Extreme Ownership by Joko Wilink

Team of teams by Gen. Stan McChrystal

Both of these are required reading for understanding how humans work together.

I think I would add "Team of Teams," co-authored by General Stanley A. McChrystal. It blew my mind when I read it a year ago at how relevant it is to working in tech, and was a fascinating read in improving how folks make decisions in complex environments.

eh,

the book Team of Teams is pretty good for that https://www.amazon.ca/Team-Teams-Rules-Engagement-Complex/dp... when the best of the best is beaten by people that barely know to use guns.

See for example Team of Teams by General Chrystal--which is also a good book about organization/business generally.

Centralized, as opposed to decentralized. I would say these farms/farmers are decentralized. There's no gov agency, with some academia pencil pusher in some removed city overseaing them. They've figured it out. And they will continue to do so.

p.s. Team of Teams (book) does a great job flying to decentralized flag.

One recommendation from a perhaps unexpected quarter for new working styles is Gen. Stan McChrystal's superb book "Team of Teams". It covers his tenure running special forces in Iraq and how he rebuilt his organization into one where decisions were pushed as far to the edges as possible and how he tried to remove himself from as many of the decision making loops as possible.

Another recommended book out of the military is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal.

Seems to me the organization is decentralized, but the CCC is centralized. Sounds military-esque, until you realize that in book "Team of Teams" General McChrystal makes a case of decentralized bottom up faster acting organizations.

Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal.

Fundamentally about being agile, adaptable, transparent, collaborative and decentralised. You could say it's about digital transformation but on a military scale. An excellent companion to some other books mentioned here, such as Deep Work (this book is a constructive counterpoint in many ways), Extreme Ownership, and Ego is the Enemy.

https://mcchrystalgroup.com/teamofteams/

I tried doing starts for the first couple years including during school. I've been personally involved in 5 different startups and after my involvement I conducted research to see if my experience was typical. To make a long story short, all 5 starts I participated in were badly managed to the point of failure and this is typical.

Any promise of eventually being the smarter move due to ownership or profit share is not worth it. Only 1 in 10 startups is likely to exist at the 10 year mark, and the majority of those still won't be well funded or be issuing dividends. Working for a startup is roughly similar to playing the lottery, somebody is going to win and it won't be you.

To your point FAANG companies used to be the worst career option because managerial expectations were impossible, but that ended almost a decade ago. If anything, FAANG companies will likely be among the first to even implement a 30 hour 4 day work week in the next 10 years for the same salary as the 40 hour 5 day work week. It's getting batter to work for an established company, and most of the bad managers that insisted on making the working environment terrible are now running the startups.

After years of research the clearest conclusion about who you should work for should always be answered by who has the best management team. Good managers enable work life balance, compensate above average and rarely dictate how to get things done. They should be more interested in making you valuable than whether you plan to stick around, and all of this is supported by real research into successful management techniques (See books like Good to Great, Team of Teams and The Goal for supporting reference materials).

Complex systems never got any simpler, only more complex.

Certain circles are beginning to realize that the main issues are human and not technological (Lean, Deming, Kaizen, Design thinking, etc).

So there's your answer. Increasing complexity of work, with unchanged or at best slowly increased ability to cope with it.

For a great overview and insight into this shift (and how to tackle it), check out Gen Stanley McChrystal's book, "Team of Teams."

Commanders already have ample opportunity to micro manage. As Stan McChrystal mentions in his book Team of Teams, he was often watching real time video and had real time comms with troops on the ground carrying out ops. He resisted the desire to interject, citing a desire to push as many decisions to the edges of the network.

I don't see AI (at least in it's current form) in a position to make strategic decisions. I see AI increasing the fidelity of and extracting patterns from information flowing through the battle space (or boardroom). So I see the greatest contribution that AI can make at the moment in the OO (Observe, Orient - what do I see and what does it mean) of OODA, with the Decide and Act still firmly the remit of humans.

Ding ding ding.

In fact, if anything, the increasing inequity between management, C-level executives, and employees makes companies even less able to handle the complex systems of the present world, which is only growing in complexity.

The real issues are human, and human problems require improvements in management, leadership, internal systems, and knowledge and understanding. When rifts form between management and employees, what happens instead is an individual competitive focus that brings productivity and innovation down significantly.

What we're seeing, effectively, is that the world is changing and becoming more complex, and management and internal systems are not keeping up, and instead in many cases going downhill.

There are small pockets of hope in the Lean movement, Kaizen/continuous improvement, and in those who know and understand Deming management philosophy. For a great modern take, read General Stanley McChrystal's "Team of Teams."

I think the Manhattan Project is the exclamation point of what really decided the ultimate victors of WWII:

Industrial capacity and efficiency.

What’s interesting is that German industrial capacity, despite being bombed 24/7(US daylight and British nighttime raids often in excess of 1,000 bombers) were able to continue producing warfighting equipment in increasing record numbers often with the use of slave labour.

Despite increased German industrial production of warfighting equipment despite being bombed, the US strategic industrial depth ensured ultimate victory rather than tactical prowess.

What’s interesting in Stan McChrystal’s recent book “Team of Teams” is his mention that while 20th century conventional conflicts were about industrial capacity and efficiency, the 21st century will likely be about adaptability.

We build a similar type of knowledge sharing tool at my startup, Tettra (https://tettra.co). It's not open source and is a paid subscription, but might be worth checking out. We charge because we want to fund ourselves through customer and remain profitable.

On a related note, my co-founder, Nelson, saw Michael's original tweet about Home a few weeks ago and reached out to speak with him. Super nice person. Reportedly Home's really transformed Stripe's already-transparent internal communication culture.

As a founder, I've always admired Stripes email transparency policy. Not sure if it's still being used, but anyone at the company could see anyone else's email from the start. Home seems like a more modern way to share, and this type of transparency really helps eliminate a lot of problems that organizations experience when scaling up.

The book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal is essentially all about how the US military transformed itself from a top-down organization a team of teams that can operate effectively in a connected, digital world. Knowledge sharing systems between groups of people that are usually siloed was at the core of that transformation. Tools like Home and Tettra really help with that. On a personal note, it's also validating for me as Tettra's founder to see Stripe investing resources into the same problem we solve. They have a culture I really admire and we're hoping to make it easier for other organizations to operate transparently too.

Anyone else using knowledge sharing tools internally? Communication is a proverbial problem for most growing organizations. Would love to hear what's working, what's not, and get a discussion going here.

I would say that you are conflating two things: war done to destroy the enemy, and then taking political power of another nation by force, and ensuring safety and continuance of government. Soldiers do the first job, and police do the second. In the Global War on Terror, the line has gotten blurry, (even Vietnam was called a "police action") but even the lowest intensity conflict has life and death sacrifices for the mission and the imposition of political will over a populace through threat of violence that are completely unknown in a modern tech business. You could make the argument that lawsuits would be the equivalent to direct action, and I might agree with that, except there is no violence and it's done entirely within a set of rules (the legal system).

I would agree that businesses and militaries do share similarities, and solve for the same problems. For instance, employee surveys came out of troop morale studies in WWI, and there is a lot of cross contamination of ideas, like the book, "Team of Teams".

Finally, there are cases where businesses actual do go to war, think Blackwater, circa 2006, where the services provided directly support one side in an armed conflict. To me, that's what a business going to war looks like!