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Leading Across Organizations: Operational Insights from Drug Cartels
October 29, 2025
Authored by Meghan Bourne
Off the coast of California, a small vessel carrying over $15 million of illicit drugs moves in perfect synchrony with dozens of other actors across continents.
This phase of their process poses significant risk to their operation. Each participant understands their role, timing, and contingency plan, a display of operational precision any supply chain executive would recognize.
The network behind these teams operates without formal authority but achieves remarkable coordination. While its purpose is criminal, the network’s structure offers a stark illustration of cross-organizational agility. You don’t have to agree with the motives or merchandise to learn from them about running effective joint operations. Drug cartels have evolved their operations by embracing an architecture and operating model similar to the Team of Teams® approach: flexible yet structured, decentralized but unified by a common purpose and an influential executive core.
Lessons for Decentralized Joint Operations
Today’s biggest challenges, from ending the U.S. overdose epidemic to building the world’s largest data centers or increasing access to quality healthcare, are too large and dynamic for any single organization to solve on its own. Effectively addressing these complex challenges often requires multi-organizational collaboration. At McChrystal Group, we see these collaborative partnerships across all industries, sectors, and fields.
If you work in government, you might refer to these efforts as inter-agency task forces.
In the private sector, you may think of them as joint ventures.
If you work at or with a non-profit, you may refer to them as coalitions, consortiums, or associations.
Regardless of what they’re called, the question remains:
Why do some efforts produce achievements otherwise not attainable while others fail to demonstrate results?
It could be due to confusing shared vision with strategic alignment, mistaking broad communication for creating shared understanding that drives meaningful action, or simply over-relying on informal relationships. The most pervasive limiting factor is ineffective structure.
Concisely summarized, Team of Teams® is a hybrid operating model that leverages the best of hierarchical structures and agile networks. For joint efforts, this means approaching the hybrid operating model depicted at the center of Figure 1 by adding structure to a network of organizations (i.e., moving from right to center).
Without intentional design and maintenance of its structure, a joint effort is unlikely to produce outcomes otherwise not achievable by a single organization. The most important structural design details are as follows:
- Establish and Engage an Executive Core
- Understand Priorities and Define Joint Success
- Add Structure and Iterate
Lesson 1: Establish and Engage an Executive Core
At the heart of each cartel’s sophisticated operations lies an Executive Core, a relatively small, tight-knit group of influential leaders who regularly engage to provide strategic direction. The Sinaloa Cartel (Cartel de Sinaloa [CDS]) exemplifies this structure. Following the extradition of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the U.S. in 2017, four of his sons, referred to as “Chapitos,” stepped into leadership roles. Recognizing the limitations and high overhead of producing plant-based opioids, such as heroin, they aggressively pursued strategic partnerships their father had initiated.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) reports, the CDS has partnered with Asian transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) for over a decade now. These partnerships created opportunities for the production, trafficking, and distribution of the more profitable and now prolific synthetic opioids that have significantly accelerated the overdose crisis in the U.S. In the 2025 NDTA, the DEA notes they have “identified tens of thousands of CDS members, associates, and facilitators operating worldwide…in decentralized networks under the larger CDS umbrella.”
The CDS’s Executive Core coordinates with executives in their partner organizations to make strategic resource decisions and swiftly adapt to enforcement disruptions, setting a cohesive direction for an otherwise sprawling criminal enterprise. For example, when the United Nations recently updated the counter-narcotics treaty, some China-based precursor chemical suppliers became hesitant about supplying controlled precursors abroad, while the CDS sought to mitigate risk by diversifying its suppliers throughout Asia and Europe.
At the same time, some China-based supply partners continue to adapt by providing a variety of “designer” fentanyl precursors to sidestep regulations, while other China-based TCOs continue to partner with the CDS to rapidly launder money made in the U.S. If the executive core of this criminal venture didn’t coordinate and manage a multi-organizational response to the changing environment, they would risk losing their strategic advantage in this market altogether.
