Author: Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
If you are a leader of a group, it is expected that you own the success or failure of your team. In this book, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin take this ownership to another level. They recount incidents in their successful battle at Ar Ramadi to underscore the fact that “Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame”. There is no shortage of pithy statements sprinkled throughout the book, like “there are no bad teams, only bad leaders”, that highlight the huge impact the leader has on the outcome of the team.
The book is organized as a series of vignettes from their battles in Iraq each one tailored to highlight an aspect of leadership that is broadly applicable to business as well. The authors give first hand accounts of what must have been some of the most deadly battlefields that US soldiers have been deployed to. These stories are clearly meant to illustrate a principle, but since they are disjointed, I found it hard to identify with the story except for the most obvious point that they were trying to make.
Since I was reading the book on a kindle, I made it a point to highlight several passages in the book as I encountered them. When I was done, I went back to look at them. While I can’t say that I incorporate all of them in my repertoire, I have to confess that most of them seemed rather obvious and not particularly insightful. There are terms that seem to be taken out of a Navy SEAL handbook, like “Cover and Move”. This might have a lot more meaning in a battle situation, but their translation in a business setting was “Teamwork”. I didn’t need a battle story to understand the importance of working together as a team.
Then there was “Prioritize and Execute”, another pithy slogan. Here is what they say a leader must do:
- evaluate the highest priority problem.
- lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team.
- develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible.
- direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task.
- move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat.
- when priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain.
- don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation
- maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.
This is very practical advice and I am sure it bears repeating every now and then. It just wasn’t very compelling for me and came across as rather trite. Another piece of advice is for leaders to start their day early, so that they have more time to be better prepared. I would love to meet the leader who hadn’t considered this tactic until he read it in the book.
In summary, Extreme Ownership is taking complete ownership for everything in your organization, regardless of who did what, or the events that may have transpired. This is very useful advice and a mindset that all leaders should try very hard to embrace. The rest of the principles in the book seem rather obvious and the narratives are short disjointed passages that seem forced to make the point.
