- Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy.
Welcome to our Daily Homeroom livestream.
This is a thing we started seems like a long time ago now,
but it was several weeks ago
when the school closures happened.
Just a way to continue to support you as a parent,
a teacher, a student, obviously,
Khan Academy has a lot of resources like that.
But there's something especially in this time
of social distancing, about being able
to connect people live.
And some days it's just me and it's here.
I'm here to answer your questions.
And some days we have incredible guests like today.
And so today, our guest is going to be
General Stan McChrystal.
I'm gonna be bringing him on a little bit,
but I'll tell you all ahead of time,
whether you're on Facebook or YouTube,
start thinking of questions that you would like
to ask the general and put them in there.
We have Khan Academy team members who are looking
at those questions and will surface them to myself
and General McChrystal.
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So, with that I'd like to bring on General Stan McChrystal.
And General you're one of those people.
You're a very decorated person in your career.
I could probably read your bio
for about five minutes.
But the headlines, you are retired four-star General,
you ran a essentially a significant fraction of some of the,
or all of the US military operations and that we've been in,
in recent modern history.
And since then, you have gone into the private sector,
and you are focused on helping advise folks
on things like leadership and organizational structure.
Did I get that generally right?
- Well, you probably gave me more credit than I deserve.
I was part of the team.
But yeah, you're pretty accurate.
- So, maybe a good place to start.
You know, there's a lot of young people
who are watching this and they're always
thinking about their careers.
They're thinking about how do I navigate life?
How do I build a sense of leadership,
if you could just walk us through your career arc,
starting from when you were maybe a high school student,
but especially at once you went into the military.
And also a lot of us don't fully understand
how the military hierarchy works.
And what are the expectations as you become a lieutenant,
as you become a one-star general, two-star.
How does that work?
- Sure, yeah, I mean, you only kind of figure it out
in the rear-view mirror.
I grew up in an army family.
My father was a soldier.
And his father was a soldier and my four brothers
all were in the army and my sister married a soldier.
Then when I married my wife, she was the daughter
of a career soldier and her three brothers were so.
So, you kind of get it, we were the army business.
From the earliest age I can remember,
I wanted to be a soldier, like my father
'cause my father was my hero.
He was a very low key guy, a decorated combat veteran,
but very self effacing, very quiet.
And so he was my idea of the model of a leader.
So, I wanted to do what he did and go to West Point.
So, at age 17, I went to West Point.
Now, that was 1972.
And to put it in context, the military wasn't very popular
in 1972, at the end of the Vietnam War.
So, statistically speaking, it was the easiest year
in the academy's entire history to be admitted.
So, here I am.
So, I got into the academy and I wanted
to be an infantry officer.
And West Point was 170 years old when I entered,
and they took themselves very seriously.
And I thought West Point was gonna be sort of
just a turnstile I go through to get to my career,
and I didn't take it very seriously.
And so we had this clash of cultures, me and West Point,
17-year-old Stan and 170-year-old West Point,
you can guess who won.
And so, for four years, I had kind of a rough go of it.
First couple years, I did horribly in discipline.
I did horribly in academics, almost flunked out.
And then my last two years, I started dating this girl,
Annie, who I've now been married to for 43 years,
and she sort of set me straight
and I started improving on those things.
But you come out of West Point basically schooled
in things like character and a college education,
you're not a trained soldier.
And so, the first thing you do
is you go to some initial courses
and your desire is to become technically
and tactically competent.
You wanna know weapons, you wanna know tactics,
you wanna be able to land navigate.
So that when you go to your first leadership job,
as a platoon leader, you know,
you'll be respected and you'll be effective.
So, I went through about eight or nine months
of additional training schools to include Ranger School,
where they sort of try to break you down.
And then if you don't break, you get this Ranger Tab
and you go forward.
But I got to my first unit, the 82nd,
as a second lieutenant, and it was '70s army.
And it wasn't very good and it was still
kind of Vietnam hangover and the troops,
most of 'em came from a difficult background.
And so you walk in, a college graduate, trained,
and you think, okay, I'm gonna lead these people.
