[inaudible [inaudible conversations] >> hello, can you hear me? welcome everyone. welcome. good evening. you can't hear? better? no better?good evening.

the back is saying they can't hear. i will try to project as much as possible. good evening everyone, my name is adele gulf oil and chief of commercial development at roy van sciences. this is the first event of the roy van rethinking leadership series. in partnership with hertz and union we are excited to begin a series of conversations with a remarkable leader, general stanley mcchrystal. before we begin, please join me in thanking margo stamos, alyssa adler, kristin allman, and the cornell club for making this event happen. stand up so we can hot for you. general mcchrystal has been called one of america's greatest warriors. a retired four-star general, is the former commander of the joint special operations

committee or jas oh and former commander of all u.s. international forces in afghanistan. general mcchrystal is perhaps best known for developing ended up lamenting the counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan and for creating a comprehensive counterterrorism organization that revolutionized interagency culture. imagine if you got military agencies to work together, what that must've been like. his leadership of jsoc is credited with the capture of saddam hussein and the death of the leader of al qaeda in amalek. over as many decades of leadership in the field, general mcchrystal came to realize that our models for identifying, educating, and evaluating leaders are woefully incomplete. in his latest book " leaders

myth and reality" he profiles 13 famous leaders from a wide range of fields including margaret thatcher, robert e lee, coco chanel, walt disney, to name a few. general mcchrystal is also the author of two other bestsellers. my share of the task, and memoir. and team of teams, new rules of engagement for a complex world. if you haven't already, i encourage you to read them. paul davis, head of communications at roy durant, will be conducting tonight's interview. without further ado, please join me in welcoming general mcchrystal and paul davis. [applause]

>> the title of the book is "leaders, myths and reality" general mcchrystal, one of the most prevalent myths about leadership? >> let me first thank you for having me here today and thank you for the wonderful introduction. let me say that my two co-authors are in the room today. jeff edgar's, former navy seal and j ãformer marine. together we had this cumulative amazing iq. had i left the group it would have gone down slightly. [laughter] so in the tough questions come, the right answers are back there. thank you guys for being here, thanks for being on the team. [applause] i deflected the first question, what was that? >> what are most prevalent myths about leadership. >> and want to start the first myth is that we understand ãb

we study it, we have books on it can we categorize ourselves as leaders but i went to a lifetime of trying to lead, trying to learn to lead as my co-authors did and yet we never really thought we got it so we went back to first principles with this book leaders and went all the way to plutarch and we said, all right, let's go back to first principles and figure it out. we started studying it and the conclusion we came to his little pathetic. that leadership is not we think it is, and it never has been. we have lived with this mythology about leadership. i grew up with a mother who loved mythology and so she read to me all the time and i got a little orange book that she got what she was five years old in chattanooga tennessee. one of the myths in it i love it's about alice. you've got this muscular alice standing among top and holding up the sky. the thing that was amazing for a long time people accepted

that. they said well this guy is up there so somebody must be holding up. if you think about it, that sort of defines how we let mythology simplify things for us. we came into three myths as we started 13 liters. the first is a formulaic myth. that's if you follow a list of behaviors or a list of traits or that sort of thing. you are likely to be a good leader. yet when we studied it we found that there are people who have all of them and absolutely unsuccessful. we got other people who have none of them, rich, famous, successful, whatever you want to call it so the formulated myth is 's proven time and again. the second is the attribution myth and that is what happens in the organization success or failure can usually be traced

back to the leader.we found that's not true either. in fact, what happens in an organization the outcome is often only marginally affected by the leader. when i got out of the military i wrote my memoirs.people come to you and say you have read history have to write your memoirs. that's easier said than done. we go to write my memoirs and i said how hard can this be? this is the story, the play of my life and i'm the star. it shouldn't be hard because i was there. but we did all these interviews and prep for the book and what we found was, my memory of things was usually not completely wrong but it was always incomplete. so i would have made this great decisive decision and something it happened i get credit for it, but then when we did all the interviews and the back story we find out there are hundreds of other people doing things, hugely important, with

