Leaders: Myth and Reality, was a bestseller, even before it hit the bookstores. According to Amazon, the book being released today by General Stanley McChrystal (Ret.), former U.S. Navy SEAL Jeff Eggers and former Marine Jason Mangone is already topping the bestseller list for business and organizational learning. The Cipher Brief’s CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly sat down with General McChrystal ahead of the release of the book to talk about what it is that he learned over his decades in public service, and how his experiences changed his definition of a strong leader.
Under/Cover: This new book, called, Leaders, Myth and Reality, is a very different turn for you in terms of how you think about leadership and lessons learned from the past. What inspired you to take on this project?
McChrystal: I had written my memoirs, My Share of The Task, not long after I left the service. It took me two and a half years, and I expected it to be pretty easy because, I've been there. What would I not know about my life? What I found though, was that when we did all of the interviews for it, many of the things I’d remembered one way were completely incomplete. What I mean by that is that I would have given an order, or said something, and then something happened, and I just assumed that I was the reason why it happened. Then, when we were doing interviews [with other people], I found out that there was all of this other activity going on by talented people working behind the scenes, that I never knew about. And that was really what made something happen, what shaped the outcome. So, I realized I had written this play of my life, My Share of The Task, and I wasn't really even the star, I was just a part of it. Then later, when we went on to write Team of Teams, and that was an examination of how teams have to work together. But when we thought about it, after both of those books and my partner Chris Fussell’s One Mission, which delved even deeper, we realized we're missing something. I'd been in a leadership factory my whole life. I’d grown up in an Army family, gone to West Point. The military had focused on leadership, but I realized there was something missing and that we just don't understand leadership clearly. So, to get there, we put the car in reverse, and we went back to first principles and we went back to the first biographer, Plutarch, the Greek biographer and essayist. We didn't know where the book was going to take us. We knew we wanted to look at leaders in history and to figure out what made them leaders. What we found was that there is a mythology about leadership. We think of leadership in one way, but it's not that way. It never has been.
Under/Cover: Simplistic, you mean?
McChrystal: Yes. We think of it very simplistically. We think that if I have a certain number of traits or behaviors, that I'm going to be a good leader; if you give me a list and say “Do this every day, diligently” and you do, that you'll be a good leader. But that's not true in practice. And there are some other myths that contribute to our misperceptions about what leadership is, and those affect almost everything we do, from how we act as leaders, how we hire leaders, select them, elect them, follow them, you name it. This book was a chance to go back to first principles, really delve into it, and see if we could understand the mythology and what to do about it.
Under/Cover: You go through 13 profiles of leaders, which I want to ask about because you chose some very interesting and different people. But before we do that, you mentioned that you realized that, even as a 4-star general, you weren't the center of everything that was happening around you - which, I’m going to be blunt - I think a lot of people think that ego is part of leadership. You must have a strong ego to be a good leader. Did you find that's not true?
McChrystal: We often talk about the servant leader, the humble leader, and about people not liking ego, but actually we do. We celebrate that in CEOs and politicians. People with big egos are actually very successfully in getting themselves into leadership positions. I don't think that makes them the best leaders, but it certainly highlights a difference between what we say and what we actually do. I think ego is important from the standpoint of, you have to have pride in what you do, and support, but I think ego is a double-edged sword and more often, I think it hurts a leader's ability to be as effective as they can be.
Under/Cover: Let's dive right into a couple of the case studies that you talked about and some of the people that you chose to look at for this book. You chose Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, which to me was very interesting, because this is a man that you were tasked to find and kill, take him off the battlefield in Iraq. You described him as a very passionate, motivated leader who was able to raise people to follow him. Why did you choose Zarqawi, and what did you learn from studying his leadership tactics?