And then you realize that, in fact, they know an awful lot.
And although they would do some amazing things on weekends,
they actually take care of you.
You take care of them, but when it really gets
to doing business, they take care of you.
So from an early age, you learn that the fight
is gonna be won by the sergeants and the privates,
the lieutenant is going to enable them to win it.
And that gets more true the further you go up.
So, you spend the first, I spent four years as a lieutenant,
leading first about 30 soldiers as a platoon,
as a paratrooper lieutenant.
And then I went to Special Forces and led a team
of Special Forces non-commissioned officers, Green Berets.
Your next--
- Just on that first appointment,
I am curious, you know, you were probably what, 23, 24,
when you were leading that group?
- 22, 23, yeah.
- And I'm guessing most of them were your age,
maybe even a few of 'em were older than you.
How did you handle that?
Like, did you ever feel like an imposter syndrome?
Or you know, how am I gonna get the respect of these folks?
- Well, it's very interesting,
you do, the first thing is you wonder,
are they gonna mind me?
Are they going to respect me?
But it was really kind of a dangerous thing
because what would happen was the non-commissioned officers
would be more experienced.
And they'd have to be sort of the hard asses,
and the privates sometimes--
- And what does that mean?
What does non-commissioned officer mean?
- Means sergeant, so you have commissioned officers,
which are lieutenants up through generals,
and non-commissioned means you are an officer
but with no commission.
So, it's sergeants, it's from sergeant E-five
up through sergeant major,
and then below that are privates and specialists.
We call them our corporals.
So, the military is broken into enlisted ranks
and officer ranks, and typically people enter as a private
or they enter as a lieutenant.
Now, some people will enlist in it
and become an officer,
but the traditional way is to come into those two.
So, as you're a 22-year-old lieutenant,
you've got sergeants who are combat veterans,
who have been around the block.
And they have got to be the biggest sticklers
for discipline and standards in the platoon.
And yet you want to be in charge.
So, it's this interesting dynamic,
you have to earn their respect,
but you're not really as qualified
or as knowledgeable as they are.
Good platoon sergeants,
you have a platoon leader and then a senior sergeant,
sergeant first class, he's responsible
or he feels he's responsible for training you,
for developing you.
And if you get the right relationship, it gets very close.
And the lieutenant learns to keep their mouth shut,
learns to let the platoon sergeant guide them,
but the platoon sergeant also learns increasingly
to let that lieutenant take more and more responsibility.
Now, when you're young, you can make some big mistakes.
I made some very bad mistakes as a second lieutenant.
At one point I started listening to the privates
when they would complain about the sergeants to me.
I shouldn't have been listening to 'em about that.
But they would complain about 'em and they'd go,
you know, LT, those sergeants really
are a pain in the ass, aren't they?
And if you give them that ear, and you start to think, wow,
they like me, they don't like the sergeants,
so I'm actually a good leader,
that's exactly the wrong conclusion.
Because what really the reality was
they're, you know, wily people
and they are creating sort of a division.
And it takes a little mat, it took me some maturity
to sort of grow through that era
before I really learned how you lead.
Another time, or we all have times
when you learn about standards.
Once we went to this position
and I was pretty demanding
'cause I wanted to have high standards.
We went to this position and I was leading a mortar platoon.
And I made them dig the mortars in,
which takes several hours, three or four hours
of really hard work for the whole platoon.
And we dug 'em in, and then we went to open the range
with the range controller, who allows you to live fire,
and they told us you're in the wrong position.
And I said, wait a minute, and it was my fault.
I had read the papers wrong.
So I had 'em digging in the wrong position.
I went to Range Control, I said,
would you please let us change
so that we don't have to move?
And they said, nope.
And so I had to go back to the platoon
and say we have to move.
It was dark, it was cold,
and it was starting to rain.
And I wasn't very popular.
I said, fill the holes in, which they did.
We went to the new location,
and then you have this moral question.
Am I gonna have 'em dig in
'cause I said that's always the standard?
But because of my screw up,
they were gonna have to do it a second time.
