The Evergreen Experience with Govig Executive Search and John Burns Real Estate Consulting
In this episode of The Evergreen Experience™, recorded on June 19, 2020, Dave is joined by John Burns, CEO, John Burns Real Estate Consulting, and Todd Govig, President and CEO, Govig Executive Search. John and Todd share their experiences leading and adapting their Evergreen® consulting and professional services companies through the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, John share his current view on prospects for different real estate industry sectors and Todd shares his insights on executive hiring across industries.
How Innovation Led to an Unforeseen Blockbuster for Cupcake Vineyards
[A note from Tugboat Institute: In mid-March, we pivoted from our scheduled Evergreen Journal publication calendar to produce COVID-related content to address the challenges and uncertainty of this unique time. This week, we are publishing an article written before the pandemic began because we feel the topic—innovation—is one that is more relevant now than ever. We will continue to publish COVID-related content in the weeks and months ahead, interspersed with general articles and videos that are relevant and timely.]
If you’ve spent time in the wine aisle of your local grocery store recently, you know that consumers have an almost endless array of choices. There are literally thousands of wine brands competing for your attention. We actually joke that the experience of picking a chardonnay is like picking a birthday card for your spouse: You find yourself standing in front of a seemingly unending wall of options, staring at the cards, waiting for something that’s just the right fit to jump out at you. It can be a daunting task.
As a 38- year-old Evergreen® wine producer based in Livermore, California, our company, The Wine Group, has a long history of searching for and developing that magical marketing differentiator that will set our product apart. Like everyone else, we are continually seeking that “lightning in a bottle,” the brand with the magical “it” factor that will drive customers to return again and again to purchase the brand.
Our experience has led us to understand that supporting an entrepreneurial mindset among our team is essential in developing and marketing the brands that have become our biggest stars. The success of one of our best-selling brands speaks to the power of our commitment to fostering innovation throughout our organization.
In 2007, Casey G., a relatively new member of our very small marketing team, proposed an idea for a brand that tapped into what was a huge trend at the time: cupcakes. I would be lying if I said we thought it was a great idea. What did cupcakes have to do with wine?
But we knew that Casey, despite her limited experience, was very tuned into trends and had valuable perspective as an actual member of the target demographic. In her view, the then current craze for cupcakes spoke to consumers’ attraction to the idea of treating yourself to a small indulgence. So, we included the idea in our innovation process, where we regularly review and evaluate a wide range of ideas developed by our team.
As the marketing team further developed the concept, the idea gained traction. The Cupcake brand proposition resonated as people recognized the popularity and broad affinity for cupcakes—everyone has likely enjoyed one at some point in time. The branding was further developed, and the brand Cupcake Vineyards, wines that “pair perfectly with your assorted collection of moments of joy,” was born.
Because there was still a thread of uncertainty about the concept—especially among the more “pragmatic” members of the leadership team, we decided to test Cupcake Chardonnay as a first-to-market item exclusive to Cost Plus World Market in late 2007. At the same time, the leadership team decided to nationally launch what was at that time our “better” idea—Swirling Dervish, a brand you’ve likely never heard of given that it failed quickly and miserably.
Meanwhile, Cupcake Chardonnay became a huge hit at Cost Plus. This success really left us no option but to expand Cupcake out of Cost Plus and into a national launch in 2009.
We sold 300,000 cases in 2009 and over one million cases in 2010. By 2011 we had 14 different wine types in Cupcake and sold 2.4 million cases. Our Cupcake Vineyards New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc became the number one Sauvignon Blanc in the U.S. that year. By 2012, we were 3 million cases, surpassing Kendall-Jackson to become the largest brand above $8 in the U.S. Our Cupcake volume remains about 3 million cases today.
If I could tell you the exact alchemy of ingredients that led to this phenomenal success, we would have five more wines that could boast the same record (and we would never have launched Swirling Dervish). But I'd be lying if I said we knew this was going to work or that we absolutely understood why. What I do know is that the brand would never have existed if we didn’t live our shared values of being “relentlessly entrepreneurial” and innovative—and fostering those values by listening to people who have good ideas, regardless of their station in the organization.
The entire organization supported what we saw as a creative idea. The winemaking team over-delivered on quality, the sales team recognized the momentum and made the brand a priority, and the operations team found ways to supply the brand even as we blew past every projection we made. Everyone went “all in” to support Cupcake.
