poor people don't vote regularly, students don't vote regularly. you can watch this and any of the programs in their entirety at booktv.org. can you hear me? great. hello. welcome, everyone. good evening. you can't hear?

okay. good evening. no, it's not. in the back they are saying they can't hear. i will try to project as much as possible. i am the chief of commercial developed and. this is the first event of the rethinking leadership series in partnership with hudson union and we are excited to begin the series of conversations with a remarkable leader general stanley mcchrystal.ys stand up please so we can clap for you. [applause]

one of america's greatest warrior is a retired four-star general he's the former commander of the joint special operations committee and former commander of the forces in afghanistan. he is perhaps best known for developing and implementing the counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan and for creating a comprehensive counterterrorism organization that revolutionized inter- agency coulter. so imagine if he got military agencies to work together what been like.ave his leadership is credited with the capture of saddam hussein and the death of the leader of al qaeda. over his many decades of leadership in the field, he came to realize our models for

identifying, educating and evaluating the leaders are woefully and can lead. in the latestt book, leaders in reality h profiles 13 famous leaders from a wide range of fields including margaret thatcher, robert e. lee, coco chenault about walt disney just to name a few. general mcchrystal is the author of two other best sellers. mbest-sellers. my share of the task a memoir, and a team of teams, new rules of engagement for a complex world. if you haven't already i would encourage you to read them. paul davis, the head of communications will be conducting two nights interview. hethout further ado, please join me in welcoming general mcchrystal. [applause]

leaders based in reality what is best about leadership? thank you for the wonderful introduction and let me say that my two co-authors are in the room today.. a former navy shield and former marine together we have this amazing iq. had i left the group it would have gone down slightly. so when the toughst questions come, the answers are back there. thank you for being here on the

team. >> where the most prevalent myths about your show? >> we study it, have books on it. but i went through a lifetime of trying to lead as my co-authors david. and yet we never thought we'd really got it so we went back to first principles all the way to plutarch and we said let's go back to the first to figure it out and we started studying it and the conclusion we came to was a little upsetting. that leadership is not what we think it is and it never has been. we have lived with this mythology of leadership. i grew up with a mother who loved pathologies as she read it to me all the time and i have a little book that she got when she was 5-years-old. one of the things i love you've

gotin this muscular pathless standing on a mountain top in the sky the thing that was amazing for a long time, people accepted that. if you think about it that is a fine mythology that explains things for us and it simplifies things for us. first was formulaic myth. if you follow the list of behaviors or trades or that sort of things you are likely to be a good leader. when we studied it there were so many that were unsuccessful.

what happens in the organization can usually be traced back to the leader. what happens in the organizational outcome is often only marginally affected by the leader.er when i got out of the military i wrote my memoirs. people come through and say you have to write your memoir so we go to write a memoir and i said how hard can this be. this is the story of my life and i am the star. and it shouldn't be hard because i was there that we have all of these interviews for the buck and what we find is my memory of thing is is usually not completely wrong tha but it was always a complete so i would have made this decisive decision

but do we find out there are hundreds of other people doing things hugely important and other factors affecting it and it meant that i still mattered, but i didn't matter like i thought i did. and then the last one is results results. they make us money. the reality is when you sort of get a blind test, we don't. we support the failures and follow people who take us places we know we don't want to go. we promote people who've never really been very successful and that's because as we found it's not an objectionable relationship between the leaders. it is an organic, visceral, emotional connection that we

make and that there is a requirement as a people in many cases the results wouldn't support. so put together this means when we look at leadership, we are doing it through blurred class classes. i would argue that it's pretty costly. >> why is it so attractive and what have people drawn to the being responsible for? >> if things are bad we would wait. the leaders that we have held on the on exalted status w own exat the spotlight on them and say

that they banned the arc of history. it makes it simpler. george washington founded the united states of america. that is not in fact true. he was there and he was part of this but if you go back to any number of leaders we tend to want to simplify the danger of that as we've simplified dramatically with a couple of things. one, we ignored the factors and personalities and the complexity of it and have a tendency to be waiting around for the next great person. we've got to understand that it will never be.