And I remember that night,
I said, okay, we're gonna dig in,
we're gonna do it again.
And there was muttering and there was hate and discontent.
And the only thing I can do was
I got in and dug with 'em, of course.
But you know, you just go through that
and you learn that you're gonna make mistakes,
and you gotta own up to 'em.
You gotta look people in the eye and take 'em.
- Yeah, I could dig into each of these segments.
(laughing)
'Cause I think there's so much there.
But sorry, I just, I,
and we're starting to have a lot of questions come in,
but continue with that narrative.
I mean, and some of this stuff
you're saying very nonchalantly,
like yeah, and then I started leading some Special Forces,
I mean, my understanding of Special Forces,
these are very hardcore types of training and activities.
- And you know, you do these things to test yourself too,
you wanna be in elite units because you wanna see,
can I do that?
Plus, you wanna serve with really good people.
So, I went to Special Forces.
And then I went to this advanced course for a year
where they really train you to go from lieutenant to captain
at about the four-year point,
and then I went and as a captain,
you're a company commander.
Now, company commander leads about 150 soldiers.
And so at this level, you're leading
essentially four platoons.
So, you were a platoon leader with 30, 40 people,
now you're a company commander, about 150,
and you have four platoons.
Now you're sort of minor level of executive leadership.
But you are supposed to be much more mature now.
In fact, behind your back,
they'll even call a company commander at age 25,
or six, the old man.
Yeah, I was very centralized as a company commander,
my first company, I had a mechanized infantry company
of 14 armored vehicles.
I put 'em all on the same radio frequency,
so that I said turn left, they all turn left
at exactly the same time.
And it was a small enough organization
where I could micromanage it,
you know, kind of put my fingerprints on everything.
And then I moved to another company command,
I went to the Ranger Regiment
where it's a more elite light infantry force.
And the non, the sergeant's there are very, very capable.
When I got there in 1985,
they were very good at their jobs.
And they wouldn't tolerate micromanagement.
And so I got in there, and I was sort of hard charged
and I said, okay, here's what we're gonna do,
and I started micromanaging.
And I got this incredible pushback.
I mean, I got in your face kind of pushback,
because they'd seen a lot of company commanders,
and they weren't particularly impressed with me.
And they said, we don't operate that way.
We are competent to do this,
step back and let us do our jobs.
And you know, it sort of started my journey of saying,
you know, okay, and when they forced me to do that,
we performed far better.
And so that became, started an arc in my career
where I started understanding
that my role wasn't to do things.
It wasn't even really to make a lot of decisions,
it was to create an environment
when really competent people could be really good
at what they do.
You're sort of, then you do some years on the staff.
I went to the first Gulf War and things like that,
but the next big level is a battalion commander.
And that's about 600 soldiers.
You're a lieutenant colonel,
you got about 17 years in service.
And you've got a staff of about 35 officers
and then 600 soldiers, I had paratroopers
in my first battalion.
And now you kind of are the old man.
Now, you are pretty darn experienced.
You've got a staff to make things happen.
And yet you're still close enough to the 600 soldiers
where you know most of 'em by sight and name at least
and you can lead by example.
Most officers will tell you that's one of their favorite
experiences because it's a big enough organization
actually do a lot and you get to do
a lot of professional development.
But you're still young enough to be vigorous
and leading from the front and deeply involved in it.
Every rank after that, you start to get further
from the soldiers.
When you command a brigade, you get about 3000 soldiers.
And you've got battalion commanders between you and them,
and you're still the commander.
But the reality is, you're starting
to be a greater distance,
you're starting to be a resource provider,
you're starting to be someone who shapes policy.
And then as a general officer,
that's really what you do, you lead by inspiration
and guidance, but you are shaping things for the people
who actually get stuff done.
- And what's the difference, you know, people hear
about one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star general,
is there a difference between like,
what divides those lines?
- Yeah, that's a really fair question.
By law, the army usually has 303 general officers,
half of whom have to be one-stars, brigadier general.
So, there are the four levels of general officer
except in World War Two and they had five.
