Call Sign Chaos, General Jim Mattis

I admire Mattis' call to 'protect their mavericks and risk takers, and reward initiative and aggressiveness'. For Marines, aggressiveness means exercising the strongest initiative, such as youthful itinerants like young Mattis himself. Progress is impossible when people and organizations are too timid to break s***, including organizational comfort. Innovation requires aggressiveness. But leaders must temper zeal with self-discipline and reading. To forego reading is to forego the intelligence for which previous leaders believed it was worthwhile to record their experience. If I could loosely summarize Mattis' leadership principles:

1. Vertical alignment by intended outcomes, rather than detailed directives: "in order to take the bridge" "in order to deny egress" "in order to _________"
2. Lateral aggressiveness and competency
3. Learn from your predecessors, read voraciously

Mattis' letter to troops prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq provides an example of these principles.

People often quote Mattis because they think it imparts swagger, but this misdirects from a historically-informed and empirical leadership style. Put bluntly, Mattis is a cosmopolitan, which means he doesn't care about how he will be evaluated by people not named Mattis. It also means that he places the world (people, problems, obstacles) as prior to his representation of their facts, and therefore, one does not try to change the world to fit one's objectives but rather to understand and respond to direct conditions in turn. The mantra of "improvise, adapt, overcome" directly applies to a leadership process that deploys objectives, derives feedback, adjusts, and continually searches out utility in others.

Mattis spoke to a packed auditorium at my old university and his appeal is easy to understand. The Marines' leadership mindset is well-compartmentalized: you have a role, you understand your role, you fulfill your role. Combined with fraternity, self-discipline, and learning/adapting/exercising, it is easy to understand why that mindset is infectious, and likewise dovetails with Aurelius' stoicism. Encouragement toward literacy and listening was what spared me from the fatal outcomes of my peers, so you can imagine my earnest loyalty listening to someone state it as a formal leadership principle. Mattis distinguishes himself as a leader capable of greater public significance. I wish to hear more of him in the future. When speaking on leadership and democracy, he does so without the self-dealing prevalent within universities, media, and corporations, a core reason for their decreasing national relevance.

Endurance, Alfred Lansing

The greatest account of determination against the oarlocks, the Shackleton expedition's survival is arguably misattributed to Shackleton rather than his team. Their sequence of hardships exemplify Mattis' 'direct leadership': a chain of short-term contexts and decisions made under environmental uncertainty to achieve the grim objective of saving as many crew as possible. Shackleton did so by keeping problematic crew members near himself, but otherwise unleashing the capabilities of a skilled team to operate independently and effectively. This is a credit to the team's hand-picked composition, trade experts except for one stowaway. In their moment, none could know the outcome that might follow, only that positive outcomes would proceed solely from their own actions. There is no luck but hard luck, but that is the best we have.

Survival narratives break against readers' psychological resistance to contemplate situations for which absolute consequences and mortal uncertainty are pitted against the personal commitment (and a difficult one) to act toward survival: the acceptance of one's situation and the conscious choice to behave rationally and agreeably toward difficult goals. The fascinating character of the team was their cheery acceptance of circumstance, and the collective understanding of each man's value and responsibilities, including the responsibility not to share spoiling attitudes in the face of uncertainty. No bad situation is chosen, but good outcomes only extend from choice.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

You can't control the world, but you can exercise absolute control over how you respond to it. Meditations is a masterpiece that speaks for itself.

The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub , David H. Sharp

Once you notice, it can never be unnoticed that SERIOUS CAPS provide admission to the military history section at your local book store. It is hard to conceive that T.E. Lawrence would today be a highly self-serious Tom Clancy ghostwriter, or Wilfred Owen an operator of several 'osint' twitter accounts for reposting graphic drone warfare videos like 90s skater reel, but seemingly not by 2022 standards. Further, even though professional military-history narratives attempt to memorialize events in good-faith, they disappoint because of the loss of gritty firsthand knowledge to second-hand authorship, very much including the vulgarity of real events and participants. I was given a copy of Horse Soldiers by one of the event's real participants, only to puzzle over the author's descriptions of a detainee's eyes resembling "cold tea". Tea color varies by temp? Er, whut?

Murphy's law is a democracy of demons, in combat as much as engineering, and doesn't reduce to solo-hero narrative formats and needless symbolism and "cold tea". Given that the military is overwhelmingly working class, is it much to ask that its authorship reflect that culture?

So nevermind that Sharp's book hails from the CAPITAL LETTERS section, nor that much of the story may be deliberate fabrication (!). A professional engineering memoir is a rare work. The beauty, of course, is stealing a sunken Russian submarine by engineering multiple massive and unproven custom apparatuses, coordinating front companies and stories, Howard Hughes Corp, opsec lapses, Soviet surveillance, and a large-scale project with mixed outcomes (familiar to any large software contract). Most of us should stick to mastering the 25¢ claw game at Safeway, but I hope Sharp kept the 240z and the fialka in the glovebox.

