The Beauty of Plywood: General Stanley McChrystal on Leadership

When a four-star general boasting a 34-year military career, including bringing together dozens of disparate defense organizations under the Joint Special Operations Command, offers some advice on leadership, you want to sit up a little straighter and listen closely.

Few leaders can claim to have overcome obstacles as large as those faced by retired four-star General Stanley A. McChrystal. McChrystal has been praised for creating a revolution in warfare that fused intelligence and operations as the former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and Director of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that captured Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. With McChrystal at the podium, NECA’s 2011 Opening General Session today was a frank discussion on what it makes to be an honorable leader in difficult times.

“Leadership is responsibility,” McChrystal said. “It’s being responsible for what people do, and for what they fail to do. 9/11 was a collective failure of leadership, and a grievous price was paid for that. Leadership demands accepting responsibility.”

McChrystal made three essential points about leadership:

• Change is necessary – but hard.
• There is always another way to get something done.
• People are often the hardest part of leadership.

McChrystal also talked about “plywood leadership.” In this philosophy, the leader is the glue that binds the planks together, producing something whose strength and efficiency is far greater than the sum of its parts. “In Iraq, everything we built was made out of plywood,” he said. “You can put it up quickly and cheaply, you can change it easily. When you’re working on plywood, it’s easy to remember you’re there for a reason. You have a function.

“But the longer I worked on plywood, the more Zen I became about it. It’s made of thin pieces of mid-grade lumber that you can break easily with your hand. But when those pieces are glued together, they have extraordinary strength. That’s what organizations are like. You take ordinary people, put them together in teams, bound together with the glue of leadership, and they can do extraordinary things. Plywood is much greater than any individual.”