General Stanley McChrystal radically changed how the US fights its enemies while leading the Joint Special Forces Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likens his experience at war to the challenges many companies face today.
With enemies that were organized in decentralized networks, non-hierarchical with distributed decision-making, leveraging new technologies to communicate in real time, the US military was required to reconsider their battle and modus operandi. Silo’d and hierarchical structures would no longer work. Individuals needed empowered, walls between departments broken down, and information needed to flow more freely across their teams enabling speed and accuracy. Sound a little like the media landscape today?
In this segment, Ashley, inspired by General McChrystal’s book, “Team of Teams”, presents her thinking on what highly functioning and agile media organizations must do to thrive. With talent, organization and workflow strategies as cornerstones of success, they must change for media companies that want to straddle the chasm of convergence and win.
Knowledge must be distributed freely and quickly across teams, which require that everyone in the organization have a holistic awareness of what qualifies as “victory” and a shared consciousness as to the part they play. This is very different from today’s typically silo’d teams, who are often not powered by technology, but rather held back. She provides her perspective on some best practices and thoughts on how to mitigate the challenges of the complicated media landscape of today.