Despite my personal fascination with Azorian, the spy intrigue subsided and yielded to a professional project memoir akin to any large-scale engineering project. Mixed outcomes, survivor-guilt levels of personal second-guessing. Resources ebb and flow, machines break, people break, and technical assumptions haunt one's sleep. Any engineer would blanche the moment the heave-compensator slammed to the stops. The discipline required to carry through such an extensive multi-year project is admirable in itself, and one envies its field work.

Azorian was an amazing undertaking, unique for the scale of its managerial and engineering requirements, one that ought to be more well-known as a major Cold War military-engineering accomplishment. The beauty of Sharp's memoir is that in an era when professional responsibility and leadership are diminishing, Azorian exemplified the absolute professional obligations faced by engineers, which is perhaps what makes such a strong example of personal leadership. It is not that I believe we are in an ethical malaise, but that compared with previous generations, American culture is remarkably unfamiliar with the assertiveness, discipline, and inherent risk of more practical fields like engineering, despite it overflowing with character- and team-driven accomplishments. The movie 'First Man' even removed the US flag from moon landing scenes over concerns about nationalism--despite the fact that the fundamental and stated purpose of the Cold War space race was the achievement of nationalistic objectives. But I look forward to seeing Azorian on the big screen, because even a mediocre production would entertain, given the merits of the project itself.

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, L. David Marquet

'Turning followers into leaders' oozes TED Talk cliches. But on reflection, followership forms the basis of every social media platform, most professional credentials, and 99% of LinkedIn (which I ditched for exactly this reason). There is even a book of the same title promoting 'followership' with all the false optimism of marketing 3.0 aspirants from the 2000s.

Marquet's book distinguishes itself by its focus on the genesis of leadership, rather than leadership as-such. The latter is Steven Covey's 'personality ethic' of poisonous leadership, which reinforces existing leadership roles without addressing how they were created; the former seeks to understand how leaders are created and the conditions thereof.

Consider the limited number of leadership examples in the public mind, yet the abundance of leaders among your familiar peers. Are leaders determined by their context? The theatrical timing of a historical moment? The resources propping them up? Surely not. "Your duty is to stand straight, not held straight". Leadership must then not inhere in the surrounding context, like some laughtrack, but in the capacity to be both a leader and one worthy of having them. A leader is anyone capable of creating the conditions under which leadership can thrive.

For example, Marquet encourages the language of subordination ("Sir, may I ____") with intent: "Sir, I intend to ____". Conscientiously structuring language is the low-hanging fruit of leadership praxis, a subtle mutual contract that a leader is someone who creates other leaders. Marquet is a good complement to Mattis' executive focus. Whereas Mattis' vertical leadership principle emphasizes communicating intent downward, Marquet's principle emphasizes pushing subordinates upward by harnessing their 'intent' and building their autonomous initiative. This appropriately decouples leaders and subordinates, notably without obtuse language about 'decentralization'. Marquet does not seek to replace leadership hierarchy but to ensure that it exists to maximize initiative and the creation of new leaders.

Perhaps the main theme of Marquet's book is to encompass an entire organization in leadership, and to not yield to reductive or embedded authority roles. A somewhat familiar example to developers, I worked at an organization where favoritism and dubious dev metrics resulted in some workmates disproportionately receiving greenfield tasks, thus building their skillsets, while starving others equally qualified. Like all such non-linear point schemes, the scoring merely encouraged developers to assign themselves easy tasks and discouraged more difficult ones, which by definition can be nearly impossible to estimate (i.e. bug hunts). Being downstream of objectives, the result was that many colleagues adopted an attitude of subordination precisely because they were essentially being required to ask permission to do work, while also being discouraged from doing critically important work of quality and security. The highest value tasks according to the "metrics" (high point, least effort, low value) provided negative value long-term, whereas the lowest value tasks (low points, high effort, high uncertainty) actually had the greatest value to quality and organization survival. (This organizational defect is what DevSecOps directly addresses through continuous integration of quality and security.)

Since the metrics disincentivized addressing quality issues, projects became progressively more buggy, while also favoring the proliferation of new and undocumented code. Technical debt exploded like a fission experiment run amok. And without greenfield tasks, downstream workmates did not adequately develop their creative intuition about how things could be done, but were pinioned by what already had been done, and done very poorly. Notably, many long-term developers did not advance their skillsets or experience, despite doing lots of apparent work. Several moved on to better companies. Likewise, providing insightful feedback regarding machine learning applications (a core product domain), security, or open source dev productivity tooling was regarded with suspicion by leads for being 'out of one's lane' or a threat to someone's kingdom. Virtually the entire company's software activities were structured in this manner, as siloed, feuding kingdoms, a matrix of rivalries that produced little for its partipants and turned the software into internally-focused and awkwardly overlapping mishmash (good ole Conway's law).

