Extreme Ownership | How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead & Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

I. Brief Summary

A book on how to be a leader with extreme ownership. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin discuss leadership lessons which includes practicing ownership, killing ego, enforcing standards, simplifying, prioritizing, and executing. Each chapter includes their experience fighting in the Battle of Ramadi, Iraq, with concluding lesson on a leadership principle and business application.

II. Big Ideas

• The leader is always responsible.
• Everyone on a team must believe in the mission.
• Work with other teams to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
• Keep plans simple, clear, and concise and communicate them clearly.
• Check your ego and lead with humility.
• Figure out your priorities, and then act on them one at a time.
• Clarify your mission.
• Engage with your higher-ups; keep them in the loop, especially when they frustrate you.
• Act decisively, even when things are chaotic. Get comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
• Lead and support your superiors.
• Leader's Planning Checklist:
  • Analyze the mission.
  • Understand the higher headquarter's mission, commander's intention, end state, and goal.
  • Identify and state your own commander's intent and end state for the specific mission.
  • Identify personnel, assets, resources and time available.
  • Decentralize the planning process. Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action.
  • Determine a specific course of action.
  • Lean towards accepting the simplest course of action.
  • Focus efforts on the best course of action.
  • Empower key leaders to develop a plan for the selected course of action.
  • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation.
  • Mitigate risk that can't be controlled as much as possible.
  • Delegate portions of the plan, and brief to key junior leaders.
  • Stand back, and be the Tactical Genius.
  • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation.
  • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets.
  • Emphasize commander's intent, ask questions, and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure that they understand.
  • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.
• Extreme Ownership:
  • The leader must own everything in his or her world.
  • It’s the leader’s fault when subordinates aren’t doing what they should.
  • Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept. It requires extraordinary humility and courage.
  • Extreme ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans.
  • Effective leaders do not take credit for his or her team’s successes but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members.
  • It is the direct responsibility of a leader to get people to listen, support, and execute plans.
  • You can’t make people do things. You have to lead them.
  • Extreme ownership is asking yourself, “How can I best get my team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?”
  • Every mistake, every failure or shortfall must be owned.
  • Pointing fingers and blaming others is easy and contagious.
  • You create the culture. What you do as a leader will be emulated by your subordinates.
  • If something isn’t going your way, start with what you are going to do differently.

III. Quotes

• Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute.
• Discipline equals freedom.
• It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.
• The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life.
• Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.
• The most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
• On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
• When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.
• Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges. The best teams anywhere, like the SEAL Teams, are constantly looking to improve, add capability, and push the standards higher. It starts with the individual and spreads to each of the team members until this becomes the culture, the new standard. The recognition that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders facilitates Extreme Ownership and enables leaders to build high-performance teams that dominate on any battlefield, literal or figurative.
• Prioritize your problems and take care of them one at a time, the highest priority first. Don’t try to do everything at once or you won’t be successful.” I explained how a leader who tries to take on too many problems simultaneously will likely fail at them all.
• You can’t make people listen to you. You can’t make them execute. That might be a temporary solution for a simple task. But to implement real change, to drive people to accomplish something truly complex or difficult or dangerous—you can’t make people do those things. You have to lead them.
• After all, there can be no leadership where there is no team.
• The leader must explain not just what to do, but why. It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand. Only when leaders at all levels understand and believe in the mission can they pass that understanding and belief to their teams so that they can persevere through challenges, execute and win.
• Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.
• A good leader does not get bogged down in the minutia of a tactical problem at the expense of strategic success.
• We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.
• The true test for a good brief is not whether the senior officers are impressed. It’s whether or not the troops that are going to execute the operation actually understand it. Everything else is bullshit.
• A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.
• Instead of letting the situation dictate our decisions, we must dictate the situation.
• Generally, when a leader struggles, the root cause behind the problem is that the leader has leaned too far in one direction and steered off course. Awareness.
• Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.
• People do not follow robots.
• A leader must lead but also be ready to follow. Sometimes, another member of the team—perhaps a subordinate or direct report—might be in a better position to develop a plan, make a decision, or lead through a specific situation.
• If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the why prohibits you from believing in the mission. When you are in a leadership position, that is a recipe for failure, and it is unacceptable. As a leader, you must believe.
• If the plan is simple enough, everyone understands it, which means each person can rapidly adjust and modify what he or she is doing. If the plan is too complex, the team can’t make rapid adjustments to it, because there is no baseline understanding of it.
• All animals, including humans, need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately.
• Our egos don’t like to take blame.
• Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best. That is good. But when ego clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the world as it is, then ego becomes destructive.
• I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong. Despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and to my ego, it was the right thing to do—the only thing to do.
• The focus must always be on how to best accomplish the mission.
• Staying ahead of the curve prevents a leader from being overwhelmed when pressure is applied and enables greater decisiveness.
• I can remember many times when my boat crew struggled. It was easy to make excuses for our team’s performance and why it wasn’t what it should have been. But I learned that good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.
• Repetitive exceptional performance became a habit.
• It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. You have to drive your CTO to exercise Extreme Ownership—to acknowledge mistakes, stop blaming others, and lead his team to success. If you allow the status quo to persist, you can’t expect to improve performance, and you can’t expect to win.
• They must believe in the cause for which they are fighting.
• It falls on leaders to continually keep perspective on the strategic mission and remind the team that they are part of the greater team and the strategic mission is paramount.
• Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well. We have to own everything in our world. That’s what Extreme Ownership is all about.
• When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win.