One-star general, typically,
you're about 23, 24 years in service,
you've been very successful because
it's a real eye of the needle.
They select 40 people to be generals each year
out of about 2,600 candidates.
So, only 40 people in the year group that enter in any year,
get up and ever make one-star.
One-stars are operational.
They serve on some staffs,
they're assistant division commanders.
Two-star commanders, major generals, command divisions,
they command that's about 15,000 people.
They are operational commanders.
And then although they don't talk about it,
there's really a big difference
between two-star generals and three,
because three-star generals is a pretty small group,
I think it's about 50 in the army, and they run big things.
They run corps of 40 and 50,000 people,
they run agencies in the government, they do huge jobs.
And then above that, there's this another big jump
to four-stars, and there are typically 12 to 14 four-stars.
And four-stars run the army completely
in the Defense Department.
Four-stars have immense power.
All of the general officers have a lot of power,
but it's kind of like the Richter scale,
your relative influence goes up much more dramatically
at the three and four-star level.
- Wow, no, I could ask more.
I mean, I'm learning a lot just about
how the military is structured.
I've always been fascinated by this.
But I wanna make sure I get some questions
from from YouTube and from Facebook.
There's a lot of people are asking a lot of good questions.
You know, so from Facebook, Jenny Evans,
and this is kind of a good balance
between your military world
and what you're now doing in the private sector.
How do we respond to poor leadership?
So, I guess this could be a situation where,
you know, maybe your leaders,
how do you manage around that?
Or maybe someone in your organization isn't leading well?
- Yeah, that's always one of the toughest questions.
If you're in an organization,
say you're in the middle of it,
and the leadership above you is not effective.
It doesn't motivate you
or it doesn't get the task done well.
It's really hard to march into your boss's office
and say, ma'am, or sir, you're not doing a good job.
You need to do X, X and X.
It's easy to say you do that.
But most of us don't receive that kind of visitor very well,
for a leader.
What I think we do is several things.
First is we personify being a good follower first,
because then leaders will appreciate you
and they'll listen to you more.
Second, reflect the leadership behaviors
you want to see in your bosses.
Don't try to make it a difference,
don't in front of the people in the organization,
don't try to make yourself look better than your boss.
'Cause it's just, it's disrespectful and not helpful.
But then have the kind of conversations that say,
ma'am or sir, this is what I think might work better
as we approach something.
But again, I would tell you put yourself in their position.
Don't be self-righteous, leaders are under,
often under a lot of pressure,
maybe sometimes they don't see it.
If you say it in a way where they are receptive
when you're communicating,
I think you have a much better chance then,
you know, being more negative.
- I like that a lot.
Like, you don't wanna just immediately
you know, create a stereotype around someone,
climb the ladder of inference,
and then somehow become insubordinate
or try to embarrass them, that's just gonna make it worse.
Try to empathize a bit, but speak your mind
in an appropriate way.
So, a lot of questions about raising money kids here
are around leadership.
From YouTube, Wahkeena M,
and then Adnan Aziz is asking variations
of the same question.
What advice do you have to raise kids
who think for themselves and become leaders
versus someone who will only do what they are told?
- Yeah, well, you certainly want your children to think
for themselves 'cause you're not
gonna be there with 'em.
I would say the first thing about leading,
you know, raising kids is a form of leadership
is reflect the values that you want.
I've told people this before,
but I had this wonderful father
and mother in my entire childhood
I never saw either of 'em do anything dishonest.
I never saw 'em take a parking place they couldn't have.
I never saw 'em, you know, take a wink and a nod
and keep change when it was given back,
too much of it was given to 'em at a store.
That just everything I saw them do was be kind to people.
Be respectful to people and even to us as kids.
So, you start by being people that the kids admire
and would like to be like.
I think after that, when you've got your kids,
each kid is different.
I mean, that's the thing we have to understand.
My son, he grew up and he's very much his own guy.
And I was a soldier and I was, you know,
pretty focused and whatnot.
And in high school, he had shoulder-length hair.
And you know, I never gave him a hard time about it.
I laughed with him.
