Business.view: Managing a McChrystal

Business.view: Managing a McChrystal

| NEW YORK

AT SOME time or another, most bosses will find themselves facing a McChrystal moment—the sort of situation that Barack Obama encountered last week when Rolling Stone magazine reported criticisms of him and of other senior administration figures made by Stanley McChrystal, his top general in Afghanistan. The moment may not always be quite so public, nor quite so mission-critical, but when an underling is going around badmouthing the head honcho, something has to be done.

Jack Welch, a former boss of General Electric, has no doubt that President Obama did the right thing by, in Neutron Jack’s words, “taking out” General McChrystal. “When you have a totally insubordinate person, despite them being very good, you have to deal with them to keep the organisation moving forward,” he says. Mr Welch certainly took that approach when he ran GE, demanding unquestioning loyalty even from people to whom he was technically subordinate—the company’s board.

Mr Welch not only praises Mr Obama for firing General McChrystal, but also for doing so swiftly—thus not leaving a leadership void—and, to ensure that memories of the ousted person fade fast, for replacing him with someone at least as talented, in this case General McChrystal’s boss, General David Petraeus.

Not everyone is so flattering about the president’s decisive action. General McChrystal was guilty of a “failure of followership”, argues Barbara Kellerman, a professor of public leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School. This in turn was a failure of due diligence by the commander-in-chief, who after only two months in office fired the top general in Afghanistan [David McKiernan] and replaced him with “another general he barely knew”, points out Ms Kellerman. “Had Obama and his advisers vetted General McChrystal, carefully, completely, they would have learned that, notwithstanding his stellar credentials, his disinclination to follow dutifully was lifelong.” If so, Mr Obama was acting decisively in cleaning up a mess of his own making—something that Mr Welch might not be quite so enthusiastic about.

Mr Obama surely came to regret this lack of due diligence long before he fired General McChrystal. Last year, as the president deliberated over what military strategy to pursue in Afghanistan, he was the subject of a well-co-ordinated campaign of private briefings designed to make him look almost unpatriotic if he had decided against General McChrystal’s request for a significant increase in American troops to conduct a “surge” in Afghanistan against Taliban insurgents. This pressure grew when General McChrystal’s strategy became public knowledge. As Ms Kellerman observes, “by ordering his own policy review, a review that somehow (guess how) was leaked to the press, McChrystal boxed in Obama, in effect obliging him to ramp up the war effort, including (among other things) sending 30,000 additional troops into battle.” Although he was reluctant to adopt this strategy, Mr Obama is receiving plenty of criticism for its lack of success so far.

So the lessons from Mr Obama’s McChrystal moment are: deal with insubordination decisively; and, better still, make sure you do not appoint someone with wayward tendencies to a key job. A third lesson is offered by Donald Trump, American television’s leading management guru. In his scholarly tome, “Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life”, published in 2007, The Donald advises “when someone crosses you, my advice is ‘Get Even!’ That is not typical advice, but it is real-life advice. If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck! When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I love getting even.”

Only Mr Obama knows what was going through his mind when he told General McChrystal, “You’re fired!”, but he could have been forgiven a frisson of pleasure at taking his revenge on a troublesome general whose earlier insubordination had put him in a tricky spot. And even if Mr Obama did not feel that way, plenty of other bosses will have discovered in their own McChrystal moments that revenge is sweet.