Four-Star General Stanley McChrystal | The Man Who Helped to Capture Saddam Hussein Shares His Keys for Leading Teams Effectively

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, yes and yes. Ladies and gentlemen, on today’s show, we are interviewing none other than the retired United States, four star general, Stanley McChrystal. Mr. Stan, how are you sir?

General Stanley McChrystal:
I’m great. How are you today?

Speaker 1:
Stan, we are just excited to have you on the show and I want to ask you my friend, what have you been up to since your retirement from the military? What kind of things you’ve been doing for the last few months? What are you working on?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, it’s amazing. I’ve been very lucky. I left the military and I’ve had the opportunity to write three books or be a part of teams that wrote three books, my memoirs and two others. I’ve been teaching up at Yale University. I’ll be teaching again later tonight. So I’ve been teaching a whole series of kids there that I’ve gotten to know as they’ve grown up and on. Then with a friend of mine, I started a company that started at my kitchen table, two of us shook hands and began it. Now it’s a hundred people-

Speaker 1:
Wow.

General Stanley McChrystal:
.. and operate all over the world. So I’ve been able to be a part of things that are exciting and fun.

Speaker 1:
What does your company do?

General Stanley McChrystal:
It’s a leadership advisory firm, which is a form of consulting. We work with a variety of big companies and some small companies to make them operate better, to make them function better. We don’t reorganize them or do some of the traditional consulting things, but we take things like decision making and communication and it’s amazing the difference it makes in the average company.

Speaker 1:
I would like to start off at the bottom, at the very beginning of your career. When did you first decide that you wanted to serve in the United States military?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, it’s important to understand. My father was a soldier, my father’s father was a soldier as well, career soldiers. So it was in my family and in my blood. As early as I can remember, I wanted to be like my dad and I wanted to be a soldier. So I spent my time thinking about trying to go to West Point. Then when I was age 17, I did. I’m not sure I ever made a conscious decision. I just sort of did what felt right for me.

Speaker 1:
You went to West Point, correct? You went to West Point. For the listeners out there that have never been to West Point or never toured the campus or have attended West Point, could you describe what your time was like at West Point?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. I think it’s changed a little bit from when I went in in 1972, but I got there 170 years after the Academy started. It had changed a fair amount, but the reality was a lot hadn’t changed. It’s a very disciplined environment. The focus of West Point is on developing what in those days was called, “the whole man,” or now it’d be, “the whole man and woman.” So it’s a very full schedule, it was physical, it was college courses, of course it’s a university as well, it was discipline. It was a variety of things all to make you a leader for America starting in the military and then of course, they hopped into other endeavors as well.

Speaker 1:
I’m looking at you on Skype here and I looked up you in Google, you look like you’re 27, maybe 31. You’re looking great by the way. It’s probably fish oil, that kind of thing, but what kind of health habits or life habits did you learn during your time as a young man at West Point that are still influencing you today?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I joke with people that I still fold my underwear and keep them in my drawer, and of course that gets a laugh, but it’s also true. But most importantly, I learned a number of things. I work out every day and I do it… People say it’s tremendous discipline. I’d say it’s a habit, it’s a good habit. I got bad habits, but I got some good ones. So there are things about what you expect about yourself, how you expect yourself to stand, how you expect yourself to interact with people, how you stay physically active because in a leadership role in the military, that’s extraordinarily important. So there were things that they do through forced behavior that become things that are part of your character for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1:
When you say forced behavior, what does that look like?

General Stanley McChrystal:
That’s funny. They say that you convince somebody to do something and then they do it. I think it’s the opposite. I think you force somebody to do something and then you convince them that it’s what they want to do. So when you get to West Point, the first thing they do is cut your hair off, take your clothes away, make you wear uniforms, give you a rank and a name. You start as a new cadet and then you’re a cadet. You have to interact with upperclassmen and officers a certain way. You have to walk a certain way. When you’re in the mess hall as a plebe, you have to sit at attention. They put you through a number of things that seem foreign, and in many cases, they seem silly. But over time, you find yourself believing that you want to stand a certain way and act a certain way.