I said, sometimes I'm keeping pictures of this
and when you get older,
you know, we're gonna have a good fun,
and then he had a mohawk through college.
He was seven years getting a four-year degree.
He had a mohawk of different colors.
He was a guitarist, lead guitarist in a punk rock band,
terrible music.
But they were pretty successful, I mean, they made CDs
and toured and all, but what the way I did it was
I maintained the relationship the whole time.
I never tried to say, you should be a soldier.
I never tried to say, I just said, great.
You know, you're gonna do that.
You know, I joked about his hair,
but we just, I thought maintaining the relationship
was gonna be more important than anything else.
Now he works for the US government in an Intel agency,
you know, who knew?
And he's a father of three daughters.
So I say, life comes around to pay you back for your youth.
- Your son's youth sounds a little bit like some of mine.
I tried to grow shoulder-length hair,
but my it turned more into kind of a sphere, but anyway.
(laughing)
So, from YouTube, there's a sixth grade teacher,
Virginia Garrett asks, what is the most difficult part
of being a leader and what would you tell
a high school child about being a leader?
- Yeah, I got an easy answer for this.
The most disciplined part is self discipline.
If all of us took a piece of paper right now
and wrote down those things we think good leaders do,
we'd end up with some pretty similar lists.
And then if we all looked at that list and said,
what do we in our lives actually do?
Our lists, we'd probably have to strike a few things off
'cause leadership is sometimes inconvenient.
It's sometimes frightening.
It's sometimes awkward.
And so, the difference, in my view, between good leaders
and not good leaders is almost never ability
or charisma or celebrity.
It's the self discipline to do
what you know you ought to do.
And because that's hard,
because it's all the time I used to, when I was a four-star,
you go around, we had 150,000 troops under my command
in Afghanistan, and I'd go around,
and I'd interact with a bunch of soldiers
that I would only see once, they'd only meet
the four-star one time, probably in their lives.
And I'd have these interactions.
And I would try very hard to remember that however
that interaction was, they were gonna write
or call home that night and tell their spouse about it.
If it was a good interaction,
if I treated 'em respectfully,
and you know, that sort of thing.
They'd write and say, hey,
I met General McChrystal, it was great.
If I act a fool, they're gonna call or write home
and they're not gonna say that,
they're gonna say something else.
And it's not my reputation I think about,
it's the reality that, that interaction is important enough
for them to call home about.
It's important enough for me to be disciplined with
so that I treat them the way they ought to be.
Now, I didn't always get it right, you get tired,
you get frustrated, you get angry,
and I interact with somebody and as soon as it was over,
I'd know I blew that.
And then at the end of the night,
you go and you're you're going to bed
and you carry this sense of guilt.
You say, I wasn't the leader I should have been today.
But you don't say, okay, that's the new normal.
I'm just gonna lapse into that,
what you do say I'm gonna try to do better tomorrow.
And that is, the best leaders I've known are never
so self-confident in their leadership
that they just kind of go around
and let everybody bask in it.
They agonize over it
and I think that's important.
- Yeah, I mean, what I get from that is two things:
Discipline, being able to do the things
that you intellectually know are right,
even if you don't want to do them
or if they're uncomfortable.
And then the second thing is to just be constantly
self-reflective and not rigid in who you are.
I guess you let your ego drive things
is what I'm hearing a theme throughout all of this.
This is a question about leadership
from actually from Poland, Rafael Molechoradisky asked,
what is the right balance between challenging people
and caring about them?
And yeah, this would apply to leadership
it might even apply to parenting.
- Yeah, they used to say in the military,
and I think it was Erwin Rommel who first said,
the best form of troop welfare is first class training.
And so what I would tell people is
you don't have to be easy on people.
You can be extraordinarily demanding.
You can push people hard,
you can make their life challenging,
and that can be the best thing you can do for 'em.
Now, you don't have to be a jerk about it.
You don't have to be ugly about it.
But you can force people to do things
they didn't think they could do.
In fact, the leaders I remember most fondly,
that I owe the most to,
were people who were actually pretty hard on me,
I always felt like I had to be really working hard
to meet their expectations.
