Review: Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World

Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World by Stanley McChrystal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading a book about organization from a General who had to modify his army’s organization to better fight militants in Iraq, you expect to get a lot of military stories. You do here, but not quite the ones I would have expected. I would have thought the stories shared would be mostly combat-related, but there are an interesting variety here. While there are combat stories, most of the “military” stories are about military intelligence. This appears to be where McChrystal feels he had the biggest impact through his “team of teams” approach. There are also plenty of examples from outside of the military, including topics like pilot error and cost/benefit analysis and information sharing in car design. The variety of deeply dissected anecdotes really made this interesting and easy to read. The stories about the war against terrorism provided a bit deeper level of information than I previously understood, so I appreciated that commentary and analysis as well.

If you are looking for a approach to copy, the author admits that you might not find it here. He positions this book as a description of what the US military was able to accomplish, while admitting that you might not be able to duplicate these impacts within your organization. His non-military examples do give hope, though, that his approach could be used.

And what is that approach? There are no checklists of things to do, but it boils down to ensuring that groups get so familiar with each other that they will work together without “friction” slowing things down. He gives examples, for instance having the best of one group taking temporary assignments working within other groups. McChrystal goes through the reasoning behind these actions in detail, which was enjoyable in its organization.

As a book about organizations, I really enjoyed this. As a "how we did this" recent military history book, I also enjoyed this. The voice of the author came through well. The chapters included a wrap-up that summarized the topics covered. On audio, the summaries were narrated by the author, with the bulk of the book read by a professional narrator. The book was well organized. I greatly appreciated the introductory section. Here, McChrystal identified the topics of each chapter, and included a short description of the key anecdotes he would use to illustrate his points. This level of organization was appreciated, and helped me to understand the rough flow of the book right from the beginning.


View all my reviews