Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

While this book is primarily a military history memoir, Mattis does share some aspects of his leadership style and advocates for them. The salient one is the encouragement of initiative taking in one’s subordinates. In every commanding role he is given, Mattis strives to minimize the need for reporting back to the higher-ups. Such data flow, for Mattis, can waste time and encourage micromanagement. This is one of Mattis’s complaints about EBO (effects-based operations) in JFCOM: that such a data-driven strategy made soldiers in the field “become reporters rather than focus on breaking the enemy’s will. This was the surest means of surrendering initiative and creating a critical vulnerability” (180).

Mattis knows that all members of a military unit must have the same objective and be working together to accomplish this goal, but once the objective has been clearly conveyed and understood, then, in the chaos of the battlefield, it is the officer on the ground who should be leading the troops and looking for creative ways to complete the mission. So it is that Mattis develops three questions that he asks himself and his officers: “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” (44).