other factors affecting it and it meant that i still mattered but i did it matter like i thought i did. then the last is results. you say, we hire or elect or select or promote leaders because they get results. they make us money.they win battlefield victories, they win elections. the reality is, when you sort of do a blind test, we don't. we support serial failures, we follow people who take us places we know we don't want to go. we promote people who have never really been very successful. that's because, as we found, leaders it's not an objective transactional relationship between follower and leader. it's an organic, it's a visceral. it's an emotional connection that we make. they fill some requirement in us as people so the consequence we tend to be supportive or

loyal to people who in many cases the results wouldn't support. these three myths put together mean that when we look at leadership we are doing it through blurred glasses. we got this fog and even though we know it, it persists. i would argue that it's pretty costly in many ways for us. >> you said this great man myth of history is toxic and intoxicating. why is it so attractive? why are people drawn to that particular notion that individuals are responsible for the major events in history? >> it's simple. first and foremost you say if things are bad, we will wait for the great woman or man to show up and make it better. you think about it, almost any of the leaders that we held an exalted status, we put the spotlight on them and we say that they been to the arc of history. in many cases, they had a big effect but it really makes it

simpler. george washington founded the united states of america, that's not in fact true. he was there and he was part of it. if you go back to any number of leaders we tend to want to simplify it. the danger of that is that we've simplified it dramatically. with a couple of things.with a couple of problems. one, we've ignored all the other factors and other personalities and the complexity of it. and you have a tendency to be waiting around for the next great person. we say, we are not happy with the way it is we will wait and somebody will come along. they never will. someone may come along and purport to be that, they may show themselves as that, they may advertise that, but they are not really that. we got to understand that they never will be. >> you said there's a crisis of leadership in the united states right now, what you mean by that? >> i think if you look at our

nation, it's divided politically. it's divided socially, is divided economically and we could go on down. it's obvious, that's what we see every day. we got to the point where we don't believe many of the leaders that speak to us. we watch on television somebody says something and we immediately discount it. i would say if you had somebody who worked for you and they lied to you, you probably wouldn't work with them anymore. if you had a client and they lied to them, they probably wouldn't work with you anymore. but it's not just political leadership, think of our corporations and whatnot. the length of tour for a ceo as shrink to dramatically. what happened is, we get very unhappy with senior leaders very quickly part because we put them in a pedestal and nobody can meet the expectations. partly because we've created this atmosphere in which it's very very difficult to leave right now.

so we have a case where i think our leaders in many cases don't live up to requirements the best they can be. but clearly we've also in terms of your book itself, why did you choose these particular individuals? >> we got this dark board and just started. plutarch has written slides were he did a series of pairings of the greek and roman. romulus and theseus and whatnot, founders. we wanted to look across the spectrum of leaders in different fields, backgrounds, diversity. we wanted diversity of sex, diversity of nation, diversity of the field they were in. we came out with six genre. we came out with geniuses, albert einstein and leonard bornstein. we came out with founders, walt disney, coco chanel, you will

be surprised, i didn't even know who coco chanel was when we started. [laughter] but i do now. we came up with powerbrokers, we keep up with boss tweed. margaret thatcher. reformers, we came up with martin luther, the protestant reformation. and then his namesake martin luther king jr. we came out with heroes. harriet tubman. in the chinese admiral john hot and then we had a standalone. the standalone was general robert e lee. we put robert e lee because of all the figures in my life and my youth he was the iconic leader. i went to washington lee high school i went to west point like robert e lee, i live about 70 feet from his boyhood home right now. for me he was the example or of military and battlefield quality and leadership. it's complex to write about

robert e lee now. i have a complex lectureship with his memory. but i didn't think i could honestly write a book about leaders without addressing the one that i had probably spent the most time in my life thinking about. >> you said that you sort of reevaluated robert e lee and actually there's a portrait your wife gave a believe that you thrown out. why is that? >> my wife of 41 years in movement back and when i was a second lieutenant she spent $25 and bought me this painting of robert e lee. you get quite a painting for $25. framed. it really was just a print of a more famous painting and they painted clear acrylic to make it look like it was flaming. what we had in our quarters everywhere we lived and i loved it because this was the symbol of what i thought about leadership, when people came in they would say, this is what stan mcchrystal admires and it was true. after charlottesville and he

