A friend of mine recommended The Mission, the Me and Me to me as a must read. I listened to it on Audible and couldn’t stop. Finished it in less than a day… then listened to it again. It was that good.
This is intended to be a quick overview of the book so that you can get some of the main principles on the quick. You should read this book to get all the stories and how he learned these lessons the hard way. Some of them where written in the blood of the men around him.
For some reason or military must continually relearn lessons that cost men their lives in battle over and over again. I see some of the lessons I learned in combat having to be learned again and again.
The author, Pete Blader, of The Mission, the Men, and Me was Delta force and starts the book in a fight outside of Tikrit, Iraq in 2003. I was fighting in Tikrit a day after the short battel he talks about. We had the same problem on a different side of town.
Our problem: commanders not on the ground trying to give orders to those on the ground from intelligence sources that are incorrect or old. Pete calls it context in his book. The commanders that aren’t there have no context for what is actually happening on the ground.
In Pete’s fight, the high command had intel of light resistance, on the ground Pete was trying not to lose one of the four tanks he had. He came close. When you are going to lose an M1Abrams Main Battle tank, it is not light resistance.
I actually had the opposite problem with the intel given our unit. We expected heavy resistance and where held up 12 hours to make a run at night. One of the strong points on the way we passed through at about 0200 local time was supposed to be hot and have heavy resistance. We were at stand to (everyone up and manning battle positions) in our vehicles. Instead of heavy resistance it was like a parade as we rolled through the small town.
At 2 AM people flooded the streets cheering us on moving towards Saddam’s home town of Tikrit. It would have been amazing if I hadn’t been hiding behind sandbags looking over my rifle sights ready to kill anyone and everyone there.
Context, Context, Context is important to the people on the ground.
The book continues, going back in time for Pete to his training and reason for becoming a Delta Commander and how he learned his principles the hard way. Here is a quick outline of his seven principles with a little of my explanation:
1) The Mission, the Men, and Me
This is the order of things to think about in combat. Pete says your decisions should be weighed against these all the time. And his decisions to follow orders or not were always made through this lens.
If you have a good commander/boss this will never steer you wrong. If you don’t, then doing anything but what the commander/boss tells you to do is going to get you in trouble. I’ve had this problem more than once in my military and civilian career.
I told one of my current bosses that I would make decisions and do actions that I thought were in the best interests of the company when lacking direction from higher. He was amazed I would think that way. I think I may have found another good boss to work for.
How do you make decisions at work, at home, and in your personal life? Do you have a specific measure to stack that decision up against? If you don’t, get one!
2) Don’t Get Treed by a Chihuahua
Yes, the little barking dog that always thinks it is a 100-pound pit bull. Really, don’t let a little bad/false/or partial information about a problem make you stall or push you in a quick react mode. That’s like making decisions from a purely emotional state… it will never be a good one.
Pete has a story about almost killing himself during training thinking he was being chased by a bear when it was a small pig. Then later he gives an example of the entire US Government getting treed by a chihuahua on some false information about a terrorist group.
On the opposite end, especially in combat, a little misdirection can get your enemy to react in a predictable manner and you can easily destroy them.
3) When in Doubt Develop the Situation
Jocko Willink explains it like a GPS on your phone. When you first open the app and tell it to go someplace, the app doesn’t know where you are and which direction you are headed. You have to move one way or the other to find out which way you should actually go on the app.
This works everywhere. If you aren’t absolutely sure of your decision, move in one direction just a little bit, and then reevaluate what is going on from fresh eyes. Every step figure what is going on. And never stop Developing the Situation!
4) Imagine the Unimaginable
Here is another lesson written in blood over and over again. Can you say 911? Before it happened, who would have thought a terrorist group would use box cutters to destroy the tallest building in the world.
The military is always stuck on stupid in this way. We create doctrine and how-to manauls for everything. The enemy learns our doctrine quickly and we become predictable. The end of the book shows how a couple special forces operators died when then probably shouldn’t have (one earned the Medal of Honor posthumously) by being predictable to the enemy.
5) Humor Your Imagination
If you let your imagination run from time to time who knows what great idea you will come up with to solve a problem that seems impossible. Pete gives an example where they had a plan to use a guerrilla suit (yes someone dressed like a guerrilla) to capture a high value target.
Bounce crazy ideas off of other people that actually want to solve the problem and are willing to build on any idea that is on the table.
6) Always Listen to the Guy on the Ground
If I had a nickel for every time this principal was violated, I’d be very rich, and many companies and military units would have been more successful. The person on the ground, working the problem, has the best idea of how to solve it.
If you are a boss for a manufacturing company and need to figure out what is wrong with the widget production, the guy actually building the widget is pissed off that you won’t change this little thing he sees as totally obvious that would fix your entire problem.
If you have a problem as a leader, go ask the people that are on the ground working how to fix it. You won’t need to let your imagination go wild; they will give you the answer.
7) It’s Not Reality Unless it is Shared
The guy making the widget needs to find a way to talk to his boss and maybe his boss’s, boss’s, boss to let them know what the problem is and his suggestion to fix it.
We all have that problem. We can see the solution and what’s going on so clearly but someone else can’t or won’t. This is where tact comes in. You have to be able to explain what you see in such a way that others around you will listen. Jocko Willink has example after example of it in his book Extreme Ownership. Read his book just to learn how to do this principle. Jocko calls it “playing the game”.
Extra Notes:
Here are a couple extra things I picked up from the book.
Share Everything: Communication up/down/sideways/diagonals/everywhere to everyone whenever possible. As a questioner that wants to know the why behind everything (Gretchen Rubin The Four Tendencies) I love this idea. Generally, if you are giving people too much information, they will let you know.
Problem Solving Strategy: Saturate, Incubate, Illuminate – To solve a problem start by getting and learning all the information you can about the problem (including from the guy on the ground). Then take some time to let it sit. Go for a run, take a shower, do something else to let the information incubate. Then start working it with others to illuminate the solution. Let you imagination run.
Reality Check of a Boss: Always ask “What’s your recommendation?” – This will keep you looking at things from another point of view and generally from someone that is closer to the problem then you are. It will give you favor with your subordinates, make you a better leader, and allow you to make better decisions with more information. Use your reality check as much as possible.
Conclusion:
This was a great book to read. If you want to be a good leader, you should read The Mission, the Men, and Me.
Stay Safe,
Ben
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P.S.S. Links in the article are affiliate links. Follow them or don’t… but you should still read this book.