Today, we continue to embrace the open, supportive culture of innovation that was a factor in Casey’s idea rising to the surface. We want people to be innovative and enterprising in all areas of the company. To this end, we have an intranet site, the Lightbulb, where anybody in the company can share ideas with the marketing department. The ideas from this communal brainstorm are thrown into the mix of ideas that come from more traditional sources like market research and data analytics, giving us a robust pool of ideas to consider as we look at new product innovation.
We believe one of the reasons our process is effective is our commitment to remaining open and receptive to new and different ideas, not allowing executive-level perceptions and traditional brand thinking to stifle innovation. Rather, we trust the people and the process that brought the ideas forward and then focus on efficient execution. Once committed to a project, we aim to get a very quick read on the potential for success—and to be quick to admit when it doesn't work. In the case of Cupcake, my predecessor had the wisdom to see the early response at Cost Plus and understand the potential for national distribution—and he let the organization run with it.
Now, the downside to this focus on efficiency is that sometimes we haven't shown the patience we need; but, the upside is that we try a lot of things, and we don't waste time and resources when we see early indicators that it’s not a win.
As an Evergreen company, we understand that continuous innovation like this is critical to our long-term vision. The Wine Group is management-owned, and we view ourselves as stewards of this organization. Our goal is to leave the place better than we found it, and that commitment requires continually infusing the company with new ideas and opportunities for growth. This extended horizon is shared across the business, so that at every level, team members are asking, “what is the right thing to do for the long-term?” This mentality is embedded into our culture.
Cupcake Vineyards continues to be a core brand equity for The Wine Group. The lessons we learned from Cupcake’s unlikely success continue to pay dividends. We continue to encourage innovation from all areas, and we’ve been able to successfully develop new brands like Chloe and Imagery from the same commitment to being relentlessly entrepreneurial and listening to ideas from everyone.
Brian Vos is CEO of The Wine Group.
The Evergreen Experience with Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialists and SOHDental
In this episode, recorded on June 5, 2020, Dave Whorton is joined by Jim Kimzey, CEO, Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialists, and Samson Liu, CEO, SOHDental. Both Jim and Samson lead Evergreen® businesses in the healthcare industry, designated as essential services. Both are navigating significant challenge and, in some cases, surprising opportunities. Jim and Samson each speak to their experiences, including their shared focus on client and staff safety and the steps they have taken to strengthen their teams and processes.
The Evergreen Experience with Gourmondo Co. and MiiR
In this episode of The Evergreen Experience™, Dave is joined by Alissa Leinonen, CEO & Founder of catering company Gourmondo Co., and Bryan Papé, Founder, MiiR, a drinkware company with a social and environmental mission. Alissa and Bryan speak to the impact of COVID-19 on their respective businesses, the critical role of their Purpose, the importance of strategic partnerships and reinvention in this challenging time, and their outlook moving forward.
The Evergreen Experience with High Plains Bank and Left Hand Brewing Co.
In this episode of The Evergreen Experience™, Dave Whorton is joined by John Creighton, President & CEO, High Plains Bank, and Eric Wallace, President & Co-Founder, Left Hand Brewing Co. John and Eric, who both live and lead businesses in Colorado, speak to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on their businesses, the innovations and adaptations that they have tried, their view on the future of their industries, and how Evergreen® principles have guided them.
The Evergreen Experience with Hollingsworth & Vose Co. and Kenmore Envelope
In this episode of The Evergreen Experience™, Dave Whorton is joined by Scott Evans, CEO of Kenmore Envelope Company, and Val Hollingsworth, President & CEO of Hollingsworth & Vose Co. Scott and Val lead manufacturing companies in two different industries and will speak to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on their businesses, the innovations and adaptations that they have tried, their view on the future of their industries, and the way in which Evergreen® principles are informing their approach to and perspective on this challenging time.
The Evergreen Experience with Canlis and Freeman
In the inaugural episode of The Evergreen Experience™ 2020, Tugboat Institute Founder & CEO Dave Whorton is joined by Brian Canlis, President and Co-Owner, Canlis, and Carrie Freeman Parsons, Chair, Freeman, to discuss how these two Evergreen®, family-owned companies have been impacted by and adapted to the COVID-19 shutdown.