Per Marquet, this team organization formed a self-fulfilling hierarchy of role-acquiescence. Engineers' capabilities far exceeded the constraints created by upstream bottleneckers, but the company culture presented toxic subservience as 'being a team player' and other downright cringe. Nor would I hesitate to work with any of those team members again, whom I know to be bright and sensitive to criticism; I moved on for unrelated reasons. But without encouraging subordinates to develop leadership skills and technical autonomy, and without cultivating an attitude that leadership may arise spontaneously from any team member:

• capabilities are supplanted by subordination and a culture of asking permission (autonomy starvation)
• leadership is replaced by 'management' (metrics, email, comm-chains)
• advancement is replaced by rework (do it right or do it twice: dutiful bug fixes require about three times the organizational resources of new features)
• accomplishment is not measured in completeness but in delegating broken products to other groups

I attempted to specify the orthogonal components, defined by naturally opposed forces:

• capability/subordination
• leadership/management
• growth/debt
• ownership/delegation

The description is nice because each component is a continuum, and provides a practical mental diagnostic for organizational health. The left-hand elements represent the long-term leadership health of an organization, whereas the right-hand elements represent immediate value (the golden goose eggs). The left-hand elements are the opportunity costs of the right-hand elements. This model might be representable using a radar plot, a personal favorite because they emphasize continuous adjustment rather than perfection.

I reflect on that experience primarily in terms of lost capabilities and advancement, and the weeks spent fixing bugs instead of developing relevant skills and valuable products. My final year consisted almost entirely of re-work of others mistakes across a collection of products, rather than actual work. On average, evaluating a single bug led to the discovery of two or three more. The experience is commonplace in an industry ruled by technical debt, but provides a stark contrast to the Shackleton approach of assembling team members for autonomy, not obedience to self-preserving hierarchy. It's always strange that intelligent people can be so adept at role-acceptance as such (I am as guilty as anyone else). Marquet's book is a refreshing antidote, especially in the tech industry. A welcome read, and a book that should be re-read periodically.

Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

Terrific book. Zamperini's persistence is a terrific source of motivation and a reminder of the opportunity we enjoy because of his generation. It is also a contrast to how much the culture of Japan has transformed since the 19th and early-20th centuries.

Servant Leadership, Robert K. Greenleaf

Servant Leadership reads more like Kant than leadership pulp. Whereas the latter is flatters its readership to pump up book sales, Servant Leadership is valuable precisely because it requires effort to grasp. Rather than tossing a cape on every middle-manager, bored administrator, or appealing to readers' narcissisism, Servant Leadership represents an earnest inquiry into authority-based leadership. But here 'authority' is not the embedded sort, but the authority of real work, competency, and earned value. What makes Servant Leadership so current is that its message is retrograde to the stagnant, self-serving realizations of leadership in 2020's America. However if you look for the servant-leaders within any organization, you discover their actual structure and capabilities. I once implemented a network-security project analyzing organizational hierarchy in the Enron dataset and several employees within the company were easily identified as critical servant-leaders, without whom the company could not have operated (otherwise ignoring Enron's fate). Their titles and rank within the company did not match their operational importance. Servant-leaders exist within every organization and provide key structural insights. A quote from Greenleaf's site summarizes the core qualities of servant-leadership:

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?

Servant-leadership is an explication of Marquet's belief that a leader creates other leaders:

• it is evaluated based on the production of new leaders and autonomous action
• it emphasizes horizontal definitions of service
• it refutes the utility of vertical hierarchies that diminish autonomy

Greenleaf strays into the arcadian weeds when praising a kind of horizontal servant-leadership organization akin to every "empowerment" fad criss-crossing career feeds. The historical arc of institutions pursuing these agenda concludes with the strongest examples of staunch, vertical authoritarianism (see Orwell's Animal Farm or any 2020's university campus). Though I subscribe to servant-leadership in principle, I reject Greenleaf's aesthetic. Or can it even have one? There was this one guy 2000 years ago who mentioned something about the corrosive societal consequences of performing deeds for recognition versus doing so without reciprocation and without a witness. Although I love the concept of servant-leadership (as someone who has occupied the role in many companies) I can leave the 1970's boomer-actualization drek and keep the practical bits. Vertical hierarchy is not an intrinsic evil; it can easily be argued that horizontal servant-leadership and vertical authority should simply be balanced. Horizontal leadership is operational and revolves around competency; vertical leadership is executive and communicates in terms of desired end-states to horizontally-led subteams.