Speaker 1:
So I want to make sure I’m getting this right here. You said you force somebody to do something and then you convince them that it’s something that they should want to do. Is that correct?

General Stanley McChrystal:
I think that’s absolutely true. It’s called, “soldierization,” in the army and you’re really changing how they think about things through habits.

Speaker 1:
Okay. Okay. So now you spent your time at West Point, you did well, and my understanding is that you then entered into the military. You were commissioned at some point to be the second Lieutenant in the United States army and that your initial assignment was to the C company, first battalion, 504th parachute infantry regiment, 82nd airborne division. A lot of listeners go [inaudible]. What does that mean? What does all that stuff mean?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Right. The United States army when I entered the service and when I left West Point in 1976 had two airborne infantry divisions: the 101st and the 82nd airborne division. They were both of world war II fame. The 82nd had jumped into Normandy and jumped into Holland, if anybody have ever seen the movie, “A Bridge Too Far “. So it was this story division that actually went back to the first world war, but it became famous in the second world war. So it’s a set of paratroopers and one of the things that’s special about paratroopers is someone’s in the army, but to be a paratrooper, you have to volunteer. Everyone in the division had entered the service. When I entered, everyone was a volunteer because a volunteer army started, but they’d had to volunteer again to be a paratrooper and go to parachute infantry training, jump out of airplanes. So it made them a special group of people.

Speaker 1:
Can you describe what it’s like to jump from a perfectly good airplane? What does that look like the first time you jump out of an airplane? What was your… or maybe what was your most memorable jump?

General Stanley McChrystal:
That’s a great question. Well, one, it’s jarring. It’s frightening when you first do it. In fact, it’s terrifying when you first do it, but the most memorable of all jumps, most of your jumps are at night. So as a consequence, you’ll be in this aircraft and those days, either a C-130 aircraft or a C-141 cargo aircraft, you’re going about 120 knots. And so they opened the doors to this aircraft and the wind is wishing your… If you’re up close to the door, you get a real sense of, “I’m about to jump out into just darkness.”

General Stanley McChrystal:
So you’re piling with other paratroopers, and then in a moment, the jump master, who’s another paratrooper who leans out the door to make sure it’s safe in the right place, he steps back, he points at you, puts you in the door, and then says, “Go.” So you’re essentially, jumping out into absolute black. I remember the most memorable for me is I jump out and it wasn’t my first jump, so I was pretty experienced at this point. I jump out and I said, “Wow, it’s really dark. I can’t see the drop zone,” we were going to drop on an airfield that night and then in the distance, probably a thousand meters away, I in fact see the drop zone. The aircraft was on a bad heading and so-

Speaker 1:
Oh wow.

General Stanley McChrystal:
… I jumped about a probably… I ended up about 800 meters into the forest or into the trees where you end up hanging in the tree.

Speaker 1:
Oh wow. Now, okay. So now you went on to serve honorably, your career is extensive, but I’d like to focus on Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. What were your roles in those two operations?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. Well, Desert Storm and Desert Shield were like one operation one after the other. Desert Shield was when America deployed forces over to Saudi Arabia to prepare to push Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. And then Desert Storm was the hundred hours that it actually took to do that. I was at that point in my career, I was a major, I was in an organization called the Joint Special Operations Command and I was a staff officer. I was a current operations officer, so I planned and helped coordinate operations and I went as part of a small special operations task force that went out to the West of Saudi Arabia.

General Stanley McChrystal:
All of the bulk of the forces and the focus was in the East over near the border with Kuwait. We were in the West of Saudi Arabia and our mission was to send small teams into Western Iraq where the Iraqi military had Scud missiles and these Scud missiles could go several hundred kilometers and they started shooting those missiles into Saudi Arabia and into Israel at the time. The mission of my task force was to go and suppress or destroy those missiles, which were on mobile launchers.

