Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

In my view, when the President asks you to do something, you don’t play Hamlet on the wall, wringing your hands. To quote a great American athletic company’s slogan, you “just do it.” So long as you are prepared, you say yes.

Year in and year out, the Marines had trained me in skills they knew I needed, while educating me to deal with the unexpected.

Woe to the unimaginative one who, in after-action reviews, takes refuge in doctrine.

In any organization, it’s all about selecting the right team. The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness. I looked for those hallmarks in those I served alongside. Institutions get the behaviors they reward.

He urged me to expand my horizons, and I adopted that same mentoring technique throughout my career.

Have faith in your subordinates after you have trained them.

“Be ready. Next week we’ll be in a fight.”

Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it.

War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle—not once or twice, but hundreds of times. Read history, but study a few battles in depth. Learning from others’ mistakes is far smarter than putting your own lads in body bags.

Be honest in your criticism, but blow away the bad behavior while leaving their manhood intact.

Show no favoritism. Value initiative and aggressiveness above all. It’s easier to pull the reins back than to push a timid soul forward. Consistently maintain a social and personal distance, remembering that there is a line you must not cross. But you should come as close to that line as possible—without surrendering one ounce of your authority. You are not their friend. You are their coach and commander, rewarding the qualities essential to battlefield victory.

A Marine knows when you are invested in his character, his dreams, and his development. Men like that won’t quit on you.

State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Win their hearts and they will win the fights.

Leadership means reaching the souls of your troops, instilling a sense of commitment and purpose in the face of challenges so severe that they cannot be put into words.

we could be only as good as the raw material we brought in,

recruit for attitude and train for skills.

You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent and unleash their initiative.

There’s a huge difference between making a mistake and letting that mistake define you,

Because a unit adopts the personality of its commander, just as a sports team adopts the personality of its coach, I made my expectation clear: I wanted a bias for action, and to bring out the initiative in all hands.

In the midst of one exercise, for instance, he told the battalion commander that he and all his officers had been killed. That required the sergeants to direct the live fires and seize the objectives. The exercise was a success and all officers in the regiment learned the lesson. It wasn’t how well any one of us performed; our test was how well the unit functioned without us.

Strangers don’t fight well together,

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write.

At no rank is a Marine excused from studying.

Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead.

Leave the “how” to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.

Subordinate commanders cannot seize fleeting opportunities if they do not understand the purpose behind an order.

If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.

at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success. When they make mistakes while doing their best to carry out your intent, stand by them. Examine your coaching and how well you articulate your intent. Remember the bottom line: imbue in them a strong bias for action.

learning and mastering your job must never stop.

If you can’t talk freely with the most junior members of your organization, then you’ve lost touch.

As Churchill noted, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

You can never allow your enthusiasm to exceed your unit’s capabilities,

Trust remains the coin of the realm.

In general, there are two kinds of executives: those who simply respond to their staffs and those who direct their staffs and give them latitude, coaching them as needed to carry out the directions.

What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?

A negative statement is not a mission.

Strangers who haven’t trained together don’t work smoothly together.

When you are in command, there is always the next decision waiting to be made. You don’t have time to pace back and forth like Hamlet, zigzagging one way and the other. You do your best and live with the consequences. A commander has to compartmentalize his emotions and remain focused on the mission. You must decide, act, and move on.

When you are engaged at the tactical level, you grasp your own reality so clearly it’s tempting to assume that everyone above you sees it in the same light. Wrong. When you’re the senior commander in a deployed force, time spent sharing your appreciation of the situation on the ground with your seniors is like time spent on reconnaissance: it’s seldom wasted.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

I may not have come up with many new ideas, but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others.

I don’t care how operationally brilliant you are; if you can’t create harmony—vicious harmony—on the battlefield, based on trust across different military services, foreign allied militaries, and diplomatic lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.

Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

I followed British Field Marshal Slim’s advice that, in fairness to my troops, they had to know what their objective was and what my expectations of them were.

To expect success every time is wishful thinking, but we should default to supporting commanders who move boldly against the enemy.

I’d always found first reports to be half wrong and half incorrect.

But leadership can’t depend on emails or written words. Leaders are not potted plants, and at all levels they must be constantly out at the critical points doing whatever is required to keep their teams energized, especially when everyone is exhausted.

We learn most about ourselves when things go wrong.