Building the Executive Core
When enabling a single organization to operate with more agility and adaptability, it seems obvious that the executive leadership team (ELT)’s support and guidance is necessary. This is true for any strategic investment intended to drive impact within an organization. However, this critical first step is often overlooked or quickly minimized when it pertains to multi-organizational efforts.
When working on a joint effort that appears to be “spinning its wheels,” the first question to ask is: Do we have executive-level engagement and sponsorship from the essential organizations? If the intended results of the joint effort are not critical to executive-level leaders from each of the core organizations, it is unlikely to succeed.
Assembling the executive core requires more than simply identifying figureheads. These leaders must commit to defining success, engaging regularly, maintaining situational awareness, and making strategic decisions.
Insights From Inter-state Alliances During the Pandemic
Many examples of joint response efforts emerged following the COVID-19 pandemic.
In one instance outlined in Raj Shah’s Big Bets, the Rockefeller Foundation collaborated with Maryland Governor, Larry Hogan, then chair of the National Governors Association, and nine other states’ governors to establish the State and Territory Alliance for Testing (STAT) at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. These leaders set a clear and measurable definition of success: Give smaller states greater purchasing power for COVID-19 antigen tests. The core group of governors stayed engaged throughout this phase, and during that time, STAT purchased and distributed over 3 million antigen tests while navigating the significant challenges of the constrained supply chain.
As the pandemic evolved, the governors were required to focus on additional challenges, but their teams had recognized the value of collaborating across state lines. To maintain sponsorship from executive leaders, the STAT team identified six secretary-level health leaders to serve as an advisory council that guided the alliance’s way forward. McChrystal Group helped evolve this rapidly formed network of interstate organizations by refining portions of its structure. This included adapting the strategic focus, from purchasing power to interstate learning networks, then enhancing communication processes so alliance members shared topic-specific best practices in a manner that enabled states to turn insights into meaningful actions. The Advisory Council provided the strategic direction throughout this process, and the alliance was scaled from 10 to 41 states and territories. The alliance remains active today as a public health interstate learning network led by Brown University.
In another example, the Commonwealth of Virginia adapted the structure and operating model for its interagency COVID response task force with support from McChrystal Group. The environment was highly uncertain, with conditions changing daily, so the interagency partners leading Virginia’s vaccination campaign met five days per week from January through June of 2021. To rapidly make informed decisions on some of the most complex and sensitive situations in this environment, such as how to allocate vaccines and when to advance to the next phase of the campaign, the Virginia team established a strategic decision-making forum.
The secretaries for Health & Human Resources (DHHR) and Public Safety & Homeland Security (PS&HS), along with the executives from their critical agencies, met with the governor’s chief of staff multiple times each week specifically for this decision forum. All agencies participating in the daily forum had clear guidelines and a simple template for how the daily forum fed decisions into the executive decision forum. This joint interagency effort, led by a strong Executive Core, enabled Virginia to move from the 49th-ranked to the 11th-ranked state for vaccination administrations in a matter of weeks.
Lesson 2: Understand Priorities and Define Joint Success
Defining joint success sounds straightforward, but many alliances fail because each participant quietly pursues its own metrics.
True coordination demands a single, shared definition of victory.
Executive engagement is critical because these leaders provide a clear and thoughtful strategic direction throughout their respective organizations. Cartels understand the power of a clearly defined collective picture of success. While individual priorities may vary depending on which stage of the drug trafficking process an organization supports, the unified objective remains crystal clear: saturate the U.S. market with highly addictive opioids. Shared metrics for success, such as the volume of drugs trafficked and profitability, keep the diverse stakeholders precisely aligned on objectives, enabling agility and effectiveness in their operations. When counter-supply actions threaten those objectives, the cartels take action to make changes.