Speaker 1:
You were described by the former defense secretary, Robert Gates, as, “Perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat that I ever met.” I know you’re a humble guy and I know you don’t want to sit here on a podcast and brag. I know you’re a team and I just want to get, what does it mean in your mind to be a warrior? You know this. I’m kind of afraid of heights, speed, water, needles and you’re over there. You’re getting shot at, bullets are flying by. What does the warrior mindset look like? What are you thinking when you’re in combat?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. No, it’s a great question. I was around truly, probably the greatest warriors of our generation as I was enjoying special operations command both in the first Gulf War and then the second, so I have a pretty good opinion on this. I think the things that make somebody, that impressed me and people were first a mission mindset and that is the idea that you get that you’ve got this mission and the people are creative, but they’re driven to accomplish it. You’ve seen it in starting small businesses and whatnot and you can almost feel it when you meet someone.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Then there’s the sense of, “I am part of a team,” and the point of the team, the purpose of the team is to accomplish something, but my sacred responsibility is to take care of the other members of that team. So you get somebody who isn’t necessarily easygoing. The best soldiers I ever saw weren’t always the ones that were sitting around and joking and whatnot. In fact, they might be a little difficult to get close to, but when you’re really trying to do something that’s extraordinarily difficult and sometimes it requires pushing other people or pulling them to do it, they are the people who stand up and accept that responsibility. I saw time and again, that proved really important in a difficult combat environment.

Speaker 1:
I’m sure you’ve seen this in your companies, you know after you’ve had like a really rough days? You and your comrades and the guys that you work with in your business, you got to have humor. We kind of joke- [crosstalk 00:11:40] like if somebody-

General Stanley McChrystal:
Sure, oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
… if a customer comes in and steals a bunch of stuff from us or if someone breaks into your business, it’s not fun, but you kind of get through it with humor and you kind of have that kind of rapport with your team. I want to ask you there, Stanley, do you guys have jokes and kind of humor and stuff? After you’ve had a big fight and you kind of calms down, or what kind of stuff do you talk about when you’re in between combat? You’re definitely engaged in combat, but there’s kind of a kind of a lull for a few hours and you’re in a foxhole. What kind of stuff? What kind of conversations do you have?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. It’s interesting you would say that because first, humor is very, very important and I think even when people don’t feel like being funny or they don’t feel like being upbeat, the cultures of good military organizations is that’s the way you act because that’s the way you’re expected to act. So even if things are frightening or if they’re frustrating or you have a tendency to be a little bit despondent because you think you might be losing, there is this cultural norm that says, “I’m going to act up beat. I’m going to make jokes,” [inaudible 00:12:46] because it’s infectious. Everybody knows how everybody else feels. Nobody sits around saying, “Boy, I’m scared. Boy, I’m really worried about this.” Everybody takes a sort of tongue in cheek attitude, but you have to still understand that’s a veneer. That’s every what is also frighteningly serious.

Speaker 1:
Stan, what was tougher for you; starting your business that you’re around the dinner table or jumping out of a plane?

General Stanley McChrystal:
That’s a great question. I think starting a business because jumping out of the plan was something I had expected to do. As I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a soldier. I knew I wanted to be a parachute trooper. You just have this sense that this is another step in my career. When I left the military, I had never thought about starting a business and I thought, “Wow, it must be really hard because all these people who’ve started businesses, they must be really bright or they must be really lucky or something.” So it was the unknown for me. It was much more unknown than anything militarily that I ever experienced.

Speaker 1:
Capturing Saddam Hussein, what was your role in capturing Saddam Hussein? Were you the guy who tricked him? You said, “Come over here. Come over.” [crosstalk 00:13:57] What was your role in capturing Saddam Hussein?