But most of 'em also had a personality
where it was desperately important
for me to meet their expectations,
meaning I respected them enough that their approval
was something that mattered to me.
But I would never shy away,
sometimes we think we gotta be popular.
Sometimes we think we've gotta be rubbing 'em
on the belly, you know, people on the belly all the time
and saying don't work too hard, etc.?
No, we gotta get people ready for the real world.
And the real world is challenging.
And so, in the real world, they're gonna have to do it.
So I think we owe them that.
- Right, you can be hard on someone as long as they know
in the heart of hearts,
that you're doing it for what's best for them
versus your own ego
or you're just trying to not be good about it.
So a lot.
I mean, there's a ton of questions.
This is great.
There, you know, this is interesting.
Beth Otto from Facebook asks,
what was your biggest challenge as a leader
in your career and how did you overcome it?
- Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I had a lot of challenges.
I think the first was being a micromanager
and I kind of got people beat that out of me.
And that was good.
Another thing is, I am by nature very, very introverted.
And so because of that, I think if I die and go to hell,
it'll be an endless cocktail party
where you gotta make small talk.
So, for me, it is being comfortable engaging with people,
not, I'm usually better engaging with people I work with,
soldiers and all, because I know my role,
but it was something I had to work at.
I'm not naturally gregarious and back slapping
and hanging around a lot of people.
So, that was really important to me.
And then I also find that when I get tired,
I get short tempered.
And it's really, it's more impatient.
I never yell or do that kind of thing.
But what I do is I just get curt.
And if I get pushed hard, and I get that way,
I'll start being very short with people,
most of whom don't deserve it.
You know, I've been lucky that people work around me
remarkably tolerable about it,
because they'll know at a certain point, yeah,
he's getting tired, all right.
He's starting to be the bad stand.
But but it's important for me to
constantly remind myself about that.
- But were there times, just following off on that question,
especially since you talked about it
when you were in kind of the earlier ranks in the military.
But once you were, you know, a four-star general
and you were deciding on things
that could affect thousands of people's
or even geopolitics broadly,
were there times where you questioned yourself,
or you just really said,
I don't know if I'm making the right decision,
or you kind of stayed up at night and just said,
the consequences are so huge that it was paralyzing for you?
- Yeah, most nights.
You would make decisions where you sent people
into an operation where you know
a number of them are gonna get killed or wounded.
And you just wonder if you've done it right.
Those are difficult.
But sometimes others are even more difficult
when you've gotta fire somebody
that you've known a long time.
And they're a good person and they're working hard,
they're just not right for this.
I would agonize over those things tremendously.
I remember, it was a much, you know,
reported in the media when I was a four-star in Afghanistan.
I recommended to the president
that we deploy additional troops,
we expand our ability to operate
and the president approved it.
And I remember right after we approved that, you know,
I went into this reflective mood and I said, okay,
I've just asked for 40,000 more soldiers,
a percentage of whom are gonna be killed.
What did I do?
And you know, I was able to come back to this and say,
well, I used my best judgment.
I think it was right.
And I do think it was right to this day.
But I asked myself those kinds of question all the time,
would it have been easier or better not to have?
And it's not the heat or the public
or media pressure that bothers you,
it's the mirror pressure when you look in the mirror.
Did I do the right thing
that I felt was right, was it my best judgment?
Do I really believe that I did the right thing
for the right reason?
- And how do you, that's a fascinating tension for me,
you know, how do you maintain that humanity
where you're just like, wow, these are 40,000 lives,
you know, not only they're gonna leave their family,
but some of them might be killed or injured in other ways,
lifelong consequences.
And so the empathetic side, that could be almost paralyzing
to just think about that idea.
But then at the end of day, you have a job,
you have to be rational about it.
You have to be kind of calculating.
Do sometimes feel like you erred too much
on one side of that or the other?
- I think I always was thinking about that,
there were days when I thought I erred one way or another.
You know, Ulysses Grant was famous
for pushing the the Union Army so hard
and causing so many casualties,
he would not visit field hospitals.