Both businesses represent industries especially hard-hit by this crisis—restaurants (Canlis) and major event management (Freeman)—and both adapted and reimagined their companies, displaying inspiring resiliency rooted in their Purpose and enabled by their Evergreen values.
Adapting in Real Time to Our “New” Customer
In late February, when news of COVID-19 began sweeping the country, I was reading everything I could find to understand what this would mean for our company. Our Evergreen® business, Life’s Abundance, produces safe and effective products for people and pets and distributes via online sales and individual distributors nationwide, and it was pretty clear to me in those early days that COVID-19 was going to change everything about the way we operate. We would have to pivot quickly because in a few weeks’ time, we were going to find ourselves in a brand-new world.
First, to support our employees in what seemed an inevitable transition to remote work, we quickly moved to get everybody set up at home so that they would have no need for the physical office—we enabled remote access, set up home office equipment, and did everything we could to think ahead to what team members would need to continue to work offsite. Our location in hurricane-prone Florida meant that we had an off-site business continuity plan established for a period of weeks. Now we were shifting to potentially be out of the office for months.
Having transitioned the team, the next step was to shift the company itself. We gathered the team virtually, and I told them, “We've changed how we operate as a company because you, our employees, are in a different place than you were a few weeks ago. Now we have to do the same thing for our customers. All of the projects we were working on before this, those were for a different customer. That was a different era. Now, today, we are serving customers whose reality—like ours—has changed. Our focus now needs to be to change everything we do to be of service and of value to this new customer if we want to survive.”
In that moment, we were jumping off a cliff. This was not like prior economic slow-downs. It was a sudden, artificial shut-down, which also changed daily life profoundly, and we had to reprioritize and rethink everything. Our priority now was to tackle projects we could get done quickly, for the benefit of customers.
An early example of this shift was the change in autoship subscriptions in pet food orders—an option allowing customers to be automatically billed for regular shipments of pet food. We saw customers begin to cancel autoships, and we knew we needed to address the issue. First, with empathy, we considered the issue from this new customer’s perspective: facing an uncertain financial future, cancelling subscriptions like this is something that allows a customer to feel they are taking a step to cut expenses. But the reality is that their pets still require food on a regular basis, and the savings they may see in purchasing less expensive food in the short term is not going to be significant.
With that in mind, we drafted text to share how customers could keep their subscription with us and still save some money. For instance, if they were to purchase a larger volume every two months, they would save on monthly shipping and get the discount that’s offered for larger quantities. By inserting that simple note on the order page that would pop up before they clicked “cancel subscription,” we were able to retain roughly 10 autoship customers a day. Now, in our normal operating mode, that change would have taken weeks because we would have gone through various text edits, customized the site to offer auto-calculations, and made other tweaks over time. But in this case, we wrote the explanation and added it to the page in one day, benefitting from the saved business immediately and, more important, empowering customers by showing them how they could get better value.
That early effort was a clear signal that we could find success through quick, pragmatic innovations to adapt to this new customer. We saw that we would need to continue to be fast, agile, and responsive. We have continued on the path of that iterative process ever since. Our sales are up, despite the stress we know exists. Though we're seeing more credit cards declined as we process orders, we are also attracting new customers who are purchasing pet and health products online for the first time as they shelter in place.
Continuing to learn about, understand, and have empathy for our “new” customer—those who have been purchasing products from us for years and those who have only recently found us—drives another company-wide innovation we embarked on in the wake of the pandemic. Every morning, since we transitioned to remote work, we gather the entire company for a 15-minute meeting, focused on understanding our customer and the new landscape of producing, selling, and distributing our products.
We spend this dedicated time asking questions and seeking understanding. We know we can’t rely on past data because now that people are working from home, every single pattern has changed—the call patterns, the ordering patterns, everything. This is a brand-new company, and we need to learn how to navigate and provide value.
To get the most comprehensive picture of our new customer and this novel landscape, each week I invite one or two distributors to join the meeting. I ask them, "How are you doing? How's your family? How has COVID-19 affected you? What are you hearing from your customers?" The entire team has learned so much through this insight into customers’ patterns, concerns, and questions.
