31 Quotes by Chris Fussell

The reality, as the battlefield taught us, is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age.

As I found while leading special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the problem is interconnected, your organization must be, as well.

As a leader, you sit at a different level of perspective from your team, either with line of sight higher and across the organization structure or connected at more senior levels with your clients and partners.

It's difficult to feel as though you are truly being effective at work. Many of us feel trapped in endless meetings, with barely any time to grab lunch, let alone do any work. Overarching strategies and key priorities seem completely divorced from the day-to-day tactics.

The Defense Department is prone to all of the 'traditional bureaucratic rules,' which is the same thing you'll find in most traditional government systems.

As the insurgency in Iraq started to grow, we realized this is a connected network of individual actors that can move at light speed.

If you're trying to stay productive, stop and think, 'Are my meetings actually productive, or are we merely having meetings for meetings' sake?'

Most teams are naturally flat; they have fewer members than a large enterprise, which allows for intimacy and trust to form. This makes collaborative problem solving in individual teams more straightforward.

Special operations are small, highly specialized. They do amazing work when they're put into the fight, but it's a limited resource. And so if we become overly dependent on an organization that's designed for a very specific mission and expect them to solve all problems around the world, you're naturally going to overextend it.