Came across this nice article which provides interesting insights from Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In 2003, Gen. Stanley McChrystal took command of the United States’ Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an association of elite forces such as the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, and Delta Force. His mission: to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq. From his experience, he articulates some of the skills needed in modern times for leaders.
I particularly liked the concept of Empowered execution, as quoted in the article:
The old organizational model for the Army — as well as for business organizations — was to have the decision-makers at the top of the hierarchy and the doers at the bottom, taking orders from the thinkers. But this approach can’t work in a fast-changing world, McChrystal says, one in which it’s important not just to get things right, but to get them right quickly enough to win.
The key for his command, he says, was to “change the thinkers into doers and the doers into thinkers, and everybody became both.” To succeed meant decoupling the traditional relationship between information and control. “Now we could get the information to everybody, and more people could control what they did, which allowed us to do what we call empowered execution.”