2019 Book-of-the-Year! (click here)
Issue No. 416 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting urges you to read the new book by former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. With Turkey and Syria in the headlines this week—this leadership-savvy book will also shed light on a general’s in-the-trenches insights on the Middle East. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this website for recent book reviews, including ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance.
Leadership Masterpiece
Wow. This morning I just finished one of the most powerful, insightful, leadership-savvy books I’ve ever, ever read. I will read it again. It’s remarkable on many, many levels. Jim Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of Defense (Jan. 20, 2017 to Jan. 1, 2019), writes:
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead.”
He adds, “I learned then and I believe now that everyone needs a mentor or to be a mentor—and that no one needs a tyrant. At the same time, there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems.”
Those gems (and hundreds more) are from the new book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, by Jim Mattis and Bing West. I read with pen in hand—and no joke—I’ve underlined and noted more than 100 leadership insights from this leadership masterpiece.
Fresh—and convicting—leadership insights:
• “If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.”
• Warning to CEOs and senior leaders: “…once you made general, you never had a bad meal and you never again heard the truth.”
• “Ever since then [the Trojan War], in their imaginations commanders have searched in vain for the orderly battlefield that unfolds according to plan. It doesn’t exist.”
• Mattis’ mantra for officers: “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” (Gen. Mattis repeated these three questions so incessantly that they appeared on index cards next to the phones in some offices!)
• Learned from Secretary Robert Gates: “The only thing that allows government to work at the top levels is trusted personal relations.” Mattis: “You can’t achieve this leading by email.”
While reading Call Sign Chaos, I was reminded of the 400 axioms and insights in Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life, by Donald Rumsfeld. Mattis’ focus on lifelong learning also reminded me of two books by Gen. Stanley McChrystal: Leaders: Myth and Reality and Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. And one more by Adm. William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed (view the video).
But I’d slot Call Sign Chaos in a category of one. Leadership savvy (check!). Loyalty to the Commander in Chief—irrespective of political party (check!). An understandable primer on the history and deep divides in the Middle East (check!). A cogent argument for allies and partnerships (check!). Blunt but courteous approaches to commanding officers (check!). And—surprisingly—the in-the-trenches battle accounts in Iraq and Afghanistan—page-turning (check!). I could go on…
Mattis served as a U.S. Marine from 1969 to 2013, and was Commander of the U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013 under President Obama. From 2007 to 2009, for NATO, he was Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation. (That’s an impressive business card!) Mattis: “The American people had paid my tuition going on thirty-five years, and if this was where my seniors wanted me, I would go.” To prepare for this job, he read 22 books!
Mattis served 712 days as the 26th Secretary of Defense. His Dec. 20, 2018 letter of resignation to President Trump is just one of numerous signed letters in the book’s epilogue—and is a short treatise on his core values and leadership savvy.
I’ve earned just one nickname in my life (“Uber Grandpa”), but Mattis has three nicknames:
• "CHAOS" (His often irreverent troops assigned this call sign/question: “Does the Colonel Have Another Outstanding Solution?”)
• "Warrior Monk" (He never married.)
• "Mad Dog" (Read his battlefield doctrine—constantly confusing the enemy.)
There’s more wisdom—including meals at stand-up tables!
• American naval strategist Alfred Mahan: “If the strategy be wrong, the skill of the general on the battlefield, the valor of the solider, the brilliance of victory, however otherwise decisive, fail of their effect.”
• Yet strategy is not enough: “Nothing compensates for a lack of trust.”
• Meeting with world leaders: “If I wanted them to listen to me, I had to respect their dignity in public. But I’m known for blunt speaking, and I was very blunt—in private.”
• In senior operational commanders meetings (every two to three months), they examined their warfighting details and reordered priorities, discussed “what if?” scenarios “…all the while walking over a map, the size of a basketball court, nicknamed the “BAM”—the [Big-A**] Map.”
• And note this! “Meals were taken together, with commands intermixed at stand-up tables so that they conversed with one another across all ranks.”
• Four-point leadership: “In keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.”
Mattis delivers a clinic in the power of “intent” (what it is and how to communicate it)—and what goes wrong without it. Example: his “Commanding General’s Message to All Hands” to the 1st Marine Division in March 2003—just one page intentionally—was distributed to all 22,000 troops. It was based on his “Commander’s Intent” written document, which launched Saddam Hussein’s downfall. (See Chapter 6, “The March Up.”)