McChrystal: I chose him because for a good part of my life, I'd been involved in a struggle against this guy. And at the end of the day, I came to respect him deeply. That didn’t mean I liked him. And we killed him. But the reality is, he was a kid who was born on the wrong side of the tracks in Zarqa, Jordan. He had a tough upbringing and got involved in crime. He was a pretty violent, tough guy. And then he went to Afghanistan, and became enamored by Al-Qaeda’s cause, first with the Mujahideen in the fight against the Soviets, and then with the rise of Al-Qaeda. He came back to Jordan and he wanted to be an insurgent and he got himself thrown into prison. In prison, this guy who had no religious education to speak of, very little other education, found that he could be more pious than other people. He tried to remove the tattoos on his arms with bleach and then he actually took a razorblade that was smuggled into the prison, and cut a tattoo away. It was a sign of his fervent belief, as it was growing in him. But it was an overt sign; every other prisoner saw this, and Zarqawi found that he could be a leader. He found that if he was more disciplined personally, that if he showed this zealot's belief, that others would follow. He came out of prison after five years - the result of a mistake in Jordanian paper work – and he was convinced not only that he wanted to be a terrorist leader, but that he could be. He had this ability to inspire people, not through deep intellect or clever arguments, but strong belief.
Under/Cover: He had a set of values, even if they were different from yours.
McChrystal: Exactly, and that passion burned white-hot and it made people say “If he believes that fervently, there must be something to it.” And that played out when he fought against us in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 when we killed him. He was an extraordinarily effective leader. On the one hand, he was a blood-thirsty psychopath. He actually wielded the blade that beheaded Nicholas Berg, a young American contractor, which was unthinkable. But on the other hand, he was demonstrating that he was willing to do even the most extreme things because he was such a fervent believer. That was very enticing to people who were looking for some kind of leadership. He dressed in all black. He had the persona of a terrorist leader. He was tireless in visiting and communicating with people. So, if you strip away the fact that he was our opponent, and he was trying to push an ideology that we disagreed with, he was a pretty good commander and you have to respect that.
Under/Cover: I think you just laid out as well, why it's so difficult to defeat this ideology that you spent a great deal of your career focused on defeating. Do you worry at all that when you say you ‘respect’ a leader like that, that it will embolden others to follow in his footsteps?
McChrystal: I guess there's always that danger, but the reality is, to deny that you respect them, to denigrate them, to say they weren't good, is not honest. And the second thing is, it causes us to say “Well, they really weren't as good as they were” and they were good in terms of talent, but they were also good in terms of belief. And if you really want to get analytical, what makes me right and him wrong? Why isn't his cause just as righteous as my cause? He's certainly willing to give everything for it. And so, you have to take pause and you have to be respectful of that even if you disagree.
Under/Cover: That's interesting because another person you chose to write about is Robert E. Lee, who I believe is a former hero of yours. I'd like to ask you first, why is he a ‘former’ hero, here is someone who also had a brilliant military career and suffered a devastating defeat. So, you've chosen to write about these people who led, and then in the case of Zarqawi, died, and in the case of Robert E. Lee, suffered the worst defeat possible for a military leader. Why Robert E. Lee? Why was he your hero?
McChrystal: I couldn't write a book on leadership without including Robert E. Lee, because it would be dishonest. For much of my life, he was my hero, probably more than any other.
Under/Cover: Why?
McChrystal: There were an awful lot of parallels. I didn’t have his skill, but I grew up right near where he grew up. He grew up in Old Town, Alexandria. I now live about 100 feet from his boyhood home. It's for sale. I can’t afford it. He grew up the son of ‘Light Horse’ Harry Lee, a civil war leader of tremendous reputation, who was a pretty irresponsible man in his later life. He watched his father be fiscally and otherwise, irresponsible, so he grew up the opposite. He grew up extraordinarily disciplined and extraordinarily focused. And then, in 1825, he went to West Point. When he went to West Point, where I ended up later going to school, he was an extraordinary cadet that his fellow cadets labeled “the Marble Man”. He was one of six cadets to get no demerits in four years.
Under/Cover: Did you do that as well?