asked me, what about that picture?i said what you mean you gave it to me and i can never get rid of something you gave me. she said, i don't think it means for everybody what it does for you. i think it's sending an unintended signal that some people may leave our home with and we talked about it and at first i said, no he's just a soldier he just made the decision to go with it and she said maybe in your eyes, maybe even his eyes but not in a lot of people's eyes. after about a month of us talking about it in me thinking about it, i took it down and threw it away. she was absolutely right. however we think about robert e lee in many ways, his legacy became used by people to include some of the iconic statues to send a message that i don't seek association with. so i took it down. he is a complicated character. because much about robert e lee

is extraordinarily something that we should admire if he was here today he would be the most impressive person in the room. but the reality is, at a key moment in his life after 32 years in the united states army, he made the decision to violate the oath that i also made on the plan at west point to turn himself against the united states and not only turn himself against it but try to destroy it. the very nation that his role model george washington had created, and he did it in defense of slavery. there is a conflict there. and i'm not here to tell you that robert e lee is an evil guy but i'm telling you, in the one moment the biggest decision of his life he got it completely wrong. and i can't ignore that. and i have to learn from that.

>> certainly in lee's army of northern virginia was not particularly safe thing to do, most of the soldiers died, two thirds of the intra-tree men. why are people so drawn to him? what was so magnetizing to him? why are people captivated by his leadership? >> this is what sows interest income and generally took over after the seven-day battle in 1862 and from then on until the end of the war he commanded the army of northern virginia for the cell. he had a higher casualty rate among his army then any other commander in u.s. history. we talk about patent, we talk about any of the other commanders or ulysses grant that incurred a lot of casualties, nobody got close to robert e lee. if he was ãbif you are an infantry man 71 percent grant is not even the same neighborhood as that. and yet, robert e lee's army

stayed entirely loyal to him through the war in after the war until his death in 1870 and that his memory kept getting burnished even more. here is a guy if you look at results he had a huge casualty rate and he lost. not a small thing. and yet the loyalty to him and part of it was how he was. he was a charismatic, devoted person. he was loyal to his people. he was personally courageous with them. all the things that make us feel good about working around someone, robert e lee epitomized. for the hundred 50 years immediately after his death, there was this a series of extraordinary platitudes that described him as the greatest american general franklin roosevelt to winston churchill.

really iconic members of our history putting lee in a category by himself. in terms of other people you mentioned disney in the book. from your account he doesn't seem to be the most pleasant. he sort of demanding and a perfectionist but animators would doubt everything to go work for walt disney, why did people find his leadership style compelling? >> he was a talented animator but in 1934 after some success they created mickey mouse with steamboat willie and they had done some technological things and an evening in 1934 he gave every employee in the company $0.50 and told them to go get dinner and then come back to work. then the auditorium at night for the next three hours he acted out a report in a story that he wanted to create a full-length animated feature of. it turned out to be snow white. he played the dwarfs. he played snow white, he played

the huntsman. on the stage made united in front of people. it was absolutely not normal. it had never been a full-length animated feature until. he created the first sound. he wanted to make an animated picture in which he could also make you cry. he was entering completely new territory. for the next three years he pushed his team. he led his team, he worked with his team to make this extraordinary picture. he mortgaged his home, he mortgaged the business. he mortgaged the property to mickey mouse. he put it online.

at one point they were working through because he is such a perfectionist, one of his animators, you remember the seven dwarves there were about 40 names they went to before they came to the seven. he got dopey at the end and they have dopey walking as the seventh one is the dwarfs move along. dopey does hit step. walt disney saw it and said i want every time dopey comes in the scene to do the hit step. it cost him six months of going back and working reanimation. but it was that level of perfectionism to try to create something that not only was new but a standard nobody else could get close to. that kind of leadership is intoxicating for people who get to be a part of it. he paid them well and push them hard and treated them well but really the thing you most want in life is to be a part of a very special team and do something of real value. in 1937 when the movie came out

and it was this extraordinary hit, it just reinforced for him and of course the power. now as the company got bigger he had trouble scaling his own leadership style. you can see why he could pull people to him. >> to begin the description by ãbcan you talk about that? >> ultimately led al qaeda in iraq, his godfather vices. he is the person they talk about, they don't talk about osama bin laden. we started life in a tough jordanian industrial called circa. not a good upbringing, he was kind of a bully he got involved in fights, alcohol, got a bunch of tattoos. but then as he got a little older he became ideologically very interested in islam.