General Stanley McChrystal:
That’s a great question. I was the commander of the task force, so I’m in the position of getting the credit for something that actually my people did. Saddam Hussein was captured like many cases with someone big. There was a very patient set of interrogations of people who’ve been detained and putting together other intelligence. Then an organization when they got a good beat on where he might be, they conducted an operation act to this farm area north of Baghdad. They went to an area and a informer had gone with the task force who was prepared to help guide them to where he thought Saddam Hussein was. Then my forces went there and in fact, found him in a little spider hole. So I’m the person who orchestrates it. I’m the person commands the organization but it, but it’s true in almost any organization actually, the people that work with you and for you, they do the heavy lifting, they do the hard part and they deserve the lion’s share of the credit because it’s the very difficult, as we call it, the, “pony into the spear.”

Speaker 1:
Are you allowed to give a shout outs, AKA a credit to specific individuals that you were very close to that situation? Are you allowed to share that or not so much?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, not so much. Not appropriate.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

General Stanley McChrystal:
But they were-

Speaker 1:
Okay.

General Stanley McChrystal:
They were just a set of real professionals.

Speaker 1:
Got it. Okay. Now I’m going to ask you, I’ve never painted a guest into a corner and I’m not going to do it now, but I just want to get your take on this idea and feel free to say, “I don’t want to answer it,” and I’ll be happy to edit it out. Okay? We have you served under president Obama, you served under different administrations, it was Republicans and Democrats had been in office and what was it like to serve under different administrations? What was it like to serve in the military, lets say under a Republican or under a Democrat. Because a lot of our listeners are business people they all vote one way or the other, but was it different running the military or being involved in military under different presidents? what was that like?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, essentially no. When you’re junior, you’re down there in the force. You never see the president. You read newspapers.

Speaker 1:
Got it.

General Stanley McChrystal:
We were pretty well taken care of by all administrations. As you get more senior and as I got very senior and you have personal interaction, then it doesn’t matter what party they’re from, it’s more their personality and their style.

Speaker 1:
Got it, got it. Now you have decided to write this book, you wrote this book called, “Leaders: myth and reality.” What first inspired you to write this book?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, it’s funny. I had gone through a long career. I’d written two books before this and then I came to this frightening conclusion that I really didn’t understand leadership as much as I thought I did. So along with two coauthors, one a former Navy seal and one a former Marine infantry man, we went back to first principles to try to get our arms around what really leadership is. So we went back to Plutarch, the first century biographer, historian, and we looked at how he had written about leaders in his famous, “Parallel Lives,” and we decided to profile 13 people and not to figure out what traits determined leaders, but really determine why this diverse group of people, why they emerged as leaders. It was an interesting journey.

Speaker 1:
So in chapter two of this book, you talk about Robert E. Lee. I’d love for you to share with our listeners out there who Robert E. Lee was and kind of break down maybe some of the nuggets of knowledge you might find inside this chapter two of your book.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Sure. Robert E. Lee for people who either were in the military or from the South, he was the most famous Southern general of the civil war. I had grown up near where he grew up in Northern Virginia. I had gone to Washington Lee High School and I’d gone to West Point like he had. So I had paralleled much of my career on him. At West Point, I lived in Lee barracks. He was considered maybe the best cadet to ever go to West Point and the most effective general officer of 150 years. He was this iconic stereotype of military leadership perfection.

Speaker 1:
I want to go back to this. See this notable quotable, I don’t have any tattoos, but if I were going to get one, I’d probably get a tattoo that said, “You forced somebody to do something and then you convinced them it is something that they should want to do,”

General Stanley McChrystal:
That they should want to do.

