To defeat a network, you have to become a network

I wish I had read “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World” earlier. It was published in 2015 and it is one of those platform books that has inspired a whole range of books on the same topics. It is a book about structure and how to deal with the speed and exaggerated impact of small players, such as start-ups and viral trends. It explains how a hierarchal, command-and-control structure no longer works.

Life and death

What makes this book special is that it is anchored in the military, where leadership is life and death. To summarise the book in a few sentences, organisations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed. Only small teams can reach the agility and adaptability that you need, combined with a shared consciousness.

To defeat a network, you have to become a network

Technological progress had overwhelmed our management doctrine. We are faced with a new wave of technologies defined by connectivity — the Internet, AI, IoT, the spread of cell phones, and the growth of social media — networks whose power lies in their emergent, nonlinear behaviours, not in the sum of their nodes.

You have to become a team of teams

The leader’s role becomes about creating a broader environment instead of…