Retired 4-Star Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Headline Florida Tech’s Distinguished Lecture Series April 29

By Space Coast Daily // April 13, 2022

best selling author of 'Risk: A User’s Guide'

Stanley McChrystal, the retired U.S. Army four-star general who led Joint Special Operations Command and later oversaw the U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, will speak on April 29 at Florida Tech’s F. Alan Smith Distinguished Lecture Series. (Florida Tech image)

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – Stanley McChrystal, the retired U.S. Army four-star general who led Joint Special Operations Command and later oversaw the U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, will speak on April 29 at Florida Tech’s F. Alan Smith Distinguished Lecture Series.

The event runs 5:30-7 p.m. at Gleason Performing Arts Center on the university’s Melbourne campus. It is open to the public and free to attend, but pre-registration is required. Registrants will be able to select whether they will attend in person or virtually.

McChrystal is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and co-founder and CEO of McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm where he advises senior executives at multinational corporations on navigating complex change and building stronger teams.

His presentation on April 29 is titled, “Understanding Risk and Mastering the Unknown” and will tap into his most recent best-seller, “Risk: A User’s Guide,” published in October 2021.

In a distinguished military career that stretched over three-plus decades, McChrystal may be best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture.

A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval War College, McChrystal also completed year-long fellowships at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations.

In addition to Risk, McChrystal has authored several other books. In 2013, he published his memoir, My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller.

He is an author of Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2015, and co-authored Leaders: Myth and Reality, a Wall Street Journal bestseller based on the epochal Parallel Lives by Plutarch.

The lecture series’ founder and benefactor are F. Alan Smith, who brought innovation and passion to the business of automobiles.

Smith spent more than three decades in leadership positions at General Motors in the U.S. and Canada, including serving as executive vice president of finance of General Motors and president and general manager of General Motors of Canada, Ltd.

Smith has served on Florida Tech’s Board of Trustees since 1996.