>> in the crisis of leadership on things right now, what did you mean by that? stack if you look at the nation is divided politically, socially, economically and we could go on down. and so that this sort of obvious. we've got to the point we don't believe any ofer the leaders tht speak to us. we watch on television but he says something and we immediately discount it. if you have someone that works for you and they liedco to you, you probably wouldn't work with them anymore. if you had a client and you lied to them, they probably wouldn't work with you anymore. but it's not just our political leaders. we think of the corporations and whatnot. we get very unhappy with senior leaders quickly because we put

them on a pedestal nobody hasni expectations because we've yet did this atmosphere in which it is very, very difficult to leave right now. and so, we have a case where the leaders in many cases don' don'd up to requirements of the best that they can b be that also we have created an environment where leading is extraordinarily difficult. why did you choose these particular individuals? >> we wanted to book across the spectrum of leaders in different fields and backgrounds. and the diversity of the field they were in so we came out with six genres.

we cannot with geniuses. albert einstein and leonard burke stocks, we came out with founders walt disney, coco chanel. you might be surprised i didn't even know who that was. but i do now. [laughter] we came out with powerbrokers and margaret thatcher, reformers, the protestant reformation and then martin luther king jr.. we came out with heroes and then we had a standalone. we put robert e. lee because of all of the figures in my life and my youth, p he was the iconc leader. i went through washington high school for me he was the

exemplar of the battlefield quality leadership and its complex to write about now and i have a complex relationship with his memory, but i didn't think i could honestly write a book about leaders without the one bites the most time in my life thinking about. >> why have you changed your mindwh about that? when i was the second lieutenant she spent $25 bought me a painting of robert e. lee. you get quite a painting for $25. this is the symbol of what i thought about leadership and

they would say this is what stanley mcchrystal admires and then after charlottesville he asked me what about that picture i could never get rid of something you gave me. and she said i don't think it means for everybody what it does for you. i think it is sending an unmanned defici data signal thae people may leave oure home wit. first i said he's just a soldier maybe not in a lot of peoples eyes. after aboutut a month i took it down and threw it away because she was absolutely right. in many ways a legacy became used to include some of the statutes to send a message that

i don't take association with. now he's a complicated character because it's extraordinarily something that we should admire. the key moment in his life after 32 years in the states army he made the decision to violate the oath that i made to turn himself against the united states not only against it but to try to destroy it. he did it in defense of slavery. here i am telling you in the one moment the biggest decision of

his life he got it completely wrong. i can't ignore that and i have to learn from that. >> serving in the army wasn't a safe thing to do and most of the soldiers died and two thirds of the infantrymen. why would people still drawn to him and captivated by his leadership? >> he took over the battle in 62 and from then on until the end of the war, he commanded the army from the south. he had a higher casualty rate among his army than any other commander in u.s. history. we talk about passion and any other man or his debt incurred a lot of casualties. nobody got close to robert e. lee. if you were the infantrymen and they had a 71% chance to be a

casualty, 71%. grant isn't even in the same neighborhood as bad and yet robert e. lee's army stayed loyal through the board and after until his death. so if you look at results, there was a huge casualty rate and he lost. part of it is how he was. he was a charismatic devoted person and was loyal to his people and courageous. all the things that make us feel good about working for someone and around someone, robert e. lee epitomized.

he seems to be very grudging and demanding and a perfectionist. why do people find his leadership style compelling? >> in 1934 after some success, they created mickey mouse with steamboat willie and the evening of 1934 they gave every employee in the country 50 cents and were told to go get dinner and come back to work to the auditorium. in the auditorium that night for the next three hours he acted out every part in the story but

he wanted to create a feature and it turned out to be snow white. he played the dwarfs, the huntsman. what he was asking seems kind of normal now that i but it was acy not normal. there has never been a full-length animated feature before. he is trying to make a movie in which people are not just entertained for a few minutes but they are made to laugh. he wanted to make an animated picture in which he could also make you cry so he was entering completely new territory. for the next three years, he worked with his team to make this extraordinary picture. he mortgaged his home and

business and intellectual property. he put it all on the line. at one point as they are working through because he is such a perfectionist, one of the animators, remember the seven dwarves you have dopey at the end who does a sort of step and walt disney saw it and said i want every time he comes in the seemed to do that. if cost them six months of going back and reworking the animation but it was the level of protectionism to try to create some big. that kind of leadership is intoxicating for people to get to be a part of it.

