In his new memoir, Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense and retired Marine general Jim Mattis recounts his military career, philosophy, and leadership strategy. Here are 20 of my favorite quotes on leadership. (Number 10 is my favorite.)
1. “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.”
2. “Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. . . . Battles, conventional or irregular, turn on the basics of gaining fire superiority and maneuvering against the enemy. Fire and maneuver — block and tackle — decide battle. The Corps exists to win battles. That is inseparable from making Marines who stand for its values in tough times. Anything that doesn’t contribute to winning battles or winning Marines is of secondary importance. Regrettably, too many of the men I’ve seen killed or wounded failed to perform the basics. 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. Physical strength, endurance, calling in fire, map reading, verbal clarity, tactical cunning, use of micro-terrain — all are necessary. You must master and integrate them to gain the confidence of your troops. A good map-reading lieutenant is worthless if he can’t do pull-ups.”
3. “Competence, caring, and conviction combine to form a fundamental element — shaping the fighting spirit of your troops. 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.”
4. “Partial commitment changes everything — it reduces the sense that the mission comes first. From my first days, I had been taught that the Marines were satisfied only with 100 percent commitment from us and were completely dissatisfied with 99 percent. You can’t have an elite organization if you look the other way when someone craps out on you.”
5. “I aggressively delegated tasks to the lowest capable level. I made sure missions were clearly understood. Ethics and honesty held everyone to the same standard. I grew comfortable delegating authority to people I saw only once or twice a month. Decision-making was decentralized. Thirty-eight junior and senior sergeants spread out over thousands of miles operated as a team without seeing one another. This showed me that this approach could unleash subordinate initiative in any organization.”
6. “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. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a ‘conversation’ with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. 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. Any commander who claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying.”
7. “Instillation of personal initiative, aggressiveness, and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an organization’s culture. If a commander expects subordinates to seize fleeting opportunities under stress, his organization must reward this behavior in all facets of training, promoting, and commending. More important, he must be tolerant of mistakes. If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.”
8. “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.”
9. “[L]eadership 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.”
10. “Be polite, be professional — but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
11. “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. Senior staffs sometimes need pruning. It’s easy to get into a bureaucratic rut where things are done a certain way because they’re done a certain way. That seems absurd when you read it in print — but it’s the norm in large organizations. Every few months, a leader has to step back and question what he and his organization are doing.”
12. “Initiative has to be practiced daily, not stifled, if it’s to become a reality inside a culture. Every institution gets the behavior it rewards.”
13. “PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions. PowerPoint is excellent when displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.”
14. “At inflection points, as history has made clear, change must come at the speed of relevance. This meant that now, right now, we had to pick up the tempo. It could not be business as usual. I wanted disciplined but not regimented thinking. Commanders must encourage intellectual risk taking to preclude a lethargic environment. Leaders must shelter those challenging nonconformists and mavericks who make institutions uncomfortable; otherwise you wash out innovation. I told my one-star admirals and generals: ‘You’re still low enough in rank to be in touch with your troops, but senior enough to protect our mavericks. That’s your job.’ If you’re uncomfortable dealing with intellectual ambushes from your own ranks, it’ll be a heck of a lot worse when the enemy does it to you.”
15. “A wise leader must deal with reality and state what he intends, and what level of commitment he is willing to invest in achieving that end. He then has to trust that his subordinates know how to carry that out. Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise it will lead to failure.”
16. “If you can’t be additive as a leader, you’re just like a potted plant in the corner of a hotel lobby: you look pretty, but you’re not adding substance to the organization’s mission.”
17. “If I were to sum up the leadership techniques I constructed on the basis of the Marine Corps’s bias for action, it would be simple: once I set the tempo, the speed I prized was always built on subordinate initiative. This governing principle drove home the underlying efforts that would make speed a reality. Speed is essential, whether in sports, business, or combat, because time is the least forgiving, least recoverable factor in any competitive situation. I learned to prize smooth execution by cohesive teams (those that could adapt swiftly to battlefield shocks) over deliberate, methodical, and synchronized efforts that I saw squelching subordinate initiative. In fact it was always subordinate initiative that got my lads out of the jams I got them into, my mistakes being my own.”
18. “A leader’s job is to inculcate high-spirited, amiable self-discipline. Leaders must always generate options by surrounding themselves with bright subordinates and being catalysts for new ideas.”
19. “Any competitive organization must nurture its maverick thinkers. You can’t wash them out of your outfit if you want to avoid being surprised by your competition. Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game. Risk aversion will damage the long-term health, even survival, of the organization, because it will undercut disciplined but unregimented thinking. Because maverick thinkers are so important to an organization’s adaptability, high-ranking leaders need to be assigned the job of guiding and even protecting them, much as one would do for any endangered species.”
20. “By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”