McChrystal: I did not. I didn’t go four minutes without getting demerits. Even while Lee was a cadet, in some ways they were admiring this perfect cadet, but the term ‘Marble Man’ was also a little bit of a derisive term, ‘Well there's the Marble Man, he's too perfect for us.’ He went into the army and had a 31-year career in the United States Army, extraordinarily successful. He was highly thought of during the Mexican War as an engineer staff officer for General Winfield Scott. He distinguished himself in a way so that when he came out of the war, he was seen as a rising star of the United States Army. He became the superintendent at West Point. He shaped future classes. So here he is, probably the most respected officer in the United States Army. I went to Washington Lee High School. The Army named a base after Lee. When you go to West Point - it's funny - Benedict Arnold tried to betray West Point and they never mention his name. There are no statues. For Robert E. Lee, however, there are paintings, there are barracks. I lived in Lee barracks for two years at West Point. They never talk about the fact that he betrayed the country. It's just not mentioned. It's known, but not mentioned. So, Robert E. Lee hit that point where he had to make a tough decision. This gets back to a decision I made in the summer 2017, because for 40 years, I had this painting of Robert E. Lee in the office in my house. Actually, it started in our little military quarters and we put it wherever it’d fit. It wasn’t a real painting; my wife had spent 25 bucks for a framed print that had been painted over with clear acrylic to look like it was a painting. And she was very proud of having bought it for me, and I just treasured it because when people came into my house, it sort of symbolized that these are the values that I like. Then in the spring of 2017, after Charlottesville, my wife Annie said, “You've got to get rid of that picture.” And I said, “Wait a minute, you gave this to me. I've had it for 40 years. This means a lot.” She said, “It doesn't mean to other people what it means to you.”
Under/Cover: Maybe that follows another point you make in the book, which is that leaders are not perfect people, and to put them up on pedestals is a mistake; to overlook their shortcomings is a mistake. What lessons we should be taking away on leadership from the current political environment. I know that you intentionally try not to be political and to focus on issues very diligently, and I respect that greatly and which I think is very hard in this political environment. But what lessons can we take away from what's going on right now?
McChrystal: I think we can take several away. The first, is that we talk about a good leader or a bad leader, and I would say that that's a misstatement. Leaders can be good or bad morally, but the real measure is whether they are effective or not. And someone can be a pretty bad person and be very effective as a leader. They can get people to follow them and do things. So, we need to understand first, that just because someone is successful and effective doesn’t mean they're aligned with the values that are important to us. We need to look in the mirror and decide what values are important to us and we need to take action. The other part is, there's this mythology that says that leadership is this thing, this quality, that leaders bring, and they sort of point it at followers, and situations and they change things for the better or for worse, but they change things. I think it's not that. I think it's actually this interaction between the leader, followers, and the context of the situation. And the leadership that emerges is almost like a chemical reaction, producing this outcome. And so, when we think about leadership it means that the leader is a factor, but they may not be the dominant factor. In fact, the best leaders understand that they are part of this equation and therefore they are constantly adapting, which means followers have much more responsibility. We shouldn't go try to find the perfect leader because there are none and then follow them slavishly.
Under/Cover: You’re talking about, and describing, a very different thing from telling people what they want to hear in order to get them to follow you. Do you see that distinction in American politics today?
McChrystal: Well, historically you see it. If you think about it - there a couple of ways to think about leaders - if you have a leader that you elect - let's say, a congressperson or a senator - and you send them to Washington, D.C. and you want them to do exactly what you tell them to do, you don't really need a leader. You just need a telephone line and just pass on the information. Our government is built on representatives where you select someone, you send them forward to get more informed, and then they are supposed to make value-based decisions informed by what you want, but sometimes it may be in opposition to what I want right now, because, I may not know enough. People will get excited about certain things, you know, populations can get inflamed, populace can do that, and we can all rush off in a stupid direction. We need real leaders who sometimes are willing to say, “I know what you want, but this what we need. This is right.” And be willing to look us, the electorate, in the eyes and say, “No, that's not the right thing.” Over time, leaders like that, I think, rise in our stature. It’s political courage. John F. Kennedy wrote the book “Profiles in Courage” about senatorial courage, and we need that desperately. It's hard. It's hard to come about because that leader needs to think about the good of the whole, not always just their current political future or current political popularity.
Under/Cover: In closing, let me ask you what the key lesson that you want people to take away from this book?
McChrystal: It is that leadership is not what we think it is. It is to avoid the temptation to simplify leadership. Don't pull out a management book and see a list of things and say, “I'm going to do those. This is what successful leaders before me did and therefore I'm going to run that play.” That's always wrong. You’ve got to lead from inside, but you lead from inside connecting with those people who are outside. I don't think it's a person, at the end of the day, it's a team. The team is going to win, or the team is going to lose. And so, your job is not to be the leader. You don't stand on a pedestal. The job is to get everybody on the pedestal with you, because at the end of the day, you'll be more successful.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Check out the full conversation on the State Secrets podcast, available here.