one of the things we want in life most isrt to be a specialtl to do something of value to 1937, when the movie came out and it was this expert mary kate, it's and forced the power. now as the company got bigger he have trouble scaling back his own leadership style that you could see why he could hold people to it. >> you kind of begin this by talking about removing a tattoo in a jordanian prison. can you talk about that? >> key is the person they talk about that started in a tough industrial, not a good upbringing did.

but asas he got older he became ideologically very interested. they get caught pretty quickly and thrown into prison and now here is a guy without real of religious education. in prison he finds the environment in which he can do very well. he studies religion and islam a personal discipline to show himself to be ideologically committed. he tries to use bleach to remove tattoos that the doesn't work. he has a razor blade smuggled into the prison and he cuts off the tattoo that was offensive to

islam. he did it in a way that others saw. i am completely committed for this. he would be the guy that would basically intimidate them that when there were others that needed help, he was extraordinarily loyal to them as well. so what he did is show himself a natural leader. intellectually superior in fact inferior to most but so committed and so convicted we could say that he became very, very magnetic to the people around him. when he left for five years in prison, he realized what he had was the ability to lead.

it shows that you can do that and then later in the fight in iraq as poetic as he was, he personally beheaded people. he was a willing to be completely committed and put himself at risk and ultimately, he died formm the cause and that made him extraordinarilydi powerful. >> and.th it was a problem though we were not his target. he wanted to incite them into a

war to terrify the sunnis so that they would band together and largely by the end of 2006, he had done back in what we saw after that was that playing out. >> you had written about the military and soldiers and politics in the 40 years fromar eisenhower to george bush the last four presidents have not served in military. i think we have to do the context first. there were certain periods where we are likely to have people in the politics that serve and it reflects the times so a lot of

people don't have that experience. just because you served in the military that isn't a qualification for office because they would tell you there are a lot of people i would vote for at the end before putting a gun to my head, nor should you. [laughter] general mccarthy. so the reality, judge by the individual. the other part i say is all for professional military people that make it a career should be a time when selected people like david eisenhower and ulysses s.

grant goes to the presidency or the senate or something i think good thing. was best facilitated it would have changed the b officer corp. take a generation or so but it would be a lot like some countries whose governments we are not as comfortable with. so i think that it would be an occasional thing but you don't want people entering into the military because you don't think that is the way they get to be a senior publication. because we have separation. are there things the military could learn in the sector?

i was just sortse of shocked. i was a fellow at harvard before that and had a fellow come to me and said so you are in the military and i said yes i am and he said wow you seem kind of smart. [laughter] and i realized he knew as little about me as i knew about him. i think it is unfortunate that we have so little interaction i would have been desperate to spend two or three years in a civilian corporation and come back into the army because many

businesses do things so much smarter than the army. but we don't find that out until too late and then we look over the fence and think of the people got it. i tell people all the time in the military, you think everybody in the civilian world as they gawk this bastard but extraordinarily efficient and i couldn't believe that because every time in the military you have a meeting somebody would slap the table and say what you would go bankrupt they would never be this stupid. now i get in the board rooms and somebody will say the army would never be this stupid. [laughter] it is exactly the same because its people, the same mistake as

though we don't allow ourselves to learn well enough. >> what do you think of the current commander-in-chief have you read thought about your evaluation over the course of your time in private life? >> i got to know george w. bush pretty well. i was the first president and i got along with both of them, i got along with president obama very well and still do. but the relationship between presidents and senior military isn't what it should be. they don't understand each other well enough, so as a consequence, there is not a -- there's almost a tentativeness or fear of one another and i

used to tell people in the military remember that when you wear your uniform you get medals and all that kind of stuff and doesn't help the conversation. that stops it the next time you want the military to brief you on a plan if the plan is impressive it might be good. that is a fair point, so you start- to think about that. here's what. i think about the leaders instead of judging each leader i wish we would put a white board up heregi and say wt do we want forever president. forget about democrat or republican, what values and qualities do we want, let's write that down and talk about that. i don't think we would be that