As overdose deaths in the U.S. spiked from 2020 through 2023, the U.S. government and international government partners placed increased pressures on the Mexican cartels and the Chinese precursor suppliers. In an effort to reduce heightened scrutiny in 2023, the CDS banned the unauthorized production of fentanyl by its members and partners, using violent methods to enforce this decision. Combined with intensified enforcement and demand-reduction efforts, this contributed to recent declines in overdose deaths.
However, the DEA’s 2025 NDTA indicates that the CDS remains a powerful producer and trafficker of illicit fentanyl and other drugs, and illicit drug sales in the U.S. alone continue to generate billions of dollars in profits for TCOs each year.
Joint Efforts to Counter the Overdose Epidemic
U.S. law enforcement and public health responses historically struggled to match the cartels’ adaptive agility. Misaligned objectives and organizational silos, along with fragmented metrics of success, allowed cartels to exploit gaps effectively. However, in recent years, interagency partnerships have strengthened their joint response efforts. The U.S. government’s counter-supply and counter-demand operations understandably maintain different priorities, but agencies more consistently acknowledge the unified objective of reducing overdose deaths across the nation.
One example of these interagency partnerships is the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, which aims to increase collaboration between federal, state, and local law enforcement organizations across 33 regions. In 2015, the HIDTA program partnered with the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) and the CDC Foundation to pilot the Overdose Response Strategy (ORS) program. Leaders took lessons from the pilot regions and formalized program goals, mission, and strategic direction in April 2017. This partnership continued to demonstrate measurable progress, resulting in increased funding and greater impact.
Today, HIDTA-ORS partnerships bridge the response efforts between public health and public safety for communities across all 33 HIDTA regions. This increased focus on partnerships with clear measures of success contributed to the nearly 27% decrease in overdose deaths in 2024.
Improving Regional Health Learning Networks
Public safety and public health are not the only sectors that have sought to overcome siloed approaches and fragmented measures of success by creating joint efforts; in healthcare, access to care is a challenge for many U.S. citizens for a variety of reasons.
In response to this complex challenge, the Anderson Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital developed new Learning Health Networks (LHNs). These networks are multisite, condition-based collaborations of clinicians, researchers, patients, families, and communities to improve health outcomes by personalizing and improving care delivery models at-scale.
LHNs use transparent data sharing, co-production of solutions, and continuous improvement cycles to accelerate both research and real-time care improvements – even among competing hospital systems. As outlined in six learning modules and whitepapers, the LHN structure starts with clearly defined leadership roles, a clear shared purpose, and methods to measure and track progress. Each network is then sustained by strong governance, policies, and incentives that align with defined goals and motivations.
The Anderson Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has won some of the country’s most prestigious awards for social innovation, quality, and safety. By aligning diverse participants around common goals and equipping them with shared tools, data, and leadership approaches, they demonstrate how large, distributed groups can overcome fragmentation and achieve measurable, lasting improvements in health.
Lesson 3: Add Structure and Iterate
Leadership and strategic direction are necessary but won’t produce results by themselves. An adaptable structure that drives operational and tactical actions is also needed. The cartels’ operational effectiveness is driven by established communication protocols and clear delineation of decision rights, enabling them to take swift actions that drive success.
When law enforcement intensifies border security, cartels quickly reroute shipments, leveraging alternative routes and methods through immediate, coordinated decision-making. This disciplined communication and decision-making ensures the network remains proactive rather than reactive. And, like any organization focused on improving, the cartels have refined their methods and cadence for communication over time. The DEA has found that since the emergence of social media, these platforms have become a primary source of communication for TCOs. This seemingly minor iteration to operational details provides an example of proactively improving to maintain a strategic advantage.
Insights From a Non-profit-led Collaborative Network
The scaled impact of the Ohio Deflection Association (ODA) demonstrates the value of using an iterative process to mature the structure by which a multi-organizational effort operates. The ODA represents a cross-functional network of organizations working together to support the health and wellbeing of those struggling with substance use and mental health disorders by focusing on deflection and pre-arrest diversion strategies.