After hearing from distributors and discussing other information and feedback we’ve received in the last 24 hours, we consider, as a team, “What do we think the trends are going to be based on this information? Who else can we talk to? Who can provide guidance?” At the end of each meeting, I ask, “What did we learn today? What is noise and what do we think is a clear signal, and why?” And, from there, “What is actionable?”
We’re not always going to get it right, but we’re learning, every day, about our new customer. We’re taking steps to act on what we learn, which is allowing us to maintain and grow our business. And, the meetings allow us the opportunity to connect as a team and innovate—something I plan to continue as we move out of this current crisis period. Whatever new version of “normal” eventually emerges, I know we will have valuable lessons to carry forward about how to serve our customers.
Lester Thornhill is CEO of Life’s Abundance.
The Simple Six: Tools for Team Well-Being in an Uncertain Time
I remember exactly when I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic was going to have a significant impact on our business. It was March 12, 2020.
I live in downtown Detroit, and as I looked out the windows of my apartment that day, down onto the streets of the city, they were empty. There were no people walking to work in the surrounding offices, and there were no delivery trucks ferrying supplies to those offices. I’m not going to claim to be the smartest guy, but even I knew that we were going to suffer a direct hit.
Our Evergreen® company, imageOne, provides managed print services, document security, and document automation services—office equipment, supplies, and services. We were in the eye of the storm.
That same day, our leadership team gathered and started planning. For a good ten days, we modeled out worst-case to best case scenarios and decided to move ahead with the modifying our plan for the worst-case scenario. We gathered our entire team for an all-hands meeting, via Zoom, and presented the situation. Because we practice the Great Game of Business and operate with full financial transparency, we were able to share the scenarios with the team and say, “You can see the math; this is just a math problem." Then, we asked everyone to take time to consider their personal financial situation and to ideate in teams and get creative to help solve the problem.
Several days later, we came back together and committed to a plan: We would stay together, with a compensation cut across the board, and would implement financial metrics that would allow us to plan our way through this challenge, and, ideally, back to 100 percent compensation.
The decision was made, but that doesn’t mean the path ahead was going to be without its challenges. As a leader, I knew this period would be the truest test of our leadership and the strength of the company culture we have been developing for years. I also knew that it would be essential to focus on the physical and emotional well-being of our team members so that we could all maintain our health and wellness as we worked together to get through this unprecedented situation.
The good news was that we had some tools in our belt. About three years ago, through research I had conducted in the process of writing a book, Do Nothing: The Most Rewarding Leadership Challenge You’ll Ever Take, we introduced an initiative in our company to raise awareness among team members about steps they could take to encourage a balanced life. The “Simple Six” is a list of practical actions that lead to a more fulfilling and mindful life: mindfulness, sleep, nutrition, exercise, connection, and gratitude. These are basic elements of healthy living, but they are easy to overlook.
For the last few years, we have taught the Simple Six as a course in our imageOne University, so all employees have been introduced to the concept. This is not a prescriptive program or set of practices but rather an awareness effort to offer team members insight into habits and behaviors that affect their lives—personal and professional—and related resources and educational opportunities. Since introducing the Simple Six, we have conducted annual surveys to understand which of the topics on the list is most relevant for the team in that year (last year it was sleep, for instance) and have then provided opportunities and tools throughout the year related to that topic, checking in regularly to see how people are responding and if needs and challenges are changing.
In the wake of COVID-19, we made an intentional effort to focus more attention on the Simple Six as part of our commitment to making sure our team felt cared for, connected, and informed through this period of challenge.
What does that look like today as we continue to navigate this new normal? It means that we are continually checking in with our team, throughout the daily rhythms of group meetings and personal interactions, to understand their challenges and struggles and to respond. We are asking; “How’s your sleep?”; “Are you able to get some exercise in?”; “Can you find a few minutes to be still and focus on your breath?”; “Have you been able to connect with your family this week?” Often, simply raising the issue and drawing someone’s attention to the one of these areas is the incentive they need to address it and benefit from putting energy in that direction. We end every meeting by sharing gratitude.
More formally, I have launched a weekly “Lunch with Rob,” during which we gather via Zoom and learn from an expert in one of the Simple Six areas—nutrition or mindfulness, for example. These sessions reflect one of our core values—learning together—but they also connect us as a team, as people open up and share their struggles, ask questions, and share their vulnerability in a safe environment.