Speaker 1:
I run call centers for some of my companies. So people get a job in a call center. Their job is to make outbound calls and you’ll give them a quota like, “You have to make a minimum of a hundred calls a day. Usually, they’ll say something like, “I don’t want to. I have anxiety. I get nervous. Is there any way someone could do it for me?” That kind of stuff.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
Then we’ll say something not encouraging like, “No, get on the phone.” Because now you do business consulting at a certain level, you do leadership consulting. Where do you see business leaders getting it wrong as it relates to getting their people just to do what they’re supposed to do?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, I think sometimes you fail to explain to people the connection between what you’re asking or forcing them to do and what the outcome is. So if you talk about, “We’re a client or customer centric organization,” everybody nods and you say, “Well, what does that mean?” And it is how does the customer feel about the interaction with your people and your firm on a daily basis or as often as they interact? So if everyone in the organization understands that the customer essentially makes a decision every day, whether or not to be your customer, they do it through every aspect of their experience. If you step back and say, “I’m going to treat that customer as the most important person is the world as exactly like I would want to be treated, not like a distraction or something that I just have to do to make money,” then you have a different approach.

Speaker 1:
So chapter three of your book, you talk about… Your whole book by the way, provides so many, I think counterintuitive approaches to leadership. Chapter three, it’s called, “Founders,” and you talk about Walt Disney in there, Coco Chanel. Can you talk to us about some of the character traits of Walt Disney or Coco Chanel, some things we can find in chapter three of the book?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. I grew up with the idea that Walt Disney was uncle Walt. Every Sunday night at 7:30, he was on and he’d give an introduction to what was then a story that was going to be on the TV show. He seemed like everybody’s kindly uncle. He was a brilliant guy and he was an innovator, but he was a tough boss. If you really read the story, he could be hard to work with and he could be driven and he could be demanding. When he created Disneyland, his attention to detail was extraordinary, but people still wanted to work for him. They wanted to work with him because he was doing something special.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Coco Chanel was much the same way. She had employees stand essentially, at attention in a little receiving line when she arrived at work in the morning and she would come inside and they had to be dressed in Chanel clothing and then she could be very hard to be around during the day. But again, they flocked to work with her. So one of the things you learn is people want to be part of something special. They want to be part of a really good organization and they’re willing to tolerate difficult work. They’re willing to tolerate even leaders who aren’t touchy feely kind of people, if they can be part of an organization that operates to a high standard and is doing something special.

Speaker 1:
Now, Dr. Z has a tough, probably a special quote. [crosstalk 00:21:34].

Dr. Z:
I’m going kind of personal now. Your father was a general also, right, in the army?

Speaker 1:
He was.

Dr. Z:
Yes, and he was a two star general.

Speaker 1:
Correct.

Dr. Z:
And you just blew right past him. You went to four stars, right?

Speaker 1:
Were you on steroids?

Dr. Z:
What’s up with the stars? The average guy out here who’s not military-

Speaker 1:
Yeah, how do you get the stars?

Dr. Z:
How do you get the stars? You just go and you just sew them on yourself. You just go and you say, “Hey, self…”

Speaker 1:
I feel like a four star.

Dr. Z:
“I feel like four star today.” [crosstalk 00:22:00]

General Stanley McChrystal:
You take it very seriously when you’re a civilian and when you’re junior in the military, you look up at people these stars and think, “Oh my God, that is the most talented, the smartest…”

Dr. Z:
Yeah [crosstalk 00:22:14] You got us hoodwinked? You’re saying we’re hoodwinked?

General Stanley McChrystal:
But that’s the mythology and I’m going to let you in on the story. I graduated from West Point in 1976 with, I think 847 of my classmates. Three of us became four star generals.

Dr. Z:
Wow.

General Stanley McChrystal:
None of the three of us were very good cadets. No one would have picked us. So there’s a certain amount of just luck. You’re just sort of there, you’re around. But I think the rest of it are, it’s character, it’s a stick to activeness. As you know from starting business, it’s not the genius who necessarily creates the best business. It’s this meshing together of opportunity of who you get to work with, but also this idea that you will just focus and you’ll have this drive and get to it. So when you see these general officers, they are just the same as everybody else, but they’ve had a series of opportunities and they were fortunate enough to take advantage of them.