Deflection and diversion, cross-discipline strategies, have proven to be effective yet challenging to implement broadly. These networked response efforts often rely on relationships and leadership styles to help build connections and maintain inter-organizational communications that drive impact within a community. This is not easily scalable.
The ODA and its partner organizations, originally a loose network based on the relationships of a few key leaders in Ohio, have consistently iterated on their structure for communications and decision-making over the past six years. Their president, Dan Meloy, shared that he and three other ODA leaders recognized the need for a more consistent cadence of cross-discipline communication to drive “collaboration across professionals with different experiences, so we can work to solve the problem at the core and not just the symptoms.”
The ODA recognized this need for increased communication after starting with an annual training event. By updating the By Laws and Articles of Incorporation on multiple occasions, the ODA has refined and clarified its communication cadence and decision-making processes. This iterative approach to refining their structure has enabled the ODA to scale from supporting deflection and diversion efforts in two states to achieving this in 17, while also strengthening its network to support all counties within Ohio.
In addition to an annual conference with over 300 participants and quarterly strategic leadership meetings, the ODA leads monthly and quarterly forums that drive operational coordination across teams and organizations working in each of these states. Dan Meloy indicated that the organization intends to continue adapting and expanding as needed to help these cross-functional teams navigate the ever-changing environment.
Insights From the Race to Build Data Centers
Turning to an example in the private sector, we can also learn from the joint ventures focused on rapidly building large data centers. The vast portfolio of invention simply coined “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” is the space race of the 21st century. Currently, power sources present the most visible obstacles to progress, as AI racks consume 5–10 times more energy than conventional servers. Creating the infrastructure to secure new server capacity can take years. In this rapidly changing field, a year feels equivalent to decades.
The global consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, projects that meeting AI-driven demand could require investments of over $7 trillion in capital expenditure by 2030 (McKinsey). When investing at this scale, individual organizations using standard project management techniques quickly give way to structured partnerships capable of operating with precision at a speed that produces results not previously attainable.
Aligning multiple for-profit companies, some of which are traditionally competitors, around a common purpose that meets both the investor’s objectives and the partners’ individual priorities, presents a series of challenges.
A rapid assessment to understand the environment from the partners’ perspectives identified safety and speed as top priorities, with slow or unclear decision-making, ineffective communication methods, and undiscussed risks as the barriers to consistently meeting them.
After completing workshops to design their operating rhythm, the joint team shifted from bi-monthly reviews to a weekly cadence that enabled them to share information without spending an excessive amount of time in meetings. The core process involved individual team synchronization meetings that fed into a broad information-sharing forum, followed by a decision-making forum with clear processes for escalating and communicating strategic decisions.
The initial announcement for the information-sharing forum communicated that this would be an iterative process, and a playbook documented how the team would implement and refine the operating rhythm over time. Twelve months into their five-year joint venture, this integrated team continues to pivot based on changes in their environment while remaining on schedule to deliver against their most ambitious data capacity objectives to date.
Applying These Insights
In oversimplified terms, the purpose of multi-organizational efforts is to produce results otherwise unachievable by a single organization.
The unfortunate effectiveness of drug cartels provides stark lessons, but there are many other examples we can learn from, including government task forces, non-profit associations, and for-profit joint ventures. Although they span a wide range of professional fields, investment amounts, and geographies, these organizations provide insights you and your teams can apply. Multi-organizational efforts can achieve previously unseen results when they focus on adding an intentionally designed structure that is championed by executives, aligned on joint success, and iteratively adapted.
If you are engaged in a joint effort on behalf of your organization and find it less effective than you would like, consider which of these lessons your joint team needs to apply to operate as a hybrid entity rather than a loose network of individuals. Then discuss how you will make changes to attain the intended impact.
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