Lessons from the Warrior Monk: Jim Mattis

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James Mattis is one of the most respected and revered military leaders of the last 50 years. Mattis served for over 40 years in the Marine Corp. Mattis in nicknamed the “Warrior Monk,” due to his incredible study of leadership and military history.1 It is reported that he has a personal library of 7,000 volumes on war and strategy.2 Mattis recently published his book, Call Sign Chaos, which details his leadership lessons learned from his military experience.

Leaders across all industries will improve their ability to lead by studying Mattis. Below are eight of the most important lessons Call Sign Chaos:

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Shifting Baseline Syndrome – The Consequences of Neglecting Gradual Change

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How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: gradually then suddenly - Ernest Hemingway

Gradual change is hard to manage. It’s difficult to monitor how change is slowly, but consistently, creating significant variations in our environments. Because we overlook slow change, we are shocked when small changes culminate in major catastrophes. In short, we suffer from Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) is an important principle found in ecology. This idea explains how many ecological systems, such as nature conservation, water quality levels, and restoration of wildlife habitats, are destroyed over time.

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Excel Under Stress: One Simple Technique Used by Elite Military Special Operations Forces

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Breathing. An action so common yet so often neglected. We don’t realize the power inherent with our breathing. We know it keeps us alive, but beyond that, we tend to just forget about it.

Improper breathing accelerates stress and anxiety while hampering physical performance.

Proper breathing gives us better conscious control over stress and anxiety and enables peak physical response.

The odds are you have never considered the critical effect proper breathing has on mental performance, especially the ability to perform under pressure and stress. Stress and pressure are constants in our lives. We face it at work, at home, and in activities like athletics. Proper breathing, especially in high-pressure environments, enables peak performance and the ability to defeat your competition.

All it takes is one simple technique.

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Everyday Survival: 9 Ideas to Overcome Life’s Challenges

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2020 has been a never-ending year of adversity and uncertainty.

How well do you feel you were prepared?

Did you easily adapt to the difficult environment? Or did it feel like an endless battle to figure out what’s going on and what to do about it?

If you’ve struggled this year, you’re not alone. Most people don’t handle the unexpected well. And the idea of hoping for assistance from the government or other institutions has been disappointing with their unreliable, haphazard efforts.

Your ability to survive chaotic environments is, and always will be, up to you.

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The Curse of Vague Thinking: How Empty Rhetoric and Hollow Words Mislead Investors

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Vague thinking surrounds us. It’s permeated politics (“come together in a bipartisan way”), business management (“leverage synergies and create win-wins”), corporate mission statements (“build a corporate culture that respects and values the unique strengths…”), and of course, investing.

Every day we are inundated with empty rhetoric used to hide, rather than reveal, the truth. It promotes laziness and obscures incompetence. It’s a tempting way to communicate. It’s the path of least resistance.

Vague communication is standard in the investment world. Market experts talk in vague generalities and obfuscating one-liners that do nothing to further investors’ understanding of the markets.

The investment world is an unrelenting assault of vague language. Vague verbiage has become a parasite in our quest to make wise investment decisions. Everyone pretends to know the future. No one admits ignorance. The illusion of knowledge is real. It’s become absurd.

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The Fallibility of Experts: How Experts Lead Us Astray and How to Prevent It

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Be careful what you ask experts. Experts are bad at predictions, but are great at assessing base rates.1

Experts are the go-to source for life’s uncertainties. We rely on them for guidance and advice during ambiguous environments. We crave their authority, confidence, and conviction.

But the evidence is clear - experts are awful at predicting the future. Expertise is not synonymous with superior forecasting ability.2

Experts are extremely useful, if properly directed. As we’ll see, we can use an expert’s deep knowledge to improve our decisions. However, the process is not intuitive and doesn’t happen automatically. The burden is on us to ask the right questions.

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Managing Human Error in the Investment Process

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All investors make mistakes. Mistakes happen not only because of misjudgment but the nature of investing. Mistakes arise from universal conditions within the investment world.1 In other words, it’s usually not the person that’s the source of the mistakes, it’s the environmental and situational factors. It’s the system.

Rarely do we acknowledge and understand the system. We neglect environmental factors and reflexively attribute mistakes to personal factors: laziness, inattentiveness, ignorance, etc.

Investors operate in a complex world with imperfect information and an unpredictable future. Add in additional pressure from clients and organizations and investors are primed to err.

How leaders handle human error separates the great investment teams from the average. Better assessment and understanding of errors build a competitive advantage.

Yes, investors make mistakes. But they’re not made in isolation. It’s the system issues that exacerbate personal mistakes. The big idea is resolving “system” issues that will lessen the effect of unavoidable personal shortcomings.

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Managing a Team During a Crisis: Using Survival Psychology to Lead Your Team

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In all walks of life, fear and stress loom on the horizon: they freeze cops in tight situations, paralyze concert performers on stage, and make skydiver’s brains lock up so much that they can forget the pull their parachutes. No one is immune.1

A crisis is challenging for all leaders. But they are exceptionally difficult for the people you lead. Of all the issues to navigate, managing your team’s psychology may be the most important. Not everyone responds well to adversity. Most people don’t. They perform at the lowest level of their training, which is next to nothing. Organizations don’t train to operate under stress. Because people are unprepared, it’s a leader’s job to anticipate reactions and make plans to manage it.

First, we need to understand how humans respond to a crisis. We’ll borrow the lessons of survival psychology to understand crisis reaction patterns. By understanding how people react, we can reduce stress and anxiety.

Second, we’ll discuss steps to proactively help our teams. Stop with vague, naïve advice. Start with evidence-based advice proven in real-world situations.

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The Art of Disagreement: Using Disagreement to Build Better Relationships

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One reason for ineffective decision making is miscommunication. Unclear goals, conflicting objectives, and vague directives all play a role. But there’s one issue that underlies them all. And it’s an issue that makes us all uncomfortable.

The act of disagreement.

We’ve all suffered through a typical disagreement. It starts cordial but devolves into a free-for-all. Anything goes. Egos get in the way. Emotions rise. We feel attacked. We subtly undermine each other. We weaponize our personal grievances. We stop listening and just want to win. Instead of learning, we want domination. We let ego and defensiveness overwhelm openness and empathy. We end up faking agreement to avoid the stress.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

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Learning From Mistakes: 5 Lessons from NASA's Challenger Disaster

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Big mistakes may grab the headlines, but it’s the path leading up to the big mistakes that intrigues me. Seemingly inconsequential mistakes, compounded over time, are the foundation for disasters.

Common wisdom says we should learn from our mistakes. Easy to say, tougher to implement. There’s a tendency to look for a smoking gun – find the people that screwed up and fire them. Or find the one piece of technology that failed and replace it. If only it was that easy.

Problems are rarely traced to a single cause. Organizations often fall into the trap of seeking a convenient scapegoat because it’s easy and convenient, not because it reveals the truth. There are several conflicting factors that complicate learning from mistakes:

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