The ongoing dialogue around Simple Six is not new at ImageOne, but we are finding that it is especially helpful during this often-stressful time. Though we received PPP funding in late April, allowing us to restore salaries to 100 percent, many uncertainties remain, and we continue to focus attention on our team’s overall well-being.
As I’m able to reflect on the success of this effort, I think it has been essential to stay tuned in with the needs of our people—the first step is to understand what people are struggling with and what resources will be the most valuable. From there, it’s about delivering intentional responses and authentic concern, regularly, to ensure they feel heard, along with resources that are relevant and accessible.
As a leader, I’m also doing my best to focus on the Simple Six in my own life during this time. I know that I need to check in regularly with myself to ask, “How’s my body? How’s my mind? How’s my heart?” I need to pay attention to all of those things to be able to show up and be present for my team. Because, at the end of the day, being present, truly connecting with people in an authentic, personal way, is the most important thing we can do. We can’t solve a lot of the personal and professional challenges that our people are facing today, but we can look them squarely in the eye, listen to them, and allow them to be heard. If we can do this, I believe we will be the leaders our teams deserve.
Rob Dube is CEO of imageOne.
Organizational Adaptability in the 21st Century
NOTE: This Evergreen Journal article is adapted from General Stanley McChrystal’s presentation at the inaugural Tugboat Institute Gathering of Teams in February 2020. General McChrystal’s message of adaptability and innovation in the face of challenge is inspiring, and we feel it is especially relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nine-and-a-half years ago, when I left the military, I started a company, McChrystal Group. I had no investors (I still don’t) and no business plan. Today, we’ve grown to about 100 people. It hasn’t been an easy road. As Evergreen® business leaders know, building a business can be tough. There are times when you find yourself hanging on by your fingertips. When that has happened along the way, people have asked me, “Why don't you just sell it?" My answer: My purpose is my people. That’s what I’m about; that’s what keeps me interested.
That interest in people fuels the work we do at our company, and it’s paired with an abiding fascination I have with how organizations are run. Today, much of the focus in businesses is on efficiency. While efficiency was essential in leading organizations through the industrial revolution to achieve greater productivity, what is actually most important today is adaptability.
I didn't come to this conclusion through academic study but through personal experience. I'd been in the Army many years, when in 2003 I was named to command Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Created in 1981, JSOC is a subset of our special operating forces focused on counter-terrorist operations, hostage rescue, aircraft hijacking, and very precise raids. It's composed of specialized units for those missions: Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Rangers, to name a couple.
I was a Major General at the time of my appointment, and I'd grown up in JSOC. From the earliest years, the organization ran successful missions, including in Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, and, after 9/11, just about all the high-profile operations you've heard of—and many you haven’t.
But for the first 22 years of our history, the organization was not pressure tested. From 1981 to 2003, all of the operations were pretty narrow in time and scope, and we could accomplish the missions with subsets of the organization. We hadn’t had the opportunity to find out where the weaknesses were—though, we sort of intuitively knew they were there. If you scraped the surface of this organization, the dirty little secret was that Delta Force didn't like the SEALs very much. The SEALs hated Delta. Both of them looked down at the Rangers, and nobody wanted to talk to the aviators. So, the reality was, instead of being this incredible synergistic team of teams, JSOC was a tribe of tribes. Each tribe had strong pride and cohesion, but they were insular in nature.
In the fall of 2003, just after I was appointed, we were presented with our pressure test. We'd been in Iraq for about six months, and suddenly it started to get really ugly. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which emerged in 2003, was a very different organization than the Al-Qaeda terrorist network with which we were familiar. Where the Al-Qaeda we knew had operated with an organizational chart that, surprisingly, you might say looked a lot like General Motors—led by a strong founder at the top and operated in a careful, precise (and therefore often slow and methodical), and disciplined way—this new organization had completely different DNA than its predecessor. They weren't slow at all; they were wickedly fast, and if they did an operation in Mosul and they learned lessons, they applied those lessons to another operation down in Baghdad the next day.