far apart. we have a bunch of candidates. if we start with that and then we looked in the mirror and said are we willing to demand that of our leaders and of ourselves than i think the nicer to reach different conclusions. the study we found is the interaction between leaders and followers is extraordinary. that means they have big responsibilities. we support or don't support them and to be obvious if we like some things that don't like other things yes there are compromises to be made. but if we like one thing because

it benefits us if we think something else is terrible and wif wedon't do something about , it's not going to treat us well, the followers. i think that it is a tie in america when we need to look in the mirror, stop looking at the tv, look in the mirror and make tough devaluations for ourselves. what is the value in reading about the lives of the figures in the past. if you buy and read this book you will lose weight and get smarter. trust me. [laughter]

we have a simplified view of them and if we think that coco chanel was a perfect thing and wasn't a pain to work for but extraordinarily talented as a marketer. then we start to look around for these two-dimensional characters and a lot of leaders are only too happy to portray themselves as two-dimensional. we've got to go back and tear these meters apart. at the same time some of them did amazing things and in many cases they did amazing things because they were a part of the team. the miracle of the civil rights movement is not that martin luther king had a worthy cause or that he was a brilliant speaker or charismatic guy.

he pulled together these disparate groups pulling in slightly different directions against great resistance and against uneven political help. it was about everyone in the movement and i'm not sure many readers come along that can do that. question in the front. how do we get the leaders of focusing on aircraft carriers into the emotional and psychological things right so that we don't lose all of our allies but also the emotional

issues. >> first off, you are not looking for a leader, you are looking for a team. the next presidential election maybe shouldn't be about a person. it ought to be about a team. with the candidates came forward and as i have 100 people from across the u.s., accomplished people already sworn to spend at least two years in this administration bringing forth the right answers into doing the right thing and you didn't charge the person because nobody smart enough has all the answers. but someone is good enough to pull together can do amazing things. there are certain things they have to provide as you talk about the emotional part.

there is a role only the seniormost theatemade theseniore head of two reflect as onl wellt there are other things we want our most senior leaders to be a candidate is to make them better than we are. i remember having leaders of the military i would be wanting to take them out to stand up and about leader walks by air more tired than i did a standup you make me want to do that. that is what the leader does even ifer they don't know the technical answers, you can get people in to do multiple things you just have to get the right kind of advisers and is the way that we ought to think about that.

>> [inaudible] if you think about writing about hitler, stalin, castro do you feel any affinity? >> we have leaders like hitler, stalin. the thing like hitler, we got closer to writing about mao but it probably wouldn't be as informative. mao would have been interesting if we looked very closely at it. they were pushing for virtue that we will do it by spilling a

lot of blood and the same thing with zarqawi. we thought that we could cover that and still be effective. as we look at those and try to get a balance, we spent more hours picking these leaders we almost got into fist fights with them and be honest, the one that i am still deeply bitter about was davy crockett. ian wanted to be crockett in ths book because i loved the show about him.

what is the problem? i ask what is the problem. it's never simple. afghanistan has been at war for 30 years and they were already in conflict. there were a few things i would offer. first from afghanistan is not the first place that it was 9/ 9/11. they've been in for almost a generation and the number of young afghans in school has changed. now the reality we have to get off the stage because we are more in the way in afghanistan. 4.4 million afghans voted this

week which is pretty impressive considering the situation. there's still corruption and challenges, but i believe that there is a way. i think a partnership with the afghan people is important. we look at what happened after world war ii and what we did in japan and europe. it's painful, expensive and what's not. but by making a commitment over time it pays off in the long term. we should be three overnight and realistic but i'm not a proponent of walking away. i think it sends a message not only to the afghans but also to the world. and that's sort of becomes one of the negatives. hopefully the world will go on forever. but we are going to have to be connected. we are all connected now.

this idea of america first is not the way i think the world's firswas first and in a lot of te places i think there is more but being open eyed, your point is absolutely well taken. >> please join me in thanking general mcchrystal. he will be signing books in the back of the room. they will not be personalized. please remain seated so that we can have an efficient signing process.

>> because our forefathers didn't write a document for this time, there was a document but to define for their day and use the terms and concepts to interpret to meet their needs.

>> .. . >> part memoir part self-help