he went to afghanistan and became very interested in the holy warriors, the idea of jihad. he comes back after that experience and starts to plot against the jordanian government and gets caught pretty quickly and thrown into prison. here is a guy without real education or religious education. in prison he finds the environment in which he can do very well. he studies religion. he studies islam. he is the personal discipline to show himself to be ideologically committed and tries to use bleach to remove the tattoos.when that doesn't work he has a razor blade smuggled into the prison and he cuts off the tattoo that was offensive to islam. and he did it in a way that other convicts and inmates saw so he was showing people, look,

i am completely committed, i am zealous for this. he also was very strict to them he said you must live up to the standards as well so when there was offenders in the prison he would be the guy who would basically intimidate them but when there were others who needed help he was extraordinarily loyal to them as well. so what he did was show himself a natural leader, he wasn't intellectually superior to them. in fact, he was intellectually inferior to most but he was so committed, so convicted we could say that he became very magnetic to the people around him. when he left after five years in the prison he realized what he had was the ability to lead. and the way he would do that is leading by example. it's the exact same thing i learned as a young military officer. lead by example.

do more than the others. he did that in spades and then later fight in iraq horrific as he was he personally beheaded people he was willing to walk the walk. he was willing to be completely committed. he was willing to put himself at risk and ultimately he died for the cause and that made him extraordinarily powerful. >> do you think you succeeded ã ⌟ >> he absolutely did. his stated goal was help create an islamic qualified emanating from iraq. his near-term goal was to form a civil war inside of iraq between sunni and shiite. at first we thought he was a terrorist group against the west and we were a problem but we weren't his target. he wanted to incite the shieh into a civil war with the sunni terrify the sunni so they would band together and largely by the end of 2006 he had done

that. and what we saw after that was that playing out and so in reality mostly he wasn't successful. >> you've written about the role of military soldiers in politics. during the 40 years from eisenhower to george w. bush we had president to all served in world war ii. the last four presidents have not served. do think it's a good thing? you think it's a bad thing? what are your views on the degree to which military service is useful for serving as president. >> i think we have to do context, there are certain peers we had huge percentages of people served like world war ii where you are likely to have people in politics that serve because so many people did. i think that just reflects the times. i think now we got the opposite, we get a very small percentage of the population serving in the dilatory. a lot of people don't have the experience. i've got a few views.

just because you served in the military that's not a qualification for office. having been in the military i will tell you there are a lot of people i wouldn't vote for if you put a gun to my head. nor should you. joe mccarthy was in uniform. you don't judge by the breed, you judge by the individual. that experience can be great because you can become more thoughtful, he can see things in a less simplified way and you start to understand what life can be. i think it's a good thing but it's just a data point. the other thing i would say is, i think all former professional military, people who make it a career there should be a time when selected people like david eisenhower or ulysses s grant goes to the president's here and senators, i think that's a good thing. but it shouldn't be viewed as a normal route in the politics

because if that happened if being a politician, senior politician and the u.s. was best facilitated by going through a military and being a general and during that you would change the officer corps. it would take a generation or so but we would change it and be a lot like countries whose governments we are not comfortable with. i think it ought to be an aberration, an occasional thing. but you don't want people entering the military because they think that's the way to get to be a senior politician. we have separation and the day we don't have separation we all wish we had separation again. >>. [inaudible question] are there things the military could learn from the private sector? >> absolutely. it's funny we are sort of walled off from the private sector. i spent a year at the council of foreign relations and i was

a colonel and that was the biggest look i really got at the private sector. i was shocked i had a young person come to me one day and they said you are in the military stand, i said i am. he had this quizzical look and said, wow, you seem kinda smart. [laughter] and i realized he knew as little about me as i knew about him. and i think it's very unfortunate we have so little interaction. after i got out the service and got to know civilian people in business and different things there was so much i wish i had known. i would've been desperate to go spend two or three years in a civilian corporation in the middle of my career and come back in the army because many businesses think so much smarter than the army. we don't find that out until too late and we both look over

