Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

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.

You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.

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

By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

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.

The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do. With all hands aligned to your goals, their cunning and initiative unleashed, you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.

any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.

PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener.

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

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

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory—instinctive reflexes—within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected.

recruit for attitude and train for skills.

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

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.

Business management books often stress “centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. In

If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership.

By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled, and by doing brave acts, we become brave.

It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead.

Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake—and I made many—the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right.

Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II: “As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.

I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission.

State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. At the same time, leaven your professional passion with personal humility and compassion for your troops.

After a rebellion…power tends to flow to those most organized, not automatically to the most idealistic.

Never advantage yourself at the expense of your comrades.

If there's something you don't want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you're doing.

Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.

You cannot allow your passion for excellence to destroy your compassion for them as human beings.