Speaker 1:
You are a very proactive person. I’m just curious, we like to always ask our guests about this, how do you spend the first four hours of every day and what time do you now wake up?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, that’s great. I get up early. This morning, I got up at three o’clock so I could work out before my wife and I hit the road. We had to drive from DC up to Yale at 5:00 AM and I don’t always get up at 3:00, but I typically up get 4:30 or 5:00. I do that because that’s the only part of the day you really control. When you’re busy, the rest of the day is calls, emails, meetings, et cetera. So what I find is I have to start my day working out or psychologically I’m not good. I work out for about 90 minutes in the morning and then I have enough time to get myself cleaned up to do a certain number of things.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Then I like to get into the office early so that when I get there, I have a little bit of time to grab a cup of coffee, talk to my assistant and a couple of other people who have the early habit too, all veterans interestingly enough, in the military. Then I’ll answer some emails and I’ll kind of clear my head because I like to be prepared. I’m not one of those people who likes to walk in at the last second without getting my mind or other preparations set before I do something.

Speaker 1:
If you had to recommend a book, what’s the one book that you would recommend for all the listeners out there? If they’re looking for one book, just one book to read that could really make an impact on their lives?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, I would say a 1968 book called, “Once an Eagle,” by an author named Anton Myer. It was made into a 1970s many series, not a great one, but it’s a story of two army officers and it goes from the first world war up until the 1950s and it’s really about character and leadership. It doesn’t have to be a military story, but it’s about these two characters, one who is much more admirable than the other, but if you go through the journey, it really gets to the heart of what leadership is, what responsibility is, what values are? Some of it people say, “Well, that’s not important,” and I would tell you after my years of experience, I come back to the point that that’s more important than anything else.

Speaker 1:
Sir, how old are you at last count?

General Stanley McChrystal:
64.

Speaker 1:
How many pull ups can you do?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, I do pull ups pretty regularly.

Speaker 1:
I know you do.

General Stanley McChrystal:
I do sets of pull-ups. So I start in the morning, I do five sets that I do one set of 12 and then four sets of 10. I can probably do, if I had to, if you have a gun to my head, I could probably do 16 on one set.

Speaker 1:
So what does your routine look like, your workout routine? What would you do today?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, today was a gym day. So I alternate. One day I’ll run and I run for an hour, which isn’t impressively far, but it’s good enough for me. Then the other day, I do this thing where I do four sets of pushups and then I do five sets of pull-ups, and I intersperse that with a set, a different combination of, of abdominal exercises. I do 105 sit ups and then I do these crossover sit ups and then I do things that are a different kind of crunch. I put planks in there and so the whole thing, and then at the end, I go to incline bench press with dumbbells and curls and I have a couple of other operators. I do some things. It’s about 90 minutes. It’s not huge. I’m not looking to be is stronger than the next guy right now. But at my age, I find if I pushed myself pretty hard, I can do a lot more than I think I would otherwise.

Speaker 1:
What do you eat? What does a typical daily diet look like for you? Because the show’s all about being proactive, how to become the best you you can be. And I know you’re intentional about your diet and intentional about how you’ve lived your days and organize your day. What do you eat during a typical day?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, I’ve got kind of a quirky habit. I eat once a day. I eat dinner. Every once in a while if the cycle is such, I’ll eat lunch in lieu of that, but typically just the one meal a day and people say, “Wow, that’s so zen like,” or whatever. No, it’s not. It’s just a habit I started like 40 years ago. I do it at night, so I sort of defer gratification all day. Then at night, I sort of eat whatever I want to. I eat a normal dinner. It’s probably bigger than I’d eat if I was eating three meals a day.

Speaker 1:
One meal?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah.

Speaker 1:
When did you start this habit?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Works for me.

Speaker 1:
Why did you start this habit?

General Stanley McChrystal:
When I was a Lieutenant, I thought I was getting fat and I was probably getting a tiny bit pudgy. So I just started doing that. I started running very seriously and so that just became habits.