the fence and told the other people they've got it going on. i tell the story of the time in the military you think that everybody in the civilian world is a godless mastered. but extraordinary efficient. i couldn't believe that because every time in the military you had a meeting with just army officers home military officers. somebody would start the table and go, if we were civilian company we would go bankrupt. they would never be this stupid. now i get in civilian boardrooms and will not and somebody would say, the army would never be that stupid. it's exactly the same because it's people same mistakes, same strengths and the problem is we don't allow ourselves to learn well enough. in terms of our current leadership, what do you think of our current commander-in-chief i know you

had thoughts around obama that led to your resignation in 2010. is there any real thought anything about your own evaluation of the past presidents over the course of your time in private life or no?>> i think we all do. i got to know george w. bush pretty well. that was the first president i was senior enough to know and i got to know president obama well. 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. as a consequence there is not a real familiarity. there's almost a tentativeness, a fear of the other. it is to tell people in the military, remember that when you wear your uniform you can

look good and you got badges and metals and all that, that doesn't help the conversation. that stops it. that's like a wall because people see that and that's what they see and they have a tough time seeing you. resident kennedy advised by someone next time you want the military to brief you on a plan make them come in civilian clothes. if the plan is still impressive, it might be good. that's a fair point. think about that. here's what i think about now, leaders, instead of judging each leader i wish we would put a whiteboard up here and say, what do we want for our president. what values do we want. what qualities do we want? what experience do we want let's write that down and let's talk about that. i don't think would be that far apart across different parts of the aisle. instead what we do is have a bunch of candidates come up and we try to trace to that if we started with that and said

well, we want this, this, this, this and then we looked in the mirror and said are we willing to demand that of our leaders? are we willing to demand that of ourselves? then i think we might start to reach different conclusions. because at the end of the day what we demand is what matters. the study we found is the interaction between leaders and followers is extraordinary and that means followers have responsibility. big responsibility. we can't stop by and say the president is bad, congress is bad. we elected them. we support or don't support them. the reality is if we like some things and that like other thing, yes there are compromises to be made but if we like one thing because it benefits us and we think something else is terrible and don't do something about it,

history is not going to treat us well, the followers. the leaders are going to be treated how they are going to be treated. but i think it's a time in america when we need to look in the mirror, stop looking at the tv, start looking in the mirror and start making tough evaluations of ourselves. >> one final question before we open to the audience. in your book you say by itself reading this book will not make you into a great leader, it won't overcome weak values a lack of self-discipline or personal stupidity. what is the value in reading about the lives of impressive figures from the past? >> that some misprint in the prologue if you buy and read this book you will lose ã [laughter] trust me. we need to look back at history to understand that because if we look back at leaders and we have to simplified view of them if we think coco chanel was the

perfect thing it wasn't a pain to work for and extraordinarily talented as a marketer then we start to think how we should lead or how we should select leaders in a skewed way and we start to look around for this two-dimensional character and a lot of leaders are only too happy to betray themselves in two dimensions because it's easier. and so we got to go back and really tear apart these leaders. every one of the leaders in this book was flawed. i can't find a leader who is flawed. but at the same time, some of them did some amazing things and in many cases they did amazing things because they were part of teams. the miracle of the civil rights movement is not that martin luther king had a worthy cause it's not that he was a brilliant speaker and a charismatic guy. it was that he pulled together these disparate groups all pulling in slightly different directions against great

resistance and against uneven political help and he kept it going in the day he was killed the movement kept going. it wasn't about martin luther king jr., it was about everyone in the movement. and i'm not sure many leaders come along that can do that but we need to understand that was genius, that was the miracle. not the i have a dream speech. >> christian in the front. [inaudible question]

the question is, how do we get a leader who's both correct on tactical issues whether battleship or aircraft carrier but also the emotional issues to maintain alliances? >> i think first off you are not looking for a leader, you are looking for a team.in fact, i think the next presidential election maybe shouldn't be about a person. it ought to be a better team. what if the candidate came forward and said i have 100 people from across the u.s. accomplished people who have already sworn to spend at least two years in this administration bringing forth the right answers, doing the right thing and you didn't judge just that person. because nobody is smart enough to have all the answers. but someone who's good enough to pull together a team with the right talent and right commitment can do amazing things. the senior leader, however, there are certain things they have to provide and as you talked about the emotional part the representational part, the

inspirational part, there is a role that only the most senior leader can be the head of, other people should reflected as well. there are things that we want our most senior leaders to be and we want them to make us better than we are. i remember having leaders in the military i be tired, just about to be lazy. we wanted to take anyone out to stand up and that leader walks by i know they are more tired than i am but standing up and suddenly they make me want to do that. that's what the leader does even if the leader never knows the technical right answers you can get people to get them or all you have to do at that point is do a multiple-choice test. you just have to get the right kind of advisors that's the way i think we ought to think about it. thank you. >> next question. remember brevity is the soul of wit. back. >> i think he's talking to me. >> general, it sounds like you should be running for office.

