Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

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.

“We don’t get to choose when we die,” he said. “But we do choose how we meet death.”

Jackie Robinson’s tombstone: “A life is not important except in its impact on other lives.”

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

I had learned in the fleet that in harmonious, effective units, everyone owns the unit mission.

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, carrying a bad attitude through life.

“I’ll tell you what leadership is,” he said. “It’s persuasion and conciliation and education and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know.”

Everyone has a plan, Mike Tyson said, until he gets punched in the mouth.

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.

Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

any senior officer or staff member can dash off a query and numerous officers will hasten to respond. Digital technology—instant questions demanding instant responses—conveys to higher headquarters a sense of omniscience, an inclination to fine-tune every detail below. When you impose command via that sort of tight communications control, you create “Mother may I?” timidity.

Trust up and down the chain must be the coin of the realm.

Developing a culture of operating from commander’s intent demanded a higher level of unit discipline and self-discipline than issuing voluminous, detailed instructions. In drafting my intent, I learned to provide only what is necessary to achieve a clearly defined end state: tell your team the purpose of the operation, giving no more than the essential details of how you intend to achieve the mission, and then clearly state your goal or end state, one that enables what you intend to do next. Leave the “how” to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.

The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do.

The correct exercise of independent action requires a common understanding between the commander and the subordinate, of both the mission and the commander’s intent of what the mission is expected to accomplish.

Biographies of executives usually stress achievement through hard work, brilliance, or dogged persistence. By contrast, many who achieve less point to hard luck and bad breaks. I believe both views are equally true.

Operations occur at the speed of trust.

praise in public, criticize in private—before

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.

Their quiet individual determination will always stay with me.

We learn most about ourselves when things go wrong.

“It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”

A senior leader in any organization must recognize when his environment has changed. I adapted my touchstones accordingly.

to quote Napoleon, “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

Civilization progresses, Homer taught us, only when the strongest nations and armies respect the dignity of the weakest.

They were spinning in a circle, without a strategic compass to keep them pointed in a consistent direction.

now was not the time to go inward. You must always keep fighting for those who are still with you.

As Churchill noted, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.”

insist on the pervasive implementation of decentralized decision-making,

Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

Regardless of rank or occupation, I believe that all leaders should be coaches at heart.

Speech galvanizes the desire to work together. It is the beginning of the urge to get something done.”

Make your intent clear, and then encourage your subordinates to employ a bias for action.

a leader’s role is problem solving.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

History is compelling; nations with allies thrive; those without them die.

But as President Lyndon Johnson put it, it’s far better having people inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

Conviction doesn’t mean you should not change your mind when circumstance or new information warrant it. A leader must be willing to change and make change.

Culture is a way of life shared by a group of people—how they act, what they believe, how they treat one another, and what they value.

The output of any organization, driven by its culture, must reflect the leadership’s values in order to be effective.

When asked how he would order his thoughts if he had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes.

Friedrich Hayek cautioned, “Adaptation is smarter than you are.”

General George C. Marshall had written: “The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types—long

do our jobs well, we should not want our job too much.

Once established, a government bureaucracy provides steady jobs and steady routines. It grows deep roots in the community, attracting the protection of influential politicians. It becomes a self-perpetuating entity. But the American taxpayer is footing the bill, so every organization must serve a worthwhile purpose or it should go away.

Religious leaders should not be running countries.”

lack of time to reflect is the single biggest deficiency in senior decision-makers.

“The only thing that allows government to work at the top levels,” he said, “is trusted personal relations.”

keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.