as a man what you hope people there's some all the things that have been written in comments and stories and glory days at West Point all these things that we can find about you out there what do you hope is the essence that distilled from you the man you are today yeah you know that is a very thoughtful question and you know you think legacies you know win a battle or something that's not really important to me the campaign's that we're a part of the legacy I

really hope less is the people who served alongside me if if asked I would hope that they would say he was somebody I trusted he did as well as he could and then we would see some glimmer of the relationship we had the values we shared not only in them but in the generation ask for them as they pass it on and people might be doing things that we did and building relationships not knowing that that's the way we did it and where it came from but because they think it's the right thing to do

that would be a pretty pretty incredible legacy I I don't kid myself that it's overblown but if you can do that I think you uh you make a difference You certainly have general general Swartz Goff was a friend of mine before he passed and there have been very few into vigils in my life that I could have that level of respect for because they didn't command it by demand they delivered so much value to human beings into their to the culture into their country and you're certainly one of those and Chris want to thank you

for partnering in this process and I hope to have the privilege of meeting you in person again soon and I enjoyed the brief time we had on The Today Show together and I look forward to time in the future with you as well well it was our honor and I really want to thank you thanks Tony thank you guys the Tony Robbins podcast is directed and hosted by Tony Robbins and Mary buchheit Carrie song is our executive producer strategy and distribution by a New York and Tyler Culbertson Jimmy carvajal and Adriel de la tarde our

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