[inaudible question] that's a great question. >> the question, do you have an affinity toward the leaders. [music] 40 think about great leaders about hitler, stalin, and the implied question about our running for office. >> the thing like hitler, we looked at all of those in great detail. we got much closer to writing about then hitler just because i thought hitler had been written about so much that it probably wouldn't be as informative. now would been very interesting and we look very closely at him. we have some negative leaders in here. robespierre, he certainly pushing for virtue but saying we are going to do it by spilling a lot of blood. those two and boss tweed doesn't come out in your pantheon of most honest people.

we thought we could cover that and show that they could still be effective like paul tweed was very effective in his corruption, effective in some things about how he had helped administer the city and certainly effective in the low level political maneuverings in the town and the hall. i think that when we looked at those we were trying to get a balance we spent more hours picking these 13 leaders will most common fistfights over them. the one i lost them still deeply bitter about was davy crockett. i wanted davy crockett in this book so bad because i just love the walt disney show about him. [laughter] maybe next book. >> thank you so much. one final question.>>. [inaudible question]

i see the politics in albany and i ask him what's the problem. it's never simple. afghanistan has been at war for 30 years and they were already a complex tribal place to begin with. there are a few things i would offer, first is that afghanistan is not the same place it was on 9/11. the number of females who have been in school now for almost a generation 17 years and the number of young afghans in schools has changed the country. the reality is my generation, our generation has to get off the stage because we are scar tissue and we are in the way in afghanistan. they need to take it. therefore .4 million afghans ã this week which is pretty impressive considering the situation. there is still corruption and challenges but i believe that

there is a way ahead and i don't believe thousands of american troops or billions of american dollars is right but i think a partnership with the afghan people is important. we look at what happened after world war ii, what we did in japan, what we did in europe, those are very painful expensive and whatnot. but by making a commitment over time it pays off in the long term. i would argue that we should be very realistic about it in afghanistan but i'm not a proponent of walking away. i think it sends a message not only to afghans but also to the world. that comes one of the negatives of being the united states of america. >>. [inaudible question] >> hopefully the world will go on forever and we are going to have to be connected, the world is connected now. this idea of america first and build walls of the border and live inside the u.s. is not the way i think the world goes forward.

a lot of those places we are not going to be fun so i think there is worthy of commitment but overnight. your point is absolutely well taken. >> please join me in thanking general mcchrystal. the general will be signing books in the back of the room. please remain seated while security detail gets in the back of the room so we can have an official signing process. thank you for coming tonight. [inaudible conversations] you are watching booktv, did you know you can also listen on the go? download the c-span radio app from your devices that store. on the weekends click on the c-span2 button to hear everything area on booktv live.

>> over the past 20 years but tv has covered thousands of author events and book festivals.here is a portion of recent program. >> a lot of what we talked about in politics is this continuum from right versus left. right to left. but i think potentially the more important variable or dimension matrix is the intensification of political addiction so that you have your political identity crowding out all of your other identities and sense you should treat your neighbor as a whole person talk to somebody you disagree with on politics. we the consumers are not usually aware enough of the way the algorithm of what we read yesterday is going to reshape what we read tomorrow. so we start to end up with the world, you know this is true if you look at the videos you might want on politics on youtube it starts recommending more videos to you. the person living right next door to you might have a completely different conception

of what's happening in america because of the self-selection and feedback confirmation in the silos of the way they are consuming from what you are consuming. we need to make sure we break out of those algorithmic senses that all of america is the one percent who agrees just like i do about how terrible that other 50% is. >> you can watch this and any of our programs in their entirety at the tv.org. type the authors name in the search bar at the top of the page. >> this has to come down lower for me. how are all of you tonight? happy new year. thank you for being here. i'm one of the co-owners of politics and prose bookstore. thank you. and along with my co-owner and