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The 20th century was all about hierarchies: if you want to create something, if you want to start a country, create a product, whatever it is. Your goal is to create a highly efficient hierarchical model, scale it, because that's what the competition's doing.
Chris Fussell
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The Defense Department is prone to all of the 'traditional bureaucratic rules,' which is the same thing you'll find in most traditional government systems.
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Special operations are small, highly specialized. They do amazing work when they're put into the fight, but it's a limited resource. And so if we become overly dependent on an organization that's designed for a very specific mission and expect them to solve all problems around the world, you're naturally going to overextend it.
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As the insurgency in Iraq started to grow, we realized this is a connected network of individual actors that can move at light speed.
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When we first met, I was probably six layers down in the military structure, but General McChrystal at that time was a soldier's leader, and he was part of the task force. So everyone developed close relationships.
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As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there's a certain point at which you realize, 'Well, I'm not really on the implementation or execution side - I'm not on the battlefield. I'm an operations person who's overseeing multiple units that are out on the ground doing the job.'
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Bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does.
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The reality, as the battlefield taught us, is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age.
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How often are you really realigning yourselves on strategy? And does it need to be faster, based on how quickly your market actually changes? The answer is usually yes.
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If the most deeply interconnected individuals can exemplify the behaviors that your official top brass sets out, then the rest of the organization will follow suit.
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In 2010, I was an executive officer in the Navy, splitting my time between U.S. headquarters and being deployed to an international location.
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As I found while leading special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the problem is interconnected, your organization must be, as well.
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