Because when he went to the hospitals
and he saw the tremendous carnage
that he was responsible for,
he thought it made him lose his resolve.
And yet he had concluded that the best thing he could do
with the nation was lower his head and just go on and win,
even though the costs in the near term would be high.
I think he'd make those balances all the time.
Because particularly in the military,
the force exists to prosecute American policy.
And if that requires us to put it in harm's way,
that's what it's for.
You just have gotta balance it against being cavalier
or doing it for the wrong reasons or not having done
enough due diligence on it.
There are a number of things
that as a military professional,
you better be asking yourself, because people look to you.
And they ask you, do we need to do that?
And you, based on your experience,
have enough respect usually from that group
that they listen.
And so you need to be very careful about what you suggest.
- Yeah, no, this is fascinating.
We're already out of time, we could go on,
well, you know, hopefully we can get you on this again.
We have a lot of questions for the message board.
Actually, let's us finish with one question
which I think is relevant to the time we're living in
with you know, the social distancing and COVID and all that.
This is from YouTube, Brian 10 Eight asks,
what advice can you offer for projecting
calm controlled confidence in a crisis?
Yeah, and a lot of times you know that stuff's going on.
But people are looking at you to and your temperament
to figure out what's going on.
- In a firefight,
as soon as it starts, the privates look to the sergeants
to see how they ought to act.
If the privates haven't been in one before,
so they're looking to see what are the sergeants doing?
Should I be scared?
What should I do?
Even though they've been trained in what to do?
They're looking for example, that's what leaders should do.
So, I would say the first thing is show calm.
That doesn't mean you should minimize the problem.
You know, there's this tension that says,
should I tell my people how serious this really is?
Am I just gonna scare 'em?
Or should I project this overconfidence?
No, I would be very candid with the team,
say this is the situation.
However, we are committed to getting through this,
we are committed to succeeding in this effort,
following through, and provide inspiration, say there,
we're gonna get through this.
And after that, we're gonna go on
to what we were trying to do.
So, the leader provides this candor, grounding in reality,
provides this confident commitment that says,
like Franklin Roosevelt did in his first inaugural address,
he said, we're gonna implement this new deal.
We're gonna try a whole bunch of things
and some of 'em won't work.
We'll stop those, but we're gonna figure out what works
and go through it, and suddenly provided hope
to the American people.
You don't ever wanna say it's gonna be easier than
it's gonna be because then you lose your credibility
when it's not.
And so I think that leaders
play an incredible role during this period,
even though we might not have the right answer.
You know, we might say, hey,
I'm not sure what we ought to do.
But I know we're gonna figure it out.
And we're gonna stick with it
'til we get to the place we need to be.
- Yeah, I'm ready to follow you, General McChrystal.
(laughing)
So, thank you so much.
I think this was, I mean, I can see from the message boards,
I mean, this was really useful for a lot of folks.
And thank you for joining us.
And hope we can do this again sometime soon.
- Well, you're kind to have me, Sal.
And thanks for all you guys do at the Khan Academy.
It's amazing.
- Right, thank you.
- Thanks.
- So thanks, everyone, for joining.
Hopefully you found that as interesting as I did,
obviously, you know, it's a shame that some of these
only last half an hour, a little bit more,
but we'll try to get more time
with all of these folks that I think
we can all learn a ton from.
I'll just remind you,
we're gonna be doing this every day.
And so come on next week.
We're gonna have a couple of sessions with just me.
I'm happy to answer any questions y'all have about anything.
And we're also going to have,
we have a pretty fun lineup.
We're getting a lot of momentum
with really incredible guests like we've had.
Obviously, we had Ray Dalio yesterday,
we have General Stan McChrystal today
and next week we continue with this cast
of really incredible folks that I think
we can all learn from.
I'll remind everyone again, we are not for profit.
If you're in a position to do so, please think about
donating to Khan Academy.
It's those philanthropic donations that allow us
to do what we're doing.
And we are running at a deficit right now,
especially as we're trying to support the world
in our own way through the school closures
that are going on right now.
But with that, hope everyone has a good and safe weekend
and I will see y'all next week.