Speaker 1:
That’s impressive. My friend, if you had to communicate a message. I give you a billboard, I give you the mic, I let you have the floor, you can wrap up today’s show by encouraging the listeners with anything. Maybe there’s a message you want to share, a specific word of encouragement. What’s one message that you’d like to communicate to the 500,000 people who listen to this show each and every month?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah, I would say that you need to be intentional about what you want to be and when I say that, you have to decide what you want to be. I think the best road to that is some kind of service, doing something, not necessarily military service, but service in something, service to something that gives you a purpose higher than money or higher than personal gratification because when you do that, no matter what else is happening in your life or on a daily basis, you just take some satisfaction that says, “No matter how much this sucks right now, I’m doing it for a really good purpose.” In a business, it can be doing it for your employees, it can be doing it for contributing to something, but I think absent that sense of service and purpose, I think things can feel pretty hollow.

Speaker 1:
You wrote in your book, “Team of Teams: new rules of engagement for a complex world,” you said that a staggering 93% of the people surveyed who work in cubicles say they would prefer a different workplace. My friend, should everyone be working in an open office environment? What would you recommend for the listeners out there who have an office where there’s cubicles?

General Stanley McChrystal:
Yeah. I think that a combination works very well. What we’ve experimented my firm is most of it is open, but we have areas where people can go because there are times when you need to write something or read something where you don’t need distractions and you want to be able to literally just immerse yourself in some privacy and thought. But most of the time, I found out that the open area and the constant engagement stimulates people, it creates relationships and people work better.

Speaker 1:
Wow. Well Z, that’s all the questions I want to ask him today. I know you have one more probably you’re stewing on. I just want to make sure because we don’t know if we’re going to be able to interview our good friend Stan here again. We had to trick him. He thought this was Oprah.

Dr. Z:
In Thrive Nation, in a pre-interview before we started this, he told us to call him Stan. So we’re being respectful by respecting his wishes.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Dr. Z:
So the fact that we didn’t go [crosstalk 00:30:32] He’s a general and they just keep calling Stan.

Speaker 1:
Right. I want to let you know, this isn’t Oprah. I want to be honest.

Dr. Z:
Yes. I even asked him, is it Stan the man? He said, “No, just Stan.” I just want to get that clear.

Speaker 1:
Just want to get that out there.

Dr. Z:
Okay. So you could go back to West Point, back in 1972, and there’s a new cadet learning how to walk, learning how to sit, learning how to do all this stuff, and you could sit down with that young man-

Speaker 1:
Wow.

Dr. Z:
… what would you tell him?

General Stanley McChrystal:
It’s funny. I asked my father that. When I first entered, [crosstalk 00:31:06] he had graduated 30 years before. I said, “What would you do differently?” And he said, “I wouldn’t work so hard,” and I said, “Hey, that’s easy for you to say, you made it,” and all this kind of stuff. He said, “No, you’re going to make it.” Remember what’s important.

General Stanley McChrystal:
If I go back to young people now, I think people should work hard. I believe strongly in that, but those things I regret about my life are not things that I did. There’s some things I wouldn’t do again, but for the most part, I feel good about those. It’s things I didn’t do. It’s things I didn’t do for people, reunions I didn’t attend, weddings I didn’t go to or things that I just, because at the time they didn’t seem as important, but in retrospect I think they were more important.

Dr. Z:
That’s a powerful word right there. You would at least high five him and go, “Dude, you’re going to be a four star. Just keep up.”

Speaker 1:
Okay. Well, here’s the deal, brother Stan. I know you have to go deliver a lecture at Yale, and I respect your time. I just want to tell you thank you for your service. Thank you for keeping us safe. Thank you for your… I mean that. It’d be kind of hard to be an entrepreneur if we didn’t have the safety we enjoy here and I’ve traveled [crosstalk 00:32:15] all around the world and America’s a great place because the guys like you and the people that you’ve led and worked with and just want to say thank you again on behalf of the Thrive Nation.

General Stanley McChrystal:
Well, you’re kind to have me in. Thank you.