Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.

When corporate types use military terminology, it slips past the pathetic and into the risible.

When executives talk about killing the competition, fighting in the trenches and running things up flagpoles, it's merely a salute to their myopia.

Rare is the truth that translates from real wars to ones over soap powder or cellphones.

However, a moving speech by Secretary of Defense and retired general James Mattis, given last week to members of the military in Jordan, is worth absorbing.

It offers a couple of fundamental pointers for how to speak to those who work for you and who look to you for leadership.

1. Think about those who work for you and the lives they lead.

In this speech, Mattis admits it's easy to get promoted so far up that you become remote and out of touch with the people who matter.

He then says: "Believe me, I know you're far from home, every one of you. I know you could all be going to college, you young people, or you could be back on the block, just grateful."

How many leaders, when speaking to those who work for them, come up with the usual platitudes about being thankful for their efforts? How many come across as reading from some old PR script?

Here, Mattis chooses to explain the stakes, thereby expressing how important the troops' job is.

"The only way, the only way this great big experiment you and I call America is gonna survive is if we've got tough hombres like you," he says.

The word hombres wasn't perhaps his best. Imagine, though, how good his sentiment made the troops feel. They're not just soldiers. They're doing something with a far bigger meaning.

Mattis made sure to let them know he had considered what was on their minds and in their lives.

He made them understand he was no power-grabbing climber, but instead someone with their interests at heart and that, together, they were protecting something very precious.

We hear so often these days that people want meaning from their jobs. It's likely you won't be able to tell your employees that they're defending the very principles upon which America was built. You can, though, run a company whose heart beats socially and doesn't just subsist on the ever-greater love of profits.

Airlines, perhaps you could take note here.

2. Don't lie.

It's quite astonishing how some CEOs think they can lie to their staff and get away with it.

They have such confidence in their own slickness that they believe everyone is taken in.

Meanwhile, as they speak, the staff whisper to each other: "He's full of crapola, isn't he?"

Here, Mattis could have offered gratuitous rah-rah.

He could have spoken in generalities about how grateful the nation is for the troops' service and how everyone is thinking of them.

Instead, the depth of his truth was disarming: "You're a great example for our country right now. It's got some problems. You know it and I know it. It's got problems we don't have in the military. You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, Just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it."

Mattis knows the military enjoys a diverse membership. He knows how extreme politics and, some might say, barefaced lunacy, have succeeded in inciting anger and dividing people.

He wants the troops to know he doesn't embrace those attitudes. He wants them to know who they work for and what he thinks and feels. He's not interested in hoodwinking them.