I was reading Team of Teams sometime around September 2019. I at least remember reading it in a really cold Starbucks in a mall in Tokyo haha. First, the standard template:

The book in three sentences

Team of Teams is former General Stanley McChrystal’s account of his time at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in his role in the conflict with AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) and Abu Musab al Zarqawi. He captures the information sharing struggles US forces in Iraq had that made them struggle in keeping up with AQI’s de-centralized un-command. And he shares the good news of how giving autonomy and decision making to teams stopped central command from being a bottle neck.

Impressions

I have had a mental bias against micro-management from my time on software/data science projects, but I did not know the story of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his notorious stopwatch that he used to optimize the slow steps in steel production work. This is probably one of the most important points in the book, because it is very unintuitive. The impact of standardizing steel work was immediate efficiency, but mantra of “management” has created a century’s worth of demoralized workers. But more importantly the inflexibility McChrystal writes about in the “chain of command” meant that reconnaissance missions expertly carried out but unconnected to analysts for example, would make time sensitive intel go to waste.

How the book changed me

I felt aligned with the book from the start so perhaps reading it was a bit of confirmation bias, but I will gladly cherry pick it as evidence of a changing tide of “management” (referred to as “command” in this book). Very close in spirit, Eric Colson’s “Beware the data science pin factory” here, is a bit more validation, but closer to my knowledge space.

Top three quotes

  • (Find the quote about the trash bag of laptops )

Unsorted Quotes List

  • “Team of teams” is distinguished from a “Command of teams”, “The quandary faced by Brigham and Women’s in 2013, like that faced by our Task Force in 2004, was that of what we might call a “command of teams”: adaptive small teams operating within an old-fashioned rigid superstructure. In a response to rising tactical complexity, many organizations in many domains have replaced small commands with teams.” (“Location 2304”)

  • “A big piece of why we lagged AQI lay in our need to relay decisions up and down the chain of command. Decisions that senior leaders a few decades prior would have been unable to oversee now required senior approval.” (“Location 3667”)

  • “Through a series of experiments, Taylor had determined the optimal temperature at which to cut steel chips, the optimal distance between the machinist and his tools, the optimal way for water to cool the lathe, and the optimal speed for internal conveyor belts. When it all came together, there was not a second of lost time, not an ounce of misplaced material, not a moment of unproductive human effort.” (“Location 704”,"",)

  • “Shia had an evil brilliance. But ideas are cheap; plenty of armchair generals have proposals for winning wars, some of them quite clever, but only those who can actually shape and manage a force capable of doing the job ultimately succeed.” (“Location 472”)

Taylor and Scientific Management

I am in the middle of reading “The Meritocracy Trap” right now, and I see a new connection as I am re-reading this quote, about how Taylor apparently said to workers, “I have you for your strength and mechanical ability. We have other men paid for thinking.” (“Location 819”). One of the questions I was trying to answer while reading “The Meritocracy Trap” was how it came to be that there is so much so called “unskilled” labor today. And putting two and two together here, Taylorism and management theory feel like part of the answer. That book underlined how the influx of the baby boomers forced colleges to more quickly be able to review the new onslaught of applicants and so they introduced Standardized entrace exams. And then it was only a natural follow on that people would stratify in getting better at those entrance exams. But what if the introduction of management was the original stratification sin here, pushing people apart into the skilled and unskilled classes.

And the second element introduced in the “Meritocracy Trap” was technology/automation as a means of how for example a ride-share driver (e.g. Uber) no longer needs to figure out how to take a passenger from point A to B, but an algorithm does this work. (Not to mention the future of self driving cars). There are countless other examples of this of course. Today you can take a photo of a suspicious mole on your skin with your phone and a melanoma algorithm will assign a likelihood of malignancy to your photograph. We need doctors to build those labeled datasets of course, but maybe that ends up being a research specialty and perhaps some of the cheapness diagnostics displaces some jobs here.

To connect this back to the topic of this summary, teams are great of course, but the unskilled laborforce does now look like a mob of elephants in the room asking us whether those teams can outperform the algorithms in the combat of the future. And that goes for “military” combat or for entrepreneurial combat or say in the league of medical care. Will teams of nurses be replaced by teams of nurses plus algorithms.