General Stanley McChrystal comes from a tradition of commitment; both his father and grandfather served in the U.S. military. Like his father before him, McChrystal graduated with a B.S. from West Point Academy in 1976, and in his long career of military service, became the general in command of the American and international forces in Afghanistan.

Rising through the ranks, McChrystal lived with military discipline and gained insight while serving around the world in high-stakes assignments. Like all successful military leaders, he learned to think systemically. However, he is also known for advancing more creative approaches to new forms of warfare in the later years of his career, especially as he gained experience and responsibility.

McChrystal was appointed to serve as Commanding General to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the military’s premier counterterrorism force, in September of 2003. When he took that job, the group was operating under traditional systems that were effective in quickly destroying hierarchical terrorist networks. But it was not as adaptable as the new insurgencies emerging in more local, loosely configured adhoc terror groups in the Middle East.

McChrystal could see that JSOC needed to change; instead of asking his soldiers to operate in carefully delineated silos, he began to integrate intelligence, combat, and strategy communications within the JSOC community. The new structure made his troops more agile and effective resulting in the high-profile capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In June of 2009, McChrystal was appointed to lead American troops in Afghanistan, and shortly thereafter assumed command of NATO operations. Again, he thought about the war in a new way. He was a leading proponent of the “surge” strategy in Iraq which would require additional troops be sent in to wipe out enemy combatants. More simply, the strategy was to add more troops with the goal of ending the conflict faster.

In 2010 though, after an off-the-record quote appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine which was critical of the administration, McChrystal began to think systemically again. The story appeared online at about 2 a.m. in Afghanistan. He remembers, “my military assistant woke me up and told me about it. I went down and read the article and said, ‘Okay, this is a nuclear bomb.’ I made some calls back, went out running right there in the compound at three in the morning, I thought I was dreaming and that I was going to wake up because this is just not possible.

This was not something I thought I could ever be accused of. Immediately you think, okay, I can connect the dots where this is going to end, not everybody could but I felt that I could then. I started to think about my son in college, my 86-year-old father, my wife and all this stuff takes place on the front page and on TV at every moment. First thing in the morning we’re working and that afternoon I’m told to fly back to the States to see the President.” A few days later, President Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation.

McChrystal said he then had decided how to command the rest of his life. “I started making decisions sort of on an hourly, daily basis but they start to weave together as sort of a thesis for the rest my life. I think it probably took about a month where I made enough decisions that the direction I was going to take was clear.”

For example, he initially did not want an official Army Retirement Ceremony (commonly called a parade). He thought the pomp and circumstance would make him feel embarrassed by the circumstances of his retirement. But after an assistant suggested the parade was more for those who would be attending, he “started making those decisions and interestingly enough, the more you do that, and the more you take the high road, the more the high road becomes the only option.”

In line with this view, McChrystal has another take on the hero’s journey. In his mind, “there is this narrative construct on the hero’s journey where the hero has a big climax or crisis and then the hero wins in the end. There is always a danger for the kind of work that you’re doing when you end up talking to those kinds of people who have a happy ending. That’s skewed,” McChrystal said.  “Not everybody has a happy ending because the crisis can end at different points. You can have the ability to rebound, you can have the time. My story to date, it’s not completely over, has been one that is pretty lucky.”

After retiring from the army, McChrystal founded a consulting firm to help guide companies through the kind of organizational transformation he led in the military. He published his autobiography, My Share of the Task, as well as Team of Teams and his latest book, Risk, A Users Guide. As someone with a Boundary Spanner perspective, McChrystal’s advice based on Risk, and how individuals and organizations fail to mitigate it. They focus more narrowly on the probability of it happenings versus a broader, systemic view of the varied visible and invisble control factors influencing the risk trajectory. He suggests looking at what he describes as a Risk Immune System that involves such control factors as timing, communication, diversity, and structure.

McChrystal’s work also navigates the contours of zealots, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and heroes like Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who ushered slaves to freedom on the underground railroad. Both leaders, he said, became larger in death than in life. McChrystal said viewing each of these individuals as humans and as leaders, helped his team to “reach a general thesis that leadership has never been what we thought it was. It’s never been the great person theory, list of traits, behaviors. In this complex interaction of factors, the leader is only one part.”