Peer within any company, no matter its health (hence the Enron example), and you will find core staff who sincerely believe in its survival, mission, and purpose. Their titles are usually a mismatch with respect to their unobserved operational importance. But were they taught to do so? Can servant leadership be taught, as quasi-leadership "empowerment" projects suggest? I would radically claim that, for several generations now, America has lacked any prior reference that would make servant-leadership intelligible to its intended audience. It will be intelligible to those who already innately possess the value, for whom no training is needed. Otherwise it is just a lever for covert self-service. The problem is not servant-leadership, but of conflating it with objectives that nullify the responsibility value forming its basis. "Caring" and "empowerment" do not of themselves bear competence; competence is caring, and extraordinary competence is the practical definition of servant-leadership. Therefore, if you want to build leaders, build competence. Unleash their existing competencies, but also define paths for them to achieve greater competence; not 'performance', competence. A mistake in most companies is the belief that they must be optimized by finding those with the correct competencies in the future, whereas building them internally would yield those needs most effectively. The truth is that virtually no one knows what future needs are, just as we as developers should 'code for today' not for future requirements that are impossible to know. And if an organization's strategy is external and seeks to hire its way to success, it should also ask why its own people have not advanced in these target competencies.

So how can servant-leadership be realized, or is it the latest organizational fetish on LinkedIn? Children of Cold War warriors and the outdoors, my siblings and I grew up mountaineering and hunting. But I once had a friend who became enamoured with outdoor magazines and fancied himself a mountaineer adventurer. When we climbed together he would easily become lost, mislead others, and fall through snow into streams, yet was also unwilling to learn basic skills. Evidently to be enamoured with skills does not impart them. At one point he led our group up the shoulder of an avalanche chute at an unstable time of year, leading by inertia and unwilling to accept that our situation was as dangerous as it was, simply because we weren't yet crushed under chunks of snow and ice, like being pulverized under piles of engine blocks. In mountaineering it was routine to encounter dangerous late-riser dilletantes, most of whom put themselves and others in critical danger and in need of rescue.

Trendy leadership crusades represent a similar confusion between skill and the work that begets it, diminishing the required work out of envy for skill: genuine leadership skills are not a thing in-themselves to be bought like transferrable currency or lifestyle status products: Teslas, iphones, etc. Bypassing a process of fundamental qualification yields extremely dangerous personalities who operate on inertia and consensus when high-risk environments challenge their insecurities. Such leaders also generally cultivate similar-minded team members as a defense mechanism, creating operational homophily. This is most notably exemplified by the actions of the captain and crew of the El Faro prior to its sinking. I would argue that the majority of leadership in America resembles the inertia-based model; in theory, we hear about servant-leadership, but in all practical experience we are closer to the inertia-model.

Skill is an expression of work, of an individual's commitment to surmount the burden of a task, a subject, an obstacle. The assumption that it might be easily transferrable represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the long-term requirements of leadership, and seemingly violates servant-leadership's core ethos, which is that leadership is equivalent to doing work. If striving for extraordinary competence is true leadership, then, without being too stereotypically denim, who are servant leaders but plumbers and janitors? By contrast, what then of the credential spigot of a higher education system awash in elitism, for which every accomodation and recognition must be made, no matter how frivolous or unyielding of applied value? The financial premise to borrow lavishly for a college degree (particularly advanced degrees in law, management, and STEM) is overtly classist: 'a degree gains you entry to the over-class'. Consequently, we now have degree mills that exploit unbounded student borrowing. Curious then, that those decrying class barriers are the ones fortifying them, and standing in their own supposed way. After acing the LSAT, a core reason I bailed on pursuing law school was that every current and prospective law student seemed to rely on the prestige of a law degree as a means to avoid doing work. Law schools themselves market and advance this attitude. The supposition of an insider class—pajama programmers, lawyers, directors, etc.—contradicts the notion of work: how does a diploma confer permission to work and produce value? Under what circumstances does a human being require credentials generate value? How can it confer leadership by precluding it? What is the survival timeline of servant-leadership in an era of institutionalized mimetic-envy? Of eased character and leadership standards? These are controversial but necessary questions for a servant-leadership prioritizing praxis over ethos.

Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield

Gates of Fire can be a bit of an over-the-top account of Spartan soldiers written from the perspective of a tightjawed New England spectator of 'hardship'. But for anyone of a harder upbringing, those whose teens and twenties were a long train of hardship jobs and thankless trades skills, or those who privately cringe whenever the LinkedIn crowd slings terms like "grit", this book is an enjoyable foray into the past hardship that secretly motivate oneself.