Mattis notes: “Over the years since [2003], many have taken that letter out of their wallets and shown it to me.” Imagine! What letter could you write—as a leader—that your team members would keep in their wallets years later? Wow.
His greatest angst (my opinion)—the lack of clarity and strategic intent from the Commander in Chief and others. He labeled it “strategic frustration.”
On the verge of being criticized for what others thought was a too-quick response in battle, a military lawyer asked Mattis: “General how much time did you consider before authorizing the strike?”
“He knew from the record that the time from when I was awakened until I authorized a strike had been less than thirty seconds. ‘About thirty years,’ I replied.”
“I may have sounded nonchalant or dismissive, but my point was that a thirty-second decision rested upon thirty years of experience and study.”
Termination by Napkin! Leading the Joint Forces Command (2,800 servicemen and federal workers plus 3,000 contractors), Mattis discerned in 2010 that he could save “hundreds of millions of dollars” by disbanding JFCOM. In a Joint Chiefs budget meeting, he wrote three words on a paper napkin and passed it over to Admiral Mullen:
“Disband JFCOM
—Mattis.”
The result: “Over the next months, the valuable parts of JFCOM were moved elsewhere, and the rest of the command was disestablished. I had succeeded in firing myself.” Imagine!
Oh, my—there’s so much more. Maybe I’ll write a follow-up issue later this fall. For now, I’ll wrap it up with these big ideas:
• “Praise in public, criticize in private.”
• “Operational tempo is a state of mind. I’ve always tried to be hard on issues but not on spirits.”
• “We learn more about ourselves when things go wrong.”
• To his one-star generals and admirals: “…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.”
• Winston Churchill: “Dynamite in the hands of a child is not more dangerous than a strong policy weakly carried out.”
• Humorous humility: “Memo to young officers: I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.” (I like the bucket reference!)
• Three categories of information—and how to respond to each: housekeeping, decision-making, and alarms (see page 199).
• “As it is for any senior executive, time was my most precious commodity.” (And why—when you’re tired—you must not get “snappish!”)
Too Busy to Read? Gen. Mattis writes that 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.”
Think you’re “too busy” to read? Click here to read an email, published in Business Insider, that Gen. Mattis sent to a colleague documenting why reading books is critical. (It’s also included on pages 257-259 in the book’s appendix.) The book includes a sampling of over 50 “favorite” books Mattis recommends, including Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat.
Planning Defined. The final 10-page chapter, “Reflections,” is packed with leadership lessons—expanding on the previous in-the-trenches chapters. Example: “Mastering the art and science of war also means understanding strategy and planning. Strategy is hard, unless you’re a dilettante. You must think until your head hurts. Planning, which is simply another word for anticipatory decision-making, is equally rigorous and, in war, is a constant, never-ending process.”
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, by Jim Mattis and Bing West. To listen to the audio version (12 hours), click on Libro.fm here.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Gen. Mattis writes that “all leaders should be coaches at heart. For me, ‘player-coach’ aptly describes the role of a combat leader, or any real leader.” What are we doing here to equip our leaders to be coaches? (Read this!)
2) Mattis quotes an Air Force colonel, “To win a dogfight, you have to observe what is going on, orient yourself, decide what to do, and act before your opponent has completed his version of that same process, repeating and repeating that loop faster than your foe.” Mattis calls this the “OODA” loop. What’s our competitive advantage loop?
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Culture Bucket Exits!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
One of the big ideas in the Culture Bucket, Chapter 8, in Mastering the Management Buckets, addresses values, conflicts, and exit signs. “…because we are human we will always have relational conflicts, so we are zealots about resolving conflict early. We invite those who won’t live out our values to exit.”
Does your culture embody sandbags and exits?
“Everyone on my staff, in Marine parlance, filled sandbags,” writes Gen. Jim Mattis. “No one was exempt from the simplest tasks. We answered our own phones, brewed our own coffee, and slept six hours when lucky.”
Culture is both subtle and in-your-face. Little things, like sandbags, matter—and when team members don’t live your values, you must act (see the four quadrants in the Culture Bucket). Mattis adds, “Because it is so hard to write about, relief of command is rarely mentioned.” Yet, Call Sign Chaos includes several poignant accounts of how Mattis terminated and reassigned officers (including an admiral from a European country)—and why.
For more resources from the Culture Bucket, click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). Question: Who is coaching your marketing team? Retain an outside voice and mentor and you’ll enrich your team’s impact. Call Pearpod Media.
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