To combat this new organization, I had unequivocally the best counter-terrorist force in the world. If you looked at the force I commanded, you’d see just what you might expect from the way these Commandos are portrayed on TV and in the movies—bearded, muscled, arrogant, and, compared with traditional troops, non-standard. But scratch the surface and you’d say, again, "Wait a minute, this organization looks like General Motors.” And you would have been right. We were a big, bureaucratic structure designed in a military culture to be efficient and to operate predictably, and we reflected that. It had always been fine.
But this structure didn’t work well when faced with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The reason: cell phones. In 1988 when Al-Qaeda was formed, nobody had cell phones, and nobody had access to the internet. In 2003, when Al-Qaeda in Iraq emerged, everybody did. Every Iraqi had at least one cell phone and access to the internet, and it gave the new organization a completely different character and set of capabilities.
We had spent billions of dollars on proprietary systems to communicate, to become and keep ourselves organized; Al Qaeda in Iraq used technology loosely within an organizational structure that melded well with that technology to make themselves extraordinarily effective—quicker than we were, able to focus faster and better than we could. And for about two years, they were defeating us.
When that happens, you have to look inward and do some serious thinking about your organization. When I took over in October 2003, we were doing raids, and we were very good. Our team was well-trained, very well armed, courageous, and committed, and we had success against high-value targets. We were feeling really good about ourselves. But we were only doing about four raids a month, one per week, because it took time to get intelligence, to get focused, and to execute. We captured Saddam Hussein during that period, and President George W. Bush called me personally to thank me and to have me pass on to the command what a great job we were doing. But the reality is that when we looked at the entire spectrum of what was happening in Iraq, and more broadly across the region, it was getting worse rapidly, and we were not moving the needle; we were not making enough of a difference.
First, we blamed everyone else. But if you're on a losing team, you're on a losing team. So, next, as a new commander, a couple of months in, I said, "Okay, well, we have to do more: We have to push harder and get faster." We continued to use our existing process, which funneled every operation up through the established chain-of-command, to me, to approve or not approve. We got up to 18 raids a month, and we were still about 70 percent successful. That means we're taking 13 or 14 enemy leaders off the battlefield every month.
But then we reached a place where we couldn’t go faster using those existing processes—it just wasn’t possible. We knew we had to operate differently. So, we did something none of us had ever done before—we connected the entire command across 76 different bases spread across the world to create a synchronized, integrated operation on a daily basis. The effect was to create a completely different mindset and mode of operating in the organization, almost like one human brain.
Through the reorganization, we kept the basic structure for all the things it had served well, like finance and logistics, but we changed fundamentally how information moved in real-time and where and how decisions were made. We democratized information drastically, and then we pushed decision-making way down the line. We transitioned from a daily video teleconference every morning for 30 minutes with our rear headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and our forward headquarters outside Baghdad, where I was—about 25 people on each end—to a 90-minute video teleconference for 7,500 people a day spread across the world, in different time zones.
You might be horrified at the thought of that a meeting that size—and it was, truly, the mother of all meetings. But it was the most efficient thing I've ever seen in my career. Because it wasn't an order-giving meeting or a report to the command in general, it was a discussion across the command. We were talking about the current situation, how it had changed, what we had learned, and what we needed to do to move forward. Instead of giving orders that would take most of the day to cascade down the chain of command, everyone involved heard the same thing every day and could connect the dots for themselves. We also ran 15 chat rooms during the meeting where people could connect, ask questions, and collaborate about resources and assets.
That fundamental change to the communication structure within our organization—that ability to adapt in the face the new capabilities and structure of Al Qaeda in Iraq—allowed us to turn the tide.
So how is that applicable to business? I've now been out over nine years, and I'm shocked by how similar war and business are. It's amazing. The people who are good at war, who understand camaraderie and commitment and all the values that you represent, typically are pretty comfortable in business, and the people who you wouldn't want to work with in war are the same people you don't want to work with in business. And, in the same way that our priority in Iraq was to first understand the new landscape, any business leader will first need to understand their market, their competition. But more important, as we learned, is to look inward first and understand your own organization and yourself as a leader and an individual. How will you be able to respond to a pressure test? If you scratch the surface, what weakness might be the thing that will hold you back? How are you communicating and leading within the structure or your organization? It’s from that place of understanding that you will be able to adapt and turn the tide in whatever challenge you are facing today.
General (Ret) Stanley McChrystal is Founder and CEO of McChrystal Group. He the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).